My ultimate solopreneur web skills toolkit
If you're new to no-code or want to build an online presence, this article covers the essential tools to create landing pages, directories, newsletters, automations, and micro apps. By mastering these skills, you’ll quickly become a powerful force in any industry.
If you’re new to no-code or trying to build an online presence in a specific industry, this is for you.
In this article, we’ll talk about how and why you should build:
- Landing pages
- Directories
- Newsletters
- Automations
- Micro apps
And how you can leverage them to build an online presence in any industry.
All of these skills tie nicely together and with them in your arsenal, you’ll be an online powerhouse in no time.
If I were starting no-code today, here is the learning and building path I’d take…
1/ Learn to build landing pages
Being able to create a simple landing page website quickly may seem basic, but it’s the start of any online project.
Want to test an idea? Make a landing page with an email signup and see if you can get anyone to sign up.
Want to pre-launch a product? You need a landing page.
Want to help your friend or family with their small business? Make them a landing page.
I know people who earn a decent living just building simple landing pages for people. It’s a valuable skill to have.
And it’s not difficult. The hardest part is making it look good.
For that I’d recommend copying existing websites you like, or starting with a template.
Tools I recommend (from easiest to hardest)
- Yep.so - This is closest to my heart because I built it (I actually sold it last year). I still recommend it as one of the quickest ways to get a landing page up quickly to test ideas.
- Carrd - a simple drag-and-drop interface for building landing pages. It costs as little as $19/year for up to 10 sites so it’s well worth getting a paid plan.
- Typedream - an AI-powered website builder with a drag-and-drop editor. I haven’t tried it but I hear good things.
- Framer - Beautiful landing pages with nice animations and a simple interface. The landing pages I’m proudest of started from Framer templates.
- Webflow - This is the industry leader for building amazing professional level websites. Personally I find it quite tricky to use but a whole industry loves it.
2/ Learn to build directory sites
A landing page is usually a sales tool. By itself it doesn’t offer value to the person who lands on it.
Directories on the other hand are the simplest, fastest way to provide real value in whatever niche you choose.
It’s basically just a list with filters.
The best part is, you don’t have to be a subject matter expert to make one.
Case in point, I recently built AI Productivity Toolkit using Softr (see below).
Let’s say you’re trying to switch to a career in interior design.
You could make a landing page but what would you say on it? “Hi I’m Kieran and I want to be an interior designer”?
That’s not going to attract much interest.
A better choice would be to make a directory of interior design inspiration, or the best resources to learn interior design.
Even better, by researching the content for the directory you’ll start to build your own knowledge base.
Tools I recommend (from easiest to hardest)
- Sheet2Site plus Google Sheets - This is purpose built tool for making directory sites based on data stored in any Google Sheet. If you’re comfortable with Google Sheets, this is a great place to start.
- Basefront plus Airtable plus Carrd - Airtable is a more powerful alternative to Google Sheets for storing your directory data. You can use Carrd and Basefront to create a nice website front end.
- Softr with Airtable - I recently tried Softr for the first time and found it fairly easy to use. It linked directly to my Airtable base and created a directory without much effort.
Here is a fantastic directory of directory tools made using Carrd and Basefront.
3/ Start a newsletter
If you do want to build an audience in a particular niche, having an email newsletter is almost a requirement.
Social media audiences are rented and can disappear overnight if your account gets blocked or the algorithm changes.
You own your mailing list.
Here are two newsletters you can start without needing any expertise in your niche:
- A resource-based newsletter - send curated resources to your readers e.g. “interior design inspiration, weekly in your inbox”
- This goes hand-in-hand with a directory. If you made already have a directory, you can send out a couple of items from your directory each week.
- An interview-based newsletter - send interviews with experts in your niche e.g. “a monthly interview with top interior designers about how they got into this career”
- This is my favourite hack if you’re really serious about immersing yourself in a new niche. Create a blog site and start approaching people with interesting stories for interviews. Some will say yes. Do the interview over video call if you can, then write it up for your newsletter. You’ll have a chance to pick the brains of people you want to learn from, and you’ll quickly build a network of influential people in your chosen niche.
Tools I recommend (from easiest to hardest)
- Substack - a super easy tool for starting a newsletter which comes with a built-in website/blog to showcase your previous issues. Lacks flexibility.
- Beehiv - slightly more complex than Substack but also comes with a built-in website to showcase your writing.
- Mailerlite - I’ve been using this for years as it’s powerful and flexible. It’s feature-packed!
4/ Learn to automate
If you’ve launched any of the above 3 things, you’ll know there is ongoing work involved.
Once people join your mailing list, you’re actually supposed to mail them things!
Thankfully, there are ways to automate a lot of the manual work so you can just focus on creating or curating great content.
There are two ways to do automations:
- A lot of the tools already mentioned will have certain automation features built-in.
- Use a stand-alone automation tool like
For example:
- You’ve made a simple directory site of resources for interior design people. You’ve got a mailing list signup on your website.
- When someone signs up, an automation sends their email addresses to a specific email list in Beehiiv.
- This triggers an automation in Beehiiv which sends them a series of welcome emails over several days.
- Whenever you write and send a newsletter, a Zapier automation creates a short summary and accompanying image for social media, and posts for you.
In this situation the automations have saved you from a lot of manual copying and pasting.
Tools I recommend (from easiest to hardest)
- Built-in automation features - most of the tools mentioned above will have built-in automations you can try out. For example, Carrd lets you automatically send email signups to Mailerlite. All the newsletter tools let you create automated welcome email sequences.
- Zapier - the leading tool for connecting and automating between other apps. You specify the trigger (e.g. someone signs up on your website) and can string together multiple resulting actions (e.g. add them to email lists, create a folder in Google Drive for them, send them a custom t-shirt, add them to a CRM).
- Make similar to Zapier but slightly less user-friendly. More powerful and flexible with some apps but less integrations than Zapier.
5/ Build micro apps
A great way to grow your technical skills is to build small, single-feature apps.
In other words, micro apps.
These can be a great way to gather email addresses or just build your site’s SEO presence.
A perfect (and slightly morbid) example of a micro app is seeyourfolks.com which calculates how many times you will see your parents before they’re expected to die.
My friend James has been doing this to boost SEO for his SaaS business with great success. All of these are just simple calculators built in Bubble and living on individual pages on his main app.
Tools I recommend (from easiest to hardest)
- Chipp.ai - lets you build conversational chatbots trained on any data. You can upload PDFs or simply give it the URLs of YouTube videos and it will learn from the transcript.
- Bubble - as you probably know this is my favourite tool for building complex apps, but you can also use it to build micro apps for just about anything. It’s also a great way of learn the basics of building with Bubble. The only downside is that to release it in public on a custom domain you need to be on the $32/month plan.
Personal example: I used Chipp AI and Framer to build HowDoIUseAI.
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That’s all for this time, I hope this has been useful and inspired you to build something cool.
One favour - if you build anything as a result of this article, please let me know!
