Bootstrapping a Small Business in the Year 2020

    As of about a week ago, I've been roped into helping turn my friend's promising business concept into a thriving business. Over the course of a few months, my friend got a tiny mountain bike tour business running and wants to off-load the social media stuff onto someone else: me. Despite its small size, it already requires nearly a dozen logins for various accounts on various social media and marketing platforms. 

    All of a sudden I'm getting to see the other side of services I've used for ages, but there are several big communities that my friend hasn't touched that I'll be probing in the near future. It's platforms upon platforms upon platforms: Mario and Sonic have prepared me well.

    Dipping my toe in the water today, I spent what must have been a two or three full hours on a single two-paragraph Facebook post to the company page about my joining the business, that I gave tour I gave on Saturday, and alluding to the impact of the city's COVID response on how we do things. For the post's image, I'd have preferred to include images of the whole tour group, but I didn't manage to snap any that day and hadn't managed to get any from the person who booked the tour. My friend and business partner thought it was a good piece of work, though. I hope she's right.

    The main booking platform my friend has used in the past has become an obstacle to doing business, blacking out later and later allowable event dates. We've got a secondary platform that my friend and I will further configure tomorrow, so we can do an ad-buy to try and drum up some quick business.

    We're hoping to get a good number of tours completed before winter comes, which is not only a slow season, but it is also when we're planning on doing an entity formation for the business, making an LLC or a corporation out of the thing. I crossed two lines off of my to-do list today—it grew by two pages.