Hey 👋
This newsletter is for independent creators, expression-minded solopreneurs, and makers who want to build meaningful work without losing heart in the process.
This week I quit Webflow, built an automated lead pipeline, launched a podcast, and I had a good reflection about ADHD, dopamine loop, and why speed actually matters. Let's get into it.
🧠 Reflection of the week
I've been doing this for two and a half years now.
Building for clients, failing, rebuilding. Shipping things.
And the one thing that never goes away is friction.
Friction in the tools. Friction in the process. Friction between what I see in my head and what actually shows up on the screen. Every project, there's always something that takes longer than it should, drains more energy than it deserves, and makes me wonder why I didn't just get a normal job.
Two months ago, if you asked me what my first hire should be, I'd say a designer. Second hire, a developer. Because the thing that drains me most is sitting at a computer, clicking, dragging, adjusting pixels for hours.
I call it pixelosis. Good, heh? 😅
This week something shifted.
I realized I don't need to hire people to handle the friction. I need to remove the friction entirely.
And here's the thing about ADHD. Your brain needs fast feedback loops (sure, it's not a feature only for adhd).
Dopamine comes from seeing results, not from planning them. When there's too much friction between "I have an idea" and "I can see it live," everything falls. Motivation dies.
I start scrolling YouTube instead of building.
But right now, with AI, the feedback loop is faster than ever. I can describe what I want, see it generated, iterate in minutes, ship the same day. That loop is what keeps me going. Not discipline. Not grinding. Just...speed.
I'm genuinely grateful to be building in this moment. For someone with ADHD, this is the best era to be a solopreneur. The friction is finally something I can engineer away, piece by piece. And every piece I remove makes the next project faster.
Two and a half years of not quitting.
Maybe that's what entrepreneurship is for me.
Constant friction. And learning to love to be in this process.
💡 Inspiration of the week
Speed is everything what is important in business.
But speed with intention (a.k.a. spirituality speed 😂).
Removing every unnecessary step between vision and reality.
I looked at my old workflow this week and it hit me how much time I was wasting. Client says what they want. I interpret it. I open the visual builder. I drag things around for a few hours. I send a preview. They wanted changes. Back to designing. A two weeks passes. Maybe three, four.
New workflow: brand detailed interview, checking with clients what is his style of design as soon as possible, AI generates the design system, client sees a live preview within week.
Same quality. Fraction of the time.
And here's what's interesting.
When you remove friction from delivery, the bottleneck moves upstream. It's no longer "how fast can I build this" but "how clearly can the client articulate what they want". Which is a much better problem to have. Because that's a conversation, not a technical limitation.
The fastest person in the room doesn't always win. But the person who removes the most friction from their process?
They compound. Every project gets faster. Every system gets tighter. Every client gets a better experience.
That's the game I want to play.
🔧 Tool of the week
Last week a friend asked me to help him find TikTok creators for his business. Because now he's doing it manually.
So how i t could be automated?
I built a small automation that scrapes TikTok profiles using Apify, pulls their recent videos, transcribes the content, analyzes what they talk about, and generates a personalized outreach message. All automated. He just gets a spreadsheet with names, topics, engagement data, and ready-to-send messages.
The backbone? Web scraping.
I've been using two tools for this:
Apify is like a supermarket of scrapers. Someone already built a TikTok scraper, an Instagram scraper, a Google Maps scraper. You just plug in parameters and get structured data out. For the TikTok thing, it was perfect.
Firecrawl is different. I have this as an open-source tool that turns any website into clean, structured data. And I have it running on my own server. Self-hosted. Literally free.
When I need to analyze a company's website, Firecrawl scrapes it, converts it to markdown, and feeds it to an AI for analysis.
I combined both of these into a bigger system. An automated prospect pipeline for myself. It runs 3 times a week:
Firecrawl scrapes a business directory. Finds companies. Crawls their websites. DeepSeek (AI) analyzes each site, scores it 1-10, identifies problems. High-scoring leads get added to my CRM automatically. Then AI writes a short, personalized cold email draft and puts it in my Gmail. I just review and send.
Zero manual prospecting. The whole thing runs on n8n (automation platform), Firecrawl (web scraping), and DeepSeek (AI analysis). Total cost: basically zero, because Firecrawl is self-hosted and DeepSeek is very cheap.
Web scraping + AI + automation. The combination is absurdly powerful.
📈 Business development
I officially moved my agency away from Webflow.
New stack: Next.js, Sanity CMS, Vercel. Everything generated with AI. No more dragging and dropping. No more pixel-pushing in a visual builder.
Why? Because Webflow was the friction.
Beautiful tool. But when you want custom animations, proper SEO control, a headless CMS, and the ability to generate entire pages with AI.. it becomes a bottleneck. Every custom layout was a new beginning. Every complex interaction required workarounds.
With code generation, I describe what I want and it appears. Iterations happen in minutes, not hours. The ceiling is gone.
I tested this on myself first. My personal website is now fully running on the new stack. Dark theme, custom animations, brand system, the works. Built in last few days.
Still working on it: https://bartbakowski.com/
Then I used the exact same workflow for a client who needed a complete website redesign. Design draft sent in one session.
The plan is to finish the remaining Webflow projects I have, and every new client from now on gets the new stack. Faster delivery, better results, more scalable.
And with the automated prospect pipeline from the tool section.. the agency is starting to feel like an actual system instead of just me trading hours for money.
🎧 DJ / Creator Journey 🌏
Today something I've been working on for a while finally went live.
"Solo z Maszyną" is a podcast I'm launching with my friend Jacek. It's in Polish, about AI, automation, and the reality of building things as solopreneurs.
We recorded 5 episodes. The first one dropped yesterday.
(edit from today: YouTube banned our channel twice, so a few hours after publication, youtube decided to cancel it 😅)
It's raw. It's real. Two guys who actually build with AI every day, talking about what works, what doesn't, and what's coming.
No corporate language. No scripted talking.
Just honest conversations about the tools and systems we're using to run our businesses.
This feels like the beginning of something.
More episodes coming soon.
💬 Any thoughts or reflections? Text me back!
Thanks for being here.
Have a good week and see yaa next Sunday ✌️
Bart
