Apr 2020 | Holy shit.. ($825 MRR) 🤯
What. The. Fuck. This month, MRR went up to $825. Initially, this month was a natural continuation of the previous one. Boring. Uneventful. Me bashing my head against the wall to think of something. Trying everything to find a way to grow Cyberleads. Nothing working. I tried many things. Reddit. Facebook Groups. Quora. LinkedIn. Direct Sales. Twitter. On the 21st of April, completely unexpectedly, a tweet of mine blew up big time. https://twitter.com/alexsideris_/status/1252656159636545538 The tweet got 2000 likes, 200.000 impressions, brought 1000 new followers, and brought 10.000 visitors to Cyberleads. That doubled my revenue overnight. The tweet was not intended to promote Cyberleads. It's just that I want to cultivate some habits and one of the things I want to do is tweet daily. So, once a day, whatever happens, I tweet something. Anything. Just planting the seed. Putting the reps in. On the 21st of April, it was a long day at work. It was afternoon, and I was super tired. Me and my girlfriend wanted to watch a movie on Netflix, so I told her to hold on 1 minute while I quickly tweet something. I tweet the first thing that came to mind. Something that happened the previous day. "I got my first $50/mo customer!" I watched the film on Netflix and went to bed. I had noticed that it was trending a little, and it had around 30 likes before I went to bed. But didn't expect much, especially not paying customers. Fast forward two days of pure chaos, Twitter and Gumroad notifications, I went from around $400 MRR to $800 MRR. I smashed my infamous $500 MRR goal. It was a huge mental barrier for me. The sad thing is that once again I was tricked. I was chasing this goal for more than two years, and now it means nothing to me. It's dead. Cold. Meaningless. Like it was never there in the first place. I am happy. But I feel kinda tricked. I have had this problem in the past a few times. When I was in uni, it was entering the ring to fight professionally. I thought when that happened that I would be happy and confident from then on. I fought many times in kick boxing and Muay Thai, but guess what, then I placed a new goal. A new goal that would bring me happiness. That was to start a startup. I built a product, ran it for some months, and then joined an accelerator. VC pitches, business plans, offices. The whole thing. Then it was to make $ online. Being a startup bro didn't make me happy after all. I did that as well. It was the 1st of June, 2018. One of the happiest days of my life. Two $5/mo customers for GitGardener. But then, that wasn't enough. I wanted to make $500 MRR from my personal projects. Two years later, I did it. But nothing really changed. I'm happy, but now I was tempted to add the $2k MRR as my goal post. There is nothing inherently wrong with placing goals. Actually, maybe this is the only way to succeed. But it's fucked up when my goals take over my mind and interfere with me enjoying my life today. Thinking that some kind of magic fairydust will glow off me and I'll be the happiest, most content and most confident person in the world. I imagine most people are like this. "When I have this, I'll be happy." But it's always bullshit. For me, this was it. This was the last arbitrary goal I set. By the way, I'm not saying that I'm successful. Cause I know I'm not. $800 per month is laughable, but for me it seemed like a big deal just a few weeks ago. From now on, I have no goals. Nothing. I don't care about anything. I don't care about followers. I don't care about revenue. I don't care about anything. I just want to enjoy my every day life. Enjoy the process. Improve a little every day. Enjoy THAT process. Not numbers growing on a screen, on a chart. Try to perfect your craft. Seeing yourself grow and improve is ten times more satisfying than watching revenue numbers grow on a screen. Also, things like this remind me of how powerless I really am. All those things I did and thought would move the needle, did nothing. Reddit. Facebook. Direct Sales. Then, luck smiled at me and things went crazy. Can I take credit for that? Did I make those customers subscribe? Did I make that tweet go viral? No. So, should I get upset when someone unsubscribes? Did I make him unsubscribe? Nope. All I can do is ask what went wrong, and try to improve. I'll just do my best and leave it at that. Whatever happens, happens. If it all goes to hell and Cyberleads fails, fuck it. It's not in my hand anyway. I don't care. Another thing that happened this month was that someone from IndieHackers copied my product word for word. In the beginning, I was mad and frustrated. But then I reminded myself that number one, I can't do anything about it, and number two, it might be the best thing that ever happened to me. Competition can make you or break you. So, where does this leave me now? I have found a good B2B product, Cyberleads. That was my goal for Q1. I have found a good distribution channel, Twitter. That was my goal for Q2. So, now, I just continue growing and improving Cyberleads, and share my progress on Twitter. Do more of the same, and document my journey, every step of the way. How transparent should I be? Should I post revenue numbers and be in danger of having more people start the same kind of product? Or should I be transparent about all other things apart from revenue? On one hand, from the outside, the barrier to entry might seem low for a product like Cyberleads. On the other hand, posting revenue numbers will bring in more eyes. For sure. It will also inspire people, which is important to me. I say that because this blog post would inspire myself just three months ago. I almost feel like it's my duty to post my revenue numbers up to a certain point. To inspire people that are a little bit behind me in this journey. Eventually, I will stop. Probably if and when I go full time. Maybe I use the Pareto principle here as well. Share enough to inspire others and get more people to see my work, but don't share all the behind the scenes. That sucks, but what can you do?
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