Two and a half years of indiehacking
Two and a half years of building products In this blog post I will explain in detail what happened and how I went from no idea to $2k MRR inside six months. The story of I found a good B2B idea, how I launched it, how I found a good distribution channel and grew it, and how you can do it too. Introduction First of all, hold your horses. Before you start getting pumped up and excited, I have to give full disclosure. It may have took six months to go from no idea to $2k MRR, but the previous two years played a huge part also. I would recommend you read my blog post “Two years of indie hacking”. You can find it on the top right corner of this website. It’s a long read, but it will give you the necessary context to understand the number of tries you may need to go through until you find your muse as well. For me, it took two years, twenty products and nineteen failures to find Cyberleads. For you, it may take less. It may take more. I may take exactly the same. Only time will tell. But in this blog post, I’ll try my best to explain what changed with me and I went from stuck in the mud, to growing rapidly. I’ll be focusing on the mental aspect of things. I was very tempted to write about how I grew Cyberleads, and everything I learned after finding my muse, but all the questions I get are about the idea-phase. Respect. I will focus on that. Because that's the point where nearly everyone gives up. Heck, I nearly gave up multiple times. That's the hard part. Not when you already have traction and everything is going great. That's the easy part. Ok, let’s do it. Let’s go back in time to the beginning of 2020.. January 4th… Moving abroad I’m getting off the plane. I’m in Milan, Italy. Going to get the bus to find the place I would call home for the next year. A little room, in a house with four Italian room mates I've never seen before in my life. The weather is perfect. I’m excited and nervous at the same time. I keep asking myself, “What the fuck am I doing here..” The reason I’m here is because of “Epilepsy Blocker”, a product I built in 2019. It's a chrome extension that protects people with photosensitive epilepsy while browsing the web. It managed to get the attention of the CEO of a big healthcare startup. That company builds life saving, FDA cleared medical devices for people with neurological conditions. Epilepsy also. Hence, the interest. He invited me for a Zoom chat, and we discussed for close to two hours. We talked about everything, and in our chat he explained what they do. He explained that they have offices in Boston, Milan and South Korea, and most importantly, that the door is open for me if I ever wanted to join. I learnt that they use AI and other cool technologies. That they work with organizations like NASA and MIT. That one of the founders is an MIT professor. That they offer fantastic perks and benefits. Free lunch every day. Free gym membership. Free weekly massages. Free MacBook Pro and gear. Summer offices in Sardinia. An international team full of young and interesting people. A great salary. I wasn’t interested. Actually, I thought that there was a slight possibility they might buy EpilepsyBlocker. So, I was even disappointed. I can't work for a company! That's like selling your soul to the devil. No matter how cool the company is, it still felt like golden handcuffs to me. But I was running out of time. And I was going no where, as far as generating revenue is concerned. I had been building products non stop for two years, and was struggling at around $100/month. I was also finishing up uni at this point, and after that I would have to find a full time job. I mean.. you have to, right? You either study or you work. You can't fuck around on your laptop all day, pretending to be doing building businesses! That was my parents' mentality, anyway. And I had to respect it. This was definitely be the best job I could ever land straight out of uni. Especially with my grades and credentials. And I also wanted a change. Moving abroad excited me. So I took it. I emailed them and told them would start in January 2020, after I get my degree. I had a few months, but I still didn't manage to build a successful product. No matter how hard I tried. I remember reading this quote: "When in doubt, do the exact opposite of what you are doing." So, what was I afraid to do? Start a job? Do that. Don't be a pussy, and throw yourself in the fire. So here I am, I've arrived in my small bedroom in Milan, and I'm getting ready to go to "work" tomorrow. At the office. Like a proper grown up. I set my alarm clock for 07:00AM. I saw my jeans, white polo shirt and watch on my chair. My shoes nice and clean. Ready to be worn the next day. Look professional. Fuck.. I'm an adult now. Only my closest friends and very few members of my family know about this, but at that moment, I started crying like a child. I wasn't afraid that I was going to hate the job. The opposite, actually. I was afraid that I was going to love it and forget everything about my goals. I was afraid that in the blink of an eye, three years will have passed and I'm still be at the same job. Will have forgotten everything about my goals and dreams. My side projects would seem like a very distant dream I can hardly even remember. "Oh, yeah. Back in the day when I used to build little side projects.. Cute." I promised I wouldn't stop working on my personal projects, no matter how tired I am. So, yeah.. Picture this. A grown ass man crying because he would start a comfy job. At twenty five years of age. It's pathetic. I know. But it's the truth. And in this blog post, you'll get nothing but the truth. Starting a full time job Luckily, reality was different to my expectations. There were no NASA scientists at lunch break. I wasn't saving lives with my code on a casual Tuesday. And I definitely wasn't discussing about AI, side projects or making the world a better place with my colleagues. Welcome to reality! I was tucked in a corner, with my brand new laptop, programming an internal dashboard for the logistics team. Clocking in eight hours per day, plus one hour for lunch break. I would enter the building at 10:00 AM and leave at 19:00 PM. That's pitch dark in January/February. It was depressing. I wasn't really close with my colleagues either. All our conversations were at surface level. Things were like I had predicted. I had daily fuel and motivation to change my life. Initially, I thought that something was wrong with me. That I'm a "special flower", who doesn't like working in an office. But no. One day, during lunch break, me and my colleagues were talking about sleep. Somehow the conversation ended up in how lovely it is to lie down in bed on a Friday night. Knowing that you don't have to wake up early for the next two days. And how depressing Sundays are because you know you have to go to work the next day. "Ok, so I'm not the only one." I'm not the cancerous cell growing inside this company. And I'm not special. No one enjoys working on a desk for eight hours a day, five days a week. Week after week. Month after month. Year after year. Decade after decade. No matter how cool the company is or fulfilling it's mission is. Most people don't know you can actually escape. Or maybe they don't have the balls to try. All I needed was a plan.. Forming my plan Hindsight 20-20, but three books I happened to read in December and January helped me shape my approach and strategy. - The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho This book was short, sweet, and easy to read. It's about a boy that has a dream and works hard for it. - Atomic Habits The most practical book I've read. It explains about how progress happens slowly, then all at once. All you have to do is focus on your inputs/habits and wait for the rewards. - Millionaire Fastlane Please, for the love of god, ignore the title! It's cringe as fuck, and I have a really hard time recommending it for that reason. But, if you ignore the title and the first twenty pages of the book, you'll thank me. The principles in are timeless and very close to the indiehacking philosophy. I took one main thing from this book that changed my perspective: Passions Making your passion your job is dangerous. It can mix up your incentives and make you hate what you once loved. I had personal experience with this. Again, I'm getting dangerously transparent with what I'm about to say, but fuck it. I was looking at how many people have photosensitive epilepsy and remember being dissapointed that the market was small. Damn it. Couldn't I have built a solution for more people? Couldn't there be more people with this? I caught myself off guard. What the fuck. My incentives started getting mixed up before I had even started. Now have EpilepsyBlocker completely free. And it always will be. I'm not trying to make it a business, and how I like it. Another thing I took from this book is that you don't have to be unique or try to change the world. Trying to change the external, the whole world around you, is a very naive way of looking at things. What you want is to change your world first, and then the rest of the world. Heck. If you are so keen like you say you are, do something more boring, make money, and donate 50% of your income to charities, every month. What is better? Trying to build a romantic, cool, probably B2C idea to help humanity, while building an average product at best? Or build a less romantic, uncool, profitable B2B product you enjoy working on, build a stellar product, make a lot of money and then give a percentage of it to charities every month? I mean, honestly, ego aside, how can you be more useful? This question troubled me for weeks. I thought about it in depth and a few things that happened at work helped me answer it: What companies really look like While working full time, I saw that the world was very different than what I imagined. Companies aren't that scary after all. If you are against a 50 person company, you aren't really against 50 people. You are against 5 motivated people and 45 yes-men. Forty five people that bored and dragging their feet until they finish the tasks they've been assigned to do. They don't care about the company. They have their own lives to care about. Financial problems. Problems with their girlfriend or boyfriend. Dreams. Aspirations. Stress. Insecurities. Health issues. Maybe even sexual issues, who knows. The point is that they are not the company. They are humans. And just like all humans, they care about themselves first and foremost. In my company people were not "bored" per se, but they were not as I had envisioned. Me included. I contributed to the company and it's cause, but first and foremost I was thinking about my own life. I can't even imagine what goes on inside huge, outdated, enterprises. Where the work you do is useless and monotonous. The human element, amongst other things like regulations and bottlenecks in communication between departments, is what makes companies slow. A solo business can pivot 180 degrees in one day. Big companies have to hold multiple(!) meetings to change the color of a button. I also saw what company budgets look like. I knew that getting money from companies is easier than getting money from consumers. But I couldn't imagine this. Remember that free lunch perk we have? That cost the company several hundreds of dollars per day. Yes. Hundreds of dollars. Every. Single. Day. Just for lunch. Compare that to chasing $5/mo checks. All you need is a few big companies for customers. Enter a big B2B market and get a small slice of the pie. That's all you need. The internet is not a zero sum game. If you think the internet is not big enough to handle you and some other company, you're stupid. B2B is the way to go. Last but not least, I saw the ugliness of maintaining a critical tech product. Not glamorous. I can assure you. Building a life saving, innovative product comes with great responsibility. I saw support tickets from people complaining. Requesting refunds. Reporting bugs. The list goes on and on. What? You thought just because you are trying to make the world a better place, people forgive you? The opposite. You have more responsibility. And when you charge money, they hate you even more. Plus, writing critical code and keeping uptime for these kind of systems is scary. Servers breaking and coming down in the night. Peoples' lives on the line. Ugh. So, I didn't want to write code either, if I could avoid it. Actually, I sort of fell out of love with programming, after coding for eight hours every day. I realized that I wasn't in love with coding after all, but creating. And you can create without code. All the above helped me decide and formulate my final plan: I was going to build a non romantic, non unique, no code, profitable, low maintenance, B2B product, charge a lot of money for it, and whatever happens, give 10% of my income to charities. You can read in depth my plan here: Plans for 2020. I was working for just one month, but I had completely re-structured my business and life philosophy. I had flipped my priorities 180 degrees and had a clear plan. All that was needed was for me to execute. Following the plan. Work in the office was my daily motivator. I would fantasize going back home and start working on my side-projects. Create my escape route. I was very influenced by 'Atomic Habits', so I tracked down everything. Motivation is overrated. Discipline is overrated. Habits are everything. It's easy to start out a new year or a new decade full of motivation. But motivation is a finite resource. You wake up early, do the shit that has to be done, all in the first few weeks. But what happens when that fades and you have already every single motivational Gary Vee video? (I hope not) You wake up on a random fucking Wednesday, but Gary is not there to lift you up. You might even power through it once or twice but that's not easy either, because discipline, just like motivation, is a finite resource. What is not a finite resource is something that happens automatically, like the brushing of your teeth or your morning coffee. Have you ever heard someone say: "Dude, this summer I've really slacked off with brushing my teeth.. I don't know man, I have to start getting back into it in September/October." Of course not (I hope). Brushing your teeth requires no discipline. Or inspiration. It's a habit. I would write down in a small notebook every day the things I had to do. - In green if I did them - In blue if they are irrelevant - In red if I didn't do them That really helped. I subconsciously wanted to make the pages green. Mornings vs Evenings Initially, I was working, or at least trying to work on side projects in the evening after work, but couldn't. Humans have the capacity for 2-3 creative hours per day. That's it. But you can get serious work in, if you are in this mode. I had it all wrong. I would blow my load every day at my day job. So, when I got home in the evening, I was toast. I would stare at my screen, pretending to be working, feeling guilty and sorry about myself. I. Just. Could. Not. Work. Especially when you are in idea phase, you need that creative juice. Idea phase is the hardest fucking part! The part that calls for the most creativity. Not many people talk about this. They say that ideas don't matter, but I love Courtland Allen's take on this. He says: "It's very difficult to become a 10 times better executioner, but it's easy to have a 10 times better idea." Ideas mean everything and nothing at the same time. They mean everything, because you can 10x your odds of success by simply picking a better one. They mean nothing, because with bad execution you'll achieve nothing, no matter how good the idea. Want some free ideas with the notorious product-market fit you are looking for? Jira. Salesforce. GitHub. Intercom. Stripe. Shopify. Basically anything that exists, is making money and is not in a winner-take-all market. The problem is that you have to find the right idea for you. The idea you know how to build, run, and be able to get it in front of potential customers. So, I flipped that shit. If your side projects mean so much to you, how come you are doing them last thing before you go to bed? I started working on them first thing in the morning. It was a game changer. True work vs Pretend work I woke up every day at 05:00AM and worked on my own stuff until 08:00AM. I would have a clear mind and get serious work in. I would go to the gym until 09:00AM and then have a shower and go to work at 10:00AM. When I got back at night, I had no guilt. I had conquered the day already. I would enjoy a book and go to sleep early. These constraints I had set me free. I knew I only had 2-3 hours every day to work on my own stuff, so I made them count. I see a lot of pretend work in the maker scene. Actually, not just the maker scene. In companies. People with their hobbies. Everywhere. People staying busy, but not really getting anything done. Some examples for us makers/solopreneurs: Pretend work: - Refactore code and move to AWS (when you have zero users) - Set up Pingdom (before you have paying customers) - Set up A/B test (when you get 300 visitors per month) - Redesign landing page (when the conversion is just fine) - Set up a business email, business cards, business paperwork - Add feature X (that customers never asked for) - Improve speed of website (no comment...) - Set up meta tags (when you have a tiny blog) True work: - Send 10 cold emails and get feedback - Promote product on FB groups, Twitter, Reddit, etc - Promote product on FB groups, Twitter, Reddit, etc today - Build landing page with a signup form and soft launch on Reddit or Twitter - Launch on PH I started to notice "pretend work" everywhere when I started reflecting and writing "Two years of indiehacking". With every launch, I found another piece of fat that was not needed. From my first failed launch, I understood that the ".com" domain I was chasing didn't save me. From the second, that the awesome logo I created didn't determine my success. From the third, that those extra features wouldn't make me or break me. From the forth, that the amount of upvotes, positive comments or recognition you get doesn't mean shit. It may sound shallow, but at the end of the day, all you want is someone to find what you built so valuable, that he/she pulls out their credit card and subscribes. And so on and so forth. By the end of it, I realized that all I needed was a fucking landing page and a stripe/Gumroad/whatever checkout. I still try to find "pretend work" and kill it. It creeps into my life all the time. I've came up with this to help me identify it. Sounds stupid, but stick with me. Someone holds a gun to your head: "You have to generate revenue online, by the end of the week. If you don't, you're dead." Extreme. But effective. All the pretend work goes out of the window. All that matters is that you get someone to pay you. Do those two or three things you know you have to do, and trust me, you are good. No need to work anymore. No need to feel guilty. You need a fresh mind. Stop pretending to be working and do what you are supposed to do. Nowadays, I still think the same way. But I frame it a little different. Someone holds a gun to my head and tells me: "If Cyberleads doesn't grow by the end of the month, you're dead." Growth is not up to me, but it helps me notice "pretend work". Shotgun vs Sniper There are two schools of thought when it comes to building products and businesses. The shotgun approach. And the sniper approach. The shotgun approach is building many products and wait until one of them takes off. Sniper approach is building one product and sticking with it for months/years, even though it might not be generating any revenue. Both approaches have worked for different people. I went through the indiehacker archive and started listening again to the podcast episodes. I noticed a pattern: - They were tinkering - They launched a product - They immediately got some traction Like the great Nassim Taleb says: "Don't tell me what you think, show me your portfolio." In contrast to popular wisdom that says focus on one idea, all the people I admired and looked up to didn't get there in that way. These lists of products by Josh Pigford of Baremetrics and Pieter Levels of NomadList are just another example. Last but not least, I had seen this from my own experience as well. In 2018, I built 12 products and had good results. I went from zero experience in building products to $200 MRR. In 2019, I focused solely on EpilepsyBlocker, and didn't generate any revenue. So I was going to build many small ideas. Building small products I started building small MVPs like I used to, but this time I went market first. I wasn't going to "throw and hope", or "spray and pray". I was going to "aim and fire". I was going to go "idea hunting"! I had two markets in mind. The Cyber Security market and the Lead Generation market. There are countless of big markets out there, but these happened to be two that interested me and I knew were lucrative. These was the products I tried out. Cyberflake A collaboration tool for pen testers - I cold emailed several people and scheduled calls - Went undercover on Reddit and asked questions regarding their pain points. Something like, "I'm a student, I want to enter the market, what is the worst thing about your work?" Or. "I have time and want to build a free tool for you guys, what do you wish existed?". Shit like that. I tried to find ideas in the market. I realized the Cyber Security crowd is far more technical than me, and I'm not an engineer at heart. I would suffer in that market. Scrapcat An uptime monitor for web scrapers. Built a Product Hunt Ship page. Built a mockup in Figma and posted it on Reddit. Got no interest what so ever. Fuck this. Cyberhound Lead generation service for startups selling to developers Built a Product Hunt Ship page. Built a landing page with a subscribe button. Launched on Twitter. Nada. Birdleads Lead generation service. Get notified when people talk about something on Twitter, eg. if you selling coffee mugs, people that are talking about coffees. Didn't get to try this one. Although I had seen similar products doing well, I launched Cyberleads before getting my hands on this one. Cyberleads This is it. My muse. The product I was waiting for so long. So the big question I get asked all the time. How did I get the idea for it? Spoiler alert, I didn't get the idea. I found it by accident while idea hunting. Most people have a sexy "epiphany" moment. When they were walking down San Fransisco. Or lying on a beach in Bali. When they were smoking a cigarette. And like some kind of Hollywood movie, the idea hit them. Nah, my epiphany moment was super boring. As I was scrolling through Reddit, idea hunting, I saw a post with a list of startups that raised money recently. It was doing very well, and people were very interested in it. It seemed strange to me, so I started googling around. I found out that startups that just got funded are like the hot chicks in school that everyone wants to date. These startups are scaling quickly and since they have a truckload of money, they will hapilly spend it to solve those scaling problems. I had seen first hand how much money these companies spend, so I got it immediately. It made sense and I liked it. I saw many businesses offering this information. As a service. As a database. As a one time downloadable list. As a newsletter. As an insight and business intelligence platform. And they were all making good money. People were paying for this. They were also selling it to many different types of customers. Some were selling to investors. Others to sales people. Others to journalists. Others to people looking for a tech job. Others anyone and everyone interested in tech and wants to keep up with the news. I found at least(!) ten companies offering the same information in different ways and to different people. This looked promising. But again, I had felt the same way countless of times. Explaining how I "rationalized" launching Cyberleads can be very missleading. So let me re-phrase. I didn't know that it would succeed. I had felt confident many times before and failed. The big difference was that for the first time, I stopped looking at ideas as if they were fucking bus seats. As if the internet is a zero sum game. "Oops. This is taken! Sorry! On to the next one." So I knew that this was a validated idea. How easy was that! But the idea isn't everything. Ok, let's say it's validated. Now what? The important thing is to find a distribution channel and get it in front of people. I was going to try Product Hunt, as none of those companies had launched there. I chose the newsletter format, since you can launch without a product and it reduces friction. I narrowed my focus to B2B Sales teams and positioned myself as a service to help you grow your business. (Today I've narrowed it even more, to digital agencies) I was ready to launch. Launch There is no epic launch. No epic event. No going viral. I just built a landing page with a no-code tool and launched on ProductHunt out of the blue. Without even a product. If people subscribed, I would rush and create it before by the 1st of the next month, as my website stated. No pretend work this time. Even those mockups, soft launches and Reddit posts had started to feel like "pretend work" now. Just launch already. The launch went well, and I got ten paying customers. Just like that. With a an initial price tag of $29/mo, I was already at $290 MRR. All and all, from no idea to $290/mo in two weeks. Or two years. Both answers are technically correct. I was pinching myself. What? That was it? So all this blog post just to tell me that you found a random idea doing well and launched it? Exactly. I took me two years of pretend work to be able to do two weeks of true work. You need time to build your skills and abilities. The ability recognize a good idea. The ability to recognize a good distribution channel. The ability to kill your perfectionism. The ability to launch fast. The ability to know which idea suits you, your skills and your resources. I already knew the above. From the first week I started indiehacking. It's written everywhere. We all know it. But there is a huge difference between knowing and understanding. We are all physically capable of moving chess pieces, but we can't play like a professional chess player. The 2018 version of Alex, could theoretically build a landing page and launch it. But he would never find the idea. The way to position it. Know what to include in the MVP and the landing page. Have the guts to launch this early. Have a small audience to push it to. Everything that looks simple hides many complex thoughts, experience and understanding. Now what? Yoohoo!!! Ok, so you launch on Product Hunt and get customers. Now what? Wouldn't it be great if we were allowed to launch on Product Hunt every week? We’d be rich! Well, that's why you need a distribution channel and a way to utilize it. Repeatedly. At a good cost. A way to generate traffic so it's essentially like launching every month/week/day. It's the final piece to the puzzle. Finding my distribution channel I'm not going to focus on the details of this process. This is already too long of a blog post, and we've only covered January and February! I'll leave the details for the "3 years of indie hacking", which will be out in December. But from this point on, I want you to know that things get easier. I was out of the dark ages and had at last changed chapter. My breakfast tasted better in the morning. The sun seemed warmer. The people kinder. Literally, the whole world was burning down, going into complete lockdown and panic mode witht he corona virus, but I was in my happy little bubble. Italy, and Milan especially, was hit hard by the virus. We were the first to go into complete lockdown. We started working remotely on March 9th, 2020. While working remotely, I found myself having more energy. I actually started enjoying my day job as well. All the "pretend work" at work was gone. The future for funded companies was extremely unpredictable so we were doubling down on building a new platform for pharma companies to track the spreading of Covid. For the next one hundred days, I wasn't even allowed to leave the house, unless it was to go to the pharmacy or the supermarket. Three out of my four room mates fled to their families to stay safe. So it was only me and my one other flat mate, Luca, who was also working remotely. I had no problem being stuck at home. I was focused. All I needed was to find a way to get new customers in a repeatable and predictable way. The daemon of "pretend work" didn't leave me alone that easily. It was back. Out of momentum and old habits, I couldn't help myself and built and launched a similar product to Cyberleads in another vertical. Again in the same way. Spent two weeks and got zero customers. I was really mad at myself. You have everything you asked for, yet you are doing the same shit you used to?! DOUBLE DOWN ON ONE THING. It's better to do one thing great than many things so and so. I instantly ditched every single project I had open. I slept like a baby that night. I read the book Traction. The book is co-authored by the founder of DuckDuckGo. His main thesis is that startups don't die due to lack of product market fit. They die due to lack of traction. What you want to do is focus at least 50% of your energy into marketing. Try every single traffic channel (there are 19) and when you find the one that working for you: DOUBLE THE FUCK DOWN. And leave everything else. Focus all your energy on that one traffic channel, until it no longer works or you find a better one. And that's what I did. I tried everything. Facebook Groups. LinkedIn. Reddit. Cold outreach. Hacker News. Direct Sales. Twitter. Over a month went by. Nearly two. Revenue was dropping. That's another thing I didn't know about the lead generation market. Churn is high, especially when you have low prices. With low prices you get either scammers, or spammers, or desperate people. Those people usually come in, blast a template to everyone, and then unsubscribe when they don't get good results. So I was very dissapointed and starting questioning myself. When I would feel down, I would log into ChartMogule and look at the charts. Look at where it was after the launch. Wow.. I was at $300 MRR.. Man, that means it's useful. We just have to get it in front of people. Don't give up. My habit tracking notebook also helped a lot. One of the habits I was cultivating was tweeting every day, and writing blog posts every day. Those two ended up being my savior. One random day, on April 21st, I went viral on Twitter with a simple tweet! https://twitter.com/alexwestco I got 10 paying customers from that tweet. The next week I wrote a monthly blog post and posted it on Twitter. Someone shared it and it went to the top of HackerNews. It went viral. People were actually reading my words on air and analyzing it on podcasts. So strange. I got another 10 customers. What?! I found it! Double the fuck down and put the reps in This is where things got much, much easier. I had a product and a repeatable system of generating traffic to my website. I would share it on Twitter, but in a way that was true to me. The way I did before I even knew it could result into paying customers. I wasn't promoting it in a slutty way. "Hey guys, use the coupon 'AlexRocks' and get 20% off in the next 30 minutes! Go! Go! Go! Don't forget to retweet, like, leave a comment and share it with your friends! #promo #crazydeal" No. I was doing the exact opposite. I wasn't selling it at all. I was sharing my personal journey, lessons and milestones. The best marketing is no marketing. No one wants to be sold anything. I was just being myself. Growth This is where the fun begins. You have your product. You have your distribution channel. You have a way/system to utilize that channel and repeatedly get new customers. Now all you have to do is put the reps in. I was keen to invest time in other channels as well, like SEO or Quora, which were both working for me too. But luckily Jordan's amazing piece kept me grounded and reminded me that one product and one distribution channel can take you very far. Pretend Work was creeping up on me again. Just double the fuck down. One product. One distribution channel. One system. Go. Until you reach this point, you have to be an artist. Be creative. Think out of the box. Do different shit every day. Until you find these. But from here on, you have to become an athlete. Be disciplined. Focused. Do the same shit every day. The three main things so the guy with the gun on your head doesn't kill you. I would work two hours per day on Cyberleads in the morning to promote it. And a couple of hours in the afternoons or week ends for the lists. Inside three months, half way through this crazy year, I was slowly getting within striking range with my monthly salary. Cyberleads was only 4 months old, but had already reached $1.5k MRR. Two months later, just six months after launching Cyberleads, I was at $2k MRR. I'm still at my day job. Hacking away, working remotely while travelling around with my girlfriend. Actually, I am pinching myself every day. I'm living my dream. Epilogue As you can see, I focused a lot on the idea part. Although I was very tempted to write about all the things I learnt after find Cyberelads, I have to listen to my audience. I get asked daily about idea and validation phase. I have to respect that. At the end of the day, this is the blog post I would have liked to read six months ago. As much as I would like to talk about the new intangibles I learnt while growing Cyberleads, I will have to keep that for the next mega blog post in December. I'll talk about things like: Positioning Competition Copycats Systems Stress Mentality Inputs vs Outputs Playing the long game --- But for now, I want you to keep this. No one knows what the fuck they are doing. Just try new things and don't give up. I could easily "forget" the previous two years, the crying, the fear and the failures. I could just play smart. Write about finding the idea on Reddit and launching it successfully straight away. Building an audience and reaching $1.5K MRR in 4 months. How cool would that be? But that's not the truth. I'm not that smart. No one is. The stars just happen to align sometimes. My girlfriend pushing me to pursue EpilepsyBlocker. That company finding EpilepsyBlocker and reaching out to me. Accepting that job and moving to Italy. Tweeting that random tweet. Reading those specific books. Seeing those specific things at work. Being sick the day I was scrolling through Reddit. Normally I would have been at the gym at that time. Everything has to align. You need luck. But guess what? If you show up every day for two years, one day you'll get lucky. I'll leave you with a Bruce Lee quote. "Keep what works. Discard what doesn't. Try new things. Rinse and repeat." Oh yeah, and when in doubt, do the exact opposite of what you are doing. Do what you are afraid of. Move abroad. Get some new inputs. Force your brain to fire differently.
🐦 Twitter/X💼 LinkedIn🎥 YouTube
✉️ Newsletter🔊 Podcast📸 Instagram