September 2021 | Dark times ahead ($5K MRR) πŸŒ‘

Oh boy. Here I am again. On the lower end of the entrepreneurial roller coaster. It's one of those months.

Super stressed. Planning to leave Italy next year and I have to start taking action.

I am moving my base and business to Cyprus next year. And that takes a lot of organizing and money.

I love Italy. But for business it's terrible. High taxes. High bureaucracy. No one speaks English in public offices. 

I can't speak about business or legal things in Italian. And honestly, that makes me utterly useless and helpless.

For example, last week I was trying to find an English speaking person at the tax office. I wanted to request a specific tax document I needed to send to Greece.

I ended up paying $150 to an agency online to do it for me. I don't feel safe having my base and business in a country that is not friendly towards foreigners and businessmen.

Plus, taxes are high!

Let me paint a picture for you:
- If you make $100k in Italy, you get to keep $50k of it.

- If you make $100k in Cyprus, you get to keep $85k of it.

I know that taxes is a taboo subject. But why not pick a country that treats you well?

My 90% tax exemption is ending next year, so I would have leave anyway. Actually, even if it never expired I'd still leave.

Because taxes aren't my main motivator. If it was taxes I'd go to the Cayman islands.

Cyprus ticks all the boxes. It's in the EU, so no visa runs. It is pro business. People speak Greek and English. It has low taxes. It is close to my families in Greece and England.

Also, they only ask you to stay in the country for 2 months per year. Not 6 like most others. This is to be considered a tax resident. That aligns perfectly with my plans of traveling starting next year.

Anyway, I don't want to bore you to death with tax stuff, but I'm only learning as I go. To take this decision I spent hundreds of hours and read multiple books. This time last year I didn't even know what taxes were!

Ok, let's talk about CyberLeads now.

Business wasn't great either this month. My SEO efforts stopped bearing fruit. And they had just began.

I'm not sure what happened. I was acting off of momentum and started split testing multiple things at once on landing pages. When things went wrong and conversions dropped, I had no idea where to look.

Ended up reverting everything. Let's see what happens.

Maybe there is no problem what so ever. Who knows. Maybe conversions from SEO are volatile as well. Even though traffic is consistent.

Probably no distribution channel is perfect. And that sounds logical.

All have volatility. All have platform risk. All stagnate and plateau at different stages.

It's only when you combine multiple channels together you get the illusion of stability. Never bank on a single one.

I should stop looking for silver bullet solutions. Stop looking for "platonic forms". Perfection does not exist. Not in business. Not in distribution channels. Not in life.

For example, here are some elements that formed the perfect internet business for me just a few years ago:
- SaaS
- B2B
- Subscriptions
- Word of mouth and SEO as main distribution channels
- Is your burning passion
- Makes the world a better place
- Is technically challenging
- Blue ocean without competition
- Zero employees
- Is interesting to talk about with friends and family
- Runs on autopilot and brings you "pAsSivE iNcOmE"

Platonic forms don’t exist in the real world. Luckily, thanks to my horrible 9-5, I ruthlessly killed many of the above self imposed constraints to set myself free.

CyberLeads was not the perfect business according to my own personal standards.

And maybe yours isn't either.

But if it helps you live a great life, make a fuck ton of money, travel the world and be free, then it's the perfect business.

In that spirit, I decided to take on an enterprise customer! It's something I was opposed to, but I want to keep an open mind.

Instantly almost doubled my revenue.

This multi million dollar company wants a custom monthly list.

I don't want to jump the gun, but if we scale as planned, we are looking at $3k per month.

That puts CyberLeads at $100K per year.

Insane. The power of enterprise.


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