Lessons from building nine startups in 2023
marclou.beehiiv.com
marclou.beehiiv.com
I made the decision to first get real work experience in a relevant industry, learn the problems there and only then start building a product. This opens up the door to building software for industries like the AEC industry, defense or healthcare, where you could have far greater impact, instead of getting stuck on building todo apps, online communities or platforms.
It's so hard to find real problems if you spend 90% of your time finding problems.
Having a job is a great fix.
Building side projects with no purpose works too.
For instance, you can sell a boilerplate to make it faster, or get feedback from users and build for them.
Although it's much harder to start, and hard to navigate life without $ for months (years in my case)
Any ideas on how to capitalize on that?
Either I'll build an audience on YouTube
And/Or I'll build new startups
Also, my Twitter is really small so there's much more work to do there.
Any thoughts?
Note: I've been building an audience there for 2 years (the first 4 years was me building in the dark)
I do have a radical idea that I am keen to share with you in particular.
I am the Founder of RocketDevs.com. The 'amazing' thing about us is that we can ethically and reliably source GREAT developers and rent them out for $6/hr or $980/mo. This entry point is cheap for USD earners, but stil a fortune in some regions.
The market opportunity here is early startups. People have ideas, but they can't spend $7k/mo on Turing. Fivver is shit. Upwork is avg $28/hr for mid-devs. With no affordable help, non-technical founders will scramble to find a 'technical' founder. You taught yourself how to code but few are that committed. Technical founders will reliably start a project and burn out quickly due to 0 help.
Our audiences intersect strongly. My radical idea is that we work together. I use my deep technical experience to source great devs. You use your following so I can conveniently focus on the product and avoid the pain of 'building an audience' just to get the word out. Stable income for you and we're helping folks build their dreams.
Look me up at linkedin.com/in/thelastsultan if you're keen. I think im in your inbox already.
> Having a job is a great fix.
My experience differs: it is very easy to find real problems, and it is possible to implement a decent solution for at least some of them. But: many of the problems that various industries have are in my opinion self-inflicted because of their structures. What is hard is convincing potential customers that your solution would help them.
What's that threshold? Well, that's the hard part. :)
But you can’t fix it by making another multifunctional tool, because you’ll just get people using one or two of your five feature-areas, and two or three other tools for the rest, same as now.
Why is this a problem?
Of course “well just use all the tools the right way and always look where you’re supposed to and put things in the right place” but it never works out so nicely in practice.
[edit] example: paying for a half dozen services that provide, between them, two code repo hosting solutions, four CI solutions, six wiki solutions (LOL), two cloud hosting solutions, two CDNs, three issue trackers, and on and on… and mixing and matching those such that it requires daily manual upkeep to synchronize info between them (you’re not using all the features of each one, to be clear—or, if you’re really in hell, maybe you are), onboarding is messier than it could be, account management is a pain, you’re over-paying at least a bit on everything, “where did/does that go?” is a constant question, everyone needs several pinned tabs opened when they could have, like, two, et c et c. Usually the reasons for doing this aren’t even strong, it’s just how things have ended up.
I would bet my entire salary you only believe this because you don't understand the constraints. When I was in my 20's and thought I knew everything I had the same attitude. I have since gained seniorship and worked in regulated industries and it's much clearer to me now. People in the industries you're talking about are generally smart and well meaning, but the constraints imposed by things like regulation and legacy systems (internal and external) make things that seem like they should be easy really hard.
I would counter bet that:
i) I do know quite some of the constraints (though surely not all).
ii) Quite of these these constraints are self-imposed prisons that the respective company/industry created for itself because of historical or "political" reasons.
What you call "constraints" is something that I would rather call "the industry's preferred flavor". Well, I do have a different taste than the respective industry. :-)
Believe me: In the past, when I was frustrated of my job, I made use of an opportunity to present some ideas that I had to some former friend who has been working in business consulting for many years: he really told me that some my ideas could be as impactful for the respective industries as I imagine it, but they would be insanely hard to sell (and a huge part of his job is selling things to customers) because they so different.
To give an even different perspective: at my current emplyer's Christmas party, my boss' boss said that I am the kind of person who cannot be classified on an optimist-pessimist scale, since I don't behave like an optimist or pessimist, but rather like an statistical outlier in a data set. :-)
- Brief. Respect people's time, and take a stand.
- Tailored, to solopreneur. It's tempting to be drawn into building beautiful tech, chasing resume skills, or building domain experience in crap work. Putting yourself on the hook of your own decision-making builds character.
- Refined: it's easy to go from bad to good (just smooth out the pain points). It's very hard to go from good (happy but free customers) to better (paying customers), because you're trading lots of pain for benefits.
- Timely: those are the virtues of 2023, of contraction (outside AI-mania), where you control your destiny as a solopreneur. If it starts raining money again, it might not be the right approach.
However, the most common measure of leadership is a success pattern in ... leadership. People can take solopreneur experience as fitting for product management and not much else.
To show leadership, you have to demonstrate decision-making under stress, where you identified the key factors and how to change them. That's a different post, one that shows how you sift through noise, excitement, and gaps to find the difference that makes a difference, and prosecute that.
It's possible solopreneurs can get rich, but more often success means finding partners, get attention or getting bought, or just proving yourself - to yourself and perhaps others.
Or, if you're really lucky, you can make a difference.
Some are actual startups with decent userbase and recurring revenue, and some are just free logo makers.
if instead it would say: 21 products, 15 products, 10 products... the list would look much more sensible.
It might not be as objective; the author benefits from people who take this advice and decide to try one of the advertised products.
What would be a lot more indicative of the financial success of the project (and less misleading) would be something like "trailing 3 months". But I get it: telling the world you're making $X/mo is a blast. And it definitely helps with exposure! But IMO it gives off guru vibes, especially when paired with the fact that you seem to be veering towards paid educational content (nothing bad with that obviously).
I wouldn't even bother writing this if it wasn't for the fact that you literally open with the line "my income jumped from $1,500 in January, to $65,000 in November", of which $50k is definitely not recurring.
(Again, not a hater, quite the opposite so I hope you take this as constructive feedback!)
It reminds me of people who sell classes using tales of their success, except all of their success comes from selling the classes in the first place.
Exercise (the right kind) has comparable effects to anti-depressants. It can help people with very hard to treat depression manage symptoms. It improves cognition and induces neurogenesis.
Sleep. It's quite a curious fact but after a person experiences sleep deprivation their dopamine and serotonin levels spike. It's been noted that this helps with depression. Psychiatrists have observed the relationship between sleep and mental health and used sleep modulation to treat bipolar. They call it triple chrono therapy 'sleep deprivation for 36 h, followed by 4 days of advancing the time of sleep and daily morning bright-light therapy for 6 months) has demonstrated benefits for the rapid treatment of depressive symptom.'
So that's an interesting example of using sleep as a way to treat illness. The more common knowledge is that having poor sleep negatively effects mood and cognition. If you look at so-called 'biohackers' the number one thing they seem to emphasize is sleep. Because if you have poor sleep it's infinitely harder to manage every other aspect of your life. Never mind exercising or eating well. You're not going to feel like doing anything.
The last one -- diet. In those with mental disorders its interesting to note that the prevalence of nutrition deficiencies is much higher than the general population. I've seen some interesting takes on the potential role that nutrition may play in mental health. There are some that say that some of these illnesses may be caused by potential issues with absorbing nutrients. While others say that specific diets have managed to cure seemingly incurable disorders. There does seem to be evidence of direct dietary ties as a kind of treatment for mental disorders. One of the most important medications in psychiatry, lithium, might also be an essential micronutrient.
It seems the more we understand about diet, sleep, and exercise, the more important they actually become for maintaining mental health. Though the specifics do matter.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurobiological_effects_of_phy...
A gap in food, sleep, or exercise in someone who has no pre-existing mental health problems will reduce productivity and can induce or exacerbate a mental health decline. Founders tend to start skipping these and it's a good reminder that these are important.
People with pre-existing mental health problems should absolutely look to food, sleep, and exercise to prevent exacerbating their problems, but this is not sufficient.
I spent 10 months on the first project. It was a very clever project, complicated to explain, hard to build, and ultimately did crap. It scratched my own itch - or so I thought, I don’t even use it myself at all. No emotions, pure logic marketing. 1000+ users only. $0 made.
My second project I built in 1 day, and launched in 1 week. It was basic, but people wanted this functionality. It was an emotion based marketing, people empowerment tool, and I wanted it and I use it myself. It immediately went viral and I managed to sell it for a decent bump to my income. 5 figures.
My third project I built in 3 days, it was the top post of the month on the subreddit for the niche, and gained about 1500 users in 1 day. Again, an emotional marketing spin and this time worker empowerment. I’m planning on selling it this year for 4 figures.
I’m now working on a roughly 2-3 month project from start to launch. It’s something I need. It will be my first non-freemium project.
Lessons learned? Build FAST, and market an mvp as soon as you can. Be clever, but not too clever because you only alienate a potential audience. I really agree with the OP regarding impressions and emotions. I will only pursue ideas I can build and fully launch in a 3 month window.
How can I improve? Get the landing page up earlier, don’t be too clever with ideas, and try paid advertisements
How would someone who is really clueless and horrible at promotion learn those kind of skills?
Part of it may come from designing the product to help with the marketing. That may also help with viral marketing.
Marketing is a pretty broad topic, and it can vary a lot, too. Maybe it's a good idea to talk to some of your customers face to face to learn more about their industry vertical. If you share some specifics, maybe more people here could suggest ideas.
Another Show HN I posted went nowhere — even though it was a good enough idea to separately get media coverage because it was timely (including in a front-page article of the NYT). There is a lot of luck involved, but you can also make your own luck, by reaching out to folks who might be interested.
As a user of indie apps, I think in general people expect the basic version for a reasonable one-time payment, you never know if the developer's going to go become inactive, stop actively maintaining it or get hampered by OS/API changes. The developer can always later on release major upgrades at higher prices (one-time or subscription). I think users are deeply wary of monetization schemes and rug-pulls - a few bad incidents got the whole proposition a bad rep.
I'm also much more likely to recommend to people I know an app that's sold by modest one-time payment (or freemium) than subscription.