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Hey guys, I've been lurking for a while. Read the millionaire fastlane a couple times and keep recommending it to people. Today I just ordered "unscripted" and felt like sharing my journey so far 
So here's a little story of how I started my business and what I'm planning to do. Except for relations with family and my health, I'm willing to sacrifice anything in order to grow this thing. I feel like growth is almost like my happiness.
In 2013, while studying engineering, I got an idea for a startup, a cloud-computing service. (It actually didn't start as an idea, but a specific group of people who I wanted to help)
I started out totally overwhelmed with the fact that it was a really hard technological challenge and almost gave up with the excuse "I don't now how". But I decided to learn how to write code and started building it. It took me a whopping YEAR to go from idea to "launch".
So after 1 year I launched my service by getting an article on a big news site in my niche. The first 2 people that tried to use it broke it.. It was pretty stressful but after a few days I managed to fix everything and it started running. First few months it was doing $300 in revenue a month, but I had more expenses than that so I was making a loss..
Around 5 months later I started making a profit (on a monthly basis). I guess around $300 profit a month. It was still pretty stressful at times because the service was not very reliable, so sometimes I worked the whole night to fix something for a client.
About a year after launching I realized this service is working, people want it. So I decided to invest in a software developer to redesign the whole software architecture. Make it more reliable and robust to allow for more clients and less time spent on fixing stupid problems.
I spend around 10k on improving the software using student loans and a credit card, about a year later I managed to break even. It was risky but I'm really happy I decided to do that.
While I was getting this version 2.0 built, during the summer of 2014 I decided to drop out of university.. a pretty big decision but I did it for 2 reasons: I always felt this nagging feeling that I had to study instead of build this business which was very distracting, and I could kind of use the fact that I was studying as a "safety net" which kept me from really diving in..
When I dropped out, it was pretty scary because now I had to make my own money to survive. The business wasn't making quite enough yet so I also did some freelancing work. I think freelancing was 80% of my income and the business 20%.
Last summer (2016) the business had grown enough and I could stop freelancing, this was a huge deal and it still feels unreal when I think back. At the same time I also felt a bit too "comfortable", I felt like I wasn't doing enough to grow the business. I talked to one of my mentors about this and we concluded that I should be way more aggressive/bold in terms of marketing and sales. So I've been learning everything about marketing and copywriting and it's starting to pay off.
It's now 2017 and it's been 3 years since my launch. For the last few months the average revenue is around 5k which still sounds a bit pathetic to me for a business, but it pays the bills for now.. I still hire some programmers every once in a while (freelance) but I'm looking to outsource more and make it grow more.
So, to come back to the title of this post. I've made a 2048 days projection of some of the goals I want to achieve and also a revenue goal. By December 31st 2022 I will:
- Be market leader in my niche
- Expand on suppliers (this is mostly a technological challenge)
- Expand into other (similar) niches
- have 2 fulltime software developers (remotely)
- have 2 fulltime support people in different time zones (remotely)
- do 100k / month (revenue)
The revenue goal sounds crazy to me compared to the 5k, but it's only around a 5% growth each month which is not all too unrealistic. I think the key is just to stick to it. And the funny thing is, since the launch, I have been making a round a 5% growth every month (on average).
Now, this business is supposed to run fully automatically, so the only "work" for me is to reach out to gain new users and to engage with existing users (although most of my users come from google search and I never interact with them before the first sale). So I'm also trying to look at new opportunities and this 100k/m goal is only for my existing business. I do actually expect to have some other stuff going on as well by that time
I think my biggest weaknesses are wanting to do everything myself as opposed to outsourcing, and still being not bold enough in certain situations. Probably still have some of that "concern what people think" left from the teenage years, unconsciously. These are just things I'll also have to work on if I ever want to get near that goal.
I'm happy to post updates here on how it's all going if people are interested. I'll also be reading other peoples journeys and try to learn from them.
So here's a little story of how I started my business and what I'm planning to do. Except for relations with family and my health, I'm willing to sacrifice anything in order to grow this thing. I feel like growth is almost like my happiness.
In 2013, while studying engineering, I got an idea for a startup, a cloud-computing service. (It actually didn't start as an idea, but a specific group of people who I wanted to help)
I started out totally overwhelmed with the fact that it was a really hard technological challenge and almost gave up with the excuse "I don't now how". But I decided to learn how to write code and started building it. It took me a whopping YEAR to go from idea to "launch".
So after 1 year I launched my service by getting an article on a big news site in my niche. The first 2 people that tried to use it broke it.. It was pretty stressful but after a few days I managed to fix everything and it started running. First few months it was doing $300 in revenue a month, but I had more expenses than that so I was making a loss..
Around 5 months later I started making a profit (on a monthly basis). I guess around $300 profit a month. It was still pretty stressful at times because the service was not very reliable, so sometimes I worked the whole night to fix something for a client.
About a year after launching I realized this service is working, people want it. So I decided to invest in a software developer to redesign the whole software architecture. Make it more reliable and robust to allow for more clients and less time spent on fixing stupid problems.
I spend around 10k on improving the software using student loans and a credit card, about a year later I managed to break even. It was risky but I'm really happy I decided to do that.
While I was getting this version 2.0 built, during the summer of 2014 I decided to drop out of university.. a pretty big decision but I did it for 2 reasons: I always felt this nagging feeling that I had to study instead of build this business which was very distracting, and I could kind of use the fact that I was studying as a "safety net" which kept me from really diving in..
When I dropped out, it was pretty scary because now I had to make my own money to survive. The business wasn't making quite enough yet so I also did some freelancing work. I think freelancing was 80% of my income and the business 20%.
Last summer (2016) the business had grown enough and I could stop freelancing, this was a huge deal and it still feels unreal when I think back. At the same time I also felt a bit too "comfortable", I felt like I wasn't doing enough to grow the business. I talked to one of my mentors about this and we concluded that I should be way more aggressive/bold in terms of marketing and sales. So I've been learning everything about marketing and copywriting and it's starting to pay off.
It's now 2017 and it's been 3 years since my launch. For the last few months the average revenue is around 5k which still sounds a bit pathetic to me for a business, but it pays the bills for now.. I still hire some programmers every once in a while (freelance) but I'm looking to outsource more and make it grow more.
So, to come back to the title of this post. I've made a 2048 days projection of some of the goals I want to achieve and also a revenue goal. By December 31st 2022 I will:
- Be market leader in my niche
- Expand on suppliers (this is mostly a technological challenge)
- Expand into other (similar) niches
- have 2 fulltime software developers (remotely)
- have 2 fulltime support people in different time zones (remotely)
- do 100k / month (revenue)
The revenue goal sounds crazy to me compared to the 5k, but it's only around a 5% growth each month which is not all too unrealistic. I think the key is just to stick to it. And the funny thing is, since the launch, I have been making a round a 5% growth every month (on average).
Now, this business is supposed to run fully automatically, so the only "work" for me is to reach out to gain new users and to engage with existing users (although most of my users come from google search and I never interact with them before the first sale). So I'm also trying to look at new opportunities and this 100k/m goal is only for my existing business. I do actually expect to have some other stuff going on as well by that time
I think my biggest weaknesses are wanting to do everything myself as opposed to outsourcing, and still being not bold enough in certain situations. Probably still have some of that "concern what people think" left from the teenage years, unconsciously. These are just things I'll also have to work on if I ever want to get near that goal.
I'm happy to post updates here on how it's all going if people are interested. I'll also be reading other peoples journeys and try to learn from them.
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