I didn't start my entrepreneurial journey here on the Fastlane Forum, but I feel like I have absorbed a lot of great data in the last couple weeks and wanted to start giving back to the community. My hope is that this will someday be a valuable testimony of my journey that will help someone else the same way a lot of the other threads have helped clarify a variety of topics for me.
The Journey So Far...
As I said, I didn't start my journey here. I have had 3 business flop for the typical reasons: me focused, with very little input from customers, and no one wanted the solutions I built. I started building the first of these projects about 5 years ago and spent entirely too long on it before realizing how much time I was wasting on a product no one wanted.
3 years ago, I tried my hand at a much smaller project that was a re-niched version of a successful project I liked. No one in the new niche saw the value of the project and I made a grand total of $14 from it... from my Dad.
2 years ago, one of my work buds and I spent 6 months pitching a "World Changing" startup idea. I am really glad we got no funding...because in hindsight I would not have been happy in a traditional VC funded founder role.
And so 1 year ago, I struck out to "bootstrap" a startup. I joined a community of fellow bootstrappers and began working on my next big SaaS idea. This time I had mentors though that walked me through customer first approaches. I talked to my potential market and picked their brains and found a problem that needed solved. At least that was the initial conversations I was having by calling customers.
I put together a signup list and began driving targeted traffic to the landing page. I wanted to measure how far the idea resonated. In short... no one signed up. I drove over 1000 page views on that landing page and zero signed up. In fact, I ended up getting an email from 2 of the site visitors asking the same question: "Who would need this?"
I shelved the idea and coincidentally the bootstrapping community leader reached out to ask if I would be interested in testing out his new Startup Academy. I said yes and began working on a new idea.
This most recent idea has some traction so far. I have 60 list signups in 3 months. I also completed a course and pitched that to the list. So far I have sold 4 copies of the course! I think with a few years of focused building I can grow this idea to a full-scale Fastlane business. I think the topic (Learning to Code) has a lot of potentials but it will take me a few years of building free content and courses to fully realize it.
Immediate Goals
Building a business around courses is fun, but it is a long-term play. My immediate situation is I am stuck in a Slowlane job that I am not happy with. I have some personal motivating factors that make me want to find a faster way to separate my time from how much money I bring home. I know I will never be able to focus on this full time until I accomplish that goal.
So, I have a short-term play for injecting money into my primary business. I had one of my email list subscribers reach out and ask me to design a website for their company which I agreed to for a pretty good fee.
I have been reading every gold thread on the forum, and the one from @Lex DeVille about landing jobs on UpWork seemed like another good way to start earning a few bucks quickly. I created a profile last Monday and started writing my first proposals. I immediately landed a $100 job to update a widget in Wordpress.
Then, Thanksgiving hit and the number of US based jobs went down pretty drastically so I decided to just focus on my family.
But, yesterday I applied for a few more jobs and landed both of them. I completed the first one in a few hours for a cool $200. The third job on my list will take a couple days (writing a custom wordpress plugin) and is for $300. The fun thing: that $300 job is actually a repeat job from my first client because he was so happy with my original work!
Once I have a few more clients and a bigger runway, I want to follow the advice of @Fox and @Sean Marshall and consider setting up an Agency, instead of doing all the work myself!
Once I start that process I will be sure to post another update!
The Journey So Far...
As I said, I didn't start my journey here. I have had 3 business flop for the typical reasons: me focused, with very little input from customers, and no one wanted the solutions I built. I started building the first of these projects about 5 years ago and spent entirely too long on it before realizing how much time I was wasting on a product no one wanted.
3 years ago, I tried my hand at a much smaller project that was a re-niched version of a successful project I liked. No one in the new niche saw the value of the project and I made a grand total of $14 from it... from my Dad.
2 years ago, one of my work buds and I spent 6 months pitching a "World Changing" startup idea. I am really glad we got no funding...because in hindsight I would not have been happy in a traditional VC funded founder role.
And so 1 year ago, I struck out to "bootstrap" a startup. I joined a community of fellow bootstrappers and began working on my next big SaaS idea. This time I had mentors though that walked me through customer first approaches. I talked to my potential market and picked their brains and found a problem that needed solved. At least that was the initial conversations I was having by calling customers.
I put together a signup list and began driving targeted traffic to the landing page. I wanted to measure how far the idea resonated. In short... no one signed up. I drove over 1000 page views on that landing page and zero signed up. In fact, I ended up getting an email from 2 of the site visitors asking the same question: "Who would need this?"
I shelved the idea and coincidentally the bootstrapping community leader reached out to ask if I would be interested in testing out his new Startup Academy. I said yes and began working on a new idea.
This most recent idea has some traction so far. I have 60 list signups in 3 months. I also completed a course and pitched that to the list. So far I have sold 4 copies of the course! I think with a few years of focused building I can grow this idea to a full-scale Fastlane business. I think the topic (Learning to Code) has a lot of potentials but it will take me a few years of building free content and courses to fully realize it.
Immediate Goals
Building a business around courses is fun, but it is a long-term play. My immediate situation is I am stuck in a Slowlane job that I am not happy with. I have some personal motivating factors that make me want to find a faster way to separate my time from how much money I bring home. I know I will never be able to focus on this full time until I accomplish that goal.
So, I have a short-term play for injecting money into my primary business. I had one of my email list subscribers reach out and ask me to design a website for their company which I agreed to for a pretty good fee.
I have been reading every gold thread on the forum, and the one from @Lex DeVille about landing jobs on UpWork seemed like another good way to start earning a few bucks quickly. I created a profile last Monday and started writing my first proposals. I immediately landed a $100 job to update a widget in Wordpress.
Then, Thanksgiving hit and the number of US based jobs went down pretty drastically so I decided to just focus on my family.
But, yesterday I applied for a few more jobs and landed both of them. I completed the first one in a few hours for a cool $200. The third job on my list will take a couple days (writing a custom wordpress plugin) and is for $300. The fun thing: that $300 job is actually a repeat job from my first client because he was so happy with my original work!
Once I have a few more clients and a bigger runway, I want to follow the advice of @Fox and @Sean Marshall and consider setting up an Agency, instead of doing all the work myself!
Once I start that process I will be sure to post another update!
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