# POV: your side project made $1M as a solo developer

Channel: Marc Lou
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Jl9l3O9Hm8
Duration: 23 min
Language: English
Words: 3911
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/-Jl9l3O9Hm8

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[0:01] okay so this weekend project made a million dollar after 18 months just build whatever you have in mind we're going to leave Val and we're going to travel all over the world it's time to work boom a freaking million dollars get the weekend project this is a website build something build it fast code code code and then repeat over and over and over this is the freaking [Music] date meet Mark Lou a millionaire who owns exactly zero pairs of shoes and way more startups than you'd think is reasonable he sits here in this disgustingly beautiful Tropical Paradise to show you how to turn ideas into Brands strangers into clients and your

[0:45] boring job into a distant memory [Music] good morning good morning in doing the food

[1:11] we uh that would be a good thumbnail just came back to Bali full jet lag but it's time to work Houston we have a big problem Brian Johnson just released a new video about calculating your speed of Aging for free so the video looks looks like this and there are six markers that you can do at home for free like how many push-up reps can you do um and and some of many other stuff and of course that gives me tons of app ideas so what I did is I Clon my Bott plates and I ask my AI editor a cursor to build an entire app for me I

[1:50] didn't write a single line of code and this is what I came up with so that's uh this is this is pretty made with AI and those basically more like forms where you enter number push-ups one leg stand U and few of other metrics and then you can calculate your score and in the end it will give you a result on what's your biological age this is extremely lowlevel product for the moment I have tons of ideas like adding leaderboards uh making it verified with uh actually uploading photos connecting your Twitter Google accounts so it could be like a leaderboard with profile pictures for uh like real people I also bought a new

[2:25] domain name bio a.ge for Bio AG this this is a really early stage but there's something going on with health at the moment artificial intelligence is shaping the medical industry and if you are a maker it's a big wave to jump in because things are going to happen in many ways stepping into Healthcare right now is like stepping into that future world the next 10 years are going to be crazy with a mix of AI an AI tool they trained on medical data plus the health wave there tons of things to build and I really really really really recommend you to just jump in just build whatever

[3:00] you have in mind don't spend too much time on it just ship your idea out there I hope the app is ready when this video comes out if that's the case there will be a link in the description and my goal is to get Brian Johnson to see this app and retweet it let's go [Music] all right so something I I believe too is that if you want something to work out on the internet you get to put on the energy you have to leave through it in my case I'm really into mental health and physical health and I'm going to build tons of health related startups

[3:48] but at the same time I try to have a life that is perfectly healthy so that means better food better sleep more workouts that means I learn things that means I discover problems and that feeds my inspiration to build startups and because those startup ideas are based on real fact the life I live then I am almost guaranteed that at some point some of those startup will also appeal to some other people time for [Music] workout and if you don't know what is your thing then try new stuff travel abroad meet some new group of people like go to meetups where people have different skills than yours try

[4:27] something new get out of the comfort zone [Music] now time to C I just got this from Google it's a badge that says I got 10,000 visitors on one of my websites in the past 30 days this website actually was my first ever indie project and even though it's not sexy it's like a Bas simple movie recommendation app this project gave me this batch from Google but it also grew my follow on Twitter gave me tons of new startup ideas and it gave me the confidence I needed to get started so do more not sexy project any kind of project just shap something and maybe years down the road you'll get a

[5:12] website with 300 daily visitors and you can run ads and he could pay for your rent I'm reading the inevitable inevitable by Kevin KY the guy who created the magazine wired and also the author of a book one of my actually top three favorite books ever called excellent advice of wisdom I wish I knew earlier or something along those lines the book itself is is just a masterpiece it's a collection basically of like mini tweets that each of them is a life lesson and uh this one the inevitable is about predictions that he makes about where Tech and AI will drive the world like 12 prediction on how the

[5:51] world is going to change I'm 36% completed with this book and I already love it full rainy season in b meanwhile delicious meal prepar [Music] by it's 7:30 a.m. and I just bought another domain two days two domain names now that I am back in my office in Bali I'm super super happy to add this into my room office whatever this is because it's here in this room that this was made possible and actually same as this little thing here is because at some point I decided to sit in this room and just spend most of my time building stuff that those two things happen so

[6:46] keep shipping I just set up these recovery emails so this is being sent to people who actually uh complete a part of the checkout they leave their email address but they don't complete the payment could be because the credit card failed it could be because they changed their mind at the last minute so what I'm doing here in the stripe webbook event called checkout. session. expired I'm checking if the person left an email otherwise I can't email them and if the person is not already a customer of mine and if that's the case then I send them a very simple email that says hey I noticed you were checking out cut fast

[7:24] yesterday anything I can help you with and then a link to get back to my landing page just in case they forgot or in case something go wrong here what I'm doing with this is I'm opening the discussion so I'm trying to understand why they didn't purchase even though they click the button and left their emails and I just hope this will give me some uh better uh feedback so I know maybe how to tweak the landing page to convert more visitors and if you want the code there is a link to one of my tweets below this video where you can just copy past the code and use it in

[7:52] your own project [Music] okay so I just set up YouTube ads for my course code fast I am very bad at ads really really bad but I want to give it a try because we never know uh sometimes you try stuff and it works and sometimes it doesn't but uh just curious about this one still waiting for Google to approve the ad and um let's see how it goes okay so quick update on Coach fast the course I launched about a month and a half ago uh you can see the revenue uh of course at the launch was going up like crazy and then now it's slowing

[8:44] down and what I'm trying to do uh for this first quarter of the year is to try to find a recurring marketing channel and since it's a course is pretty large I'm targeting like a very wide audience so I'm trying to run ads to this website so I created this sort of uh as here so you want to learn a code to build your own online business go to cast.now enroll for the course learn the basics and everything you need to build an online business ready to get customers so my video editor pH a model in Bell to help me read the script and since I

[9:17] absolutely suck at making a marketing scripts I asked my friend Nico who is really good at marketing to help me with that and then for the format I got inspired by clo which is a very famous software engineer on you YouTube I remember 3 four years ago I was watching a bunch of his videos then I saw a masterpiece of an ad and I use his format to make my own ad and I just started running this uh YouTube video on Google ads so it's only showing on YouTube at the moment I just started spending money so I have two campaigns one uh that is a wide campaign so it

[9:48] targets people who are somehow in the software engineer coding industry so people who visit websites like code academy or who watch a YouTube like a programming YouTube YouTu channels it looks like it's getting a bunch of clicks for the amount spent about $30 per day uh but so far no conversion so I don't know if I'm doing something wrong with my code or if it's just not converging at the moment and I set up another campaign where it's more like retargeting people who visited the websites uh usually this is what marketer calls that like a warm audience so people who are more likely to buy your product because they already know

[10:21] what you have to sell and uh Google is going to show this ad to those people where it gets way less click but somehow it converted already uh I think there was one purchase which makes the campaign profitable making ads is really not my uh cup of tea but I feel like if I manage to make it click it could be one way to make sure that the business somehow is steady and then I can focus on for instance um making more lessons adding more things for students so my time and mind doesn't have to be on the marketing side of things and of course if I get good results I'll report that

[10:52] in those videos I can't not put this on the record this should be remembered 15 ingredients vegetables and love that's the recipe [Music] important is there wave sir yeah tomorrow is going to be firing W hello little babies hello hello this is uh the place here where we came with tons of ideas for the Vlogs tons of startup ideas walking man it's a such a creativity hack that's true okay so we are deciding where we go this year because we're going to leave Bal and we're going to travel all over the world to meet you we're going to host a Meetup we're going to host Meetup countri first is New

[11:41] Zealand then we're going to go to Japan Japan oh we're going to do a meet up in B first then the plan is right now we go India first then we go back to Europe we were thinking of doing like Norway Finland Sweden North countries just for the peacefulness and quietness and then maybe the US go we know that there are many people living in the North America like Canada us so we're excited to meet you there as well that's very true and if you can maybe St or Central America because it has been my you know dream to go back there and we go back to France

[12:17] for next Christmas the issue here is trying to stay productive while traveling so I still make apps we still make those Vlogs we still make more videos on YouTube right for the news later make some tweets while trying to enjoy traveling this is the really hard part but uh yeah let's see it now it's put on the camera we'll see how that year

[12:39] goes it's so empty there is no one here except this person good wave tomorrow yeah this is where I'm surfing yeah I'm excited I cannot wait for tomorrow wow look at this man such a de Focus mode we're working on I I am designing this was one of the most requested feature so now you can watch your website analytics for specific like a custom date range so you have this option where you can choose to watch for custom and then you have this date biger yeah that's pretty much it so I'm pushing this today I guess I spend too much time on this but I freaking love it

[13:19] I like all the little animations where the mouse cursor moves and even this you know like this little transition when you move the cursor and then it's just super exciting actually to make this kind of stuff I didn't really like at the beginning then you realize design is absolutely not about creativity but more like principles it's a mix of rules and coping what's working adding your own signature on top of it and then a little bit of obsession no coffee and straight wake up code code code [Music] ah quick update on my web analytics software data fast so let's look first at the revenue on stripe now I start to

[13:56] see daily payments which make me super happy like little uh sales notifications uh here we're looking at the last what 3 weeks or so of data uh so we can see the monthly recuring revenue is at 925 which is getting close to $11,000 per month that makes me super happy it's overall going up constantly and the number of active subscribers as well and the subscriber turn rate is now around 14% I guess which is uh I I think I can leave up with it I added new feature this uh option here will let users choose uh when they want to query their data and I also spend a little too much time

[14:30] designing this uh loading screen where uh when people change the type of Journey they want to see they want to know what their customers are doing on their sites they're going to see like a little spinner like a loading screen here so they have something to look at and they know it's loading this is not necessarily useful but this just made me so happy I also created a documentation for data fast to help people set up their accounts so this is kind of like a Blog SL documentation this is using a mark down down template right here where I just have to write English and a

[15:02] couple of markdowns and it outputs a nice looking documentation and of course I had to design every little uh things from scratch but now that it's designed I don't do anything I just make beautiful articles uh very simply oh and one last thing I am not sure I mentioned this in the this YouTube video I set up server side tracking which means that now people using data fast and tracking payments with it can link visitors and customers data with almost 100% accuracy so that they know exactly where the money is coming from the goal with this software is to grade to a million dollar in valuation so that's about 20 to

[15:36] $225,000 in monthly recuring Revenue we're far from there and there are still a lot of things to build but uh it's going up so this is a positive [Music] thing are you ready for the cold PL no more Russian what is this head actually I really don't know I hope our Russian friends can tell us what is this okay please leave in the comment what is this for yes look at this wow with all this view very good yeah so let's take some SAA and think about our life Wow super hot man so H the the iPhone will die the warmest sa I've ever

[16:30] is it cool so I think you can stay unlimited here until we I need a massive [Applause]

[16:46] [Music] coconut I found a flower

[17:02] [Music]

[17:13] W [Music] influencers daily reminder for happiness it's time to work what is it what do you see um 800k we have cross $1 million with ship Fest already wow how many months 18 18 months this this is the freaking date we made it what's very crazy to me is we were sitting in the exact place 18 months ago we made almost 0 back then yeah and I remember I had this little weekend project that I created for myself and I was like ah I'm going to try to launch it and right here it was 5:00 p.m. I was about to go skate before it's dark and I put the computer and I

[18:12] told you I launched something on product hunt I'll be back in 2 hours we're lucky if we make $300 I had no idea any of this would happen oh yeah cuz back then we didn't have any result so if you can have like one or three sale it was still success you know and then one year and a half later boom a freaking million dollar with a weekend project this is a website the launch day was crazy CU we earn like $4,000 a day yeah about three 3.5 but still like for us like $1,000 was a monthly salary and then yeah we kept having notification and we were in Hong

[18:51] Kong we kept up what is happening is it real like yeah it's was like did you make money we refresh like wow we just drank coffee more Starbucks Cooke wow we made more money in 24 hours than we would in 6 month crazy okay so this weekend project made a million dollar after 18 months and 85% of that is pure profit these are the stripe dashboard so that's the first one back in 2023 and I then I opened a new business and this is the new one so I wanted to tell you a little story about finding million-dollar startup ideas I started the entrepreneurship in 20 2016 back

[19:30] then I had a Grand Vision like a big dream I was working 12 hours a day and I believe that IDs were Priceless and 4 years later I made around $70,000 with one of my set which let me pay the bills which is technically not bad I was able to leave anywhere with a computer but with all the sacrifices I made it was clearly not worth it and that's why I had a burnout in 2020 and this is the actual SAS I created I was working with physical businesses Escape rooms and in then in 2020 Co killed my set it went literally from about $4,000 in monthly

[20:04] recurring Revenue to zero in a single month and after that I had almost no savings no ideas to start next and not even motivation to start again so I started to look for a job and I work as a software engineer for someone that you might know tylerz and they offered me a salary that was way beyond what I ever thought I would earn so obviously I accepted and I worked for them for 9 months but of course there was this it ins inside of me this Freedom itch that keeps scratching back and called me back and so in November 2021 I started entrepreneurship again and this time I

[20:36] had a different set of rules I dit all the ambitious and the Big Dreams that I had before and instead I would work on tiny little project that I could launch on a weekend I would share everything publicly on Twitter and then I would just launch move build while making sleep my number one priority and back then my goal was to create something that I can control and the goal was to create a massive portfolio of websites sometimes those websites are not even monetized like this one here where you can vote for your favorite quote from Naval ravikant about this websit where you can like visualize how much you can

[21:09] achieve in one year with tiny habits I build this directory of gamification apps there was no goal really it was just purely I want to build this portfolio of websites and 12 months later I had made around $10,000 and grow a little audience of 5,000 people on Twitter which is definitely good but clearly knowing that I was working all day and then I was already in the game for 5 years this is also not crazy but it doesn't matter because I was actually having tons of fun and since my obsession was to build a portfolio massive portfolio a website I wanted to create a little tool for myself so that

[21:45] I can make those websites faster so I created this tool called ship fast and launched it on the last day of August 2023 2 days later it made $6,000 what I would typically earn in 6 months and now day 18 months later it made a million dollar this is just absolutely crazy because in my journey it was just yet another website with uh no marketing strategies no big plans nothing just a little tool I need for myself but this experience took me one thing that is crucial startup ideas are not found they are crafted from your own experience so instead of waiting for uh something a good idea to come and strike

[22:26] you instead here is what you can do around and find out build something build it fast share it to the world whether it's on Twitter Youtube or Instagram repeat the same process but this time build something different or share it in a different way and then repeat over and over and over and then in all the noise you create when it's time some luck something some signal will find you so if you're a developer like me who loves to create stuff this is your advantage ship stuff no matter the outcome no matter if you get lots of users no matter if it makes some money just ship it for the sake of it ship it

[22:59] to create the noise so that luck can find you later keep

[23:08] shipping I want to confess something I bought a new domain name damn it

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