I made $63,247 in September | Solopreneur Diary

0:05[Music] this is a crazy [Music] story today is day 1,49 building startups in public and uh since I made my first tweet on almost 3 years ago I have built 24 websites and made a million dollar and started this YouTube series where I share everything I do so you don't make the same mistakes as me so here is my solo prary diary for

0:472024 this is a habit tracker I built two years ago and sold it a year ago for $10,000 because I was running out of money and just 2 weeks ago I got it back for free this is a crazy story but before I tell you what happened let me show you why this habit tracker is special so the app will give you daily missions where for instance it tells me that I have to read today then once you have completed your reading habit you can finish the quest and then you will get some rewards like experience points and gems and then you have a little garden where you can grow flowers with

1:21the gems you just earned you can plant any sorts of flowers and you can grow them as you're consistent with your habits and on top of that there is a social part where you can play against or with your friends see how consistent they are see their activity Etc I built this app 2 years ago it was my first project with a pay wall at first it was just a simple web application and I launched it with this video boom and we're live thanks for doing this man I appreciate it Hey Joe thanks for having me I was looking forward to this podcast and that video

1:54[Music]

2:00people enjoy those videos that's why I grow a little following on Twitter and one of the most requested feature was Mark we need a mobile apps but the thing is I have no clue how to build mobile application I am a web developer after all so I reached out to my friend Martin and he showed me this new thing called capacitor it's basically like a web view that lets you input any HTML and CSS files inside and ship it as an iOS and an Android app and from zero to having an app published on the App Store and Android store without learning anything it took 14 days it was around January

2:362023 back then the app was making a couple $100 a month and it wasn't enough to pay my bills I was running out of money and in August 20123 someone made me an [Applause] offer Ron offered to buy habits Garden for $110,000 that was enough money to pay my bill so I accepted and I sold my little baby I announced the acquisition on Twitter I was pretty happy and reliev for the money but I was also a little bit sad because well that was that was the the product that I've been working on for the past 6 months so I was also a little sad it was a year ago and fast

3:16forward to a couple weeks ago I was curious about how the new buyer is doing with a new startup so I just sent an email asking how is it going with the startup I had zero expectation from this email just genuine curiosity and the buyer replied we don't have the bandwidth to work on habits Garden we can give it back to you for free man are you kidding me I got my habit tracker back my little baby I was so excited and now that I'm not running out of money like before I can plan and carefully make my moves so I'm trying three things the first one is that I am shipping new

3:53features last week I shipped a new flower for the habits Garden the Hein that unlocks randomly when you complete quests and as always with capacitor it takes just a day or something to for the app to be approved on the app stores and my friend Martin is still here to help me when I'm stuck with the app storees release second I'm trying a new pricing it used to be a monthly or a yearly subscription now I'm trying a $5 a month subscription or a $50 lifetime deal you pay once you access forever the pay wall looks like like this this and now people have the option between a monthly or a

4:33lifetime deal payment and so far there has been a couple of customers and all of them chose to go with a lifetime deal even though it's 10 times more expensive I'm making a video about pricing for software and apps and mistakes I made in the past that kept my startups from making money and I'm going to release that on my channel in a couple of weeks you can subscribe to make sure you don't miss out and finally number three I am testing user generated content in Instagram reals Tik toks shorts I think this is where the audience for the Habit tracker is and since I am a boring 30

5:06years old adult I don't watch any of those short form videos I asked my good friend Jack freaks if he can help with this and so he's making content all by himself one short form video per day and within 7 days he had a viral Banger this is the Instagram account he created it was Zero followers a couple days ago and it's all because Jack has been super super consistent and thanks to that he got the V the first viral Banger 3 million views for a new Instagram account that brought a hundred of users to Habit garden and it's absolutely amazing make sure to follow this guy

5:46Jack freaks on Twitter he knows what he's doing he's doing the exact same thing for one of his mobile app and that's how he's getting thousands and thousands of users and I'm I'm tired of sitting all day long feels much better there's a a good friend of mine in Bal who told me to visit this place in the north part of Bal called munduk so my wife and I took a three days trip there I brought my uh my computer and uh we went to that beautiful Villa and it was absolutely amazing we would work on the daytime and unlike here where I live in the south part of belly where it's super

6:20hot outside so I'm mostly indoor with that AC thing all the time otherwise I'm sweaty everywhere and uh the brain is not working in munduk the the weather is much more chill so you can actually work outside and at the same time my wife and I would do our daily morning workout cook a little bit travel a little bit and enjoy a good time and then I received a text message from someone I admire Peter Lao asked me if I was in Singapore and uh I was done in Singapore but of course I bought a ticket to Singapore the man is giving a conference at the network state in Singapore and it

6:53was an opportunity for me to meet him for the first time so we flew there right away with my wife brought the computer put on some hours of work in the plane and attended to the conference the conference is called the network States if you haven't heard of it it's by the guy named Balaji um and I was actually very impressed by what they're doing they are building an entire ecosystem for new types of society so digital Nomad with their computers can go there I think it's $11,000 a month for a room with roommates or $2,000 a month for your own room it's built on an

7:26island in between Singapore and Malaysia they provide good food they provide co-working space with AC they provide a gym and a place to be healthy like literally a new kind of school and I was hooked the conference was great I got to meet some of you out there not through the camera but like for real and by the end of the conference I got to meet Peter levels the guy is amazing he's just a guy with with one computer and he makes at the moment $42,000 a month solo developer this is absolutely lutely insane the guy has given me the inspiration I needed to get started and it's still inspiring me like

8:05crazy he's super humble super kind we had fun with him his wife and his friends and he just made me more pumped to keep shipping startups and at the same time he invited me to the speakers dinner where I get a chance to meet another of my hero Brian Johnson he's the guy that now you see everywhere that talks about diet and sleep he is an amazing person really thanks to him I got to prioritize My Health Sleep diet and I feel so much better in my body so much more creative so much more efficient and seeing him in real after watching all of his videos it was just

8:40just just crazy just crazy the guy is exactly like he is in his videos he looks young and explosive and it was it was just so it was just so good and since my wife and I were in Singapore we also enjoy doing a little bit of City things uh man it's if you have never been to Singapore it's it's a crazy City in 20 minutes you go from the airport to the city center there's no traffic jam everything is super simple you get a Huber in like couple seconds you never use cash you never use credit card you pay with your phone everything is fast

9:11efficient it's a very very interesting City and we finished the trip with a little session of wake surfing in the middle of the city right on Monday morning a regular day as a solo prer and then we went back to belly because because I got some work to do if you follow me for a little while you probably know me for shipping startups in a couple days sometimes in a couple weeks but I have made a little exception I spent the last 3 month working on a new software and I'm proud to announce that this video is the official release of the beta let me show you how that

9:46works taam here is data FAS it's an analytic tool for startups fer to analyze traffic find out the best marketing channels and discover if a product is worth our time or not so this is my data fast dashboard with some of the website I built it gives me a quick overview of what happened in the past 24 hours for each website I have access to simple web analytics so I can see the visitors per hours day uh whatever time frame this is that I want as well as a few metrics about user retention the bounce rate the session times the visitors on my site at the moment and I

10:19also see all the good web analytics data like which Pages do people visit where they're coming from the map of my visitors the brother they're using Etc now now if you have a startup that intends to make money on the internet this is where data fast shines you can connect with lemon squeezy or stripe and it's going to start showing Revenue data on your charts and he's going to try to connect the revenue and the traffic data in order to find out some growth inside for instance I can see in the referal tabs that um from Twitter I'm getting lots of visitors for this site but very

10:51low Rue the conv rate is .6% on the other side from these websites I'm getting 20 times more convers way less visitors but way more money and this and it's actually telling me that these seems to be the best marketing channels I have for this month so far then I have access to other interesting data I can see the map of my Revenue where is most of the money coming from is giving me some kpis about the revenue per visitors generated and what's the conversion rate now it's a very early version of the product but I I had to launch this because I spent 3 month on these single products so I

11:26shipped this with a cheap pricing and there is even a free trial so you can try at no cost and I really hope you give me feedback so I can make the best Analytics tool for solo entrepreneurs so this here is what my portfolio of startup made in September 20124 around 85% of that is profit and the business is down by 7% well the fact that I'm focusing on data fast for the past 3 months probably does not help shift fast is still quite steady I'm building data fast actually to try to understand where is the revenue coming from for now what I see is mostly Word

12:06of Mouth affiliate a little bit of ads and that's it if you watch my previous video you will see that Indie page software made much more money than it used to I made a previous videos to explain how I managed to uplift the Basel line of this revenue and the rest is pretty steady most of those product are run on autopilot which means I'm here for customer support if needed or if there is a feature that is B being requested a lot that I'll ship something but for most of them they don't need my attention it's pretty much self served so there's nothing much to do here and

12:39finally I added a new source of income habits Garden my habit tracker which this month made $412 which is pretty good for a vitamin

12:54products 30,000 readers on my newsletter I started a year ago and it's been growing steady up and up and up it's a newsletter SL blog I share everything I learned as a solo entrepreneur in a written format for free if you want to check it out there's a link in the description I um I also finished this book by ran holiday it's a really good book it's made of like maybe 20 or 30 chapters about stoicism and how to get things done literally and this is a really good match for entrepreneurs and when I'm not feeling like it sometimes sometimes I reread pages of it just to

13:30get motivated and right now I am reading this this book from Naval ravikant um I'm a big big fan of him actually I saw him at the network State Conference in Singapore and um I don't know just rereading the words of Naval is every every things he write is a little pleasure oh and uh this this thing happened GE domain name is ranked 57 domain rating domain Authority 57 which is it's pretty high everybody call me crazy when I bought like those weird domain name that ends with unconventional tlds they said that it's hard to rank on Google you might get blacklisted or something and uh well

14:10it's it's my highest rated d right here so I think we should make exotic TLD cool again and um the domain name is super short I don't have to add a com it's like four letters in total so it's very simple and it creates a bunch of opportunities for a new brand name oh and and there is this as well started with something simple it's the best way to get more ideas to build a tiny audience to get feedback to learn there just so many things that just roll after that I went on these guys podcast and we talk about getting startups idea I sh everything I would do if I had to start

14:45over again it's jumping off startup ideas it was really interesting podcast I'll add a link in the description if you fancy and I also revived this is my very first startup this is how I made my first dollar on the the internet it was like back in 2018 so I revived the Ling page of that business just to remember where it's all started and how it it does not matter where you start because if clearly if you go to the site you will see that I had no idea what I was doing um the copy is bad the design is bad and this is not terrible because

15:19this is like two years of work but the first version of this was was actually very very terrible so yeah I just want so I just wanted to make sure the Ling page is up there just to remember that you can start from minus 100 and still improve from there and uh finally I am no longer using mail gun to send emails the reason behind that is I need to send marketing emails and I don't want to have two platforms one for transactional email and one for marketing emails so I went with recent it's a much simpler to use marketing platforms and they have a support for marketing emails and just

15:54with a few clicks you can send emails to your entire audience so you can broadcast new features about your product new update Etc it makes things much easier for developers like me who build startups in public that's it I hope you keep shipping and there is red ink everywhere that's the end of this video cheers [Music]