I made $131,520 in May | Solopreneur Diary

0:03[Music] all right we are rolling I just bought uh ship fast.com for $5,000 us plus another $1,000 for the marketplace fee this is crazy because exactly a year ago I was making around $1,000 per month with my little software and I was counting every Pennies from uh domain names but also everything like food and accommodations and I was trying to buy the cheapest for absolutely everything and ending up paying uh probably what was my annual salary in 2022 for one domain name is just insane um and I was able to get here um because I've been grinding for the past 3 years until luck found me and

0:59one of the things that kept me motivated to grind was to compete with friends that's why I added a new competition feature to one of my software called Indie page let me show [Music] you you want to be on the Vlog hello rooster about a year ago I created a little software called Indie page it's like a link tree for entrepreneurs basically they creat their profile they add their startups and they have a beautiful uh public page and I wanted to bring some gamification elements so that uh people who need some motivation to get started or to grind and find motivation uh would be easier for them

1:49and I added a leaderboard it's basically uh taking every startups and every hours it's fetching the revenue from stripe and it's ranking those startups based on their actual Revenue in the last 30 days so every month people can compete to rank on that leaderboard uh this is exactly the strategy I use to grind for the past three years or so I was competing against my two friends Dan and Nico and you know we would share like who has the most like on the tweets and who has the most revenue on his startups and uh and this is really helpful for [Music] motivation hello

2:31[Music] something fcy boy such a beautiful s it okay one of the biggest update of the month is that I built my 24th uh digital product it's called Ino it's a little tool to collect feedback from customers it was born out of frustration CU Alternatives were either super complex or too expensive and I made an entire video about that if you want to check it's somewhere around here how I get the ID How I build it fast how I launched it on product hunt and got around 10,000 visitors and I actually got the product of the Day badge I was really really happy with that one of the questions I

3:12get the most on my YouTube is why do I build so many products instead of focusing on one in my experience there's a lot of luck involved in entrepreneurship um one of my product ship fast made I think close to $600,000 in the last8 months or so and I had zero expectation I really build it uh for myself as a codebase so I can ship faster and it was totally random and it's very hard to predict what's going to happen so the more product I ship the more bets I make and at the same time I learn so much from every product I make from um how to build faster how to make

3:47less bugs how to be better at copyrighting I'm learning about marketing like it's just a pure like Learning Journey that I absolutely love for instance a couple days ago I found this guy on Twitter his name is janjo he built a lit Chrome plugin in I think an afternoon or something that helps developers testing credit card with stripe instead of having to type 42 42 42 uh in the stripe checkout it prefills all that and you save a couple of seconds every time you test the credit cards and he sold that plugin for 4.2 uh per customer which I think is really smart and I think in a week he

4:20made around ,500 us just selling this little Chrome plugin and I think he after that he even sold a startup for another $1,000 so the guy went went from just about the span of a week it went from just having a random ID to building a product getting customers and getting Acquired and that's amazing CU that's so there's so many things you learn in this little process and that's one of the reason I'm very uh addicted and I love uh shipping so many [Music] product are you afraid to what you know is real like any [Music] other and we are live in B where the waves are crushing the show this month

5:13my family-in-law my Korean family know visited Us in belly I've been married to the lovely Korean girl behind this camera for seven years and they often visit us in belly or we go in Korea to see them I'm from France and so we mix a culture and is very very um C what what is mixing culture is very I don't even know what I was about to say with cultur different person she's from Korea I'm from France and being with a person from the other side of the globe has been so interesting and I learned a lot from it for instance in France if you say

5:45bonjour or hello with the not the perfect French accent people will say no bour and in Korea if you say like Hello in Korean with a very broken accent they'll be like oh congratulations they'll be very cheerful so uh it's very fun to mix cultures also I've been learning a lot living here in B I see how people live very different lifestyle very different mindset uh it's so just so interesting to see uh how different we can be and we can learn a lot from each other that's so beautiful [Music] I know what it is uh let me open it t it's here it's uh wa if you don't know what it is

6:47um it's coming from product hunt product Hunt is a platform for uh developers and designers uh VC startups whoever wants to launch product on the Internet uh product Hunt is the place to launch the startup it's a place where you can get um thousands and thousands of visitors for free actually when you watch this video there might be a video on my YouTube channel where I go over my strategy to launch startups and get traffic for free if you want to check it out and once a year they do this little ceremony where they select the best product for developers the best product for designers the best crypto app and

7:20they also select one maker of the year I don't know exactly how they select the maker of the year um in my case probably because I launched over 10 products on the platform uh the in 2023 and they gave me the maker of the Year award 2023 I'm so happy uh because when I studied the journey three years ago I would uh I had models I still have models like mentors people I absolutely admire like Peter LEL Danny bosma Timo maker those guys would get this maker of the Year award and I saw them as like some kind of rock stars and I would absolutely admire them and it would help

7:57me grind and show up every day and it's so unreal that it's here like I get the same a word as they gots it's I don't know it just feels really unreal and it's so beautiful but you can be literally no one at the moment like nothing that's working for you and showing up and and you know doing the thing I don't know you can you can get one of this like it tookes two years two and a half years and yeah thank you if you have been around for a while following the journey it really means a lot thank you [Music] you're ready to do

8:36it that's the place I surf every day cuz I I tend to overthink and surfing really helped me clear my [Music] mind okay uh what is your workout routine uh I don't have a routine I don't have much goals with workout I just want to be fit I don't care being bulky I don't care being a gym boy I don't care having big muscles I just want to be feet and lean and stretchy so I can do a bunch of sports so my routine is a bit different from the one you probably see on YouTube I don't go gym I don't take any supplements I don't lift

9:19any weight never lifted weight in my life I don't like lifting weight I feel like this is how I hurt myself and it forces me to go to the gym instead I am working here in my house every single day 365 days a year uh 20 minutes workouts uh 20 to 30 minutes body weight only uh mostly cardio and calisthenic uh I follow this YouTuber I love her name is Caroline gavon she's a beast um I do hold her all the workout she does that are not um requiring any weights uh and it's very short so it doesn't require much thinking it's not like a big hurdle

9:55I have to do so it's easy to get motivated but once I am in the work out I really push myself like crazy uh sometimes I even get dizzy I don't know if that's good probably not but I really push as hard as I can I don't think about anything else there's no phone distracting me uh I try to make more reps than her uh and I try to never have any break and if I feel like it's too easy whatever I'll do some ABS in between rests uh I would really get the most out of it like really pushing crazy for 30 minutes um and then I eat healthy foods

10:26so mostly vegetables uh nuts cereals fish eggs a little bit of meat um almost no sugar obviously no alcohol no cigarettes uh very no pizza pasta or almost never and uh yeah but no supplements but just healthy food is it boring no that's true also one more thing uh to be fully transparent I live in belly so I surf almost every day and when I surf I don't work out so obviously the results I get is results of Fitness like homeworkout plus surf uh but I've tried this like body weight Fitness only routine uh every time when I go on travels and my body stays roughly the same except that

11:11that my shoulders shrink a little bit cuz surf is a lot of paddling so it's a good shoulder workout but the overall body weight the overall Body Fitness is pretty much the same whether I do only workout or surf workouts mix [Music] let's talk about Revenue this month I made a little over $130,000 as a solo entrepreneur from nine sources of income and seven of them are digital product it's also the biggest month for Indie page my link in bio for entrepreneurs I'm very excited and this is where uh lots of my focus is going on at the moment in terms of money spent I spent around $5,000 for stripe

11:59fees so somewhere like 4% of all the payments um what is it $3,000 for ads around $ 1.5 th000 for Affiliates a little bit less than $500 for the Tex stack and $25,000 to Outsource a few tasks so that's around $112,000 of expenses which leaves me with $118,000 of profit I started sharing my Revenue publicly on Twitter when I started the journey three years ago and I do this for two reasons the first one is I want to remember where everything started and I want to remember that it took time and the second reason is because it's very easy with and the second reason is because

12:39it's very easy to say pretty much anything with a little bit of Storytelling so I'm not saying that the person with bigger numbers is more right than other people but I'm saying that it's so easy for anyone to say anything on the internet so I just want to add a little bit of proof here but for sure I'm still a total rookie in entrepreneurship all right and to be totally transparent with the Rue and this is the dashboard for one of my product called ship Fest uh this is the daily revenue and this is the revenue for this [Music] month I don't want [Music] I know you know

13:32already okay this has been a crazy month uh it's been a crazy year actually from opening the business here in Asia to changing my tax residency as well as you here launching three softwares customer support marketing Twitter YouTube um I still do almost everything myself cuz the the goal has always been to stay solo so I don't have any meeting I don't have any deadlines nobody's waiting for me uh but it's at the same time it's so uh terring physically tiring I really struggle to disconnect from work I'm looking for boundaries like where I can close my computer and be off work completely but this never really happens

14:16I wake up sometimes at 3:00 a.m. and my brain is fully focused on work for sometimes 1 hour or 2 hours uh yeah sometimes I just wish this would go away I hired a therapist this month to help me with bounding if I if there if there is such a thing in entrepreneurship but uh I kind of guess this is you never expect anything and then you have to deal with all the new issues new problems coming up um I also feel guilty saying this because I wanted I wanted this so badly and now it's happening uh there's a part of me that wish he would

14:47slow down a little bit uh but anyway it still just a wonderful Journey um the YouTube channel crossed 50,000 subscribers this month and it was about a th subscriber earlier this year so this is just this is just absolutely crazy thank you so much for following the journey it really means a lot um I read all the comments uh except the bad ones but I I read all the love messages um and if you're watching this probably you are not one of those bad comments so thank you for staying around all right until the next video I hope you just ship it cheers