I made $83,212 in March | Solopreneur Diary

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0:08this is going to happen hey it's Mark and welcome back for this video I'm starting this new series where I will make a short video about everything that happens in my life as a solo entrepreneur I go over things that I built like softwares and products I'll over marketing things that I tried that worked and didn't the revenue that I earned and everything else like if I travel or nice books that I read workouts stuff that I learned I'll try to share everything and be as transparent as possible so I will share the good parts but also the parts I struggle with so if you like this Ser

0:40please let me know so I do it more oh and also here is my story really quick I got fired 2.5 years ago as a software engineer and I discovered at the community of developers building tiny startups in public on Twitter meaning that solo developers a q Andi who have no ambition to build a unicorn to raise money for VC or even to have any employee just building their tiny little product and I fell in love with the mindsets so I started to build my own project and today 2.5 years later I have grown a little audience of 880,000 people on Twitter where I also met a

1:11bunch of friends there this is actually the t-shirt from one of my Twitter friends I also built 21 projects and currently I have 10 stream of income and in average my salary is around $50,000 per month so I'm going to share everything that happens in the month of March let's go all right so now let's talk about work I created a new very tiny software called popup the idea is to increase the website conversion rate by displaying popup notifications it's almost started as a joke the inspiration came from another product of mine called Zenvo one of my friend actually the friend that gave me the T-shirt Dan told

1:45me to make it a product and there it was I spent 3 days building it I used AI heavily in order to build a software I'll share a link somewhere here where you can see the video on how I built the product really fast and I launched it without any expectation and 24 hours later it made $1,000 and about 2 weeks later it was at $25,000 in Revenue it's almost pure profit so it was overall pretty nice a very interesting experience and it also gets results for people I've seen a lot of customers coming back to me that says they love the product and it's working well for

2:16them so tiny experiments that turn out to be a good thing all right and so far the product that brings the most Revenue to my income is ship fast it's a b plate for developers to ship startups faster and I got a testimonal from a customer who made 2.6 th000 Us in 9 days and this is probably the biggest testimonial like Revenue Wise from a customers that shares the revenue publicly just as a comparison this took me years to reach that point I was stuck at $1,000 per month for so long so big kudos to him I also shipped a new component for the Vol plate called with without it's tiny

2:49component that people would typically use under the hero section of their website to show what it is to live without the product they're selling and to live with it it's like basically a before after and this is also really good to improve website conversion rate and I usually get inspiration from all the other products that I make in order to get inspiration for ship fast components so I know what's working and what's not working I also added a new feature for Zenvo my little software for stripe users to generate invoices for their customers without paying the stripe fee now it displays the stripe account name when the email is being

3:23sent about two months ago I did a little experiment with AI and SEO so I have a product called logo fast which is a free logo maker it has a little bit of AI in it where if you want a logo for your business you could describe your business ID the AI will reply with the icon that would fit and the colors that would fit and it will suggest you three logos when the user clicks on one of the three suggestions it will save the logo in a database and my server will create an HTML page optimized for Google in order to rank and a few weeks ago Google

3:56started to rank all those pages so I have generated now almost 3,000 logos so I have 3,000 pages that are now indexed by Google and I hope that these pages will rank hopefully if it happens it should happen within 3 to 6 months I will definitely report uh the experiments but I think it's pretty fun to see how AI plus a little bit of a human touch could create those valuable HTML pages that could potentially rank on Google I have 21 products and seven are making money and so I sometimes get drowned into data which app should I focus on where should I spend my time

4:29and attention and I found a new metric that really helps me to decide which is worth my time it's the kpi is the revenue generated per unique visitor so if a product gets 1,000 unique visitors and generate $1,000 this is a $1 per unique visitor as a matter of comparison my best product ship fast gets 93 cents per visitor and my worst conversion product is by dispute which gets 06 Cent per visitor it's very simplified you know there are opportunities for some mistakes in there but overall I found it really helpful and very clear on where to put my attention on I also did a podcast with Arvid KH he's like the

5:13father of solo entrepreneur is a really nice person I will link to the podcast somewhere in here if you want to listen to it we go over the addiction of building apps and all those kind of things filed startups in the past and I would drive my mind crazy I would spend a year building a product that nobody would ever want and finally the probably the biggest highlight of the month work-wise was YouTube I have been making one video per week every week since January this year and my channel was around 5 to 6,000 followers most of the people were probably watching from my audience on Twitter nothing was really

5:47happening and suddenly YouTube decided to take one of my video and pop it up and it's crazy in 6 days my channel went from 8,000 followers to 15,000 followers which is absolutely crazy to me my channel was already monetized but it was making $2 to $3 per day which is not crazy and now it's making about 40 to $50 per day which is here in B it's like a living this could pay the bills so this is overall absolutely crazy it's also the first time for me to Outsource a task I do everything solo from product building to marketing to customer support to legal things and I hired

6:23someone to make those videos so uh let me know what you think about them all right now a little health update I search every day about 2 hours and 6 months ago I hurt my back I have some back pain in the bottom and one of my friends actually the same friend who the same friend who gave me the t-shirt and who told me to create the poop up startup gave me a pull-up bar and so I do pull-up and chinups every day and also bar hang to flatten my back and this is actually really helpful it has eased the pain to a point where I almost

6:52don't feel it anymore and my wife and I are trying a new experiment where we do not eat any food after 5:00 p.m. and go to bed at 10: p.m. and this is working really well we've tried this for the past 10 days and we have a very good restorative slip I also bought a ring the aura ring sleep tracker a couple months ago and I got rid of it it was nice but I felt anxious about getting the perfect sleep score and ironically it would trick me and make me anxious about it and get a worse sleep so I got rid of it and my sleep is better okay

7:23now little life update I was reading the book called same as ever by Morgan howel it's it's a book about things that never change in the world it is a really good book for anyone whether you are Developer entrepreneur whatever this is a book that will teach you how the brain works it's a lot of psychology it helps understand how people behave it's very interesting my wife and I also went to Taiwan for 2 weeks we would break our home routine every month or two and go to a different country in Asia we love Taiwan we have a new routine there you're a star you're Hollywood

7:58famous so we would wake up around 6:00 a.m. and then we would go straight to a workout after drinking a coffee we always work out together so it's easier to find the motivation to get things done then we would do a little stretch have a healthy breakfast together around 7:30 8:00 a.m. and then we would both go on our computers and work for 4 hours straight where we stay offline so no Twitter no emails just basically most of the time coding or making those videos writing my newsletter but like pure 4 hours of focus then we'll close the computer for the day and we rent a scooter and we

8:35would just go around places and wherever this is we're boring tourists we don't do any specific places we want to visit we just get lost with the scooter or by walking and uh this is pretty uh good fit for us we usually finish the day with a 1 hour to 30 minutes walk you got a new friend what and then we come back home take a shower and sometimes watch a movie and go to bed and start the exact same day the day after and in Taiwan we also met a friend from Twitter and I love the fact that now we can find connection Interest online and then meet in real life now

9:16let's talk about Revenue I made

9:28$83,200 I've been sharing my revenue on Twitter for the past 2.5 years and this is my Revenue in March 2023 back then I made 1,000 us from my product and this month I earned 833 times my salary back then that's absolutely crazy I guess that's why entrepreneurship is so addictive and probably the power of showing up every day now let's break down the revenue for these startups first the most important one that brings the most revenue is ship fast the revenue almost double this month making about $75,000 in the last 30 days this is my Tri dashboard but I also collect payment from other sources like PayPal I guess

10:02the revenue double because YouTube picked up my video and decided to put it on the homage so that increase the number of visitors and eventually the revenue and the revenue for my other products like any page or by dispute is pretty steady I barely don't do any marketing for them so I don't expect it to change much I'm happy the way it is because it's solving my own itches and I just like it this way my YouTube channel got monetized back in February this year back then I made $50 and this month It Grow significantly we're sitting now at about $800 for this month and this is

10:33pretty nice I would literally pay for my villa here in Valley okay so that was for the money in now let's talk about the money out for business expenses I spend about $4,000 a month for everything plus 3.5% goes to stripe to process payments there is about $300 that goes for the tech stack so my newsletter affiliate program servers database and all that $700 goes to affiliate people who like my product and Market them in exchange of a commission I also spent about $1,000 in ads I'm not very good with ads a friend of mine Nico is helping me with it and usually $11,000 in would bring $2 to $3,000 out

11:12and I also spent about $2,000 to Outsource a few tasks like the video editing right now I also lost one income stream it's viral but it's a little software that I created back in 2018 when I started my first solo prer project the wrong way everything was tough back then I stopped I abandoned the product in 2020 and it kept making money until this month where the last customer turned it was a 200 bucks per month subscription so yeah that hurts it's the end of a passive income era and it was a good time and for personal expenses my wife and I rent this place for about $800 per month and we spend I

11:50think in total about $2,000 for basic stuff like food we don't like buying physical stuff uh we sometimes go to a good restaurants but we barely don't spend anything I think my most addictive thing is coding apps and luckily that is free all right and just one more thing my YouTube channel recently popped up and if you look at my previous videos it looks like I am doing some kind of overnight success making 50,000 bucks a month I want you to know that it took 2.5 Years starting from zero to get here I have been struggling a lot finding motivation to get things done and sometimes even questioning my entire

12:22work thinking that it's absolutely useless and if you actually dig deeper in my story you will see that I have been in the game for about six years not very seriously at the beginning but I've tried a bunch of stuff felt a lot of stuff really a lot of stuff yeah this is not an overnight success but I hope this shows you that if you stick to something and you show up daily then you would get good results all right that was it if you enjoyed the video please subscribe to the channel That would really means a lot all right cheers