# I failed 27 startups... and made $1M as a SOLO developer (my story)

Channel: Marc Lou
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqgUjOByexc
Duration: 30 min
Language: English
Words: 5757
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/eqgUjOByexc

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[0:03] my name is Mark and this is the story of how I went from living with my parents and $0 on my bank account to making $1 million as a solo developer in less than 3 years this is a story of a regular kid who had no idea what to do in life I got addicted to video games and lost my self-confidence in my 20s so I needed to change I started building tiny internet businesses along the way I learned everything on YouTube whether it's marketing coding and even speaking English and after 27 businesses I made my first $1 million now seven of these internet businesses make $62,000 per

[0:40] month I work on any project I want I can move my office from Bali to France to Korea i surf every morning I prioritize my sleep I can spend time with my wife I have designed the life I've always wanted but the journey has been very challenging most of my businesses failed and I gave up multiple times and at my lowest point I run ads on adults website making $4 in two month before falling into depression so in this video I'm going to share my story transparently from everything I did and what I learned from it and I hope it inspires anyone on the journey so let's get

[1:16] [Music] started I was born in no Sur a little town near Paris in October 1993 I have two beautiful younger sisters my parents grew up poor but work hard to become engineers and this is important for the next part and my childhood was really beautiful all I remember is me in my bedroom building Legos all day long Middle School is when the trouble started I didn't like School the teachers were old and boring the topics were outdated we were learning old French used like 500 years ago and on top of that as students we were ranked against each other based on our grades and I never understood why two students

[1:59] be compared against each other instead of being just compared to themselves I was not interested in school so I had bad grades the teachers would put me at the back of the classroom and label me as the disturbing kid it almost became my identity now I'm 30 years old and I still have n Mayors about not being prepared for a school exam and things got worse at home my parents who had worked their way out of poverty through education expected me to do the same but I just couldn't connect so I was constantly fighting at school and at home and I felt like I was rubeling

[2:31] against everything eventually I was expelled from school and my parents had to meet with the director to get me back in I knew I pushed too far so I made a promise to my parents that I would graduate when I turned 18 I had to do something with my life but I didn't know what in French society there's a strong belief that if you don't go to university then you are less smart it's like there are two path and if you choose the wrong one then too late you miss your chance and it's fun because after graduating from my master's degree in computer science people started to

[3:04] see me as a smart engineer but I was a total scam I knew nothing everything I learned to run my businesses are thoughts from YouTube Google and the internet but I didn't know that back then and my parents pushed me toward University so in 2013 I got accepted in a university to do a master's degree the school was 2 hours away from a parents place in TW so I moved into my own little apartment I was so excited because For the first time in my life I was free but that's also when things became chaotic since I didn't like school I didn't like University either and now with a freedom to skip classes I

[3:39] studed to play video games all day long I played World of Warcraft 8 hours a day and by the end of the year I had spent 65 days in the game I also picked up a smoking habit and completely ignored my studies things got so bad after the first year that I was kicked out just like in high school my parents had to meet with the director to get me back in and I remember my mom pleading with him asking what are they going to do with me if they didn't give me another chance I had to promise to the university I would get good enough grades and once again I

[4:13] made a promise to my parents that I would do the minimum to graduate I got back on track reduced video games and I started dating a girl then something unexpected happened in 2015 my girlfriend got accepted for a student Exchange program in Hong Kong I was was devastated by the idea that she would leave me so I decided to do whatever it takes to follow her but my grades were not good enough to get into the same program but I found a loophole the only way to be in Hong Kong at the same time as her is to find an internship there there were two problems first my English

[4:48] was terrible and second I had no valuable skill for the job market but I was so afraid of losing her that I didn't care and that's when I made the first real bet on myself I will get that internship in Hong Kong no matter what to learn English I switched the settings on my computers from French to English and every single day I would struggle to understand what was going on on my interface and I also made a rule for myself to never Google anything in French anymore I can only use English it was 10 years ago and up to these days it remains one of the best

[5:22] decision I've ever taken then I needed the skills to apply for a job and since I knew nothing I had to find some something I could learn on the internet that's how I came up with the idea of becoming a programmer but time was limited and I couldn't become a software engineer suddenly so I went on Wikipedia and I googled the fundamentals concept of programming just so that I knew what it was and I send countless resumés and miraculously one of them accepted my application that trip in Hong Kong changed my life The Internship itself was a disaster I didn't know how to code they figured it out and I almost got got

[5:59] fired but living in Hong Kong opened my eyes to a completely new world new culture new food new ambition new mindset for the first time I realized that there was more to life that I could ever imagine I came back home transformed I somehow managed to graduate by coping on my neighbors during the exams so I didn't learn much I didn't even go to the ceremony because I didn't care about University but I had a new goal in mind I wanted something different around this time in 2016 I watched The Social Network the movie about how Mark zukerberg created Facebook that's when I had an epiphany I believed I will be the

[6:41] next Mark Zuckerberg I just needed a billion dollar idea back then I was climbing and I always struggle to find a partner that's how I come up with a new concept Tinder for sports lover an app that will match you with people with similar sport Hobbies I moved back to my parents house which was tough because I lost my freedom and to support that I found a job as a waiter for $10 an hour it was an interesting experience because I learned that if I smile which is something very rare for waiters in Paris then I would get more tips I realized that people don't just pay for the

[7:13] product they pay for the experience it was my first deep into the marketing World during the day I worked on building my mobile app the problem is that I had zero knowledge in coding and even though I had studied computer science it was nothing practical either Theory or outdated dinosaur programming languages I wasn't sure how to learn how to code properly so I just Google how to create a button for a mobile app I found this library of components called ionic and I felt amazing I felt like I could build an entire mobile app with just a couple hundred lines of code at least that's what I thought I was just reusing

[7:49] beats of code without understanding the fundamentals I spent an entire year building this app and it was a total disaster the more code I was adding to the app the buggier the app guts one day I talk to an entrepreneur a real entrepreneur who asked me how I plan to make money that's when everything collapsed and that was my first slap in the face I realized that my brilliant ID would never exist and even if it did it would never make money my entire world fell apart it was the first time for me to try to do something different to prove a point and it was going nowhere I

[8:23] felt like a failure I remember crying at night with my girlfriend unable to explain what's wrong I just felt miserable and I knew I needed a change when things started to go downhill a high school friend of mine Sasha reached out to me he was in South Korea and told me he could raise $100,000 from venture capitalist to start an AI startups and he wanted me on board with nothing going right in my life I accepted and I was so disillusioned with the past that I quit everything my app my girlfriend my family and I moved to South Korea in 200 17 at first things were great I finally

[9:02] found a friend who shared my ambition to create something we agreed that I will be the CTO so I bought a JavaScript course on UD and I started to learn programming from the ground up our startups focus on predicting the price of flight tickets to tell customers when is the best time to buy we had two investors and hired two employees I built the mobile app using react native and the team built the API and the Machine learning algorithm we had a great MVP to show but no one was interested in after a few months we realized that this was going nowhere we were both engineers at heart

[9:36] and we didn't know how to get customers an ambitious idea and a great product I was making the same mistake I did back in France just a year earlier so we decided to go our separate race in 2018 and here I was again alone on the other side of the planet with poor cutting skills and no idea what to do next so I started to question my choices I lost my self-confidence and started smoking again around the time I met a current girl who worked at the same startup centers and me we started dating and she became my girlfriend one day I saw an ad on Facebook selling couple

[10:15] gloves mittens for couples to hold their hands together I thought it was genous and perfect for the current market where nothing like this existed and since I had failed two big projects earlier I was excited to try something new and simpler my girlfriend was also also excited so we decided to work on the project together we started a small closing brand called Glovers gloves for lovers we worked with a lovely Korean Grandma who knitted all the 50 gloves for us and we did everything else from designing the gloves to creating the logo it was fun first I started selling the gloves on Facebook replicating the ad I had seen but it was a total flop my

[10:52] bank account was near zero and we had 50 unsold glove I burned a couple hundred because I knew nothing about ads so we decided to go industry to sell them we managed to sell a few making my first dollar as an entrepreneur I was happy and a little proud but the lifestyle was pretty unhealthy we would go out late at night in the freezing korein witer getting drunk in order to stay warm barely making any profit so in March 2018 we closed down the project I had no income and no savings so my girlfriend and I moved to a $500 a month underground apartment in sale it was

[11:28] Tiny humid there were centipedes and other kinds of insects but this is all we could afford I found a few gigs as a background actor making sometimes up to $100 a day which helped us survive for a few more months I wanted to return to making apps and websites but I was frustrated with my past failures around that time I met a guy named Andre who became my friend I shared with him my frustration and he told me sell it before you build it my engineer mind couldn't comprehend that but he was smart so so I decided to give it a try but I had no idea what to sell so I came

[12:03] up with a universal business idea help businesses get more customers and since I loved playing games I thought that the product could be a gamification marketing tools for escap room businesses in other words it's a game that escape room businesses could give to their customers to entertain them that would promote the escap room business when they're done playing the game so that the escape room would get more customers I was in Japan for a Visa Run staying in a cheap hot and noisy guest house with poor Wi-Fi I was paralyzed with fear to have someone on the phone and to sell them something I felt like I was scamming them but I took

[12:42] the call anyway the person on the other side was danela escape room owner in Perth Australia despite my awkwardness and all the wrong things I say during this call um so um I REM um um I sent you um a demo of the of of she said yes after 40 minutes on September 8th 2018 I made my first dollar on the internet this is the money on my P PayPal account danela paid $300 for the setup and $99 a month in subscription I was so happy I felt like I finally made it and the feeling of getting money from the internet with just me and my computer it

[13:30] felt amazing and on a side note danela ended up being my customer for the next 5 years and spent $4,000 for my software and all it took was a single code email I still had mediocre coding skills but I build a software for her and she was happy with it and at the same time I bought courses on UD in order to improve my coding skills I was so excited about getting my first customer that I repeated the process called emails calls and improve the software and and by the end of the month I had closed three customers as the business grew my life started to get

[14:04] better I quit smoking I started working out again and I ate healthier food my girlfriend quit her job and since we had no reason to stay in Korea we moved to Bali Indonesia in the middle of 2018 life in B was great it was cheap it was sunny I even learned how to surf and I became addicted to it I kept the same routine Marketing in the morning and coding on the afternoon the business grew quickly to $1,000 in monthly recurring revenue and picked at $4,000 at the end of 2019 I increased the price to $199 per month and I played around with annual deals for

[14:41] $2,000 yesterday I did two hours of marketing and today I get the payment from the guy from Melbourne so I get just earn $1,000 and here is my reward and I remember selling a few of those annual plans and it felt like I was a king I was so happy I was not broke anymore and I also felt like I had a purpose and then in March 2020 covid hits because of the lockdowns escape room businesses were forced to close so I decided to pose all the subscriptions and the software I built for 2 years went from $4,000 a month to zero in 1 minute on top of that I was a little

[15:22] scared being in Bell not knowing what would happen luckily it was not bad there was no real lockdown so I went surf that's how I met a new friend who became my best friend I started making YouTube videos and I didn't think much about entrepreneurship for a little while when Co began to ease in August 2020 my wife and I went back to friend and decided to get married so we could stay together no matter what the wedding was beautiful and even her parents could come from South Korea but we couldn't come back to Bali because they suddenly imposed another lockdown so we were stuck in

[15:54] France living with my parents my previous software started to make money again around $15,000 per month but it was pretty slow and I got a little bit bored of it after focusing on it for 2 years so I decided to start something new since I had some customers into the escape room industry I decided to work for the same customers but build a little different product this time it would be a little widget that would sit on the customers's website so that their visitors could play a game directly onto the website have F get a discount coupon for The Escape BR business and book right away

[16:26] it was the first time for me making games I learned everything from YouTube I had so much fun and on top of that it was working well I beta tested with some of my customers and it increased their comption rate from 3% to 3.5% just with one little script I was really excited about the product but the world itself was not really in a good position for marketing tools especially not escape room businesses so the launch was really slow at the peak it R $300 in monthly recuring revenue and at the same time the churn for my previous software was growing so I decided to change

[17:01] completely and work on something else I was not really sure what I wanted but I wanted something smaller something simpler something that I could ship quickly now we are entering a weird phas in my life my sister who is a doctor explained me how the male bladder works and why some drops of urine could fall down after leaving the toilet and she also explained me how to fix it so I decided to sell this information I spent a couple days creating a PDF to explain how it works how to fix it and I build a website called the golden Plumber where you could purchase the PDF for $4 I

[17:33] printed stickers with QR code that led to my website and I stuck them in toilets all over Paris I thought it would be the perfect place because this is exactly where customers need it but after a few weeks and no sales I give up on the stickers but not on the business I think I needed to prove something to myself so I started to run ads on adult websites I made a little video with my face and started to pour money into it and one month later I had one C customer and made $4 by this time I was 27 years old living with my wife at my parents'

[18:04] place all of my previous projects miserably failed I had no savings I was getting out of shape the reason I left my home was to prove that there was an alternative to the current education system and years later I came back in the exact same home with nothing but failures I felt like a failure for weeks I couldn't get the thoughts out of my head in one random morning while making coffee I started to cry for no reason I went back to my room cried again and then anger started to feel inside of me something that I had no control over I started to shout and I needed to express

[18:40] this anger so I punched the wall in my room four times I didn't even realize but each punch was hurting my wrist I kept smashing until my parents came afraid and worried and had to stop me I spent the next hours with my mom and my girlfriend on the sofa trying to understand what happened without finding the answer I felt miserable and I knew I needed a change I made a big U-turn and I decided to do something I never thought I would do I took a job I wanted to become a software engineer mostly because it's remote and also because I had a little bit of coding knowledge that could help

[19:16] but I wasn't really a software engineer so at the same time I was sending application I was learning through YouTube about apis nodejs react Etc at first they were interested about my application because I had some cool experi experiences to share but they realized that I was actually not a proper software engineer so I got rejected but one of the company was hiring aggressively so they overlooked the gaps in my experience and after two interviews I lended the job and the hiring person told me that I would be working for Ty Lopez the famous internet marketer knowledge I didn't know I would work for him because he was not

[19:50] mentioned in the offer but I was pretty excited and at the same time it paid almost $9,000 per month an amount of money that I've never seen in my life life suddenly felt different for the first time in years I had a sense of purpose I was told what to work on and by the end of the day I would have produced something valuable for that person I felt worthy something that I haven't felt in a long time plus unlike entrepreneurship I didn't have to work all day long so I had time for me to read books and get back in shape I thought I hated reading because of

[20:22] middle school they gave us like 500 years old books to read I couldn't understand a word and I didn't like it but since I could choose what to read I started to love it and it's been 3 years I started reading I've read around 30 book and it has changed my life completely the first book I read is called why we sleep by Matthew Walker I used to set up an early morning alarm so I could work more and the book completely changed my perspective I started to prioritize my sleep and I instantly felt better less stress more focus and overall happier it is by far

[20:54] what impacted the most my mental and physical health and I'm still wondering why they don't teach us that in school instead of the Pythagorean theorem and since I had more time I decided to improve my coding skills I wasn't really sure why but I thought it would be great either if I need to find a job later or if I just want to build better apps so I bought cheap UD me course and learned the fundamentals again of JavaScript HTML CSS and react by the end of 2021 the covid lockdown in belly had been lifted so my wife and I decided to return back home since I could work

[21:27] remotely it was not an issue but one week after landing in Bal I received a call and got fired but surprisingly I didn't care I discovered the social media Twitter because Ty Lopez was running polls to question his audience and I found a tweet from Peter levels a solo developer who built tiny startups from anywhere in the world and he built these startups in public sharing everything he does and everything he learns a new wave of Entrepreneurship less ambition that VC funded startup but more freedom with no employees a smaller project I was hooked so when I got fired I knew it was time for me to go back to

[22:02] entrepreneurship with a different strategy December 2021 $30,000 on the bank account back in Bal in a new dream I was so frustrated with the past that I told myself I would do things differently so I set five rules for myself rule number one I prioritize sleep I have seen in the past how much it impacts my mood and my overall happiness so no matter what I will always prioritize sleep rule number two I will share everything I do transparently on Twitter that way I could connect with other entrepreneurs and never feel lonely again rule number three I committed to shipping the smallest version of my idea no more

[22:41] spending one year in my bedroom overthinking a project I will show it to the world as fast as possible rule number four I promise myself I will always launch my project and try to show it as as many people as I can rule number five no more outcome goals but only process goals so instead of having a goal of losing weight my goal would be working out every single day instead of focusing on something I cannot control like how much weight I'm going to lose I'm going to focus on something I can control like how many times a day I'm going to work out that way I approach

[23:16] the journey as a collection of small projects even if my project is a total flop and nobody wants to use it it still grow my portfolio of little websites I started the journey by launching a website called mood to movie a simple website that would recommend movies based on your mood I wanted to test the strategy and I got lucky it went viral on Hacker News which bring a couple thousands of visitors on the site and also grew my Twitter following I also created habits Garden a gamified habit tricker people would set up their daily habits like reading books or working out they would get some quest to challenge

[23:51] themselves and they would get rewards like gems if they complete the quest that way they could grow a little digital garden and stick to to their daily habits people love the app and there was a payroll for the premium version and the app grew to 500 in monthly recuring revenue and I keep repeating the same process over and over one idea a few weeks launch it and move on by the end of 2022 I had built 10 websites that way it was not making much money but I was having a lot of fun and my Twitter audience was growing there were some moments that were really slow

[24:23] nothing much was happening and I remember feeling lonely just like in the past and sometimes questioning my choices whether or not I should maybe take a job as a software engineer in 2022 my best friend passed away my wife and I were silent for a couple day trying to process the loss he is an amazing person and taught me that there is a little gem inside of everyone his death made me reflect on the journey and reminded me that the fern is in the process not the outcome so I kept shipping apps I found my first success with a new approach making fun videos skit when launching a new startup I did

[25:00] videos with Joe Rogan Leonardo DiCaprio Matthew mcon I even did a video playing World of Warcraft In Real Life as a little reminder for the University time it was unconventional but people loved it and that's how my Twitter audience went from 1,000 followers to 10,000 followers early 2023 after about a year I started to run out of Muddy so I shifted my focus toward apps that solve real problems painkillers and not vitamins I also focused on app that have a payall so no more free plans and no more free users in 2023 I built Indie page a little software that lets anyone build a beautiful portfolio page it went

[25:40] really well and made a couple thousand dollar in Revenue within the first month which helped with my financial worries around that time the AI Trend was so big that I decided to give it a try I built make Ling it's a website generator people would input some text and it would output an entire website sites the launch went well generating an extra couple thousand in Revenue but I really didn't care about the market or the customers so I got bored of it at this point I had projects all over the place so I decided to sell some of them in order to focus I sold Mech Ling for

[26:14] 35,000 I sold habits Garden for $10,000 and I also sold that second software I built for escape room backs in 2020 for $4,000 and he was still making $50 per month in monthly recurring Revenue in August 2023 I had built somewhere for 15 to 16 new websites and I wanted to improve my strategy to ship faster so I created a little Cod base for myself and it was working so well that I decided to sell it I called the website cheap fast and I launched it a week later I told my wife we would be lucky if we make $100 24 hours later it had made

[26:50] $4,000 the biggest hit I had ever had I remember being in Hong Kong for a Visa Run sleeping in a 12 squ met bedroom room the airport just closed because of the typhoon and the building was shaking but I didn't care I finally had found product Market fit and it felt incredible I was so excited I couldn't sleep for three nights in its first month chifas made $50,000 in Revenue so I kept working on it listening to users adding new components opening an affiliate program and as I build everything in public sharing my Revenue my Twitter following also grew but I knew that Chief fast couldn't be 100% of

[27:28] my focus because its value came from the lessons I learned shipping software so I kept shipping a startups a month I built buy dispute to prevent chargebacks on stripe I built logo fast a free tool to make logos pretty quickly I built Zenvo a tool to generate invoices for European customers I focused on startups that solve my own problems and each of the project I launched made money anywhere from a couple hundred to a couple thousand per month and at the same time times I kept improving ship fast with my learnings in January 2024 I was still making around $50,000 per month I was having fun so I decided to start YouTube

[28:08] I gave myself another process goal I would make one video per week in less than 24 hours no matter what and up until this day I have stuck to this New Year resolution at first nothing happened for 3 months then I made a video showcasing the 23 websites that I built and YouTube decided to push my videos the channel Grew From almost 0 followers at the beginning of the year to 990,000 people in August 2024 thank you so much and at the same time my Rue doubled and at the top in April 2024 I made $143,000 with all my projects combined at this point I started to have couple

[28:45] hundred of thousand dollar on my bank account way more money than I could ever imagine owning at 30 years old it removed all the stress of wondering how to pay next month rent and it made me feel awesome to think that I might never have to work for money again that brings me to today life is a little simpler but overall nothing has changed I still surf every morning work on my tiny businesses on the daytime and enjoy a good evening with my wife the biggest shift is my mindset now I am addicted to building startups and I can't wait for the next hit and right now I'm working on two big

[29:22] project that I'm about to launch and I am so excited I did not make this video to brag or to sell you a course I made this video because I was so frustrated with the education system I wish someone would have shown me earlier there was another way you shouldn't take advice from just anyone especially not someone with a mustache but if there is one piece of advice for you this is it tomorrow you'll wish you would have started today start now build something build anything as chpt or Google when you're stuck find a way to make it fun through a challenge or doing it with a

[29:54] friend each project will teach you something and the right project can change your life and that's the end of this video If you enjoyed it please consider subscribing that means a lot and until the next one I hope you just ship it

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