I made $143,280 in April | Solopreneur Diary

0:01[Music] welcome back for another video this is Mark and I'm going to bring you to Japan where I spent two weeks with my wife uh but I've also been busy I'm going to share with you uh two updates that I made on my product and software I'm also going to share transparently every Revenue that I got from my seven products I'm going to talk about a new book that I read this month that changed the way I work and how I'm able to produce more while working a little bit less and I am going to show you how my server got hacked and I end up having a

0:44massive bill that I still have to pay and I don't know how to fix this and finally a little reflection on how I grow this YouTube channel from 0 to 45,000 subscribers in 4 month all right let's go [Music] [Applause] [Music] I added a new feature to my code bow plate ship fast I wanted to bring some gamification elements to the process of building startups to help people stay motivated on the long term and so now makers of ship fast can compete for the ship fast leaderboards the leaderboard will ring project made with ship fast based on their actual Revenue there are two leader boards an alltime high where

1:33I chose the entire Revenue since the person got started and another one for the current month to make sure that newcomers have a chance to rank on those leaderboards the links on the leaderboard are clickable so hopefully that brings a little extra traffic to the projects that are featured so ship fast maker can log into to their account and there are a few things that they can polish like they can change their profile picture name and Twitter handle and then makers can add as many startups as they want and handle which one are shown on the leaderboard this is an addition to the current Discord community and I hope this helps make

2:02your stay motivated and show up every

2:11day oh it's shaky [Music] [Music] noow oh wow in Japan this pool [Music] I also added a new feature on my tiny software called poop up poop up is a little marketing tool that users use to increase their website conversion rate they will show a popup notification to know they either understand the problem of their customers or to show some time sensitive notifications like a discount coupon that's available only for a few hours I use a feedback collection tool called p in order to understand what customers want from the product customers can create features requests and also upvote other feature requests and every week I will open the candy

3:09board and just see which feature is the most requested and people ask for clickable popups so I implemented the feature basically now all those pop-up notifications can be clicked and they will open a new tab and R ring to any link the customer wants [Music] okay now the not so fun part update for this month um one of my servers got attacked I believe it's denial or service attack so it happened on AWS I'm using two uh services from Amazon the bucket where I put basically all my uh images and videos from my website as well as AWS Cloud front uh basically a CDN so that images and videos would load

4:09faster and I realized this month that the bills for the previous month wor about $2,000 which is really strange CU I usually spend somewhere from $5 to $50 per month so I knew something was wrong and so when I checked the cloud fronts usage I saw that there are three weird spikes of traffic I think about over 10 terabytes of data were transferred which is really weird because um my website would get somewhere from 2 to 5,000 visitors per day but we're far away from those 10 tabt of data so I reach out to the AWS support and it's still ongoing but it looks like they are first they're

4:44very friendly and it looks like they're going to remove those spikes and just build me as I would typically on a normal month I also posted that story on Twitter and I was amazed to see that 90% of the comments would mention Cloud flare to solve these kind of things I didn't want to change my text tack so I chose the simpler version so I turn on AWS W it's a firewall that should prevent these kind of attacks to happen again and so far it seems like it's working pretty [Music] well and B home in my house in B let's talk about finances in April 2024 I

5:34earned $143,200 let's break down some of the revenue streams a really good chunk of my revenue is coming from ship fast my B plate for developers to launch startups faster it was around 40 to 80,000 per month uh since the launch 8 months ago and this month it almost doubled it's also a good month for my software like bu disputes Zenvo and Indie page it made almost $6,000 this month and I'm really happy with it as I'm working on a very big project at the moment they are not growing as fast as I wish they would but as soon as I'm done with that I'm going

6:04to spend much more time on it especially on Indie page for which I have bit projects by the way you can check all the projects I'm talking about with a link to all my startups in description and I also made about 2,000 in YouTube and Twitter Revenue money in Money out let's talk about expenses I spent about 13,000 this month uh to run the business so there is about 500ish us for the tech stack about $2,000 for outsourcing some tasks like the video editing and $6,000 for marketing so affiliation and ads are the only two channels I spend money on and finally I spent 5,000 for stripe the

6:38payment processing platform I use to accept credit cards on all my websites so that makes me around $130,000 in profit for this month this is absolutely insane uh if you've been following me for a while you know that I've been calling ads for about 6 years now and I've been earning like peanuts for such a long time like almost literally 5 years making somewhere from Z to one or2 to $3,000 per month my wife and I have been living like cockroaches for 5 years or so um I would say no to dinner with friends because I couldn't afford it I borrowed money from my parents to pay for this Villa if you go

7:13back in time on my Twitter account you see that every month I still share the exact Revenue I earn and you could see that the past the two years prior to that I would earn nothing from1 to $1,000 per month and what's happening this month and the previous eight month have been absolutely insane and I'm just so happy I stuck with doing what I'm doing showing up daily and not quitting I know how hard it is to keep pushing when nothing really is happening but I promise you if you do it something will happen because this is my story I don't have any particular skills I'm not uh

7:47especially smart I don't have business friends who know everything about entrepreneurship I just did the things that I wanted to do code apps for long enough until luck F me and if I can do it you can do it too [Music]

8:19every day I try to read about 15 minutes and I usually finish one book per month and this month I was reading deep work by Kyle Newport the book is really good it's not crazy amazing but it's a really good reminder that we live in a world of distractions and this is definitely not helping us produce the things we want to produce I try to have a working habit where I focus on the important tasks first and then later on the day I will go online and the book was really helpful to be even more religious about that and so now I'm even more extreme in

8:52my uh work style where I don't go online before 400 p.m. so it means my phone is off and I don't check emails Twitter YouTube or anything else before that and I realized that those four to five hours of undistracted work I get every day are very very productive if you find yourself checking your phone a little bit too much I really recommend you reading the book I'll share somewhere around here the notes I took when I read the book

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9:45I started this YouTube channel four months ago in the first week of January 2024 it was actually part of a New Year resolution and so every Sunday I would go to my desk and just make whatever it is one video I did that for a month and nothing was really happening and then about a month ago YouTube decided to pick some of my videos and pop them out and my channel went from a couple thousand subscribers to what it is now I think around 45,000 subscribers I feel like when I really want something and I create some kind of habit that I do consistently something will happen for

10:17instance I started a news lator in August 2023 I would write whatever I learned during the journey and I would spend 4 hours every Saturday sending that newsletter I almost didn't skip every single Saturday and I I've been sending I think well over 30 issues right now and there are almost 20,000 readers on the newsletter and the same thing happens for my daily life as well a couple years ago I was not in my best physical shape ever and I decided to start working out every single day I've done that for years and even though I am not a bodybuilder I feel fit and healthy and that's the win off for me and now I

10:50built this identity of a guy who has to work out every day who has to write a newsleter issue on Saturday who has to make a YouTube video on Sunday and it's very hard to give up those habits I really believe there is some kind of powerful force that rewards people who show up consistently and don't give up and it's probably thanks to this force that I'm able to talk to you through this YouTube video by the way I am very grateful for the attention you gave me uh through those YouTube videos that makes me feel like I'm not some kind of Weirdo And I would like to thank you in

11:17Japanese Aras all right until the next video I hope you just ship it [Music] cheers wow we're driving in Japan for the first time we

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