How to create a freelancing website that makes money.

Everything I've learned.

A thread.

As a freelancer,

Your website is everything.

First, prioritise its existence.

Second, prioritise its improvement.

The technology you use is irrelevant.

- WordPress
- Notion
- Carrd
- Wix

It doesn't matter which you choose,

What matters is you have a website.

Pick a platform that you're comfortable with.

If you can:

- Capture leads
- Add content easily
- Have a clear design

You're good.

If your website doesn't get leads,

It's not working.

Don't rest on a website that doesn't work for you.

Improve it until it does.

At Udemy, we were 3 first-time entrepreneurs trying to raise seed capital. We made every mistake in the book.

We got 200+ no’s and wasted 12 months fundraising.

We eventually pulled through, just barely. 😅

This thread shares our mistakes as lessons for founders.

**Read On**

We built an impressive product, but we were nobodies.

We thought: we need money to build our vision, so let’s go talk to some investors.

WRONG.

Nobody gave a fuck that we needed money. We needed to prove we deserved their money.

We met some associates and intermediaries who might introduce us to investors.

Few decision-makers wanted to meet with us.

We should’ve stopped there.

If getting meetings is hard, it will take you forever to raise.

Instead, spend your time building product + getting traction.

I was frustrated with investors: treated them as adversaries who asked dumb questions. My derision turned them off.

Learn to understand and appreciate investors. Follow them on Twitter, listen to podcasts from @HarryStebbings or @eriktorenberg.

An investor's job isn't easy.

They kiss a ton of frogs just to find one deal that may make them money 10 years from now.

They only win if you become a billion dollar company.

Don’t kid yourself - if you aren’t the right fit, bootstrap.

Risk-adjusted, bootstrapping can make you happier and more successful.

A few things I've learned this year from building a small, profitable internet business from zero to $100k ARR in 8 months.

Ride the wave:

People often ask what we do for marketing, and I don't really have a good answer. You don't have to push your product as hard if you're building for a vocal community of passionate people within a growing market. They'll do most of your marketing for you.

Scratch your own itch:

If you don't experience the problem you've set out to solve, you’ll have a slight disconnect between what your problem actually is, who’s experiencing it, and how to reach them. I’ll probably never do another user test in my life.

Get specific:

The web hosting space may be crowded, but the web hosting space for Notion is not. I used to think a niche would limit the total size of my business, but If we capture 1% of all Notion users, we'd be making at least $720k/month—far beyond what's enough for me.

Use side projects as marketing:

Some of our record signup days came from one of my side projects. The only mention of it was a link to it in the footer of the page. Your side projects don't have to be clearly correlated in order to still correlate.

Saturday thoughts on funding: Where it helps. Where it doesn't. And how it affects team, success, and PM fit.

This is just my $0.02 after looking reviewing 30k+ early stage startups personally and having led 350+ investments across 2 VC firms & as an angel.

Let's begin! >>

1) Money is great to have in building a startup (for the least dilution and pain possible) That's true and always will be true. 😆

But just like how money can't buy you happiness, it also can't buy you PM fit.

2) PM fit is the holy grail for software startups. (we're not talking biotech - if you have a cure to cancer, I guarantee you everyone wants it).

But for software startups, it's unclear if ppl want your product at your price pt.

3) If you don't find PM fit, in this day and age, you will be able to get some sales. Maybe even say $1m in sales (or more!) per year, and you can still make a living.

But having sales does not mean that you have a repeatable customer acquisition process that can be sustainable

4) As an aside, that is why we invest at pre-seed & don't care about startup traction, because I don't believe traction at the earliest stages suggest PM fit. Traction only shows that a founder can execute (& that's impt too) but there are other ways to assess execution earlier.

Just watched this 47-min presentation given by @adamwathan at @MicroConf in 2018 titled 'Nailing Your First Launch'. It was recommended by @RandallKanna

Adam shared a step-by-step guide for launching successful info products from idea to launch.

Thread 👇👇

1st Product: Nitpick (Automated PHP code review comments on Github in one click)

Total Revenue: ($3650.59 from 19 customers) Nov 1, 2015 - Apr 30, 2018

2nd Product: Refactoring to Collections (eBook to teach PHP developers some functional programming principles)

Launched: May 2016

1st Day: $28,299

1st 3 days: $61,392

After 2 weeks he quit his job to focus on info products

3rd Product: Test-Driven Laravel

Early Access: November 2016

1st Day: $82,919

1st 3 Days: $115,676

Sales from May 2016 - April 2018

Book $179,147

TDD Course $468,536

Total $647,683

Why an Info Product?

There is a finish line

Doesn't take much time

Unlike SaaS, it puts money in the bank quickly

Selling subscription software is hard, courses are easy

1/ Does this exist in VC?

I'm constantly running tests on ad platforms and cold outreach to gauge market interest in specific products/solutions/pain points.

2/ Seems like what some people try to accomplish with an EIR, but from
what I can tell, that's usually focused on a single venture.

We are constantly uncovering new potential ventures through our outreach, and we aren't even a fund.

What I learned from raising my first seed round.

This isn’t a how-to guide, that may come later. This is just a story and observations from my own experience.

See, I didn’t know what I was doing at all...

We had a built a prototype, people seemed to like it. Investors seemed to like it. Not because I showed it to them, I wouldn’t know how to do that.

But I got a lot of inbound asking about the product and found myself stumbling into meetings with people with no real goal.

We decided it was time to raise and I had to figure out how to do that.

I’m not from SF. I’m from small town Missouri. I didn’t have connections.

But I did spend a lot of time making internet friends. It’s what I’ve done my whole life. In particular friends in @genzmafia

It was here I had some help from @nhuebecker on the first pitch deck I ever made. It went a long way btw - Thanks nick!

And met a lot of connected people thanks to @ItzSuds. He also got me on clubhouse.

In there I started talking to people and met @YousifAstar

Yousif taught me the game. I cannot stress this enough he taught me everything. Pitching, materials, intros, down to the verbiage of my emails.

He taught me how to be intentional with raising instead of stumbling into meetings.

I blocked off two weeks and got started.

1/ I recently read about Adjacent User Theory and, despite it being focused on expanding existing users. thought there were some great takeaways about prospecting.

2/ General concept is that just beyond your existing users are groups of potential users who would better adopt your product if it were positioned differently. As you expand your positioning, you convert under-engaged users.

In outbound sales it's the same.

3/ Too many startups try too hard to guess their exact prospect profile. This is necessary to find their first successful customer profile, but beyond that, identifying new types of prospects should be more formulaic.

4/ Here's how I've done it to identify 12 different successful prospect profiles in a few months:

- Use the 80/20 rule: 20% of the leads you reach out to should fall outside of your current core prospect profile.

5/ Priority should be on profiles with only 1-2 differences from the current core. Perhaps a slightly different pain point, but not dramatically different.

Here are all the businesses I’ve tried:

(Half of them failed)

👇

Training Spectrum

A website showcasing local sports talent, health and fitness articles and interviews with personal trainers.

Started at 17. Lasted 4-5 months.

Food & Drink

A local website listing restaurants in each city (before Zomato was a thing).

Started at 18. Lasted 6-7 months.

Ambitionaire

An online magazine interviewing entrepreneurs for aspiring entrepreneurs.

Started at 18. Lasted 3 months.

10 Question Poll

A website asking 10 random funny questions and you share your results with friends.

Started at 22. Lasted 3 months.

1/ Come for the Content, Stay for the Community. A thread.

My interview with @Mixergy is live. Check it out here: https://t.co/fvxio9FArN

It's great. We cover 15 years of business.

I like getting tactical on podcasts. I know Andrew likes it too. I missed some spots. So here are 5 tips I wish I shared during the interview.

🧵👇

1) During recessions, get close to the money.

I talk a bit about what business was like in 2008. Besides some personal struggles, 2008 was also a time when individuals and businesses were clamping down on spending. So what can you do if you are freelancing through that?

Get close to the money. People will be cutting spending on things that seem superfluous, but any tools, service, or consulting that ties directly to the company's bottom line will be the last to go.

This was part of what encouraged us to focus on membership sites.

I remember some clients we built websites for, even friendly clients (maybe family members ;), saying to me "The website is nice, but it didn't really bring us business."

!!!

We weren't tracking it. The membership sites we helped launched had reporting built in showing $$$.

2) When going up against established competition, don't compete with them head on. Focus your marketing efforts on features and in spaces they aren't addressing.

There were already a couple established membership plugins for WP when PMPro launched.