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.
Rank & Rent

Rank niched websites on Google and sell the leads or the website to businesses.

Started at 23. Some have worked pretty well, others have not.
Web Design & Marketing Agency

2 niched agencies and 1 general agency helping clients grow their business.

Started at 23. Slow start, but doing very well now.
Study Web Development

A website where I share what I know to help people get into web development and freelancing.

Started at 23. Slow start, but doing very well now.
Drop Shipping

2x drop shopping businesses.

Bought into 1 at 26. Started another at 26.

Both are doing well.
As you can tell, my journey has been a slow one filled mostly with failure and frustration.

I hope this motivates you to keep going 👍

More from Startups

The Beatles wrote “Yesterday” in less than a minute.

Led Zeppelin wrote “Rock And Roll” in 30 minutes.

The White Stripes, “Seven Nation Army”, 10 min during a soundcheck.

The Rolling Stones, “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction”, 40min.

Making a startup in 24 hours is perfectly fine.


I worked on my first startup for 2.5years. It was an events app. Sunk in cost and expectations were so high, that I had to close it, despite getting consistent revenue.

In comparison, I wrote @CryptoJobsList in 2 days. And it's way more meaningful than what I've been doing in my events startup for 2.5 years.

When I let go of my engineering ego and let go of expectations that I need to raise capital and hustle for 4+ years — I started lauching fast and interating fast without any expectations — then I started coming up with something truly meaningful and useful ✨

12 startups in 12 months by @levelsio
24 hour startup by @thepatwalls
— are great challenges that make you focus on the end product value, iterate fast and see what sticks and ruthlessly kill what does not work.
I shipped all these apps in 2020. Most of them generated $0.

🎬 https://t.co/JAhXqsuu6h $0
🌍 https://t.co/BrNUAhfiIT $0
💡 https://t.co/ZWcLfOH4aI $0
🐞 https://t.co/aghOxYEcPI $1.99
👍 https://t.co/2JhJLe27pW $3,025 in 10 days.

But that's ok, just keep shipping! My stories👇

🎬
https://t.co/wuiBp1XsYD is the first thing I created. It's a community for indie makers. The different thing is we post updates in videos. I created it for fun as I think the world doesn't need one more text-based forum, so I make a video one. No monetization plan so far.

🌍 https://t.co/fiwjgCWho5 is a social app. The idea is from Linktree, an app to share your social links. I thought it would be cool to add more visuals to it, and meanwhile we can explore others around. I also have no monetization plan for it. Make it for fun too.

💡 https://t.co/fZfL45uvVX is a platform to connect influencers with their fans. People says it's like @superpeer. But the only difference is it's all sync. Influencers don't need to commit their time to fixed slot. Fans pay to ask questions, influencers can answer at anytime.

Continuing Influenswer... I think the product has its potential. But for now maybe I didn't find the right niche to serve. Will re-evaluate it in future.
There are a *lot* of software shops in the world that would far rather have one more technical dependency than they'd like to pay for one of their 20 engineers to become the company's SPOF expert on the joys of e.g. HTTP file uploads, CSV parsing bugs, PDF generation, etc.


Every year at MicroConf I get surprised-not-surprised by the number of people I meet who are running "Does one thing reasonably well, ranks well for it, pulls down a full-time dev salary" out of a fun side project which obviates a frequent 1~5 engineer-day sprint horizontally.

"Who is the prototypical client here?"

A consulting shop delivering a $X00k engagement for an internal system, a SaaS company doing something custom for a large client or internally facing or deeply non-core to their business, etc.

(I feel like many of these businesses are good answers to the "how would you monetize OSS to make it sustainable?" fashion, since they often wrap a core OSS offering in the assorted infrastructure which makes it easily consumable.)

"But don't the customers get subscription fatigue?"

I think subscription fatigue is far more reported by people who are embarrassed to charge money for software than it is experienced by for-profit businesses, who don't seem to have gotten pay-biweekly-for-services fatigue.

You May Also Like