The Biggest Mistake I Made as a Beginner Solopreneur
And how to fix it
On August 16th 2023 I quit my 6 figures job to become a fulltime solopreneur. That’s over two years ago.
And before I quit, I believed I am going to make a million dollars in a year.
Heck, I even made a monthly video about it
The plan was solid:
Put out a weekly YouTube video, develop a mobile game, develop a mobile app and write consistently on LinkedIn.
That way I will get the ball rolling and start making big money.
Well, it goes without saying that this was an awful plan. I just started and I expected to have so many things going on.
For starters, each video took me 20-40 hours to make. A week.
Then building the mobile game, learning Unity and relying on it to be good enough to make money, well.. That was a little too ambitious and time consuming.
But hey, focusing on many things at once was just one of the mistakes I made.
Although it’s quite a big one, it is not the most critical one. The one that made me waste over a year trying to build a valuable product.
Getting into X
After spending a few months on LinkedIn, I realized something.
Most people there are either working a fulltime job OR are selling to people who work a fulltime job.
Not the kind of people I was looking for.
I wanted to connect with indiepreneurs. People who build products and try to make it out on their own.
And X was just the place I was looking for.
It’s filled with them, groups and communities. I could follow and comment to every big creator I heard of.
And I learned something that changed everything for me.
‘Ship fast and kill even faster’
In other words, build a tiny MVP as fast as possible. Then ship it to the masses and see if it gets any traction.
→ Did it? Well, congratulations, keep at it.
→ Did it not? Good, kill it, move on to the next idea.
Sounds good? Hell yeah!
I get to write code all day long, just to ship my idea and repeat the process again and again until something hits?
For a passionate software developer, it sounds like the good life.
Building 12 Products
So for around 500 days I built SaaS products. As many as I could.
It ranged from a books-management web app, through a stock investing mobile application all the way to an image enhancer for Booking and AirBnB listings.
I tried many different technologies. I even learned how to use (the now deprecated) Photoshop API (pain in the ass).
I spent weeks writing code, back when Cursor wasn’t a thing, Copilot would barely complete some of your code, and ChatGPT 4 was the hottest thing on planet earth.
And although I shipped extremely fast, many products, I made $0.
But hey, it’s part of the plan. I shipped fast and killed the products much faster. Right..?
Well, that’s what kept me going for so long.
The Turning Point
Although I was extremely passionate and had the motivation to succeed, I felt like I was going nowhere.
Yes, my coding skills improved SIGNIFICANTLY (I cringe when I think about the code I wrote when I started), but I was not moving.
I spent so much time but I still didn’t crack the code.
I kept asking myself: ‘What the hell am I doing wrong? Something should’ve already worked!’
It was one of my lowest points. And trust me, I experienced MANY burnouts and depressions throughout my journey.
But this was different. I was finally ready to let go if it didn’t work.
So, with all the desperation I had in me, I decided I am going to give myself one last chance.
A chance to prove whether I have it in me, or not. Whether I can succeed and make it, or go back to job market and work on my passion on weekends at best.
This was the deal I made with myself:
You have 6 months to work on a single product and make money. If the 6 months pass and you didn’t make it, you’re going back to find a job.
Oh, and you are not allowed to read ANYTHING but the best 5 books on marketing there are.
Good luck.
And boy, was it the smartest idea I had in my entire journey.
The Deal I Made With Myself
Product
For the product I chose WriteStack (which began as ArticleGenerator → WriteRoom → WriteStack).
For those of you who are familiar with WriteStack, it started as a text editor that generated post ideas and outlines.
For those of you who are not, shame on you. Go ahead and try WriteStack now, for free.
That’s it. One page, one feature, one landing page.
Books
For the books I chose:
Dotcom Secrets - Russell Brunson
Experts Secrets - Russell Brunson
Traffic Secrets - Russell Brunson
100M Offers - Alex Hormozi
100M Leads - Alex Hormozi
The reason I chose them is because I trust Alex Hormozi a lot and he was a student of Russell and was influenced by him.
Timeframe
And the timeframe was February - August, 2025.
I had 6 months to make WriteStack profitable, or it’s over for me. I will be the loser I was afraid to become.
The Mistake I Overlooked For 600 Days
Look, for almost 600 days I had very short-term goals, with no deadlines.
Build the product → ship the product → see if it gets any traction → continue based on results.
The Ship Fast mentality that many other indiepreneurs have.
The core problem with this type of thinking is that it is very short-termed and doesn’t bring any value to the creator.
You don’t learn or gain anything but a beautiful graveyard of products.
All you think about is the next fun cycle of building your new idea and showing it to the world.
And yes, after some time you might hit a gold mine. But it’s rare as hell and you cannot count on it.
Fun fact:
The guy who’s known for growing the ship-fast community has changed gears and is now focusing on one product only.
How Everything Has Changed
Let me tell you something.
If I’d have bet the house on that initial idea of post ideas generator, I would’ve failed miserably and be at work right now.
That idea was bad and not useful to 99.99999% of the people (the 0.000001% were me and a handful other non-creative people who can’t think of good ideas for articles.)
BUT!
Having to stick to one product for 6 months had completely altered my mindset from short-term thinking to a long-term one.
Now I have to find out how to continue working on it, even though it didn’t get any traction.
And I had to figure out this:
How can I learn what doesn’t work and make it work?
And to learn that, I have to get people to try the product or at least tell me what they think about the idea.
That’s when I decided it’s time to talk to people and get them to use it, so I can learn why is it not good enough.
I started sending as many DMs as I could to try and get people onboard.
Not many people actually cooperated and gave me a few minutes of their time, but those who did gave me valuable feedback:
‘This is not a problem I am facing with. I have plenty of ideas, I just don’t have the time to write them. The Notes are a bigger pain.’
That’s when everything clicked.
What do all the big tools for other platforms, like LinkedIn and X do? They help creators generate short-form content!
WriteStack has to do the same for Substack creators.
And from there, everything is history. I made my first ever online dollar with WriteStack on April 6th, 2024, from my first ever customer —
(thanks for believing in me before anybody else man ❤️).Final Thought
I hear a lot of ‘You didn’t waste 600 days. You failed and learned from them’.
Well, I don’t feel that way. No matter how I try to look at it, I think that I wasted almost 2 years of my life with a false belief.
What made me change and start learning wasn’t those 2 years of ‘learning’.
It was deciding that I can’t go on like this forever and something has to change, otherwise I’ll stay stuck and burn through my entire savings.
So if you are in the beginning of your journey, or considering it, do yourself a favor and save this article.
Read it. And then read it again.
There are 2 very important lessons here that will save you months and years of trying, despairing, burning out and repeating this cycle.
P.S.
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It's a great opportunity to share experiences with great people
I loved the image! Have you generated with Gemini, can you write for us about it? :)