How to start a profitable micro-startup without quitting your job? [Day #12]
For a solopreneur that wants to start their own products immediately and thinks that having a full-time job is just delaying their dreams. Keep calm, it’s possible to have both.
Don’t take a risky decision
As I already shared in my previous posts, I got laid off recently from a fintech company, and so I decided this was a great opportunity to start some online products to try to get financial independence. That’s why I’ve started writing these Medium posts and built small products such as http://Remote-Work.app and https://FootballTips.app
. This was the best decision I could have made because I’m learning a lot about how to build products fast, focus on customer retention, and have a strategy for long-term growth.
Writing here on Medium helped me to start my businesses
These Medium posts also gave me a new passion, which is about making an impact on others with my ideas, opinions, and experiences. I receive every day's messages from new followers about how I inspired them with my articles, some also got laid off recently and my posts helped them to take action to start their own businesses. That is an amazing feeling, knowing that we are helping others. Also, this experience gave me a completely different perspective on the importance of creating a community or a group of followers. Because, if we have these people to support us, it will be much faster to test and fail new products. For instance, since I started writing on Medium, the number of new users on Remote-Work.app increased a lot daily. So, definitely, I want to keep the focus on creating a group of followers and start a community of Micro-Startup Founders (this will actually be my next product, so stay tuned :)).
Still seeking a new job meanwhile
But, even if I’m currently focused on building my products, I started in parallel to find a new job. I’m not in rush, I’m financially quite stable, no kids at the moment, so I’m looking for a new job that I feel that will give me good stability, flexibility to keep working on my side projects, and some job that can give me new skills/knowledge (new industry or a different context that I’ve been used to work on my whole career). But I believe that if we want to succeed with our own businesses, we still need to have some stable cash flow (a.k.a. a full-time/part-time job) to support our parallel adventure.
Building a profitable micro-startup takes time
While working at the moment full-time on my product made me realize one thing, mostly for MVP, time and patience is the key to our success as Solopreneur. You need time to build your products, and you need time to start gaining traffic. But, for building and developing your products you need to understand your users (potential customers), to understand what they think about your product if they feel it is valuable for them, and what kind of features they need in your product. However, to have those kinds of feedback you need traffic, and to get that traffic you need time.
For instance, I started these Medium posts at beginning of November (when I got laid off), when I started obviously I had zero followers, and didn’t have any idea of what kind of content Medium readers was looking for. One month after I have 343 followers, almost 8k views of my articles, and I was already a top writer on the Medium platform.
In the above image is a screenshot of the email I received from Medium, letting me that I’m getting popular on the platform (I was also popular on topics #Entrepreneurship and #Startups), what an amazing sensation inspiring others and this achievement just gave me even more motivation to keep writing. But, all of this takes time, takes resiliency, takes self-motivation, and knowing that everything to get success needs time. That is something we can control, we can’t accelerate those progress unless we are well funded by VCs, that is not my case at least (and to be honest, I’m not looking to start a business based on VC, again, I want to be financially independent, not being even more financially dependent by VC).
You are your own VC investor
When we are solopreneurs that are building a business from scratch and we are not looking for VC capital, in fact, you are your own investor. You need money to keep you alive, to pay your bills, to start your side-hustle business. But to achieve that, you need cash flow, mostly while your micro-startup is just starting and you don’t even know if your users will find it valuable and so profitable. You need to keep a stable cash flow while your product is gaining traffic, evolving and you are learning more about your type of users to regularly improve your product.
To get that cash flow you don’t need to have a full-time job, can be a part-time job, but I consider this job really important to keep you working in your micro-startup. Also, nowadays exists many side-hustle where you can make some online profits without a full-time job, we can’t consider that as a micro-startup but a cash flow to support your daily bills. One example is Medium, if you have more than 100 followers, you can apply to the partners' program and start earning some money from your articles. Independent of how you get that cash flow, always remember that you need to keep yourself alive, you are the root of your business and so, don’t put all your investments in your idea without having any insight into your idea could be successful. In the next post, I will bring you some suggestions on how to get that cash flow without a full-time job, just follow me to get notified about that post.
First, prove to yourself that you know how to make money
One of the things I need to prove to myself before I give up on having a full-time job is to prove to myself that I can make money from my businesses. But not just a few sales, like “woww, I just had one customer that paid me $30 for my product”, that is not making money, that is just a sale. I know, I know, it’s an amazing feeling when we are starting, but don’t consider that as a mission accomplished, actually, that doesn’t mean anything in terms of having a business.
Instead, define some goals on how you will consider your product to become a real business. For instance, these are my goals:
I need to reach $1000 of Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR);
I have a retention rate of users around 15%, which means that part of the users that come find my product valuable for them;
You know that your product is just an MVP and so you already identified how you can scale up to increase the retention and the MRR;
I will only consider that I know how to make money if I achieve those numbers. That numbers are not enough to pay my bills, but are the insight I need to trust in myself, to believe that I’m on the right way to making a business. While I don’t reach that, I have to be honest with myself, I don’t have a business and so, I need some regular and stable cash flow meanwhile.
Enjoy your ride while building your dream
I will always win, even if the dream of making a startup fails
And to finish, just enjoy the ride. I’m dreaming of building my own products not to become a rich man, but to enjoy the progress, to enjoy the journey of watching things grow (as this Medium publication account for instance). If you quit your job, you will put too much pressure on your shoulders, you will not enjoy the ride because you will be too focused on getting the product to succeed. I know that is a great motivation to make the product works, but I prefer to enjoy and I don’t want to have pressure on making anything work, because the probability of having a successful startup is really small. So, if my goal is to enjoy the journey of creating a business I will always win, even if the dream of making a startup fails, I will always enjoy the journey of making my products, and that is priceless.
So, what do you think? Did you quit your job to pursue your dream of making your startup? Are we using the same rule of proving to yourself that you know how to make money before you quit your full-time job?
Have a nice week and enjoy your solopreneur journey.
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