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100k / month in 2048 days - a projection

Ripe

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Hey guys, I've been lurking for a while. Read the millionaire fastlane a couple times and keep recommending it to people. Today I just ordered "unscripted " and felt like sharing my journey so far :)

So here's a little story of how I started my business and what I'm planning to do. Except for relations with family and my health, I'm willing to sacrifice anything in order to grow this thing. I feel like growth is almost like my happiness.

In 2013, while studying engineering, I got an idea for a startup, a cloud-computing service. (It actually didn't start as an idea, but a specific group of people who I wanted to help)

I started out totally overwhelmed with the fact that it was a really hard technological challenge and almost gave up with the excuse "I don't now how". But I decided to learn how to write code and started building it. It took me a whopping YEAR to go from idea to "launch".

So after 1 year I launched my service by getting an article on a big news site in my niche. The first 2 people that tried to use it broke it.. It was pretty stressful but after a few days I managed to fix everything and it started running. First few months it was doing $300 in revenue a month, but I had more expenses than that so I was making a loss..

Around 5 months later I started making a profit (on a monthly basis). I guess around $300 profit a month. It was still pretty stressful at times because the service was not very reliable, so sometimes I worked the whole night to fix something for a client.

About a year after launching I realized this service is working, people want it. So I decided to invest in a software developer to redesign the whole software architecture. Make it more reliable and robust to allow for more clients and less time spent on fixing stupid problems.

I spend around 10k on improving the software using student loans and a credit card, about a year later I managed to break even. It was risky but I'm really happy I decided to do that.

While I was getting this version 2.0 built, during the summer of 2014 I decided to drop out of university.. a pretty big decision but I did it for 2 reasons: I always felt this nagging feeling that I had to study instead of build this business which was very distracting, and I could kind of use the fact that I was studying as a "safety net" which kept me from really diving in..

When I dropped out, it was pretty scary because now I had to make my own money to survive. The business wasn't making quite enough yet so I also did some freelancing work. I think freelancing was 80% of my income and the business 20%.

Last summer (2016) the business had grown enough and I could stop freelancing, this was a huge deal and it still feels unreal when I think back. At the same time I also felt a bit too "comfortable", I felt like I wasn't doing enough to grow the business. I talked to one of my mentors about this and we concluded that I should be way more aggressive/bold in terms of marketing and sales. So I've been learning everything about marketing and copywriting and it's starting to pay off.

It's now 2017 and it's been 3 years since my launch. For the last few months the average revenue is around 5k which still sounds a bit pathetic to me for a business, but it pays the bills for now.. I still hire some programmers every once in a while (freelance) but I'm looking to outsource more and make it grow more.

So, to come back to the title of this post. I've made a 2048 days projection of some of the goals I want to achieve and also a revenue goal. By December 31st 2022 I will:

- Be market leader in my niche
- Expand on suppliers (this is mostly a technological challenge)
- Expand into other (similar) niches
- have 2 fulltime software developers (remotely)
- have 2 fulltime support people in different time zones (remotely)
- do 100k / month (revenue)

The revenue goal sounds crazy to me compared to the 5k, but it's only around a 5% growth each month which is not all too unrealistic. I think the key is just to stick to it. And the funny thing is, since the launch, I have been making a round a 5% growth every month (on average).

Now, this business is supposed to run fully automatically, so the only "work" for me is to reach out to gain new users and to engage with existing users (although most of my users come from google search and I never interact with them before the first sale). So I'm also trying to look at new opportunities and this 100k/m goal is only for my existing business. I do actually expect to have some other stuff going on as well by that time ;)

I think my biggest weaknesses are wanting to do everything myself as opposed to outsourcing, and still being not bold enough in certain situations. Probably still have some of that "concern what people think" left from the teenage years, unconsciously. These are just things I'll also have to work on if I ever want to get near that goal.

I'm happy to post updates here on how it's all going if people are interested. I'll also be reading other peoples journeys and try to learn from them.
 
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Ripe

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Long time no update, which is probably a good thing. If I was writing here all the time I’d be unfocussed as *** :) On the other hand I don’t want to be responsible for one of those abandoned topics of forgotten dreams.

So the update: I’m kind of trying to take a week off, which I wasn’t able to do in a long time since customer support has always been my top priority. I always had to check the support inbox a couple times a day. Fortunately now I have hired a freelancer who’s helping me with customer support, because finally the revenue starts to allow this. This is a really big milestone for me because it literally gives me a ton of freedom.

I’ve been working with him since January, building up a "relation" of sorts and building trust. A few weeks ago I finally gave him full access to the backend of the business. He’s able to handle refunds and everything. It feels great to finally have some help in this area!

I’m occasionally checking in how he’s doing (still have to get used to letting go), but it’s been awesome so far :) He already issued a few refunds, I told him he can be really "liberal" with this because customer satisfaction is way more important than short term revenue. And with one customer he actually issued a refund while I may not have done it that easily.. but today that customer returned and we made a sale 4x the original (refunded) sale :)

In the mean time I’m revisiting UNSCRIPTED and the concepts start to settle in more every time I re-read it.

Few days ago at the airport I saw my first Aventador, and yesterday a Murcielago. They look soooo much better in real life than on pics / youtube vids! I’m not doing all this to buy an exotic car but it’s just a nice cherry on the "cake of motivation" .
 

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Love seeing the progress!

I'll be watching this thread, I'm interested in seeing how far you take this :)
 

Ripe

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Thanks Certg!

Woke up this morning and my "machine" already did $400 in sales :D Feels really good. I'm realizing more and more that I just have to stick with this one thing and stop looking around at other possible things to do (I've been thinking about creating an app, doing dropshipping, lead-generation) etc. especially because I see others doing it successfully.

This is all shiny object syndrome and I just have to "stay on the bus", make my platform grow slowly but surely (and exponential). It's easy to say this after such a great morning of course, but I'll have to remember this in the bad times and stay on the wagon.

I'm also reading some other great threads on here and it's awesome to see so many like minded people :D I'm sure is good for the brain to be surrounded by this vibe on a daily basis.
 
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Thanks Certg!

Woke up this morning and my "machine" already did $400 in sales :D Feels really good. I'm realizing more and more that I just have to stick with this one thing and stop looking around at other possible things to do (I've been thinking about creating an app, doing dropshipping, lead-generation) etc. especially because I see others doing it successfully.

This is all shiny object syndrome and I just have to "stay on the bus", make my platform grow slowly but surely (and exponential). It's easy to say this after such a great morning of course, but I'll have to remember this in the bad times and stay on the wagon.

I'm also reading some other great threads on here and it's awesome to see so many like minded people :D I'm sure is good for the brain to be surrounded by this vibe on a daily basis.

Wow! That definitely fits into the "Progress" side of things.

And yeah, I agree. That "OOO, Shiny!" feeling is strong at times. Just gotta backhand it and keep moving :p

As for the other threads, they've intrigued me so much that I'm considering an INSIDERS pass. I feel like it's a small price to pay for the wealth of info that's provided in there.
 

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I’m occasionally checking in how he’s doing (still have to get used to letting go), but it’s been awesome so far :) He already issued a few refunds, I told him he can be really "liberal" with this because customer satisfaction is way more important than short term revenue. And with one customer he actually issued a refund while I may not have done it that easily.. but today that customer returned and we made a sale 4x the original (refunded) sale :)
I hope all members read this, because it can be a key to success in any business whether B2B or B2C. I have always found that a liberal refund policy pays off.

I refunded a customer who quoted the wrong Pantone color, and we matched that color precisely. A customer for life.

I replaced faulty product supplied by a competitor and only pointed that out while delivering the replacements. The result was orders many times larger than the original.

It was difficult to persuade my franchisees to adopt such a liberal policy, but as they gradually though reluctantly adopted it, they one by one told me how pleased they were to have made the change because of the boost to business it generated.

One of your best customers can be a disgruntled and even angry customer that you have treated way beyond what anyone could expect, and that applies particularly to the issue of refunds.

Walter
 
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Ripe

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Awesome story my friend. I admire your mindset. Can i ask you how old are you ?

Thanks Denis, I'm 26

I hope all members read this, because it can be a key to success in any business whether B2B or B2C. I have always found that a liberal refund policy pays off.

I refunded a customer who quoted the wrong Pantone color, and we matched that color precisely. A customer for life.

I replaced faulty product supplied by a competitor and only pointed that out while delivering the replacements. There result was orders many times larger than the original.

It was difficult to persuade my franchisees to adopt such a liberal policy, but as they gradually though reluctantly adopted it, they one by one told me how pleased they were to have made the change because of the boost to business it generated.

One of your best customers can be a disgruntled and even angry customer that you have treated way beyond what anyone could expect, and that applies particularly to the issue of refunds.

Walter

Thanks for sharing Walter! I believe this is very true. Being customer focussed, liberal with refunds etc. is probably one of the main reasons why my customers turn into returning customers.

I'm tracking daily how many customers I have and I separate them into "one time customers" and "returning customers". As I'm writing this I have 208 one time customers and 301 returning customers :)

A while ago I realised I should put more energy into developing a relation with my existing customers, turning one time customers into returning customers as opposed to constantly looking for new ones. It seems to work really well.
 

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Lately I’m trying to spend more time looking at my bigger picture / vision for the business, and whenever I do that I feel like updating this thread.

Since November I’ve been setting goals/tasks EVERY DAY, no excuses, and keeping myself accountable by participating in an 8 person mastermind, doing a Skype call every single day, no excuses. (we did skype calls through Christmas, New Year’s etc.) The daily tasks also have to be growth-related or revenue generating of some sort. It’s quite crazy what this has done with my work ethic and it feels really good, a sense of control.

The revenue hasn’t been growing as much lately though, but this might be due to looking at the short term (monthly) stats. When comparing 2017 with 2016 I have more than doubled revenue, which is pretty good. My last quarter (2017-4) has been my best one ever in terms of revenue. But so far, the start of 2018 isn’t too exciting.. the start of 2017 was better.

During a session of thinking about my numbers and reasoning backwards to what I have to do, I made a very simple set of KPI’s which I need to increase in order to grow my revenue:

More revenue: more sales OR increase prices
More sales: more proposals OR increase close rate
More proposals: more traffic OR increase conversion rate
More traffic: Organic, PPC, etc.

My close rate is around 35%, conversion rate around 4%. Assuming they stay the same, right now I’m simply working on increasing traffic. I’ve got some methods, using Facebook ads for retargeting and of course good old Adwords and working on setting up some partnerships with influencers. Setting up a YouTube channel with tutorials, etc.

I’ve also came up with some ideas that are very related to the service I’m offering, but could possible tap into a bigger market (niche is good but I feel like I’ve niched down too much) and allow for a recurring revenue model. I hope I don’t regret spending time on this later since it kind of deludes focus on the core business a bit.. but it’s related enough for me to rationalize it being a good investment of my time.
 

Ripe

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It's been more than a year. 2018 has been interesting. I broke up with my gf, moved out of a house I shared with friends, now renting my own apartment in a new city.

About a year ago the revenue was going down quite a bit, during the breakup period too, pretty stressful. Last summer I was wondering whether I should stick with this business or move on since revenue still wasn't great. But then Sept. was my first 5 figure month, and after that I had two other 5 figure months. January was my best month ever, 19.3K USD net revenue.

If we zoom out and look at the yearly revenue, I broke the 100k/year mark about a month ago, now at ~105k / year. This is 11% less than I wanted according to the original projection.

So far so good, I'm doing a lot of work now that doesn't increase short term revenue at all: building a whole new web app from scratch which solves tons of problems and implements a lot of feedback I got from my users over the years. It's a lot of work, I'm coding myself and hire experts to give me advice and help me out with the difficult stuff. It's kind of a leap of faith, but I believe this should allow my business to solve problems better for bigger clients than it can now.
 
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Hey @Ripe thanks for a great thread. Looking forward to hearing more updates.
 

Ripe

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We're about to hit Q3. I've had a massive wave of motivation for building the business, which I wanted to capitalize on so I pretty much cut out everything and just focused on: consistent sleep, gym 6x / week, and work. No new girls, (almost) no dates, very little social life. And I've got a lot done! I haven't been doing it all myself, hired 5 developers during this project so far (all parttime). I would feel bad if I'd be doing all the work myself, I think I found a nice balance because I don't want to completely remove myself from writing the software because:
- It's fulfilling to be able to summon an "army of robots" in the cloud
- I still have leverage because I make computers work for me
- Keep my brain occupied with complicated stuff which keeps me sharp

About to launch the web app, which is a bit scary, but that makes it feel like I'm on the right track. I'm in one of those cliche entrepreneurs situations, launching this thing with the bare minimum features I want to include is like throwing myself off a cliff, no way back, and on my way down, while it's live, I'll have to add the rest of the important features and build the proverbial airplane.

Revenue hasn't been growing a lot, I'm at 106.5k yearly now, but I honestly haven't been doing anything to grow it so I can't complain. All I've done is work on this new app which is not live yet so no real world results have happend as a result of it. Plan is to get this thing live and continue the growth from there :)

Once my motivation for business dies down a bit (which it will, just the nature of things). I will have my discipline take over and keep working. But I don't want to keep neglecting social life for too long, since getting better social skills will help in business too.
 

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Hi @Ripe

Thanks for a great thread.

Is this new web app a new iteration of the service you already provide or are you building something new?
 
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Ripe

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Cheers @Sadik it's an iteration of what I already provide (the thing that's making the money now while I work on the new one). It's based on a lot of feedback form users I received, missing features, and issues that have popped up in the past that I want to prevent with this new system.
 

Ripe

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Today's the last Sunday of 2019Q3 so time for an update:

Just spent some time planning Q4, exciting days.

Revenue is not good though.. dropped below the magic 100k/year mark down to around 94k.. Reason for this is simple: I spent pretty much all my time and energy over the past year on building a new platform that’s not live yet, so that work has zero impact on growth (so far)

I’ve been delaying the deadline many times.. which is bad. 3 months ago I said I was about to launch.. but now however, I expect with 99% confidence we’ll be able to deploy this thing in October.

Biggest reason for the delay is slower work than anticipated, and unforeseen tasks that pop up after diving into the rabbit hole of proper web application practices. It’s going to be so much better though than what’s running now, it’s ridiculous. This will be such a solid foundation to build/expand upon, and maintaining this thing will be a breeze compared to the current Frankenstein situation.

Also, I spent some significant time this Summer off the business. I’m not planning to do this often, but I felt I had to work a bit on my social skills like I mentioned last update. Did some networking, traveling, dating, had a blast. And was so energized to get back to the grind afterwards. I don’t regret it. I had an opportunity to get to know some amazing contacts. If I wouldn’t have done this, I’m quite certain there would be this nagging feeling of "what if", and now I know.

Finally, I’m doing THEMFCEO’s #75HARD challenge. If you don’t know, TheMFCEO is a business podcast (highly recommend it). This program is 75 days of working on your grit, discipline, and mental toughness. I’m at day 21 as of writing this. Feels good, it has a positive influence on my productivity already.
 

Ripe

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It's the end of the year, so a quick update on the business progress:

Revenue hasn’t changed much over the past quarter. Which is not surprising. I was deliberately working on improving the service rather than promoting it. I finally launched the new web app around the end of November though, which was a huge milestone. While I did so, I screwed up the SEO slightly which caused a drop in sales, but I found the issue and things are recovering. Valuable lesson learned there.

The end of the year I’ve spent a lot of time fixing some teething problems with the new app. Talking to users, getting feedback, implementing small new features, and planning the next year.

2020 will be all about promoting/marketing/sales, talking to my users and gathering / implementing feedback. I have tons of new ideas to work on and it’s really exciting to just sit down every day and get to work.

My natural tendency is just to constantly improve the service by both coding myself and coming up with higher level ideas which I then delegate to other developers. That’s the most fun for me and probably my comfort zone too.

So because of that tendency I have to be the "engineer", I’m going to force myself to spend time on marketing and sales every single day, 7 days a week. It doesn’t have to be a lot, but I just need to do one thing every single day that contributes to this side of the business because I don’t naturally do that. Maybe I’ll hire someone to do this at a later stage, but for now I think it’s a good way to go out of my comfort zone and be a bit more "plugged in" by talking to people in the industry.

Another thing I really need to spend more time on is very accurate tracking of important metrics, which will help me figure out how much effort I need to put into the actual marketing and sales, and be able to just look at it like a math equation.

I like the fact that I’m actually more excited about growing the business and becoming the best in my industry, rather than extracting a huge profit out of it. It gives a lot of clarity.

I wish you all an amazing launch of the new year!

Cheers.
 
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Ripe

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I'm just going to keep updating this every quarter. So here we are, 2020Q2. Even though the world’s in a very strange situation right now, it’ll keep spinning. I’ve done some planning but the situation is quite uncertain and I have no idea if this will be over in a month, or whether it’s gonna take a whole lot longer..

I’m will keep working on this thing from home. I’ve been talking to at least 3 customers or prospects a day, 7 days a week every week of 2020 so far and got some good results from it. Fortunately I don’t need human contact to operate the company. I’m delegating work to 3 remote people at the moment, so got some leverage going. I also see a lot of cloud computing providers becoming very interested in partnering up with my business and I’m having meetings here and there with them to see how we can help each other.

Sales are still bad due to the SEO hit we took after the update of the website. I have now pretty much fixed every single issue I can think of and I’ve started to go on the offense by just spreading the word more and trying to get big websites to link to me.

Dating situation is better than ever fortunately so that’s not really a distraction as it used to be. I feel so stupid to have ever worried about this area of life and let it be such a distraction from business, oh well.

I hope everyone on here is doing well, healthy at home or doing an "essential" job, stay safe!
 

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We're halfway through 2020, what a year..

Sales have definitely taken a big hit. I've just been bunkering down, working on improving the service and started thinking of the next iteration, pretty long term planning.

SEO has improved slightly but it's not where it used to be. I've been putting more effort into Adwords which is working. I cut some pretty significant unnecessary costs which has improved my margin quite a bit.

I just turned 29 and I'm seeing people around me buy houses and stuff. I'm trying to ignore that and think for myself, what is the best plan. I think for the time being it is better to keep renting relatively cheap and avoid being sucked into the hamster wheel of mortgages and despair. I value freedom / agility way more than being able to have a lifestyle I can't afford for cash right now.
 

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This is my first comment on this forum and I want to say that I read your whole story and it is really great to know that you are progressing. I must say that you are a consistent person. I wish you luck. Thank you!! Keep posting updates, we are interested.
 
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Ripe

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Thanks @kamal_ch !

Again, what a year, entering Q4 now. I love kitesurfing and I had a pretty big crash a couple weeks ago. Ripped my right pec muscle off my upper arm, went for surgery to stitch the tendon back to the bone. Pretty intense. Now I have to recover for a couple months..

However, the week I had the surgery, I did virtually zero work, but the machine is making sales again :) It was the best week in sales of 2020. And for September I hit 12.1k in net revenue. Main reason for this is that I've optimized a lot of systems for delivery, so things run smooth even when I'm not looking, and SEO has been recovering :)

I'm now making plans for Q3 to end the year well. I can't do much else than work as I'm recovering, so the plan is just to redesign some key components of my infrastructure, because that's the bottleneck at the moment. And I have to prevent falling into the trap of trying to figure it all out myself, and talk to some experts. Not be afraid to spend money on that.
 

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Happy new year!

I'm gonna keep updating this thing religiously, I feel like if I stop, the dream stops, and it will never happen.

The past few months have been pretty good and consistent, revenue hitting above 10k for Sep, Oct, Nov and profit margins are higher than ever because of the optimizations I did earlier this year when things were going bad.

My 6 month goal is to finish the underlying infrastructure and have it all running live, which will allow me to compete with the heavy hitters in the market. I've been hiring a bunch of coders as well as doing things myself.

I'm making sure I look at a vision board with this this goal every day, and write it down in a journal, among other things. And check off a daily checklist of clearly defined tasks that get me closer to the goal.

I'm getting a strong sense of urgency and things feel like they're moving too slow.. But I'll keep chipping away at this and either get to the point where I hit that $100k month, or die trying :)
 

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Update time, first quarter of 2021 went a bit slow, but plowing along regardless.

I decided to hire a business coach, I'm pretty much willing to do anything to get to the next level now so I started that as an experiment, it's been good so far. It's good to have some outside perspective and someone to tell me to get my act together when I'm doing some stupid stuff. Uncover blindspots. Will keep him in the loop.

Also started to go to a shared office space with some other entrepreneurs one day a week, and just being around "the action" helps and it's good to make new connections.

I'm building some advanced software systems to be able to solve problems we can't solve currently. Have been talking to lots of experts about how to do things properly. I wanted to hire someone to build it out for me, but had a hard time really nailing down what exactly to build since it's still so experimental in nature..

So now I've decided to handle the experimentation myself for the time being (I think I'm pretty good at it and I'm reading lots of books about the topic).

Instead of outsourcing that part, I decided to outsource part of our web app that I was also managing myself, which is a way more common piece of software and there's lots more developers out there with experience in similar projects.

So yeah that was the big dilemma of the past few months: Where to allocate time (do it myself), and where to allocate money (delegate). I think I have a pretty solid strategy now.
 
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Ripe

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Overdue update:

Business went crazy during May, really great month. Then SEO ranking dropped early June due to some Google update most likely. Fortunately the paid traffic funnel is pretty strong and things are still pretty good. And zooming out and looking at yearly revenue, it's at an all time high. So in summary, 2020 was a clusterfuck, but we're pretty crawled back out of that hole and doing better than ever :)

The business coach I've been working with is amazing. He's pushing me to do way more marketing which is really showing in the sales. I naturally want to build stuff instead of talk about it I guess so marketing is something I've just not put enough resources into and my coach is making me very aware of this.

Other than that, I've been reading a bunch of business books (I'm always reading something). And I'm really using the ideas of 'the ONE Thing' and 'Essentialism' lately to remove clutter and focus on the important things. Then the book 'Work the System', I've pretty much started using that as a bible to systemize my business even more. It's already automated quite a bit, but things can definitely be improved!
 

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Just read through your whole thread @Ripe , thank you for coming back to update over the years! Seeing someone's progress thread spanning several years is a great reminder that the fastlane is a lifestyle dedicated to process, which gets you progress over time.

Reading through the thread and seeing how much emphasis you seem to be putting on improving the product and optimizing technical features I was actually about to recommend the One Thing. As long as you have a viable product that provides value for people, you may just have to double down and focus 100% on your sales and marketing efforts to take this thing to the next level. Rooting for you to hit your 100K MRR target!

Best,
Hampus
 

Ripe

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Just read through your whole thread @Ripe , thank you for coming back to update over the years! Seeing someone's progress thread spanning several years is a great reminder that the fastlane is a lifestyle dedicated to process, which gets you progress over time.

Reading through the thread and seeing how much emphasis you seem to be putting on improving the product and optimizing technical features I was actually about to recommend the One Thing. As long as you have a viable product that provides value for people, you may just have to double down and focus 100% on your sales and marketing efforts to take this thing to the next level. Rooting for you to hit your 100K MRR target!

Best,
Hampus
Thanks @Hampus I appreciate that! I'm not very active here on the forum but I try to at least keep this thing updated, whether I'll be successful or not. Just sharing the process.

I agree on focusing on one valuable thing for the market, but I tend to go through cycles where I forget this and for some reason think that I should tap into a larger market, because I think market size is the bottleneck. It's good to be aware of this ;)
 
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Ripe

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Update time (overdue again), we've hit Q3 of 2021.

Business revenue is a solid 10k+ a month now over the past year. Yearly revenue is at an all time high, even though it's a marginal improvement I'm glad to be out of the 2020 year of doom dip.

My coach asked me an uncomfortable question: Have you thought of selling the biz and starting something else?

I don't really want to sell it. But because the market size might be a bottleneck after all, I'm looking into it now.

Regardless of whether I will actually sell it or not, going through this exercise will improve the business.

I'll have to think about making this thing run without me babysitting it, systemising, automating things, getting my accounting straight. All things that make the business better.

So that will be my main focus to the end of the year: make the biz run itself like a well oiled machine without me having to be plugged in all the time.
 

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Quarterly update:

Ended the year with an all time high in revenue, which is nice.

I've spent some time delegating the daily operations I've been occupied with, which is awesome. One of those "why haven't I done this earlier" things.

This is making the business more sellable. If I want to grow revenue substantially though I will have to definitely start doing something different, tap into another market most likely.

Besides this main business I'm also building up another startup. I feel like this startup has a huge potential, and it's a similar enough business as my main one that it's not a complete distraction. However, there is a bunch of drama going on among the co-founders, which I'm currently in the middle of.

I'm reaching out to everybody I know to get advice, which is great. Some people say, why don't you just walk away from it, which is a fair point, but the potential of this company is great enough that I'm willing to try and save it.

This situation can go any direction, maybe by next quarterly update the business has completely exploded and it's gone, maybe we're running it and doing great. I have no idea, it's quite exciting, I hope it's the latter :)
 

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Cool update: Right before closing 2022 Q1 I've touched the $112k in 30 days level.

I was just looking at my first post in this thread, which was May 2017, with the deadline of hitting 100k/month at December 31st 2022.

So in a sense I've kind of "made it" to the 100k / month level. However, I made 94 grand from a single sale (massive rush to go through that by the way).

Since it was just a single sale that contributed to more than 80% of the result, it means I have to work really hard and find more of these types of deals, and I'm not sure if I'm able to. Since it was a combination of great preparation of my infrastructure to be able to deliver such a project but also luck.

Regardless, I'm feeling awesome about this and I'm sure this is re-adjusting my "wealth thermometer" in the right direction :)
 
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Such an inspiring story! Thanks for sharing and congratulations on your progress!
 

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Such an inspiring story! Thanks for sharing and congratulations on your progress!
Thanks! It means a lot hearing people actually getting something out of this "business diary" of sorts.

I guess the lesson here is persistence pays off. Because there have been many times where I felt like a total idiot for keeping this updated with the lack of progress.

Almost felt guilty for not moving closer to the goal while still writing an update. Which I guess makes it an extra source of motivation to keep truckin'. Almost a form of accountability.

I'm not quite there yet since I wanted to hit >100k/ month EVERY month. It has only happened once so far.

I think it's very likely that I'll raise the bar before I actually hit that 100k goal though. Because once you start hitting in the vicinity of 70k+ months regularly, 100k is not very exciting anymore. And that's the beauty of it ;)
 
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