Hello everyone,
I'm very happy to be here! I first read Unscripted a couple of years ago after my FTE when I was drinking too much, eating like crap, and addicted to video games. These habits helped numb the underlying desire to build a profitable online business that produces income while I sleep. The FTE happened when my overall lifestyle and negative attitude started to affect my marriage; something clicked and I was jolted into a complete identity change towards my ideal version of myself. Over the next year or two I introduced new daily habits including eating healthy, zero alcohol, exercising, meditation, journaling, and some more of the usual self-betterment habits (only the ones mentioned have stuck to this day, besides the occasional drinks at social gatherings). In less than a year I was feeling like an entirely new person (checkout attached images for pre/post FTE if interested).
During this time I also picked back up a previous hobby of trick skateboarding and started a website to first blog about my progress and added ads to hopefully get some advertisement revenue. Then I delved further into Wordpress and Elementor and (barely) put together and "app" for people to upload their own videos of a pre-defined list of tricks. People could like and comment on tricks of others, think Facebook for skateboarding. I ended up get a handful of very inactive users, zero dollars, and a few extra scars and gnarly toe nails. I did learn a valuable lesson through the blogging though - unless you're famous people really don't care about you, they're much more interested in what you can do for them.
During this process, I got really fed up with how slow and limited functionality Wordpress had so I scooped up a $12 course on Udemy to learn web development and flew through the 60 hours of material in no time. From there I tinkered on many different small side projects that didn't amount to much while learning the stack that I exclusively use today - NextJS, Typescript, and tailwindCSS. I wish I'd discovered this intense passion earlier in life.
A couple of months into my coding journey I was chatting with my brother-in-law who owns a real estate brokerage and he was complaining about how there were no good apps for contract management / cash flow projections except for a spreadsheet for $30 / month (with about 10,000 subscribers - dude is killing it!). So I started to build realtyflow out (realtyflow.co) on the MERN stack that I was learning at the time, but it eventually got really messy and a pain to work on so I reformatted it to my current stack. I took a break from the project for a bit when I succumbed to shiny object syndrome during the crypto boom. Entered wayyy too many hackathons on GitCoin; I earned about $15k to $20k in crypto (at the time, much less now!) through various hackathon wins but each project died as soon as the results were in so I could work on the next one.
Anyways, I went back to realtyflow after that detour and we've fully transitioned my brother-in-law's brokerage into the platform and his company of about 60 people use it daily. I kind of lost steam on it recently (as can be seen around July of this year on my GitHub Seth-McKilla - Overview) since it sort of turned into just fixing bugs for the users and not expanding to other users and generating revenue. I think the main culprit has been a combination of creating way too many features for an MVP (some not generic enough for a broader audience), not enough planning on how to market it, perfectionism on writing the cleanest code possible, and both of us having a lot of other things on our plates professionally and personally. However, we're currently in talks with a large influencer in the real estate space for some potential angel funding / promotion of the product to move it forward. I was naive with how much effort it would take to build it to what it is now and am burnt out with the product and finding it so hard to find any motivation to work on it without revenue coming in the door.
Apologies for the long post but it's been cathartic to reminisce on my journey up to now. My current objective now is to start fresh on a new product from my accumulated list of pain points (from my day job and building realtyflow) with my previous learnings in mind. I plan to basically do the opposite of what I did last time, in a nutshell:
- An idea that scratches my own itch and is something that I'm passionate about
- Don't write a line of code until I have done some validation on the idea by reaching out to as many potential customers as possible
- Be purposefully quick and sloppy with the code I write to get the most minimally viable version possible in front of users
Again, I'm very excited to be here and thanks for reading if you got this far! I'm thinking of starting a thread on here as I hit the drawing board again and build out a new product. I feel it could both provide accountability for me and hopefully some lessons learned on failures / successes. With this reboot, I'm also of course listening to my favorite book, Unscripted , again to kickstart the journey.
-Seth
I'm very happy to be here! I first read Unscripted a couple of years ago after my FTE when I was drinking too much, eating like crap, and addicted to video games. These habits helped numb the underlying desire to build a profitable online business that produces income while I sleep. The FTE happened when my overall lifestyle and negative attitude started to affect my marriage; something clicked and I was jolted into a complete identity change towards my ideal version of myself. Over the next year or two I introduced new daily habits including eating healthy, zero alcohol, exercising, meditation, journaling, and some more of the usual self-betterment habits (only the ones mentioned have stuck to this day, besides the occasional drinks at social gatherings). In less than a year I was feeling like an entirely new person (checkout attached images for pre/post FTE if interested).
During this time I also picked back up a previous hobby of trick skateboarding and started a website to first blog about my progress and added ads to hopefully get some advertisement revenue. Then I delved further into Wordpress and Elementor and (barely) put together and "app" for people to upload their own videos of a pre-defined list of tricks. People could like and comment on tricks of others, think Facebook for skateboarding. I ended up get a handful of very inactive users, zero dollars, and a few extra scars and gnarly toe nails. I did learn a valuable lesson through the blogging though - unless you're famous people really don't care about you, they're much more interested in what you can do for them.
During this process, I got really fed up with how slow and limited functionality Wordpress had so I scooped up a $12 course on Udemy to learn web development and flew through the 60 hours of material in no time. From there I tinkered on many different small side projects that didn't amount to much while learning the stack that I exclusively use today - NextJS, Typescript, and tailwindCSS. I wish I'd discovered this intense passion earlier in life.
A couple of months into my coding journey I was chatting with my brother-in-law who owns a real estate brokerage and he was complaining about how there were no good apps for contract management / cash flow projections except for a spreadsheet for $30 / month (with about 10,000 subscribers - dude is killing it!). So I started to build realtyflow out (realtyflow.co) on the MERN stack that I was learning at the time, but it eventually got really messy and a pain to work on so I reformatted it to my current stack. I took a break from the project for a bit when I succumbed to shiny object syndrome during the crypto boom. Entered wayyy too many hackathons on GitCoin; I earned about $15k to $20k in crypto (at the time, much less now!) through various hackathon wins but each project died as soon as the results were in so I could work on the next one.
Anyways, I went back to realtyflow after that detour and we've fully transitioned my brother-in-law's brokerage into the platform and his company of about 60 people use it daily. I kind of lost steam on it recently (as can be seen around July of this year on my GitHub Seth-McKilla - Overview) since it sort of turned into just fixing bugs for the users and not expanding to other users and generating revenue. I think the main culprit has been a combination of creating way too many features for an MVP (some not generic enough for a broader audience), not enough planning on how to market it, perfectionism on writing the cleanest code possible, and both of us having a lot of other things on our plates professionally and personally. However, we're currently in talks with a large influencer in the real estate space for some potential angel funding / promotion of the product to move it forward. I was naive with how much effort it would take to build it to what it is now and am burnt out with the product and finding it so hard to find any motivation to work on it without revenue coming in the door.
Apologies for the long post but it's been cathartic to reminisce on my journey up to now. My current objective now is to start fresh on a new product from my accumulated list of pain points (from my day job and building realtyflow) with my previous learnings in mind. I plan to basically do the opposite of what I did last time, in a nutshell:
- An idea that scratches my own itch and is something that I'm passionate about
- Don't write a line of code until I have done some validation on the idea by reaching out to as many potential customers as possible
- Be purposefully quick and sloppy with the code I write to get the most minimally viable version possible in front of users
Again, I'm very excited to be here and thanks for reading if you got this far! I'm thinking of starting a thread on here as I hit the drawing board again and build out a new product. I feel it could both provide accountability for me and hopefully some lessons learned on failures / successes. With this reboot, I'm also of course listening to my favorite book, Unscripted , again to kickstart the journey.
-Seth
Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum:
Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.
Attachments
Last edited:
