Today I’ll be sharing my playbook on how to make money from something you’ve made. I went from 0 to 10K ARR, and I’m going to try and help everyone do the same. This won’t work all of the time, but I think it’s a great way to ideate, start, and succeed in generating revenue from something you’ve made.
Stick to what you know
the entrepreneurship & startup area is very, very competitive now. check twitter and you’ll see. With this new uprising in competition, you need differentiation, and you need a head start.
To gain a head start, you can do many things. 2x your work by getting a cofounder, pay other people to help (not recommended), or you can start in a place you know. Starting in a place you know means being in a community where you have
- A following/voice (know how/who to advertise to)
- Super In depth knowledge
- You know your customer (because you are your customer)
These items make it easy to not get lost creating something no one wants, and make it easy to get customers. You know how to build for them, as you are them. “eat your own food” – Gustavo Rodriguez-Rivera.
EX1: for my project duckmath. I was a student who wanted to play games in school. I know everyone in my entire school was on tiktok; as such, all students are on tiktok, right?
EX2: for my project quackprep. I am a college student who wanted to study past exams not found elsewhere. I know everyone at purdue used boilerexams (validation). I am in a purdue reddit with mostly purdue students, I am in the purdue snapchat which has 30k+ purdue students (easy access to audience). easy.
Create something In 2 Days
There are too many people creating for you to take more than 2 days to create something. You’re spending a week, a month, a year?? I spent 7 months creating something no one wanted. I won’t do that again.
We have cursor, chatgpt, loveable etc now; you CAN make whatever you are making in 2 days. Ai generated blogs which go onto your website? 2 days. 3 different directories? 2 days.
If you truly can’t do it in 2 days, slap up a waitlist in an hour and gather validation before you create.
Validation before Creation
It’s easier to market a product that’s already built, but we don’t always get that luxury. Talk to people, call companies, tweet about it.
Make sure everything you do daily is known. “I built this, talked to this guy about it, took the prof’s mic and got up and lectured about it.” Post it everywhere and build a following. Make sure everyone knows about it. So when the day comes and you open the doors to your crappy vibe-coded SaaS, everyone who follows you wants it.
If this isn’t full time for you, just spend an hour or so a day talking about it. Also no one is going to steal your idea, *t’s probably not even original anyway.
Growth
At some point 1 of your 20+ failures will start to gain traction—maybe it’s that keyword you were trying to rank for, maybe your reddit post blew up.
Spend more time than usual on that project; if it keeps going up and you keep getting good signals, then drop everything else and 10x that project.
Conclusion
Overall times have changed, and I wish I was back at the times when if you didn’t know how to code it you couldn’t make it, but times have changed. Everyone and their brother is doing a startup.
If you want financial freedom then you should do one too. I recommend first making a directory (listing of services). they are easier to market, take <2 days to build, and don’t take any maintenance. John Rush does great on this. I hope I have helped you guys in some way, and if you have any questions contact me. Thanks for reading!
