📰 My First Year as a Solo Developer

Successful people tend to be persistent. New ideas often don't work at first, but they're not deterred. They keep trying and eventually find something that does.

Mere obstinacy, on the other hand, is a recipe for failure. Obstinate people are so annoying. They won't listen. They beat their heads against a wall and get nowhere.

But is there any real difference between these two cases? Are persistent and obstinate people actually behaving differently? Or are they doing the same thing, and we just label them later as persistent or obstinate depending on whether they turned out to be right or not?

If that's the only difference then there's nothing to be learned from the distinction. Telling someone to be persistent rather than obstinate would just be telling them to be right rather than wrong, and they already know that. Whereas if persistence and obstinacy are actually different kinds of behavior, it would be worthwhile to tease them apart. [1]

I've talked to a lot of determined people, and it seems to me that they're different kinds of behavior. I've often walked away from a conversation thinking either "Wow, that guy is determined" or "Damn, that guy is stubborn," and I don't think I'm just talking about whether they seemed right or not. That's part of it, but not all of it.

There's something annoying about the obstinate that's not simply due to being mistaken. They won't listen. And that's not true of all determined people. I can't think of anyone more determined than the Collison brothers, and when you point out a problem to them, they not only listen, but listen with an almost predatory intensity. Is there a hole in the bottom of their boat? Probably not, but if there is, they want to know about it.

It's the same with most successful people. They're never more engaged than when you disagree with them. Whereas the obstinate don't want to hear you. When you point out problems, their eyes glaze over, and their replies sound like ideologues talking about matters of doctrine. [2]

The reason the persistent and the obstinate seem similar is that they're both hard to stop. But they're hard to stop in different senses. The persistent are like boats whose engines can't be throttled back. The obstinate are like boats whose rudders can't be turned. [3]

…

On February 1st, 2018, I quit my job as a software engineer at Google to start my own single-person software company. It’s exactly one year later, so it feels like an apt time to reflect on how that decision affected my finances, lifestyle, and happiness.

One way of looking at the chart is that I lost $21k in a single year. Alternate interpretation: I grew profits by almost $1k each month! If this trend continues, I should be fabulously wealthy quite soon.

Okay, that’s a bit of a fanciful interpretation. The reason that my profits increased (i.e., remained negative, but decreased in magnitude) was that I reduced spending.

Costly lessons in outsourcing

At first, I had a very Four Hour Work Week mentality: my job was not to do work but rather to manage work, so I hired freelancers to do everything.

Two problems quickly arose:

It takes weeks or months until outsourcing saves time. There are upfront costs to specify a task, hire a freelancer, train them, etc. Outsourcing requires careful coordination. If managing work requires only 20% as much time as doing it directly, I should be able to manage five freelancers in a full work week, right? But, what if all of them submit their work on the same day? It’s impossible to review everything at the same time, and the freelancers don’t want to sit idle for a week until I catch up. In my struggle to give everything proper attention, there was a decline in the quality of work I accepted, and sometimes I had to throw things out entirely because of my poor planning.

To address this, I reduced my outsourcing and handled more work myself. This change decreased my spending and made my business feel less chaotic. There was also a significant change in my personal life that affected my finances, but I’ll cover that a bit later in this post.

At the moment I quit the company was in a crisis. We were arguing more than creating. The sales also went down.

It is much easier to have a partner. But there are always risks in relying on another person.

Even though I had the money for only a few months of living, this time I decided to go completely on my own.

I had an idea and a clear vision of a landing page builder. I wanted to create a tool which is:

Stylish. Easy and fun to use. Simple. Powerful just enough. Tailored for one audience — startups (SaaS, mobile apps, software, NFT etc) So let’s start building!

Making MVP It took me 2 months to create the initial version.

I coded an HTML generator. The tool was able to compose pages to export as HTML. There was no online editing, no hosting.

I was absolutely sure about my vision. I knew people need this. This is why I was not worrying much when I was posting Unicorn Platform on Product Hunt.

I got so much positive feedback. And the most important, some cash as absolute proof of demand.

To increase a visitor's purchase rate, increase the visitor's desire while decreasing their labor and confusion: • Increase desire — Entice visitors with how much value you provide. Create intrigue. • Decrease labor — Reduce the work your visitors have to perform so they don't get tired or annoyed. Be concise and ensure every word and element is of value. • Decrease confusion — Don't confuse visitors with obscure or verbose messaging. Ensure every sentence can be easily understood. And make it self-evident which action they should take next (e.g. sign up or purchase). And ensure your action elements (e.g. buttons) are unmissable. This means we shouldn't do something avant garde with our homepage structure unless we have a good reason to. Here’s the typical structure we'll be using:

Navbar: The top of the page — where your logo and navigation links are.Hero: The main section at the top of the page, which includes your header text, subheader text, and captivating imagery.Social proof: Logos of press coverage or your well-known customers.Call-to-action (CTA): Your signup button and a concise incentive to click it.Features and objections: Your key value propositions fully written out.Repeat your call-to-actionFooter: Miscellaneous links.