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My website builder https://unicornplatform.com/
All my 20 products https://johnrush.me/
I post daily here https://twitter.com/johnrushx
These 3 things changed everything for me:
1. Kill me EGO. Back in the day, I worked hard, but in most cases, I was simply fighting with my own "intentional" mistakes. Most of the things I did came out of my ego. For example, I'd design things based on my personal taste rather than looking for this year's trend and adopting it. Why did I go for my own taste vs the current thing? because of my EGO. 99% of founders in my network make this mistake as we speak, I see it every day now, but I didn't see it in myself back then. Killing my ego led to becoming 2-5x more productive, which means I don't need to work as "hard" anymore.
2. Validation & Brave Confidence. In old times I'd just go and build the sht instead of validating. In 10 out of 10 cases, I'd build crap that nobody needs and right after that, I'd iterate doing 100-hour work weeks with no sleep or holidays. Could I have avoided all that? Of course. Today I validate things before I write the first line of code. I haven't failed a single launch since then. The productivity gain here is 10-100x. In old times a typical product would need 2 years of iterations to get somewhere, now it's "right" from the start because I iterate on the validation stage using different marketing messages. Compare this to iterating with the SAAS, where each new version might take many months of coding, versus me spending a few minutes to redo my marketing message from a new angle.
3. Reinventing wheels. I'd never reuse external libraries or nocode tools or boilerplates. I was too proud of myself. Every boilerplate had "spaghetti code", SDKs were poorly designed, APIs were limiting me....and all sorts of bulls
it excuses I could find to reinvent the wheel yet again. Now my typical project has just 5% of my own code and the rest comes from external boilerplates, apis, sdks, nocodes, lowcodes. This is yet another 10x time saver. I don't need to code for 100 hours a week anymore. I can spend more time inventing cool creative marketing ideas that actually move the needle instead of proudly reinventing the CRUD.The Moral.
If you have to work hard, it means you're not working "smart". Often founders romanticize the "hard" and look for hard ways instead of going for easy ways. I know it's hard to accept it. I was the one who denied it myself for many years.
Mine:
1. Validate idea first. I wasted at least 5 years building stuff nobody needed.
2. Kill your EGO. It's not about me, but the user. I must want what the user wants, not what I want.
3. Don't chaise investors, chase users, and then investors will be chasing you.
4. Never hire managers. Only hire doers until PMF.
5. Landing page is the least important thing in a startup. Pick an average template, edit texts and that's it.
6. Hire only fullstack devs. There is nothing less productive in this world than a team of developers.
7. Chase global market from day 1.
8. Do SEO from day 2. As early as you can. I ignored this for 14 years. It's my biggest regret.
9. Sell features, before building them. Ask existing users if they want this feature.
10. Hire only people you would wanna hug.
11. Invest all money into your startups and friends. Not crypt0, not stockmarket, not properties.
12. Post on Social Media daily.
13. Don't work/partner with corporates.
14. Don't get ever distracted by hype, e.g. crypt0. I lost 1.5 years of my life this way.
15. Don't build consumer apps. Only b2b. Consumer apps are so hard, like a lottery. It's just 0.00001% who make it big. The rest don't. Even if I got many users, then there is a monetization challenge. I've spent 4 years in consumer apps and regret it.
16. Don't hold on bad project for too long, max 1 year. Some projects just don't work. In most cases, it's either the idea that's so wrong that you can't even pivot it or it's a team that is good one by one but can't make it as a team. Don't drag this out for years.
17. Tech conferences are a waste of time. They cost money, take energy, and time and you never really meet anyone there. Most people there are the "good" employees of corporations who were sent there as a perk for being loyal to the corporation. Very few fellow makers.
18. Scrum is a Scam. If I had a team that had to be nagged every morning with questions as if they were children in kindergarten, then things would eventually fail.
The only good stuff I managed to do happened with people who were grownups and could manage their stuff. We would just do everything over chat as a sync on goals and plans.
19. Outsource nothing at all until PMF. In a startup, almost everything needs to be done in a slightly different way, more creative, and more integrated into the vision. When outsourcing, the external members get no love and no case for the product. It's just yet another assignment in their boring job.
20. Bootstrap. I spent way too much time raising money. I raised more than 10 times, preseed, seed, and series A. But each time it was a 3-9 month project, meetings every week, and lots of destruction. I could afford to bootstrap, but I still went the VC-funded way, I don't know why. To be honest, I didn't know bootstrapping was a thing I could do or anyone does.
In January I launched an indexing tool called Index Rusher, that forces google to index your pages quicker, to get ranked for SEO faster. This whole project was something I needed myself since I got over 20 products and paying for an external one would simply cost too much.
My initial idea was that I would just build an internal tool for my use, that has only 1 feature. No UI really, just 1 button.
In the middle of the process, I realized that I could actually run an experiment and launch this tool publically with just one feature. Super simple.
I hired a dev who spent a month building it. It looked super easy at first, but it turned out there were so many hidden snakes on the way. Troubles with sitemaps, google APIs, and more.
1 month later I launched it (In Jan). The launch didn't go so great, but I didn't really have high hopes. Because nobody knew about this tool, I had no traffic on the site. I still sold several licenses, which made me pretty happy, it felt like validation, people needed it, even if it solved such a narrow problem.
At that point, I declared my next stage of the experiment: Growing the traffic and revenue.
I've done a number of growth hacks in the next 30 days, resulting in over $7k in revenue, but what's more important, the traffic on the site has grown a lot and stays high and growing. This means I've done a pretty good job on organic growth too, which will just accelerate over time.
Here is what I've done:
Cross-linking. I added links in the footer on my other products. This is one hidden effect of having multiple products. Each may serve as a lead magnet for the other one. In my case, I have the same audience for all my tools, people who love one of my tools often check out the rest.
Being visible on social media. I monitor discussions around the Google Indexing topics and add my replies there. I don't just spam in replies with my tools, in most cases, I genuinely answer and bring value. If my reply gets a reply, I may include my URL in the next reply.
Social Media and Blog posts. I've posted several posts about Growth, where I mentioned Indexrusher since I actually use it for me Growth.
Traffic from Directories. This one was the top channel of growth. Over 50% of the paying users arrive from web directories. I used a tool that listed Index Rusher on 100 directories & websites.
Sponsored listings. I "sponsored" directories to place a banner for my tool on the top of their page/list. Seeing the effect of "boosted" listings. The ROI was good. About $2.5k of revenue came in from these boosts.
Affiliate partners Made a deal with a few affiliate partners who reached out to me on X and he drove a decent amount of traffic and paid users to me since he was launching on PH the same week,
The total economy of the project now Dev costs: $1500*3=$4500
- Godaddy domain: $9
- hetzner Hosting: $10/mo
- landing page on Unicorn Platform: $9/mo
- cost of sponsorships: $800
- Affiliate payouts: $150
- listingbott for backlinks: $499
- seobot ai for blog: $99
- Stripe fees: $654
Total cost: $6711
Revenue: $7164
Profit: $453.
So, it's profitable!
My next steps will be 1) Promote it to 100,000+ users of my Website Builder and reach out to more website builders and pitch them the integration
2) Increase Word-of-mouth effect
3) Perhaps try some paid ads
4) Add automated emails to remind about Index Rusher users who signed up but didn't buy
5) Launch a directory as a lead magnet
6) Launch little free tools as lead magnets
7) Product Hunt launch
8) AppSumo launch
I will make a new post in a month describing how it went.
CoFounder He was about to start a hardware startup that wanted to build a vending machine that looked like it was made by Apple. Until this day, I’ve spent years building software, and his idea around hardware felt so compelling, that I had no doubt and joined him as a CTO and CoFounder. I got 15% of the company.
Rich Man He was a rich man, with a huge house in the best luxury area of the city, with a big exit in the past. He kept saying: “I can’t do this without you..”. Which was very inspiring, and I probably did my best job ever over the the few years. I worked days and nights, my girlfriends left me because we didn’t see each other at all.
Living A Dream Things were going really well, We met Jack Dorsey in SF and presented our machine, partnered up with his company that was doing the payment stands. Lots of the doors were open, We raised money from investors and got into the best b2b accelerator in the world.
Departure While things were going really well, I realized that I could not work here, mainly because I realized I had no passion for hardware and I wanted to be my own boss, while being CTO meant that my boss was the CEO. I spent a year on hiring more people and finding a new guy to replace me as CTO. The replacement went very well, so eventually I left.
I Lost It I moved on with my new startup but a few months later I got an email from the board. They were planning a new funding round as it looked like to me. So first I was happy about that, it meant my shares would be worth more. But it turned out they were planning an internal round, where all investors had to put money in. For all the investors it was relatively little money, but for me, it was more than I could afford. Since I owned 15% and couldn’t participate in the round, my 15% was diluted to 0.15%.
Why? It turns out that in a VC-funded startup, it’s very easy to lose all almost your equity if the startup decides to have an internal round and issue new shares. It may have 100 shares, I own 15 and others own 85. Then it may issue 1000 shares, where each costs 10k. So I’d have to put 150k to stay with my 15%. (the numbers aren’t real, just for an example). So this was the end of the story for me.
The moral: owning Equity in a startup doesn’t protect you at all unless you’re rich.
[An Update/Clarification]
Comment from a Reddit user:
The trick was the pre-money valuation was decided by the “internal round” participants. They basically decided the company was near worthless valuation pre-money. This then meant you owned 15% of nearly nothing.
Reply from me:
YES! This is the only reply that's correct under this thread. This is exactly what happened under the hood. Very few founders know this may happen, and most think their equity is safe, just like I thought. But in this case, both the founders and early investors lost nearly all their shares. (99% of it). Someone might ask: how can they reduce the valuation to such a low number? well, in startups, the board is usually small, just CEO+Chairman, and they can vote for anything they want and it's easy to justify stuff. because they control the story
2) Open "Performance" page
3) Sort the "Queries" tab by "Impressions"
4) In the top 20, find top 5 queries with "CTR" < 50%
5) Insert them to your home page hero, h1/h2 & meta tags
* for MVP Stage