I Built 30 Projects. They All Failed Except One

Category: Entrepreneurship

Tags: businessentrepreneurfailurestartupssuccess

Entities: CidiFrisbeeGidleyGitHubGum affiliatesMobinNextJSPat WallsSuperbaseThomasUnid

Transcript

00:00

We get the same complaints on every YouTube video. You just talk about successful ideas, but what about the failures?

I hear you and I get it. So, today we're doing something a little different.

Today, we're talking to Thomas, a guy who's failed with over 30 ideas.

00:15

I failed way more often than I ever succeeded. After failing with over 30 ideas over many years, something finally clicked.

Yeah, it started to grow step by step until I reached $10,000 of revenue last month. In this video, Thomas breaks down the

00:32

five core reasons why your project will fail, what he thinks makes a good idea, and what makes a bad idea, and why his new project finally worked and made $10,000 a month. I wasn't even sure this would ever work.

Thomas' journey is what it actually looks like to build a successful

00:49

business. And this video might change how you think about building online forever.

A lot of indie hackers, especially developers, don't realize this. All right, let's get into it.

I'm Pat Walls, and this is Starter Story.

01:04

All right, welcome Thomas to the channel. Tell me about who you are, what you built, and what's your story.

My name is Thomas, and I'm the founder of Unid. You need is a product alternative that makes $10,000 per month.

But before this, I launched more than 30 projects that all failed. One of

01:21

the reasons why I wanted to bring you on this channel is that you have built a ton of stuff and most of them failed. Lots of different projects.

Can you just tell me about some of the projects you built? I built Gum affiliates.

It was a marketplace to connect Gumroad sellers with affiliates. I think I met something

01:37

like 500 bucks from it, but I just gave up after 2 years. I also built a simple platform in a day with my girlfriend called Frisbee, a platform to exchange feedback about your product, but never published it.

We can have a look at my

01:52

GitHub account and yeah, as you can see, I have a lot of repositories and most of them are abandoned. For example, this one, the repository is named SCS, but the name of the project was Gidley and it was a simple website builder.

This one was a simple Twitter feed. I built

02:08

something really useless called Cidi, a simple web app to manage your plans. Actually, I used it for maybe a year or two for myself.

This one was a bookmark manager. And yeah, there are a lot of things on my GitHub profile.

All right, so you showed me all your

02:24

failed projects. There's a lot in there and you spent a lot of time kind of thinking about why those didn't work.

I'd love if you could break down the reasons why these projects failed. I think the first reason is because we give up too early.

You know, I often see people launching a project and giving up

02:40

after a week or two because they haven't had any registrations or sales and so on. But I don't think a product will ever work overnight.

I think we have to make sure the market exists and we have to kind of iterate and iterate again and iterate again learning from our

02:56

mistakes. Another reason is maybe your purpose is unclear.

I've seen hundreds of landing page that may look great with a lot of animation details and so on, but if people don't understand exactly what your product is offering when they

03:11

read your headline, it's a lose and lose situation. Nobody's going to scroll down if they don't understand your headline.

Another reason could be the loss of momentum. When I think about my failed project, I realize a huge part of them failed because of this loss of momentum.

03:27

That's a classic mistake. If you build in public, every time you post about your product on social media, you create momentum.

Step by step, people will see the name of your product, your name in their feed. They'll end up remembering you and your product and recognizing it.

If you stop talking about your project

03:44

for a few weeks or a month, you have to start again to build this momentum. Another reason I often see the phrase build it and they will come.

I just hate that phrase and I think it's very wrong. People won't come to see your product because it has amazing feature or things

04:01

like that. No matters what your product is.

If you don't do any marketing, if you don't talk about it, no one will come to your website. The last reason would be the timing.

Timing is important when launching a project. If your project doesn't work in, let's say, January, it doesn't mean it won't work

04:18

in July. So, my advice here would be to stay consistent and don't give up because you don't have the right timing.

You never know. Okay, so we talked about all these reasons why projects fail.

Let's now talk about the idea that actually work for you. The idea that's making over $10,000 a month.

What is that?

04:34

You need is a launch platform today where you can showcase your tech product. But it started as a simple directory for front- end tools.

At first, Unid wasn't really a successful product even though it got a bit of traffic. I think I reached to $200 per

04:50

month at some point, but that was my best month. So, at some point, I pivoted unit from a simple tool directory to launch platform.

And at first, it was a huge failure. I was scared because my revenue went down a lot.

A few months after the pivot, my revenue started to

05:07

grow up again. It started to grow step by step until I reached $10,000 of revenue last month.

And that's cool. I mean, one of the reasons why businesses sometimes don't work or why projects fail is timing.

It's just too early or you stop working on it, then maybe it could have been

05:23

successful later. Can you tell me a little bit about the timing aspect of Unid?

If I had pivoted unit from a directory to a launch platform maybe a year before I did it could have been a huge failure. I took advantage of drama around product and a few hindi hackers

05:39

who were complaining on social media about the fact that they couldn't be no featured on product or product was only talking about the big products or people with a big audiences and so on. That was the right moment to launch a concurrent an alternative to product tent.

And

05:54

yeah, I don't think it would have worked without this timing. Okay, let's just pause for one second.

I know a lot of you watching are building apps right now. You've got the idea, the momentum to build it, but then you hit the UI stage and suddenly you're up at 1:00 a.m.

tweaking and spacing buttons

06:10

and second-guessing every single layout and design decision. Well, I have good news for you and that's where Mobin comes in.

And yes, they're today's sponsor, but honestly, they're one of my favorite tools for getting out of the design spiral and building beautiful apps. Mobin is basically a giant

06:25

organized vault of realworld product designs. Actual apps, actual screens, all broken down by feature, flow, style, all of it.

So, instead of guessing how to design a pricing page or an onboarding flow, you can just see how the best apps in the world do it. Personally, it saved me hours and

06:42

honestly, it makes design kind of fun. Again, if you want to check out Mauin, just click the first link in the description.

They're offering Starter Story subscribers 20% off. All right, let's get back to the story.

Okay, let's kind of pivot a little bit to ideas. A lot of people watching this are looking

06:57

for ideas. You probably have a lot to share on that.

So, if you could potentially break down based on your experience, what makes a good idea for an online business and what's a bad idea? The better thing that make an idea a good one is that you know how to sell it.

That could be because you know the

07:13

market, because you have a huge distribution channel, or because you have a great marketing idea. But if you don't know how to sell your idea, it's a bad one.

From my personal experience, Gum affiliates, my marketplace between Gumroad sellers and affiliates, I didn't

07:29

have a plan. I didn't really know Gumroad.

I didn't really know the affiliation business and it failed. With unit though it was a bit different because I knew product, I knew indie hackers, I knew launch platforms, I knew the market.

I started to have a great

07:45

distribution channel, my Twitter account. I knew how to sell my idea.

Another thing that makes an idea a good one is you have competitors. Not having competitors means that there's no market.

So, you won't be able to sell anything to anyone. You're not Steve

08:02

Jobs. Creating a new market is nearly impossible.

So if you don't have competitors, you don't have a market and your idea won't sell. All right.

Well, let's dive into some of the numbers behind you need your successful business that's crushing it. Can you break down those numbers?

The revenue are very irregular. There

08:18

are a lot of up and downs because it depends on my marketing ideas and my success on social media and so on. But yeah, I think you can say that it's oscillating between $8,000 per month and 10,000.

In terms of numbers, I think we

08:33

just reached 40,000 users on the platform. So, that's huge.

I cannot even comprehend this. I think I also reached 2,000 customers.

So, people who paid to skip the line or advertise their products. In terms of traffic, we're at

08:49

30,000 unique visitors per month. But there are a lot of up and downs regarding traffic, too.

Another number I can share, to my opinion, it's the most important one. We redirected 10,000 people last month to the listed website.

09:05

So we generated 10,000 clicks on the product. So that's a great number.

That's amazing. Congrats.

Let's talk about the tech stack. How this thing actually runs.

Can you break down your tech stack for Uni? I use NexJS as a full stack framework.

So the front end and the back end. I use

09:21

superbase for the database, Bentop for the emails and automation on a lot of marketing things. The website is hosted on etsner on the VPS and I use quify to manage it.

I also selfoster for the analytics. I use ferno a not very

09:38

wellknown sas to end customer support. I also use a lot typeing for social media scheduling and finally I use polar merchant of record for sales.

Cool. All right.

All right. Well, the last question that we ask all founders who come on Starter Story, if you could

09:53

stand on Thomas' shoulder before or during or after you had all those projects that failed, any advice you can give for people that are thinking about getting started building or have some failed projects under their belt? What would be your advice on how to get to where you are now?

My answer to this question is going to

10:09

be very personal because it depends a lot of your personality and maybe your personal life and a lot of things like that. But for me, I need to have a personal space and I'm not the type of person who can work maybe 10 hours per day.

I'm not like that. I can't do that.

10:26

I need to do some sport like cycling, see my friends or go outside every day, you know. And one advice I could give is you don't have to, you know, lock down in your bedroom and code and market for months without seeing anyone.

You just

10:42

have to pick your time and find a way to make it sustainable in the long run. And don't forget your personal life and realize you're in this game for the long run and you have as much chances of becoming rich in a month as winning the lottery.

You can think of it as a

10:57

marathon, not a sprint. Well, that's great advice.

Thank you, Thomas, for coming on the channel. I love the business you built.

I think it's going to keep growing and you're going to be really successful. Thanks for coming on.

Thank you, Pat. Thank you, Thomas, for coming on the channel.

I think his story is awesome because it's realistic. Almost nobody I

11:14

know is an overnight success. There are always years of work behind every successful project, even the ones you see on this channel.

But most importantly, if you don't build anything, then you never know if it actually could be successful in the first place. And that's why we launched

11:30

Starter Story Build. It's the place to learn how to build fast with AI.

In just a few days, you'll have a real working app shipped to the real world. If you're interested, just head to the first link in the description to check out Starter Story Build.

All right, that's it for this one. Thank you guys for watching.

11:45

We'll see you in the next one. Peace.