I just had my best month after 18 months as a solopreneur

Last month I reached important milestones both financially (60+ sales) and in terms of my personal brand (2.500+ new followers)

But the most important part is that it has reinforced a belief in myself: it is possible, as long as I keep going, improving, learning and iterating.

For the last year and a half, I've been grinding and launching project after project. But there was always something wrong:

• Product didn't solve a real problem
• Bad marketing (very often lol)
• Target market had low purchasing power
• Super-competitive niche (usually b2c)

It's difficult to have failure after failure and keep going on. At times it would feel like everyone was making money, except for me.

I was hacking on my projects every single day before and after my 9-5 and had mostly given up all my free time for this.

But results were far from being what I wanted. So I would doubt myself all the time.

One thing I had going for me is that I really enjoy building things - so that helped me a lot in staying consistent.

I always knew this was a long-term thing and that I'd probably have to fail again and again before seeing some success.

But even so, it was really hard to keep up the spirits at all time, especially after working so hard for so long.

I wasn't going to give up but I also knew that continuing like this would lead nowhere.

So I decided that for my next project I would do 2 things: 1) prioritize marketing and 2) build something strategic

1) Prioritize marketing

I decided I was going to put in the same amount of effort into marketing as I put into building.

Usually my time would be split 90% coding - 10% marketing. Now, for the first time ever it's probably 65% coding - 35% marketing.

I organized myself and made an entire gameplan for it. This forced me to learn a lot about:

• Video editing
• Cold emails
• Copywriting
• Running ads
• Short-form content

There are a lot of items I still need to execute on - but at least I have a good idea of how to approach most things.

2) Build something strategic

I had to build something that I would be able to use even if nobody else did.

For the last year and a half I had been building AI apps and my plan was to continue doing that.

So I decided to leverage that and thought about how I could build something that would give me an unfair advantage + have a compounding effect over the long term:

a) Unfair advantage

Having AI demo apps that cover all type of AI functionalities would make my life easier & would allow me to ship new apps quickly, regardless of the required model/functionality

So even if nobody bought this - I'd have built something really useful for myself & would have a slight edge over other people

b) Compound over the long term
Building "AnotherWrapper' (my new project) would have a good synergy with my future projects:

• It would allow me to build new projects faster
• While building new projects, I'd learn new things, which I would then be able to implement into AnotherWrapper and improve the product that way

A win-win.

Closing thoughts

I did not expect things to go this well - it's been an amazing month and I'm truly grateful to everyone that has been supporting me.

But at the end of the day, there is still a lot of work to be done.

The initial 'hype' & effects from some viral tweets are starting to wear off. I still don't have a reliable distribution channel that guarantees me traffic.

So I need to figure that out.

I think the product has a lot of potential - it has been well received and has been a success so far, but my distribution is still lacking.

The good thing is that I now have some extra cash to spend on things like ads, influencers, freelancers etc. So it opens some new doors that were previously closed!

I also have some other projects down the pipeline which are coming soon.

Will keep you guys updated!