🧠 Startup Wisdom

Probably as you saw, I skipped last week’s edition, as I was gone on vacation.

And that gave me the the idea for this week’s subject: stability and self-care.

It’s not unheard of, and actually it’s quite common for different creators to push the idea of entrepreneurship as a 24/7 all in kind of venture, where you have to give 110% all the time.

But that’s not sustainable at all. That’s how you get burned out, and in the long term, you actually sabotage yourself by doing that.

Instead, you should aim to show up daily and do some work, be consistent, and find the work level at which you can show up and deliver each day. That’s sustainability, and that’s how you get far.

In other words, entrepreneurship is a marathon, where you have to pace your running, not sprints, where you go all in at the beginning and then you consume everything in the short term.

🏆 Indie Highlights

• IACrea: an AI tool that redecorates a room, based on a picture you upload. Currently making ~8-9k USD per month, it seems to be something people are willing to pay for. It’s not clear to me who these people are, but I have a hunch they are interior designers who use this either to get inspiration, or speed up their projects.
• DevUtils: a desktop app which bundles all kinds of tools useful for developers (formatting,  file type converters, time handling utilities, etc). It’s a productivity boosting app, which seems to have a market of developers willing to pay for it (which is surprising to me, as developers usually prefer to built it themselves rather than pay).

✈️ My Journey

• Quest of the Hero: progress is slower than anticipated, due to me being away for a week, but I am on track for creating the Steam store page (without a demo yet), and start collecting wishlists! After than, I estimate I’ll be like a month away from creating a demo, and start the “real” marketing. The main kind of work still needed to be done is: adding game juice (sounds and effects), balancing the current content, bugfixing. The core of the game is ready!

• Photozilla.io: although I said before that I will pause it, I changed my mind! I realized that I didn’t really exhaust all my validation attempts, and I can’t throw in the towel after two weeks and like 5 conversations. I will improve the product a little more and then I’ll put some money towards validating it for real.

• Social media presence: The numbers are slowly growing, but at least they are growing, I guess :D I focus mostly on LinkedIn, where I do three things: I post daily, I comment on various people posts’ (Gary Vee’s 1.80$ method). Not sure what the end goal is with this venture, but it’s something that I want to do, because building a personal brand is definitely a thing that boosts your future outlook.

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  If you have any topics on your mind you’ll like my 2 cents about in here, or on social media, or if you have any suggestions, let me know by sending me an email at vlad@vladcalin.ro or in a DM on social media!

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