🧠 Startup Wisdom

In today’s edition, the subject is “the journey will be hard”. This is due to to me stumbling upon some content that highlights the reality of starting a business, and how it impacts your life. A reality that might make you question your path at times, but that’s when it’s the most crucial to stick to it.

• Once you become authentic, start prioritizing you more and stop trying to be a people pleaser, you will upset people. A lot of our relationships are based on needs, security and feelings. And once you start to pursue your entrepreneurial journey, some people will feel a change in their relationship with you, because you are steering from “the norm” of having a 9-to-5 job, of hating your job and being predictable. And they will start to exteriorize it and try to guilt you into coming back to the status quo and playing it safe.
• The path of an entrepreneur is lonely and has a period of extreme loneliness, pretty close to when you’re starting and focusing more on your business. Why this happens: original entourages are not resonating with you that much anymore, if work was a common topic you connected with your peers, so you start to feel disconnected from them. And you don’t have the results yet to be “accepted” in the “real entrepreneurs” league where you can connect on your entrepreneurial journey. So this period where you are in-between entourages, feels lonelier than before and you feel you lack the support network to make it through it. But you will.
• Don’t get all-in without something to back you up. Manage risk. I see too often the stories of the entrepreneurs who risked everything and hit it big. But for each such entrepreneur there are probably hundreds, if not thousands, that lost everything and live in their parents’ basements. That’s why I love the indie hacking movement so much, because it offers a mental framework for succeeding while reducing risk to almost zero: start in weekends and outside your day job hours, validate, get some money in, reach ramen profitability, reach enough profit to match your current day job earnings, then quit and focus 100% on your indie business. And scale from there. It works again and again for many indie hackers, and I just want to see this movement to grow bigger and bigger in the following years.

🏆 Indie Highlights

This week, two Indie startups drew my attention:

• Enrich.so: making  ~6000k USD per month in revenue, it is an API that gives you a lot of useful data for a domain or an email address, such as the LinkedIn data attached to them, maybe other emails and contact points for their company, etc. I envisioned something in this direction (at least with the email validation part), but the direction I picked proved to be a dead end (spam filters). I should have went the data harvesting way :D
• Youtube Transcript generator: A tool that gives you the transcript of a Youtube video, currently making ~100 USD per month. But I can see it growing way bigger than that, because of other businesses that want to index video content (and transcription is a big part of it, that usually these companies just outsource to 3rd parties and are willing to pay good money for it). I’ll definitely keep an eye on it.

Disclaimer: I am NOT affiliated with any of these startups.

If you want to submit an indie startup to be featured here, send me an email on any social media you find me on, or an email at vlad@vladcalin.ro.

✈️ My Journey

• With Vuuh, we are delivering a lot of data real fast, and are currently reworking some core systems to allow us to increase our data quality. We recently took in a few more paying clients, and discovered some quirks in how we handle the data. It’s one of these data issues where one category of clients do it (and expect it) one way, and another category does it differently. And you have to find a way to have them both work well together.
• With “Quest of the Hero”, I started iterating on the content, balancing. The big graphic overhaul didn’t start yet, but when it will happen, it will be a “game changer”. See what I did there? :D After I do it, and manage to add more content, I will launch the demo on Steam, and start the actual marketing phase. With 500 views and 117 browser plays on Itch, I managed to get some valuable feedback which really helps me find out and adjust faulty game mechanics early on in the development cycle.
• With “The Tech Bubble”, I am looking for more reliable channels to draw more subscribers it. In the past I had two “big hits”, one with posting on Hacker News, and one from the Substack “social media” section (I don’t even know what to call it). From LinkedIn, X and Reddit I only manage to draw in views, but not many subscribers. Not many views or subscribers came from IndieHackers.com, but I guess it makes sense given that it is a smaller community.

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