A few years ago I sold all my stuff to explore the world, creating 12 startups in 12 months and building $1M+/y companies as an indie maker such as Nomad List and Remote OK. I'm also a big pusher of remote work and async and analyze the effects it has on society. Follow me on Twitter or see my list of posts. My first book MAKE is out now. Contact me
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Bootstrapping Side Projects into Profitable Startups

Entrepreneurship, Presentation
Sep 22, 2016

I presented about bootstrapping startups to profit at Dutch startup school Growth Tribe. Here’s the transcript. It’s pretty rough because I had to be very practical in my presentation, but I hope it’s useful for you! Also sorry for the layout on a few of these slides, I did it in Keynote and didn’t have a lot of time. Video will be up soon too of this. This presentation was about 30 minutes long and is everything I know about bootstrapped startups really. Most of it comes straight from my book that’s out soon which you can pre-order now already: MAKE. As always I don’t claim to know anything, this is just my ideas and hunches. You need to develop your own to succeed, not copy mine 🙂

Here’s the video thanks to Growth Tribe for filming it (colors of slides are a bit off but ok):

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Sorry for my face, it does these things sometimes ¯_(ツ)_/¯

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Sooooo I’m here because of a Twitter argument with this startup school’s founder (scroll down to skip to the good part!). He asks why Amsterdam (the city where I come from too) has such a low startup score on Nomad List. Well, it has relatively slow internet, not much of a real startup scene and mostly people talking about startups and a few big companies (like Uber) having their foreign HQ in Amsterdam purely for tax reasons, not for the “ecosystem”.

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There’s too much bullshit

It seems the Dutch startup scene (and most startup scenes outside Silicon Valley, I’ve seen the same in London, Berlin, Barcelona, Bangkok and Hong Kong) consists of:

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We spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to have our royalty prince (the guy on the left, who has zero industry experience, yes he’s an actual prince) and an aging bureaucrat lady “boost” the startup ecosystem by…well…organizing an annual conference called Startup Delta to “attract” startups, as if we needed more conferences…

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Dutch startup founder Alexander Klöpping from Blende tweets “I have a question. What did Startup Delta really accomplish after a year except for organizing a conference?”.

And they can’t even keep their site up:

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It’s pretty ridiculous. And it’s my tax money burnt for nothing. I really hate it. This is why people don’t trust governments.

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After this presentation a girl from Startup Delta approached me and thanked me for my critique of their organization and how they loved to invite me to come speak about it. NO YOU DON’T GET IT! YOU ARE THE ENEMY! GO AWAY!

To me, all this signifies what it all is in most startup scenes, lots of bullshit. Actually I’ve been in a few scenes in my life (graphic design, music and now startups), and I think I’ve never seen so much bullshit as in startups. All talk, little action.

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So what’s the opposite of talking about stuff? Well, people actually making stuff:

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And I don’t mean:

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Not as a hobby, but making stuff that’s actually profitable:

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Not many are, and that’s the problem. We could have more makers like that if we had less talk and more action.

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That’s why I wanted to tell about bootstrapping startups to profit. Because if I can show I can do it, more people can stop attending these events, and just open their laptop and build stuff. And it’ll solve the problem.

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As much as the startup scenes are like this, people in general are getting more sick of bullshit. They’re more informed. People don’t like being sold to. They want real stuff. That means ads are dead.

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Traditional marketing is struggling even reaching any audience anymore because people simply aren’t interested by bullshit.

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Therefore, the product has become marketing. You make something great. And it mostly spreads itself.

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My story kinda relates to this.

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My first “startup” was an analytics dashboard for YouTube. I was a YouTuber back then and saw the need for YouTube multi-channel network (MCNs) to have an overview over all their channels. YouTube’s own analytics was REALLY bad back then.

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I had never really built anything big for web except for maybe editing some PHP on a WordPress blog.

I spent 1 year (!) on building it as it was so difficult. I had to learn about database design with millions of entries per day. I had to learn about calling APIs to read how many views videos had. Then I had to build all sort sof of difficult mathematical calculations on the data. I had to learn design etc.

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But it worked out. VICE became a customer. They stopped using it after a month mentioning “they didn’t really need it” and never paid a dime. Actually nobody paid a dime for it.

So I thought, let’s try something different. I’ll not spend another year on one project again, I’ll just do a shotgun approach and build lots of stuff and see what sticks.

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I decided to do 12 projects in 12 months, and for fun I called it 12 startups in 12 months.

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The first project was PlayMyInbox.com which scraped your inbox for YouTube video URLs of music and playlist them. This was useful for me and my friends.

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Then I was in a store in Asia and saw some flipbooks and thought, why don’t I put animated GIFs on flipbooks? So I did. I called it GIFbook.io. And sold a few hundred of those.

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Then I made a site that lets you set a goal, deadline and price and if you don’t reach your goal your credit card is charged and I receive the money. A few $100k was committed with I think about $10k made by me from it.

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I made a site for remote jobs, as I started traveling and seeing the remote work revolution slowly happening. It aggregated the jobs from traditional job boards which can be done remotely.

As I was traveling and trying to work from anywhere, I was living in Bangkok, Singapore, Hong Kong etc. But I wanted to know about more places that were affordable, warm with fast internet. So I made a spreadsheet:

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I shared it on Twitter and thousands of people helped to edit it.

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It was the first project that kinda really de-railed and went crazy, in a good way.

Then I made a site around it:

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I submitted it to Hacker News and it went to #1:

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And Product Hunt:

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And the front page (!) of Reddit a bit later:

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Suddenly I was getting press coverage. It revolved around me traveling and building these 12 startups. How meta, they were helping the startups become successful merely by covering them. The point here is that the products had become the story. Without any marketing.

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When it hit TechInAsia I started getting recognized by people in the coworking spaces in Asia and they literally started making photos of me sneakily from a distance:

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Then it hit Wired, and I started getting recognized in the street (!) even in the West by startup people:

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I hit lots of press with it:

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And this is how I felt after everything happened.

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Over 2 years, I built the site into a business:

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I added paid social features:

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And after 2 years, revenue hit (along with the remote jobs site) $40k/m:

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What I learnt here that there’s a few stages of doing a bootstrapped startup:

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And every stage needs to kinda go well. I’ll go through each of these stages now and give you my little secrets and tips.

Idea

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Solve your own problems.

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You’re the expert on your own problems.

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That’s the issue though, as everyone builds either another app to find your friends, another photo sharing app or yet another food delivery service…

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So how to get original problems?

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And how do you do that? Well, travel works because you meet people in new cultures and see how they do things differently. And you’ll slowly become different.

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What also works is, working on stuff that’s taboo! Because there won’t be many others doing it. And you’ll be ahead of the curve. Stuff that’s taboo/fringe now but big soon is polyamory for example.

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Get jobs that you wouldn’t take normally. Just to figure out what problems those companies face. And see if you can offer a solution to them.

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Go to Burning Man. Although that’s kinda mainstream now. Go to some anarchist meetup. Go to a witch ceremony. Whatever it is, do different stuff, meet different people, become different and see different problems.

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When picking an idea, don’t start wanting to build a spaceship. Start small, like build a tiny rocket and see how high you can go. Progressively evolve.

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I started out with a social network for digital nomads.

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Now that’s it’s saturated that scene, I’m slowly evolving it into a social network for travelers. That’s a bigger market, and now that I have already validated the niche, I can expand a bit. But I started small.

Build

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So the next stage is actually building your idea.

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I’d strongly suggest not outsourcing it. This creates a lot of hassle. Imagine you want to change something on your site and you have to do a Skype call with a developer team and they have to have a meeting about it? Now imagine if you can do it yourself? Takes a minute vs. days!

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So do it yourself! Can’t code?

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You don’t “learn to code” one day. If you learn to bicycle, you don’t have to become Lance Armstrong. Just learn what you need to know WHEN you need it (e.g. when building). Most people just Google everything. I do. Start with the most basic question you have. Like how to make a button:

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Then continue from there.

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I see lots of people learn entire new giant JavaScript frameworks like Meteor or React, the first time they start coding. That’s stupid because it’ll take a long time before you have anything practical working. I see them still build their MVP after 3 months because it’s so hard. Better is to just keep it simple and build the most simple version with the tools you already know. Ignore frameworks. Keep it plain and simple!

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The first version of your startup doesn’t have to be a website. It can be a public spreadsheet on Google Docs.

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You can use Typeform.com to build a basic MVP that can even include a payment box to charge users!

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Or use SquareSpace.com to build a basic site. They also let you add payment boxes so you can charge users money.

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WordPress is probably one of the easier ways to build a basic web app as you can use themes and its interface is quite noob-friendly.

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If you can write HTML already, just build a basic page in a text editor in HTML and see how far you can get.

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Again I’d press on this. If you’re building an MVP (a basic first prototype to launch), don’t use giant frameworks. They’re bloated and will drag you down. You can always switch to a framework once you have users, money and can hire developers to scale for you.

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With everything I make, I’m sure to build in automation from day one. It’s super important. It means you’ll have lots of time left to develop new features, or launch more projects (increasing your odds of success).

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An example of basic automation is scheduled jobs on a Linux server (they’re called cron jobs). But most hosting services (like Heroku) will also have some sort of scheduled job planner that’ll let you run scripts on certain times. That’s literally automation.

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This is important. Add a BUY button, even if it’s not functional yet and you don’t have a product. Hook it up so people have to enter their credit card information. Then when they pay, don’t charge them but record their email and see how many people actually “would” pay for your product. Before you have an actual product even. This gives you a basic calculation how much your revenue will be (sales * price / day). And that means you can see if it’s actually worth it to build it out further.

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This is another one that won’t be popular. But work alone. It. Saves. So. Much. Time. I don’t have meetings. I literally go to bed and put my head on the pillow and have a meeting with myself and decide what I’m going to do tomorrow. I don’t have to schedule. I don’t have to discuss. No compromises. Just what I want myself. Especially in the early stages this is SO important. Your first product can’t have compromises. It needs to make a distinct statement.

You can always hire people later, even a co-founder, a CTO, or whoever. But oh please, DIY early on!

Launch

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Launching is probably the most important stage of any startup. Because you can have a great product but without a launch you’ll never get people to find out about your product.

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A launch is simply getting people to discover your product.

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If you just upload or deploy your app to your server and send it to your friends, it probably won’t get very far. You need a substantial audience (like 10,000+ people) to see and use it first. And then if it’s good, a few of those might send it on and it’ll start rolling.

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When are you ready to launch? Well, when you’ve removed most bugs. And the basic functionality of your app/site works. Don’t launch with just an email sign up form (like we’ll message you when we really launch). THAT’S NOT A LAUNCH.

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When preparing for launch, make sure you don’t forget:

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Analytics!

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Add an email sign up box so you can re-engage users later. Of those 10,000+ people, maybe 10% will sign up, and you’ll have 1,000 emails now to talk to later and tell to come back to the site when there’s new features.

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Add a feedback form. I use Olark free but they’re a badly maintained aging dinosaur of a company. Most hip new companies use Intercom which is great, but not free. Having a feedback form means you can get instant alerts by your users of bugs or features they want.

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Now when approaching journalists for your launch, make sure you only pick out the ones that are actually relevant and talk about your industry. That means I can email journalists about Nomad List when they’ve written about travel stuff before, not chat bots.

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Make the story you pitch to journalists deeply personal.

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This doesn’t work.

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This is personal and might work.

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Also make sure you keep messages to journalists short, they’re busy people and get hundreds of pitches/emails every day:

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Getting on Product Hunt is a big thing for startups. The best time to submit is 1 minute past midnight San Francisco time as the leaderboard refreshes then. Make sure to participate in the comments section and answer people’s questions and implement their feature requests immediately!

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You can email your friends or email list that you’re on Product Hunt. They’ll check it out and if they like it might give you some upvotes.

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Hacker News is the more engineer hangout of the startup world. To submit here, make sure you title it properly. HN has a Show HN section, which is like people showing each other’s startups. So title it like it: “Show HN: I made an app/site/thing that does X”. After submitting, get a few (I mean like 4 or 5) people to upvote it. It’ll then rise up to the front page. Now STOP! Don’t do anything. Let the organic flow take over and if it’s good people will upvote it. Otherwise it’ll fall down and it’s just not good enough for HN’s front page. Participate in the comments, but not too much because it’ll hit HN’s controversy filter which will push it down.

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To get on Reddit’s front page, find a subreddit that is featured on the front page in this list. Submit it there, and title it in a similar way “I made an app/site/thing that does X”. Be nice and answer everyone in the comments.

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Product Hunt, Hacker News and Reddit are good starts but if you’re app is about a very specific niche (like motorcycles), then you need to find the places where your audience hangs out:

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So did you validate your idea?

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You’ll know by checking your analytics.

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Your revenue.

If it didn’t work out. No worries, go back to the idea phase. If it seems promising continue to the grow phase. Yes this is like a text adventure book 😛

Grow

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Now that you’ve launched, and you have a product that kinda works. How can you grow it to a bigger audience (and more revenue)?

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Here’s where you’ll see lots of growth hackers come up to you and tell you they have the magic. They don’t. Don’t hire growth hackers. They’re bullshit.

The best growth you can get is organic!

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Because it’s free.

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Most importantly though, not paying for ads and paid traffic means you have direct market feedback. If people open your app or site and then leave, you’ll know something is wrong with the landing for example. If people leave after a few days, you’ll need to work on re-engaging them. Now if you did pay for traffic and ads, you might get lots of growth for months, but then the money runs out and all those users might disappear overnight! You won’t know if you build something people actually want!

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So how do you get new users? Well, you get them the first time you launch.

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But it doesn’t end there. Nobody said you should launch once. In fact, I think you should keep launching with new features. Not every week, every month, but every few months at least. Launch a new version, tell press and put it all over the internet. Make it into a thing.

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See all those spikes? That’s where I launched with new features. It adds to the traffic in the long term.

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Another trick is to spin of a new feature into an entirely new product. I’ve done this multiple times where I was building a new feature and then figured “hey this could work on itself even better and reach more people”. Add a new domain to it, give it a fresh design and launch it.

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Another example is Places to Work. I was adding coworking spaces to Nomad List. Then at some point I had so many and I made it into a separate page. And I thought, lots of people that don’t travel might need a place to work too. So I spun it off.

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For example, when the Brexit happened this year, I quickly bicycled home and ran to my computer to make a spin off of Nomad List. I changed the layout and excluded all UK countries from the list. I hooked it up the domain EscapeTheBrexit.com. Now it was a search engine for people from the UK to figure out where to flee. It went viral and got some press in the UK.

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This worked and I could launch it to Product Hunt and Hacker news etc. and now it’s about 50% of Nomad List’s traffic.

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A great way to grow is to blog/vlog/tweet/share everything you learn from doing your startup. I kinda do it a bit and it works for me. A more famous example is Buffer, who literally wrote about everything they did (the good and the bad) from day one to now being a $10M revenue company:

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One often missed but very important part of growth is making your site easily shareable.

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What I do is add dynamically generated pictures to each of my individual pages (automatically), so that their thumbnails on Facebook etc. show the contents of the page in a summary and attract people:

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So now that you’ve got your new users, how do you get them to come back? Or how do you re-engage old users?

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Well, remember those email boxes we added in the beginning? Now that you launched you probably have a list of emails you can message. Don’t message them too much, but send them a message very few months to tell about new features they might like:

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Also, you could add push notifications. That means you can send them notifications on mobile and web if you have new stuff that’d be interesting for them to see:

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When I launch a new version of my site, I usually send out an email like this:

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I also have dynamic notifications though, like when users are in the same city and they could meet up:

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A great way to keep getting people to come back is simply keep improving your app or site. An example is Snapchat. People simply open it up to see what new filters and features there are as they’re added weekly.

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You should improve based on user feedback. Use your feedback form and listen to what people say and build based on that.

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As you add new features, see if they work and get used, and if not, scrap them as fast as you added them.

Monetize

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The final stage is monetizing.

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Why should you monetize?

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Because a startup that doesn’t make money isn’t a startup, it’s a hobby.

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So, don’t make free stuff! Charge people for what you build.

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A startup that doesn’t charge money will never make more money, whatever the scale is. In fact, the bigger it is the more money it loses.

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To avoid users getting angry later. Make sure you state early on clearly that you charge money.

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Don’t feel bad about asking for money. You put HOURS of work into this, why can’t you get rewarded for that work?

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I used to be a bit more naive and just build whatever I wanted (which is nice too). Now I think a bit more about monetization because I know I have to maintain apps (they will break because of sheer entropy). So I pick ideas where I have some idea of how to monetize them (later).

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Charging money is also another test. It validates your idea. It shows people value it and are willing to GIVE you money. By the metric of startups, where the goal is revenue, that means it’s a good idea.

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So let’s go over some potential business models for startups in 2016.

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IMHO the whole affiliate market where you get commission for people buying or booking stuff (like hotels) is dead. What is left is a very sleazy industry. Stay out of it. I make about $10 per month with hotel booking affiliate income from Nomad List. No, NOT $10k, but $10 dollars. Yes, that’s insanely low. Don’t even consider it.

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Traditional ads like AdSense are dead to me too. They’re super ugly and annoy users. And income is low, like $1 per 1000 views. NOPE.

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You know what works and makes A LOT of money? Asking people for money. Yes, insane. But it works. And more than ever people are willing to take out their credit card and pay for stuff they really need.

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Think about your app and its features and see which stuff you can charge for. Keep it in the interface but when people click on it, tell them they need to pay directly to unlock it.

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I do this on Nomad List. The moment users want to start using premium features (like interacting with other people on the site), this modal shows up and they need to pay to unlock (e.g. become a member).

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I charge recurring membership fees. You want recurring income because as long as people don’t cancel, it kinda doubles every year. Your paying userbase keeps building up. Year 1 you have 1,000 people paying $100/y or $100k/y. Then year 2 you add another 1,000, now you have 2,000 people paying $100/y or $200k/y. See? As long as people don’t cancel this works well.

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A more recent and interesting model is patronage. It’s asking your users for donations. It seems stupid but it works.

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My friend and YouTube vlog celebrity @abroadinjapan does this now through patron platform Patreon:

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Marco Arment does this with his podcast app Overcast.fm:

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This is the most important slide of this presentation. I’d suggest strongly to put BUY buttons on everything all over your site and app and see what people want to buy or not. Then remove what doesn’t sell.

A great example is Buffer, who started kinda like this with a button that then told people the product wasn’t even ready yet:

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So ads are dead right? But what about customized ads that kinda fit the site’s design and are not obtrusive? Those are native ads!

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I use them on my site.

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You can either sell them yourself (I do that) or through a native ad network like BuySellAds.

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If your site gets enough fame, sponsorships also work well.

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When Nomad List launched, on day one I got an email from the founder of WordPress who wanted to sponsor the site and add a mini ad to recruit remote workers:

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This helped the first few months of keeping the site up tremendously.

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Future trends

Finally, I’d like to tell you what future trends you can build for that I believe will be big.

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If you liked this, check out my little book about this that’s almost finished and up for pre-order (you’ll already receive all the drafts of all chapters when ordering):

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Why write a book if you already have startups that make money? Sounds dodgy right? Well, it’s a financial backup for if all my stuff explodes one day. Although by then, the book wouldn’t make sense anymore because it meant I failed. Anyway, backup! You need backups!

After this presentation there was a panel discussion:

P.S. I'm on Twitter too if you'd like to follow more of my stories. And I wrote a book called MAKE about building startups without funding. See a list of my stories or contact me. To get an alert when I write a new blog post, you can subscribe below:

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2022
18 Sep
This House Does Not Exist
2022
14 Jul
Sam Parr + Shaan Puri asked me about bootstrapping, open startups and lifestyle inflation (My First Million Podcast)
2022
16 May
Thinking and doing for yourself (Life Done Differently Podcast)
2022
10 May
Relocation of remote workers (Building Remotely Podcast)
2022
26 Jan
Money, happiness and productivity as a solo founder (Indiehackers Podcast)
2022
20 Jan
Bootstrapping, moving to Portugal and setting up Rebase (Wannabe Entrepreneur Podcast)
2021
25 Mar
Why I'm unreachable and maybe you should be too
2021
25 Mar
The next frontier after remote work is async
2021
19 Mar
List of all my projects ever
2021
08 Mar
Why coliving economics still don't make sense
2021
14 Feb
Inflation Chart: the stock market adjusted for the US-dollar money supply
2021
10 Jan
I did a live 4+ hour AMA on Twitch w/ @roxkstar74
2020
20 Dec
No one should ever work
2020
10 Dec
Normalization of non-deviance
2020
05 Dec
Copywriting for entrepreneurs: explain your product how you'd explain it to a friend
2020
30 Nov
Entrepreneurs are the heroes, not the villains
2020
12 Nov
The future of remote work: how the greatest human migration in history will happen in the next ten years
2020
05 Nov
Will millions of remote workers become location independent in 2021?
2020
11 Apr
5 years in startups with Abadesi
2020
11 Jan
Twitter giveaways can be hacked to win every time
2019
16 Oct
Lorn - The Slow Blade ✕ Hong Kong
2019
28 Sep
Most decaf coffee is made from paint stripper
2019
12 Sep
The odds of getting a remote job are less than 1% (because everyone wants one)
2019
08 Sep
In the future writing actual code will be like using a pro DSLR camera, and no code will be like using a smartphone camera
2019
29 Aug
Instead of hiring people, do things yourself to stay relevant
2019
28 Aug
Nobody cares about you after you're dead and the universe destroys itself
2019
28 Aug
The only real validation is people paying for your product
2019
05 Aug
Monitoring Bali's undersea internet cable
2019
29 Jul
Nomad List turns 5
2018
29 Jan
I'm Product Hunt's Maker of the Year again!
2018
28 Jan
Why Korean Jimjilbangs and Japanese Onsens are great
2018
24 Jan
Turning side projects into profitable startups
2018
03 Jan
What I learnt from 100 days of shipping
2017
28 Dec
As decentralized as cryptocurrency is: so will be the people working on it
2017
22 Oct
How to 3d scan any object with just your phone's camera
2017
09 Aug
In a world of outrage, mute words
2017
03 Aug
How to pack for world travel with just a carry-on bag
2017
26 Jul
Building a startup in public: from first line of code to frontpage of Reddit
2017
24 Jul
Facebook and Google are building their own cities: the inevitable future of private tech worker towns
2017
21 Jul
The TL;DR MBA
2017
12 Jul
We did it! Namecheap has introduced 2FA
2017
08 Jun
It's about time for a digital work permit for remote workers
2017
23 May
Using Uptime Robot to build unit tests for the web
2017
08 May
Namecheap still doesn't support 2FA in 2017 (update: they do now!)
2017
03 May
Taipei is boring, and maybe that's not such a bad thing
2017
16 Apr
What we can learn from Stormzy about transparency
2017
17 Feb
The ICANN mafia has taken my site hostage for 2 days now
2017
10 Feb
Most coworking spaces don't make money; here's how they can adapt to survive the future
2017
11 Jan
A society of total automation in which the need to work is replaced with a nomadic life of creative play
2017
07 Jan
Nomad List Founder
2016
12 Dec
Make your own Olark feedback form without Olark
2016
29 Oct
How to fix flying
2016
19 Oct
Robots make mistakes too: How to log your server with push notifications straight to your phone
2016
17 Oct
Hong Kong Express - 上海 (Shanghai)
2016
17 Oct
Choosing entrepreneurship over a corporate career
2016
13 Oct
"I can't buy happiness anymore. I've bought everything that I ever wanted. There's not really anything I want anymore."
2016
11 Oct
From web dev to VR: How to get started with VR development
2016
05 Oct
What I would do if I was 18 now
2016
22 Sep
Bootstrapping Side Projects into Profitable Startups
2016
27 Aug
Kids
2016
13 Aug
How I cured my anxiety (mostly)
2016
26 Jul
We have an epidemic of bad posture
2016
17 Jul
Fixing "Inf and NaN cannot be JSON encoded" in PHP the easy way
2016
26 Jun
My third time in a float tank and practicing visualizing the future
2016
15 Jun
How to add shareable pictures to your website with some PhantomJS magic
2016
29 May
My chatbot gets catcalled
2016
19 May
From web dev to 3d: Learning 3d modeling in a month
2016
09 Mar
My second time in a sensory deprivation chamber
2016
04 Mar
Day 30 of Learning 3d 🎮 Cloning objects 👾👾👾
2016
02 Mar
Day 29 of Learning 3d 🎮 Glass, reflectives, HD, coloring and more details
2016
29 Feb
Day 27 of Learning 3d 🎮 Details, details, DETAILS!
2016
25 Feb
Day 23 of Learning 3d 🎮 Filling up the street and adding shadows
2016
24 Feb
Day 22 of Learning 3d 🎮 Added rain, blinking lights, sound, textured menu sign and a VR web app
2016
23 Feb
Day 21 of Learning 3d 🎮 High res textures, physical rendering and ambient occlusion
2016
22 Feb
Day 20 of Learning 3d 🎮 Objects and camera perspectives 🙆
2016
19 Feb
My first time floating in a sensory deprivation tank ☺️
2016
12 Feb
Day 10 of Learning 3d 🎮 Making complex objects by combining shapes 🙆
2016
06 Feb
Day 4 of Learning 3d: @shoinwolfe visits the actual street I'm modeling 🏮😎🏮
2016
03 Feb
Day 1 of Learning 3d 🎮 I learnt how to make shapes, move, rotate and scale them + how to texturize, and add colored lights 💆
2016
02 Feb
I'm Learning 3d 🎮
2016
27 Jan
The things I have to do to read an email sent to me by my government
2016
12 Jan
How to use your iPhone as a better Apple TV alternative (with VPN)
2015
23 Dec
Here's a crazy idea: automatically pause recurring subscription of users when you detect they aren't actually using your app
2015
17 Dec
Stop calling night owls lazy, we're not
2015
16 Dec
We are the heroes of our own stories
2015
25 Oct
There will be 1 billion digital nomads by 2035
2015
21 Oct
Tobias van Schneider interviewed me about everything
2015
18 Oct
Why doesn't Twitter just asks its users to pay?
2015
17 Oct
Punk died the moment we learnt that the world WAS in fact getting better, not worse
2015
15 Oct
Stop being everyone's friend
2015
14 Oct
Vaporwave is the only music that fits the feeling futuristic Asian mega cities give me
2015
09 Sep
We live in a world built by dead people
2015
01 Sep
Why global roaming data solutions don't make any sense
2015
26 Aug
How to export your Slack's entire archive as HTML message logs
2015
24 Aug
How to play GTA V on your MacBook (and any other PC game)
2015
14 May
I uploaded 4 terabyte over Korea's 4G, and paid $48
2015
08 May
How I sped up Nomad List by 31% with SPDY, CloudFront and PageSpeed
2015
04 May
My weird code commenting style based on HTML tags
2015
01 May
Now is probably the time to make HTTPS the default on all your sites and apps
2015
17 Apr
Do the economics of remote work retreats make any sense?
2015
17 Apr
Don't grow up
2015
06 Apr
Calling people "expat" or "nomad" is just as irrelevant as calling internet users "netizens"
2015
02 Apr
How I built Remote | OK and launched it to #1 on Product Hunt
2015
29 Mar
Our society is not in line with our natural reward systems, and alcohol and drug abuse proves it
2015
28 Mar
Makers have become the invisible hand
2015
07 Mar
How technology is shaping our future: billions of self-employed makers and a few mega corporations
2015
22 Jan
We are the orcas at Sea World
2014
31 Dec
Love, Anxiety and Startups: My Year in 50 Tweets
2014
15 Dec
How to backup your Linode or Digital Ocean VPS to Amazon S3
2014
01 Dec
The total chaos that the dawn of the 21st century has become
2014
23 Nov
How I hacked Slack into a community platform with Typeform
2014
05 Nov
How to successfully build a community around your startup
2014
27 Oct
The ideal place to start a startup is not necessarily in Silicon Valley
2014
23 Oct
"If I had this, I would be happy"
2014
14 Oct
This is what happens when FlightFox copies your entire site without attribution
2014
02 Oct
GIFbook, the first animated GIF flipbook
2014
01 Oct
On Thailand's immigration police targeting digital nomads
2014
13 Sep
Why traveling makes you feel lost
2014
02 Sep
How I build my minimum viable products
2014
31 Aug
How I built Nomad Jobs, a remote job board for 100% distributed startups
2014
27 Aug
Danism & Rae - Sirens
2014
16 Aug
How I got my startup to #1 on both Product Hunt and Hacker News by accident
2014
15 Aug
Why does Generation Y feel so lost? And what's the cure?
2014
23 Jul
Bali is the magical voodoo spirit island of Asia
2014
05 Jul
Ideals, fears and the script of life
2014
22 Jun
How to access anyone's Telegram messages without unlocking their phone
2014
14 Jun
The achiever in crisis
2014
12 Jun
How I did not sell my startup today
2014
07 Jun
The free fall that is coming home after traveling the world
2014
02 Jun
Never dismiss your ideals as post-adolescent fantasy
2014
31 May
My 3rd startup: Tubelytics, the real-time dashboard for YouTube publishers
2014
29 May
How Go Fucking Do It raised $30,000+ in pledges in less than a month
2014
24 May
We have an ideologically broken and personally unfulfilling society
2014
24 May
On self-funding startups
2014
22 May
Run through ideas quickly
2014
11 May
If you can't express yourself by email, you're not worthy of anyone's time
2014
19 Apr
My 2nd startup: Go Fucking Do It, set a goal + deadline and if you fail, you pay
2014
18 Apr
Over 2,000 people played their inbox with Play My Inbox
2014
13 Apr
Celebrating my birthday North Korean style
2014
02 Apr
How Automation Left Us Feeling Empty
2014
09 Mar
Play My Inbox, collect music from your inbox and playlist them
2014
01 Mar
I'm Launching 12 Startups in 12 Months
2014
14 Feb
How to protect your backups from solar flares with a faraday cage
2014
06 Feb
Linkoban - Oh Oh
2014
05 Feb
Nationality is an accident of birth
2014
18 Jan
How I Went From 100 To 0 Things (Or How I Was Robbed of All My Stuff)
2014
04 Jan
All Watched Over by Machines of Living Grace
2013
31 Dec
Celebrating NYE 2014 in Hong Kong
2013
30 Dec
How I ended up in Hong Kong (or my adventures in the New York of the East)
2013
28 Nov
It's practically impossible for regular people to buy Bitcoin
2013
27 Nov
2014 is the year techstep drum and bass makes its comeback
2013
25 Nov
Rinse FM, here's your podcast feed we've always wanted
2013
23 Nov
How I travel the world with just a carry-on bag
2013
23 Nov
How I spent the night with Singapore's migrant workers
2013
22 Nov
Why I want to live in Singapore
2013
21 Nov
How I predict Bitcoin's price by tracking Twitter mentions
2013
04 Nov
James Blake & Chance The Rapper - Life Round Here
2013
03 Nov
Sasha Keable - Careless Over You
2013
30 Oct
My not so great time in Vietnam
2013
27 Oct
Wiley - And Again
2013
27 Oct
The myth of a globalized world
2013
19 Oct
Remote working is the future
2013
19 Oct
What happens when you're #1 on Hacker News for a day
2013
14 Oct
Steve Summers - New Surroundings
2013
12 Oct
What I learnt from bootstrapping my startup from Thailand in six months
2013
11 Oct
Palms Trax - Equation
2013
11 Oct
Cash means controlling your own destiny
2013
24 Sep
You're just a piece of a heartless shitty machine that makes money
2013
16 Sep
Automation Will Free Us From the Endless Consumption/Production Cycle We're In
2013
16 Sep
National Borders Have Become Irrelevant
2013
04 Sep
A Culture of Distraction is Not The Problem
2013
20 Aug
Governments are always ready to grab the greatest degree of power that the people will give them
2013
17 Aug
You constantly need to be painting or it looks like total crap
2013
09 Aug
Oversight: Thank You For Volunteering, Citizen
2013
07 Aug
Stripe launches beta in the Netherlands
2013
22 Jul
Google+ spamming people every 2 weeks to put up a profile photo
2013
20 Jul
The 100 Thing Challenge – From 200 to 20 things in 3 months
2013
17 Jul
Living in a Hotel
2013
16 Jul
The Story of my Visa Run to Tachileik in Myanmar
2013
16 Jul
This is what "acting professionally" results in
2013
08 Jul
Lockah - Sly Winking Usury
2013
30 Jun
Stand-up comedians on creativity
2013
24 Jun
With jobs gone, will robot owners pay people's income?
2013
24 Jun
Money as an enslavement method
2013
19 Jun
Make money where prices are high, spend it where prices are low. Does income arbitrage work?
2013
16 Jun
Finding an apartment in Chiang Mai
2013
13 Jun
Add HTTPS to NGINX for free and help make the world more secure
2013
11 Jun
Co-Working Spaces in Chiang Mai: PunSpace
2013
10 Jun
Moving to Chiang Mai
2013
04 Jun
My Bad Day At The Co-Working Space
2013
03 Jun
If it's in the news, don't worry about it
2013
29 May
The 24-Hour Coffee Place in Bangkok: Too Fast To Sleep
2013
28 May
Nosaj Thing x Chance the Rapper - Paranoia
2013
23 May
"There simply are no other fields in which I can spend $100 tomorrow and set up a new business..."
2013
21 May
"Speaking as a graduate of one, top schools teach you credentialing and ladder climbing..."
2013
17 May
Visiting Koh Samui, the island of paradise
2013
05 May
From dive bar to roof-top bar to roof-top pool in Bangkok
2013
02 May
"To awaken quite alone in a strange town..."
2013
01 May
Co-working spaces in Bangkok: Launchpad
2013
24 Apr
The 100 Thing Challenge
2013
24 Apr
"Do whatever you're drawn to"
2013
23 Apr
Co-working spaces in Bangkok: Hubba
2013
22 Apr
Reset your life
2013
09 Mar
OSX Terminal Tricks
2013
09 Mar
OSX for Windows users
2013
09 Mar
How I switched from PC to Mac in less than 7 days
2013
21 Feb
Black Mirror is the best TV series I have seen in years
2013
20 Feb
Why overnight success is a myth
2013
20 Feb
Constraints make people more creative
2013
13 Feb
Kitty Pryde & Riff Raff - Orion's Belt
2013
13 Feb
Dedicating our lives to what is essentially an organization to make money
2013
11 Feb
Watch The Pirate Bay: Away From the Keyboard
2013
16 Jan
My new music video for rap duo RASA
2013
14 Jan
What if money was no object in your life?
2013
03 Jan
Why attention to detail matters, even if no one notices the details
2013
03 Jan
In the 21st century, Maria Montessori shows to be more relevant than ever
2012
30 Dec
Unless the job itself is your dream, stay the fuck away from salaried jobs
2012
30 Nov
Success is One Big Hoax
2012
18 Oct
The death of the corporate drone
2012
13 Oct
The West's unemployment problem is permanent
2012
04 Oct
New Panda Mix Show branding and website
2012
29 Aug
Headhunterz - Power of Music
2012
21 Aug
Essendle interview on my music and my YouTube show
2012
07 Aug
The XX - Angels
2012
02 Aug
Spenzo - Ova
2012
02 Aug
Anna Lunoe & Diamond Lights - Stronger (Willy Joy Remix)
2012
10 Jul
Herve feat. Ronika - How Can I Live Without You (Make it Right) (Death Rose Cult Remix)
2012
09 Jul
Pheo - Nyquil
2012
05 Jul
I love minimalist living
2012
05 Jul
Why buying YouTube views is bad
2012
05 Jul
Citizen - Deep End
2012
03 Jul
D!RTY AUD!O intro
2012
01 Jul
Anybody can monetize their passion (now)
2012
28 Jun
Diplo - No Problem
2012
27 Jun
Skream - Thoughts of You
2012
21 Jun
TEED - Blood Pressure
2012
19 Jun
Today is the first day of the rest of your life
2012
17 Jun
Happiness maximization vs. profit maximization
2012
16 Jun
Music genres are dead
2012
15 Jun
Make a great product
2012
15 Jan
Rasa - Noem 't Wat Je Wilt
2011
23 Dec
Rasa - Hard & Soul
2011
15 Nov
Earth