6 builders who never spoke to each other

Buy nothing until there is revenue

The premium domain, the logo, the lawyer, the incorporation, the servers sized for traffic you do not have: all of it can wait, and one post-mortem lists every one of them against zero income. Pick whichever paid service gets you shipped soonest and stop researching the stack, which is not what made anybody's product sell.

The method

1. 01

   Buy nothing before revenue: no premium domain, no lawyer, no dedicated bank account, no paid SSL, no commissioned logo or icons, no custom email addresses, no premium mail service.

2. 02

   Do not pay for infrastructure sized for traffic you do not have. A hundred concurrent users will not break anything, so get the hundred users first.

3. 03

   Trademarks and incorporation are not worth worrying about until there is a visible route to profit.

4. 04

   Refuse to spend pre-launch time on tool selection, incorporation, fonts and business cards, or on questions like the best hour to post, and do not run two unrelated ideas at once.

5. 05

   Skip accelerators, incubators, paid coaches and bootcamps, and put that time into releasing something instead.

What it returned

• $0

  Phoenix carried all of those costs and returned $0. The founder's next project ran on a $3 a year domain plus metered email and SMS.

• Expensive Heroku servers are on the founder's list of Phoenix mistakes.

• Welsh lists these as the four things that stall aspiring side hustlers and says he made every one of them himself.

• Viewst covers nearly all its infrastructure and operations on credits from Google Cloud, from HubSpot, Notion, Miro, Stripe and Sentry, all obtained through the Station F Founders Program and the Aurelia.Ventures Program.

Sources

• We are not normal peopleJustin Jackson · justinjackson.ca · We are not normal people · undated
• So you want to start a side hustle? Do these 4 things first.Justin Welsh · justinwelsh.me · What Most Side Hustlers Miss · 2024-06-22
• @levelsio's blogPieter Levels · levels.io · Avoid accelerators incubators coaches bootcamps instead ship · 2017-08-16
• Micro-SaaS Ebook: from Idea to Shipping a Minimum Viable ProductTyler Tringas · tylertringas.com · Avoid the faux professionalism · 2016-11-29
• Eventloot: Failing to Listen Feedback Means $20,000 LossJustin Anyanwu · failory.com · Were you worried about anything when starting that at the end you realize doesn't matter? · undated
• Phoenix: Failed to Keep It Stupidly SimpleEnrique Benitez · failory.com · What did you learn? · undated
• Building a No-Code Ad Production & Design Tool to $50kVictoria Duben · failory.com · What tools & resources do you recommend? · undated
• 3 pillars to building a successful businessPreetam Nath · preetamnath.com · Pillar 3 · 2020-06-07