Welcome to the third issue of Solo Founder 🔥

Hi, I'm Baadier and thanks for signing up to Solo Founder!

As a fellow solo founder, I know that we have unique challenges and I wanted to tell those stories and be a part of your journey. My vision is that we can learn together and reach our goals as fellow founders.

Please don't hesitate to reply here if you would like to interview on Solo Founder or would like to recommend someone else 👐

Upcoming Interviews

• Andrew Kamphey of BetterSheets.co
• Edwin Klesman of Washem
• Michael Callaghan of WalkingRiver.com
• Miguel Piedrafita of Sitesauce
• Simon Grimm of Ionic Academy, Kickoff Ionic
• Kir Kovalin of Noizio

Solo Founder  

What's your background, and what are you working on?

I’m Jorge, I’m from Colombia, almost pushing 34 years, married to an incredible woman for almost a decade and we have 2 kids together.

I come from a normal background; we didn’t have much money, but food was always on the table. I initially went to school for Electronic Engineering, but dropped out. It just wasn’t for me.

Since I was bilingual, I started working as an English teacher. A friend recommended me to his boss and by the time I was 19 I was teaching English as a second language in 2 major universities here in Colombia.

We didn’t make much when I was working as a teacher and quickly got into debt when our son was born.

A friend of mine asked me to do some paid translation work for him, he was building a tourism website for the city, and he showed me how I could make the edits myself directly (He actually trusted me to ftp the files to his server, horrible mistake hahahhaha).

A lot of people talk about passion and how they loved it from the beginning, I didn't. I saw the income potential of knowing how to do it and then started enrolling every free course I could find to learn HTML and CSS.

Another friend told me that Python developers were highly paid so I learned Python for the backend and got my first paid gig freelancing. I built the entire backend for a CRM specialized for Insurance Brokers.

Then I built the backend for an e-commerce using a Django package called Oscar. It was fun and it was good money.

One day I saw a video of a friend talking about Ionic and why he chose it so I decided to give it a try. It was Ionic 1 with AngularJS and I created my first app and saw the potential of being “full-stack” with Ionic and Firebase. I mostly thought of it as a way to build products faster.

I started blogging about how I was learning Ionic and it started to pick up traction, Max from Ionic retweeted one of my articles and lots of people started asking me questions, being a teacher at heart it felt really good to be able to explain those things and help them.

What motivated you to get started with your startup?

I guess you can take the last part of the previous question here :-P

It was mostly money and the lack of job opportunities at the time. People like to talk about how there were thousands of jobs for developers, but I come from a city in Colombia where there were like 3 or 4 dev companies, working for the government and only hired graduated engineers.

So I started looking for myself and getting freelance gigs, then started turning most of my “regular code” into templates to sell.

What went into building the initial product?

The first products I ever sold were $10 USD code templates. That told me that people do buy stuff online.

I took the authentication part of an application and packaged it, added it to Gumroad and then sent the link to my newsletter. I remember that template made like $150/week.

After that I went into making books, and courses, right now I’m managing a course platform called JsMobileDev, it’s still in active development, but already has subscribers. The idea is to be able to add more courses on building mobile applications with JS.

What’s your business model, and how have you grown your revenue?

My business model has always been the same, create something that adds value to people and then charge money from it.

I don’t do ads, sell user data, or anything like that, all my money comes from paying customers.

The one thing that has helped grow my revenue is to grow my audience and nurture it.

No hacks, its consistent day to day work.

My most notable expense is my email software, I use ConvertKit, at my level it’s like $1,000/year.

What are your goals for the future?

Right now I’m finishing a long consulting engagement, it ends late June. The goal is to use the extra time to grow my platform.

I already have a to-do list of things I want to do or achieve, summarized its something like this:

1. I want to get the design right, right now it’s mostly Ionic defaults, I actually sketched something on markers on my whiteboard yesterday of the general idea.

2. Also, I’m writing a new mini-course on security, I need to make the time to accelerate that process.

3. After the course is done, my goal is to migrate all my blog content there, and have a mix of free/paid content, the paid content will be accessible through the subscription.

4. Then focus entirely on one site, I’m a “Company of One”, I don’t have employees (and don’t want them). I like to keep my business manageable, so multiple sites complicate things.

   I guess the end goal is to make enough out of this working 20h/week so that I don’t need to take on the additional consulting work.

If you had to start over, what would you do differently?

I would have started writing sooner.

Nothing beats having an audience of fans ready for whatever you build.

Have you found anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

Yes, Amy Hoy and Alex Hilman on Twitter, both of them share incredibly useful and actionable advice, I’m a member of their 30x500 class which is a course on how to start and manage your product business.

What's your advice for solo founders who are just starting out?

• Play to your strengths, there’s no point shooting yourself in the foot with your first product. The idea is to start making money online, all the improvements can come later.
• Relentlessly say no to the things that don’t add value. Derek Sivers has a saying that goes “If your immediate reaction is not, hell yeah!, then it’s a no.” So if it’s not something that excites you or that makes sense, just say no.
• JFDI => Just Fucking Do It. Nothing kills more businesses than inaction.

To end off, where can we find you?

You can find me on twitter as @javebratt, I am very active and reply to everything there. My blog is at https://javebratt.com and my course platform is at https://jsmobiledev.com.

If everything goes the right way in a couple of months everything will live under the JsMobileDev platform.

Solo Founder  

30 Lessons After 30 Million SEO Visitors

The inimitable Neil Patel with some business changing tips to help you grow your inbound and referral traffic. His blog and newsletter are well worth a follow.

neilpatel.com  

How We Support 10,000+ Users With Only 2 Customer Team Members

The team at Groove has truly showed the benefits of content marketing and their founder, Alex Turnbull's, journey to $100,000 MRR is seminal reading. This week I'm highlighting how you can improve your customer support with Groove's 9 Tips for Remote Customer Support.

groovehq.com  

Want Your Content to Succeed? Make it Resonate with the Right Audience (no, not that one).

The common theme of this week, if you haven't picked it up yet, is Content Marketing. Jorge highlighted it in his interview and many startups build their marketing flywheel off it. Rand Fishkin, previously of Moz, takes us through connecting with the right audience. His new venture SparkToro can definitely help your efforts to understand and connect with your audience.

sparktoro.com  

Help out Solo Founder

Once again, thanks for joining me for this issue 😄 I would really appreciate if you can share this with your circle and help me spread Solo Founder to more of our community.

You can reply right here if you have any feedback on anything at all. I'd love to hear from you 👋

Cheers, Baadier (@baadier)

Solo Founder