Rolando

Yeah okay. I fucked up. Here’s my hard-to-swallow pill: I lost 90% of my money in the first part of 2024 due to bad decisions, stubbornness, and lack of composure. And I don’t even remember most of it. So it’s time to admit to myself I was wrong. Here’s the list of my mistakes, so maybe you can avoid doing the same: 1️⃣ Betting everything on Indie Hacking: 10 months ago, I moved to Bali with $25k in my bank account and one goal: reach ramen profitability before I ran out of cash. Being a beginner developer with no marketing background, I refused to understand how hard this task would be. Most people don’t win with their first product, and neither did I. Everyone advised me to freelance to gain a fresh perspective, keep my finances in order, and avoid being stuck in my own head, but I was too stubborn to listen. I placed my bet on reaching ramen profitability. It didn’t work, and I ran out of money. 🤡 Well done, me. If you’re working towards independence with your product, make sure you have a plan B. Freelancing is good. 2️⃣ Building without talking to users: My biggest guilt. Like many beginner developers, I started building without talking to users. With CopyCopter, I actually had a client in the beginning, but I wasn’t listening to him. It was all about my ideas and my product, not about the users. I hit a wall when I realized marketing is super hard if you don’t know what you’re selling. Selling is about solving problems, not building features. If you don’t know what problem you’re solving or who you’re solving it for, it gets very hard. I had to face this first-hand to finally understand this dynamic. 3️⃣ Working EVERY SINGLE DAY for six months: At the beginning of 2024, I started coding every single day, aiming for 100% green boxes on GitHub. Initially, it felt great because I was making continuous progress. But then I started to burn out. I became so stuck in my head that I couldn’t get a fresh perspective. Every day was just about coding one more thing. I stopped thinking strategically. It would have been more beneficial to code four days a week and spend two days planning and talking to users instead of just working non-stop. 4️⃣ Not taking care of myself: Around March-April, as I started running out of money, I decided to cut expenses. Balinese gyms are expensive, so that was the first thing to go. Then I stopped spending money on myself altogether, only paying for breakfasts and dinners. I cut off my co-working space, gym, travels, and even social gatherings with friends just to extend my runway. In hindsight, this was an awful idea. It put me in a mindset of being poor. I convinced myself I wasn’t working hard enough and didn’t deserve anything, so I worked even harder (I was already working every day). It became a vicious cycle — less money, more work, no progress. And here’s the thing: you HAVE to give your brain space to rest and process stuff without focus. Defocusing is a real thing. I started taking one day off from work in the last four weeks, and it feels awesome. My brain finally has time to process stuff in the background, generating more ideas and being fresher. 5️⃣ Lack of sports: I cut the gym, stopped running, stopped doing yoga, and stopped stretching my body. I also started eating unhealthy food because the less exercise I did, the less I cared about my body. This, combined with the daily grind, made everything blur together. My last six months felt like one long, unhealthy, sad, monotonous day. It’s awful, pointless, and doesn’t make any sense. The gym breaks the vicious cycle of work. Don’t skip the gym. 6️⃣ Scaling mistakes: I've made mistakes with CopyCopter too. Launched in March, it started growing faster than I expected. Then I started doing ads, which were almost profitable, but the conversion wasn’t great, so I stopped and spent another three weeks building more features. When I ran the same ads again (with what I thought was a much better product), the ads didn’t work anymore. I focused on building features instead of talking to users. I started building something super complex without a target group, while successful startups often find a small problem and create a simple solution. I wanted to go big, build a future-proof tool from the start, but that mindset was wrong. The future-proof idea is dumb. Start small, and then grow. 7️⃣ Gambling I started betting on ads without having a lot of money because I was convinced I was so close to reaching ramen profitability. I kept thinking, “Just one more bet and it will work.” But it never did. I wasted time and money, behaving more like a gambler than a strategic entrepreneur. It was a huge mistake, especially in a situation where I couldn’t afford to lose. Don’t gamble with your limited resources. 8️⃣ Looking for false feelings of accomplishment: When I started working every single day, people began to notice and say things like, “I admire your grind” and “You’re so dedicated.” This made me feel like I should work even more. Then, @tibo_maker wanted to work with me, which reinforced the idea that I was doing the right thing. Also, after my co-founders played me in my previous startup, this time I wanted to prove to everyone I could do it on my own. I was seeking validation through overworking, which was not sustainable or healthy. I started prioritising external validation over my own happiness. This is just dumb. Don't do that. // That was a quick brain dump. What triggered this tweet is that I realized I’m cooked, started looking for clients and immediately found people who needed my skills. Making money with services is so much easier than with SaaS lol. Anyways, the bottom line is: at the end of the day, the happiest person wins (not the wealthiest). And I was the least happy person for the last six months. Time for a little change 🫡