The Best Startup Advice I Got: Monetize First

The most useful advice I got:

1. Explore monetization opportunities If you quit your job to work on your own project, as tempting as it is to start cranking out a bunch of cool features, pay yourself first (as Kiyosaki would say).

My hypothesis at the time was that solo indie students and hobbyists wouldn’t pay. So I needed to find small engineering teams and study their processes.

I was advised to explore both directions.

What to do For B2C — based on past interviews, pick the most needed features, create teasers and pricing descriptions. Instead of payment, ask for an email for a waitlist. This way we can tell if there’s real demand, experiment with pricing, and calculate conversion rates.

For B2B, they suggested outreach via LinkedIn and cold emails, finding more people for interviews, sending them questionnaires.

What happened Two weeks went into updating the site. We switched to Tailwind+DaisyUI — modern layout libraries. I was skeptical, but turns out it’s super convenient and saves a ton of time. I named the paid subscription Lopaka PRO, set the price at $10, and waited.

Then my wife joined me and started actively pushing LinkedIn. We picked about 30 companies that make electronic devices with screens. Got about 80 contacts. It’s a very slow process, people are reluctant to accept connection requests, rarely reply, but we got maybe five constructive conversations going. We even got a response from the head of platforms at Teenage Engineering 🤩! (Though he thought it was another pitch looking for investments, so it didn’t really go anywhere.)

My assumptions were wrong…

B2C: In a month of experiments, 50 people wanted to buy and filled out the form on the site! Some even filled out an additional survey. That’s absolutely insane. I could already be making $500 a month (hypothetically 😁)

B2B: It’s complicated. Only managed to collect a few responses, never got on a call with anyone. There’s a set of features that could be interesting, but it’ll be super hard to replace a whole bunch of established, if suboptimal, processes all at once. It’s a lot of work, we’ll get there gradually.

Next piece of advice:

2. Sell the most needed feature you can build fast I was researching demand by offering a huge set of different things for graphics design: team collaboration, asset library, prototypes, and diagrams. But I’d be building all this forever. It’s very hard to do well and quickly as a one-person team. And I ideally need to roll out some features and start making a living in less than a year.

They suggested I focus on the bare minimum, with a small price tag. A basic feature set—Lopaka Plus!

And so for the past two weeks I’ve been rewriting the beta and integrating cloud tech into the current project. There will be a database, a project list, and auth via GitHub and Google. Just need to hook up payments. So far I’ve only registered with LemonSqueezy, haven’t figured out how everything works yet.

One more small insight:

3. Talk to people who are ready to pay All this time I’ve been conducting interviews without paying much attention to money. I was trying to understand how people’s processes work and what’s missing in their workflow.

When project survival is on the line, you need to focus only on those whose pain is so strong they’re willing to pay just to stop suffering. They’ll be much more eager to share their experience and demand solutions to their problems. Exactly what you need!

The advisors also confirmed that an editor is not really a venture story at all. Pure bootstrap, you can launch it on your own.

You’d think I’ve been reading about startups, product launches, and all that for years. And the advice is super simple. Like, stupidly basic. And yet I struggled to get my thoughts together and pick the right direction. Over the next couple months I’ll be testing new hypotheses.

Maybe you’ve got some advice too? I’d love to hear it, maybe something will work.