$200k/yr at 25 and 19 y.o. Plus Reddit SaaS (50,000+ members)

Hey! I've been interviewed by Pete from HighSignal. Below is the interview, but do let me know if you'd rather want me to write this as an article instead.

Ch Daniel is a 25-year-old founder who is making $200,000 in annual revenue from a variety of websites. He's made everything SaaS businesses to Reddit communities and podcasts with his brother David.

Can you tell us about your entrepreneurial achievements so far?

Yeah sure! Let’s do this: I’ll put up the vanity metrics and then bring some realness into it

• 11,000,000+ all-time users reached
• Been making $200k/yr for the last couple of years
• Lately my 2nd company (successful company I should say, as it’s faaar from being the 2nd company at all) has reached $3-4k per month in revenue
• I run a community (Reddit SaaS) that has about 45,000 members
• I run a podcast where I talked to billionaires, partners of Jeff Bezos (i.e. Jason Fried, founder of Basecamp/37 signals), founders of unicorns, and other people with their top vanity metrics.

The reality of it is: my brother and I (co-founder) have been lucky a few times out of hundreds of tries. The bullet-point list above: that’s the highlight reel. We’ve been lucky at one point, and in the last few years we’ve only been moderately successful - but that’s ok!

That’s the beautiful thing about entrepreneurship, I think - you only have to be right once and, for some time, you can cruise on your success. Just like we did. We’re like those writers that start with a hit book, then they release stuff that is… so and so (our situation right now).

But make no mistake - we’ve been trying to get our next hit in the meantime. It’s just another one of those hundreds of attempts 😀 SignHouse, our eSignature tool, is our next attempt, which is also our most ambitious one so far. But I’ll talk more about it below. Anyway, that’s life so far!

How did you first get involved in entrepreneurship?

I started my first online business when I was 15 - it was an e-Commerce shop. (I’m 25 now). But the success I talked about above was started when I was 19, so 4 years into this sport. It’s https://legitcheck.app/. However, LC only became a company after about 2 years. So that makes it 6 years into the sport!

Regarding inspiration, I always thought entrepreneurship is the way to go, so I didn’t really consider a job. I took a job for some time, at one point, to try it out, but didn’t really needed. That said, it’s been luck yet again — I started practicing a sport early on, the same way LeBron or another one of your favourite athletes probably started very early on.

So if you’re reading this and you’re considering starting a business, do not postpone! You might or might not become LeBron. But in business, you don’t have to be LeBron to live a beautiful life.

How come you’ve chosen different projects over focusing on one thing?

A cocktail of probably-ADHD (haven’t been diagnosed, but wouldn’t be surprised) and shiny object syndrome 🤣

On a more serious note, hmm. A few months ago I’d have said it was the itch to keep on creating, which gets limited when you start one project (I don’t believe that anymore).

But then I’ve heard Andrew Wilkinson talk about the 4 types of entrepreneurs he’s seen in his (very extensive) entrepreneurship life.

See, after starting to really look into Andrew, I realised I could make use of his opinion: maybe I’m just the type that likes to start things, but I also suspect there’s something else in there that I’ve got too. Time will tell!

Regardless, it’s worth noting this: I’ve also started different projects because I thought of them as different stages:

• Junior year: LCBC is a great foundation for us, but I always thought the project is limited in terms of potential - and I was right! A low TAM that is now hit by the global recession
• Sophomore year: Simple.ink was meant to be a micro SaaS. And it turned out fine! We recently decided to call it our sophomore year because we learned so much about what we’d need to do in our…
• Graduation: SignHouse (I hope!). If SignHouse turns out fine, it’ll be our graduation - the accumulation of what my brother and I learned over the last few years.

Do you have to through these stages? Maybe yes, maybe no.

If you have previous experience (e.g. worked in a small/big/etc company), that adds in to the equation.

We just started from 0 because… oh well. I was 15 when I started, and then David was 15 as well when he started with me). So we were pretty much at ground 0.

What’s your technical background?

No technical background at all. I come from the design world, did graphic design. David isn’t technical either. We outsource this totally!