My first year with 30x500 (including some stats)

Let me quickly explain what 30x500 is: it's a business course that promises to teach you how to create products that you KNOW will sell. I'm not affiliated with it, I'm just happy that I found it :-)

My 30x500 journey started in January 2019 with this question here on IH. I had started a couple of projects before but none of them were successful for various reasons. I still had lots of product ideas, but I was afraid to work on the code for weeks and not be able to sell it afterward.

So I decided to take a step back and look at my approach. I read a lot of material and listened to podcasts about building businesses. Luckily a fellow indie hacker at the Berlin IH Meetup told me about Amy Hoy and stackingthebricks.com. I immediately fell in love with the content. The decision to enroll in her and Alex's course was quickly made.

Now it's been a year already and maybe some people are interested in my progress. (btw here is a progress update from July 2019).

First of all: I don't have a product and I didn't get a return on my investment, yet. At least money-wise. But I have new product ideas and I'm pretty confident that I'll be able to sell them.

How come I'm confident this time? Because I did my research as I learned in the course. The ideas stem from real people's pain and not from some hunch or my own itch.

So what did I learn? Basically, I learned a process to create products.

You start by picking a target audience. You find places where they hang out online (aka watering holes). You research their problems (aka Sales Safari). Then you try to solve their problems with educational content (aka eboms). If you do it right you can build an email list with this process.

This is the first part of the course. I spent almost a whole year on this. With mixed results until very recently.

One reason why it took me so long was that I had a busy year. My wife and I had a baby in November so my priority was spending time with my wife and earning money. I was freelancing most of the year to build some savings. There was not so much time left to research and write content.

I also took a couple of detours. Ebombs are supposed to fix a pain. You don't have to write long blog posts to do this. I didn't quite understand this in the beginning. I found a pain which was based on my own experience rather than research. Then I built a whole series of blog posts with accompanying code repositories.

This just took a long time. It still drives a majority of the traffic to my blogs. But half of the posts are not used by my readers. So from hindsight, it wasn't worth it.

Another problem was that I didn't pick the best audience. I had experience with GraphQL. I thought that this is a great niche to start. And since it's kind of new there should be plenty of opportunities to write great content.

The problem was that there aren't a lot of online communities around GraphQL. The pain that I found was mostly very specific like "Why doesn't X work with Apollo version Y.Z?" These are in fact great pains to write ebombs, but I just couldn't see a product there.

What helped was to expand my audience. I started to focus on React developers and web developers. Now I was able to find much more interesting pain.

In the last couple of months, I got more and more interested in career-related pain. There seem to be a lot of people who want to become a web developer but have problems to figure out what to do after tutorials/toy projects/bootcamps and how to get the first a software dev job.

I wrote a couple of posts about refactoring a React component, a checklist for portfolio projects and why to add tests to portfolio projects.

The blog posts were kind of well-received. They got up to 80 reactions on dev.to and a good amount of upvotes on Reddit. I learned the first important skill: How to produce content that people like. There's still a lot of room for improvement but I got a lot better.

The next step of 30x500 is the product. I just started this part a month ago. Now it's getting really interesting. What I learned in this part is how to create lots of product ideas for a pain point. This is how it works:

You take some pain that you found during your research. You paint a horror scenario full of this pain. Then you do the opposite: you write a dream scenario where none of this pain exists. Finally, you write about a potential solution that enables the user to move from the horror to the dream scenario. And tada, you have a product pitch for a product that doesn't exist yet. Only now you start brainstorming about potential solutions that can become your product.

Of course, there are processes for all of these steps.

My first product idea was an email course about tips for getting your first software dev job. I took the idea from another 30x500 alumni. It's quite simple to create. I wrote the pitch and added a subscribe form. Then I wrote the first email which only said that the course will start in a couple of days. A few days later I wrote the first lesson and have been writing one per week until now.

The email course is free for now. It didn't attract as many subscribers as I wanted (around 30 by now). But I learned already with the help of the 30x500 community how to optimize my CTAs inside the posts.

Currently, I'm preparing my second product idea. It's too early to say what it will become. I hopefully can say more with the next update. The plan is to have a product that generates revenue by the end of the year.