My Top Learnings After 5 years Building My Site + YouTube
Hey Folks! đ
This site has been awesome over the past few months I've been frequenting it. I have loved following along the journeys of others just like myself launching products and sites and seeing the stories of successes or failures.
I just recently hit the first "big" milestone when building a subscription product of 50 paid users subscribers 2 and a bit months into launching paid courses on my site.
Alongside standard ad revenue from standard site traffic and YouTube income, now is the first time in over 5 years of building the website that I've felt it could possibly sustain me working on it full time in the near future.
Starting Out & Motivations
Getting to the point where something is successful and growing is HARD. Like seriously hard. It takes countless hours of promoting, building the product and improving it so one of the most important things to consider when starting out is your motivations.
If you go into developing a service purely motivated by money, you may end up making poor decisions like setting the pricing point too high or not focusing on aspects of your site that don't truly deliver value to your users.
When I started out, my site was no more than a blog that I used to document my learnings and push myself to properly understand the fundamentals of new frameworks such as Angular and Go. The underlying motivation to build the site at the start was to improve my self so that I was a more effective developer.
1% Improvement Every Day
If like me, you are building these projects in your spare time, you need to ensure that you aren't devoting every waking second to the project.
You want to ensure that the way in which you build your own project is sustainable and doesn't negatively impact personal relationships or your health - both physical and mental.
Try to limit yourself where possible to making incremental changes to your projects in such a way that you can maintain this momentum over months and years.
It may not feel like a lot of improvements are made within a day or a week, but as the months roll by, you will start to see massive improvements and your personal life will be thanking you for it đ
Focus on Helping 1 Person before scaling
One technique that I have found helpful was to strategize about what my customer base should look like.
Before you get started, define your ideal customer. Define their background, their income, and their wants and needs. All of these things will help you to make decisions around the pricing for your services as well as ensuring that you focus on delivering value to them.
Once you have this brief, start building your systems to cater to that one person. If you can find a customer who matches this brief when starting up, spend as much time with them as possible to iron out every little issue and make sure they are completely happy with what you are delivering.
Build Things In The Open
Developing in the open by posting screenshots to Twitter or creating polls can be a great way to help build an audience and get them engaged with your product or service.
Take them on the journey with you and share the highs and the lows and you will see people who ultimately become more invested in you and care about your success.
I've made a good deal of friends by going down this approach and we end up supporting each other on various aspects of our lives.
Conclusion
These are just a few of my own personal experiences that have helped me in the past. If you have more then I'd love to hear them and apply them to my own project!
If you want to check out my site then you can do so here: https://tutorialedge.net
