How to Fail as a First-Time Founder [eBook]

Psh. Same as building anything, I was questioning my self the outcome of this project. Because I'm writing in pseudonym, it means I won't have much time in the future to proactively market Jessica Leo and her story. It then means that this side project is likely to not get many viewers.

This type of thoughts is very very common for makers.

Anyway, I promise myself that I should at least finish the project because it marks a great ending to my 18 month story. And some people are in fact enjoying reading it. Let's do it!

In the last few days, I edited chapter 4 and published it. It is the last free chapter and anyone who wants to keep reading would have to choose an amount to donate with a suggested price of US$7. I think it is really fair for all the effort that I've put in.

Since Gumroad is the platform that most people go to for selling digital products, I also started checking it out. Pretty straight forward to set up. It asks me to upload a file (my product), so it means I would have to finish chapter 5-14 altogether and upload as PDF. I was hoping I could keep these chapters as webpages with unique access links, not too sure how to do that!

It is definitely getting harder and harder to continue to edit the book, come on Jess!

After drafting out a chapter, I left it for a few days before coming back to edit it. I was measuring how much time it took me to edit one chapter, roughly 2-3 hours.

Woh - again, I regret not working on my writing skills as a child.

I first released chapter 1 on Indie Hacker and received my first 8 subscribers, out of my mind already. I didn't expect anyone to be interested in my story.

So I decided to set up Mailerlite so that I can send them updates about new chapters, this way I can keep everyone in the loop.

So far what I've learned:

• Same as building a product. Don't put my heads down into "writing", I need to spend more time getting the word out.
• I can always "perfect" it, but is that the best effort? I need to remind my self
• With a side project like this, I need to plan out a schedule to keep myself accountable, or else it could take forever to make progress.

Date since launch: 5 days
Website user traffic: 58
Subscriber: 8

🌈🌈🌈

I outlined and drafted out the content of the book. I didn't realize it is so hard to publish something (I kept going back to edit, edit, and edit), because I want it to be good and useful to people.

So far, I am able to get the website and chapter 1 out. My goal is to treat it as MVP and see if I can get some feedback from the community as I release the upcoming chapters. This can def help me.

I also call the book "How to Fail as a First-Time Founder" because I want to be direct and I don't want to hide the fact that this book is more about sharing failures than to share winning formulas. So yeah, https://www.thefirsttimefounder.com/

I totally don't know how people will react to chapter 1 or the whole concept, but overall, it is more a project for me to reflect myself before I move on with my life, so either way, I'd be happy that I've done this.

Okay, I've decided to do this - to write out my startup journey in the last 18 months in pseudonyms.

This is going to be quite a challenge as I've never written anything this long before, but I like a challenge.

I researched a little about the stack that I'm going to use:

• Google doc for writing
• https://www.brizy.cloud/ for landing page
• https://gumroad.com/ for selling digital products
• https://www.mailerlite.com/ to gather subscribers

Let's keep it simple for now. And my plan is:

1. Outline all the chapters to know how the story flows
2. Design the website/landing page to know how to "market" it
3. Write out each chapter
4. Have key lessons, haters, and links section at the end of each chapter, inspired by @dru_riley who built Trends.VC

I aim to finish all this in the next 2 weeks, because I should soon find a way to sustain my own life.

Let me put my heads down and start doing it!

I had been thinking about writing out my 18-month startup story for weeks now, I wasn't sure whether I should do it. It was mainly because I wasn't sure if I should write it with my own name or in pseudonyms.

The reason I'm considering pseudonyms is that my story was quite crazy (and interesting) to a lot of people. Within my network, people had been asking me to speak at events about it, but I never did it because I didn't want to share these sensitive stories about certain people. All the people I've worked with were respectful.

So I created a post yesterday as I wanted to see how people view all this.

A lot of people expressed their doubt over whether this is real, and that made me think hard about my approach because I like to take ownership of my work.

After a hard debate with myself today, I think I would go ahead and write the story in pseudonyms, because:

1. If I take away all the parts about others, then there is no point for someone to read about this. It'd be just be a series of dry and dull startup lessons without proper context. I thought the lessons I had would be valuable to other founders or founders-to-be, but I really don't want to affect the people involved.

2. I originally wanted to do this as a way to reflect individually, not to be a profitable project, so whether people view it as a fake story doesn't affect my objective. I would probably still try to add a paid part of this project because I want to see if this project I create has some sort of value, but I'm leaning towards donation-based and free refund if someone doesn't find value.

3. Most importantly, the startup is still going forward even though I left. I don't want to affect the people who are running it.

This is the first time I'm doing something like this plus creating in public, so I don't know what to expect, like negative comments and stuff. I guess I can only find out.