Young Makers

I launched Young Makers Newsletter 3 weeks ago to help young makers like myself. I never thought I could do it.

Here's my transparency story, the results achieved, how I started and what worked for me.

Read till the end!

If I could do it starting from nothing, so could you!

My First Online Revenue

• 8 paid subscribers
• $328 in revenue
• 150 subs

Here's how I got my traffic

Indie Hackers – 260 views, 7 subs, 1 paid
Twitter – 174 views, 8 subs, 2 paid
Direct – 170 views, 14 subs, 1 paid
Hacker News – 9 views, 1 sub
Telegram Groups – 8 views, 2 subs, 1 paid
Facebook – 7 views
Reddit – 6 views, 1 sub

Here's how I made $ from "experiments"

• $150 from mastermind group
• $15 from early supporters
• $10 from subscriptions
• $18 from buymeacoffee

If you don't experiment, you'll never know what works. I simply followed advice from @AndrewKamphey and my newsletter's actionable advice.

When I did my first few interviews, I realized these about successful entrepreneurs. They:

• had huge bias for action
• were creative about how they made money
• kept moving, never stopped
• iterated if needed
• focused on ramen profitability
• had community support

I wasted 4 years in college...

• learning things that didn't align with my future path
• building products that made a loss
• having no friends who shared indie hacking dreams
• struggling to subsist while doing what i love while helping others

However, it all changed when I did these…

STOP
• lurking in online communities
• over thinking
• over planning and
• over strategizing

Strategy is useful when you have revenue. If you don't have it, hustle for that first.

START
• putting myself out there on twitter, WIP.chat, Indie Hackers, Newsletter Geeks (an invite-only telegram community for newsletter operators)
• being consistent
• ask for mentoring
• DOING things fast
• execute, execute, execute
• experiment and improve

success = consistency * quality

if consistency was less than 1.0, no matter how much quality I put in, it would be useless. I'd still get less than 100%.

therefore I must be both consistent and put in quality work. Quality work is 10,000 iterations.

What are you waiting for?

Start building! Stop lurking.

Put yourself out there, build in public. Setup a product page on Indie Hackers and blog there. Tweet about your progress.

Use that consistency to ask for help; ask for guidance and mentoring

I'm not alone

These are the communities that brought me up:

Indie Hackers
Wip.chat
Newsletter Geeks by @anthilemoon
Reading.supply
SMUMods with my co-founder, Zachery

And many other people such as @AndrewKamphey who mentored me. As well as those who gave me guidance and encouragement along the way. My twitter followers were a very encouraging bunch as well! Last but not least, my girlfriend 🙏.

I have a rather comprehensive list of whom I'm thankful for here if you care to follow them.

Thoughts?

• Happy to help makers starting out if you need a bit of push. Just ask away below in comments or DM me on twitter.

• Is there any actionable advice you got from this milestone? Share them below so I can give you a reminder to execute it! We could also bounce ideas!

It is so surreal! I can't believe I have actually made money from making an online thing – a newsletter!

I have been a long-time lurker of Indie Hackers, Newsletter Geeks (NG) and WIP.chat. NG is a telegram group by @anthilemoon for newsletter creators)

Less than 3 weeks ago, I ended my final exams for college. I decided I wasn't going to lurk anymore and started working on YoungMakers. But I got stuck. I was lamenting about needing mentors on Twitter and @AndrewKamphey reached out. He was so kind to walk me through how to setup a newsletter from scratch.

After hundreds of edits, we were both finally happy with the output and I hit schedule for 2PM. I sweated so much and felt a strange chill as I hit the send button.

At 2pm, it fired out and I started to post my first issue on various Telegram Groups. I messaged Newsletter Geeks, WIP, Isolated Founders and Twitter. @MarcelHagedoorn on WIP saw my launch and wanted to support me so he subscribed for $50/year and it threw me off my chair.

This was my first ever dollar earned from making an online info product like a newsletter. I ran and told my mum about this and she, being less tech savvy, was so surprised. I explained how this worked and she went "ah, that's so cool" and gave me huge smiles. This made my week.

The maker community completes me in many ways where college didn't.

(PS: @rosiesherry you'll love this quote!)

The huge epiphany moment was when I took advice from the same makers I interviewed on monetizing. I started adding options for people to pay me for my content. And it worked!

I can't wait to help more Young Makers with this newsletter. I believe in the mission and its purpose.

Check out my first ever newsletter issue at

https://youngmakers.substack.com/p/edition-1-making-your-first-profit

PS: I build in public daily on my Twitter as well: https://twitter.com/gabrielchuan/status/1246516101673938944?s=20

It's not a huge number but this is a meaningful milestone for an aspiring Young Maker like me.

I'm in my final semester of college and here's me putting a foot out into the world trying something totally different from my peers; they would otherwise advise me to go into corporate jobs otherwise. But no, I'm taking a huge risk to build my own lifestyle by indie hacking.

Over the past few days, I've been working with @AndrewKamphey who was super kind to walk me through a 101 of how to setup a newsletter, work out a format and line up interviews for me. He's a great guy and knows his stuff about newsletters – give him a follow on Twitter and IndieHackers if you haven't!

After the interviews were lined up, I announced my launch and the first issue will be sent out on this Friday. I went to bed and checked the subscriber count the next morning and got 19 subscribers.

Are you Young Maker interested in how successful maker made their First Profits?

If you are, subscribe to my newsletter at YoungMakers.substack.com

I interview 2 kinds of makers:

1. Successful makers on how they got their first profit

2. Aspiring makers who are looking for advice from successful makers (I help them to reach out to successful makers if they’re in the same niche or I feel they could help) to get to their first profits

Interested in getting advice from Successful Makers?

Subscribe and DM me on twitter at twitter.com/gabrielchuan and I will follow up with you. I'll send your pitch to successful makers and try to help you get advice from them.

Thank you!

My goal is to help Young Makers like myself succeed with their First Profits and beyond. If you like what I'm doing, please support me by:

1. Following me on my Twitter at twitter.com/gabrielchuan
2. Subscribing to my newsletter at youngmakers.substack.com
3. Leave me a comment or DM me! I love to hear from anyone and making friends over the Internet.

I have been a long time lurker of Indie Hacking communities, such as Indie Hackers, WIP, Twitter, etc, and consumed a lot of content and advice. I've probably tried to apply a few of these advice to my first public project – SMUMods.com

Not all advice is equal though.

• We don't fully grasp the context or the context is missing entirely
• The advice is misleading
• The advice is not applicable to you (due to different circumstances)

And there is simply too much advice out there. Many of them are even hidden within interviews and stories but they are not centralized in a single location where it's easy to find them.

Being an aspiring Indie Hacker myself, I thought I'd appreciate it if someone could compile all these advice and turned them into something actionable for me.

That's when I came up with the idea for Young Makers.

h/t to Pete from NOCSDegree and Marc from WIP.chat for the nudge on the naming.

PS: Many will probably think Young Makers might be competing with Failory, Starter Story and Indie Hackers but no, here's a visualization to see that we're simply aggregating and curating content. Also, it'd be nice to work with Courtland someday to improve the state of Indie Hacking for many aspiring makers out there.