After divorce and 6-figure debt, I finally sold a product

Four failed ventures, six-figure debt, a wrecked marriage, a false start, loneliness; those are some words that immediately come to mind when I think of my last ten years of indie hacking.

Before I paint an all-gloomy picture, let me tell you that there were exhilarating moments too; for example, there was a social campaign that catapulted a bootstrapped business to 7 figures in just 90 days. But those are stories for another day.

Today, friends, I’d like to start from the beginning, my very first venture. So, please jump into my GT, get comfortable as I share with you a story about how I got lucky to build a product that got me a partnership with one of the biggest companies in the world.

What did I learn from all that? Fasten your seat belt, I promise you that this is not going to be a ride across the Bonneville Salt Flats.

Today is the day

It’s early Saturday morning, 4:12 on the clock to be precise. I am up as usual, sitting at a small IKEA desk tucked into a corner of my tiny shared East Harlem apartment overlooking the FDR.

Today I am going to launch my project. But first, I am going to do some final touches of the landing page, and maybe also a final sweep for bugs. After that, I’ll trigger my launch sequence i.e publish the landing page, schedule my email blast, share the release news on Twitter, Reddit and so on. The plan is perfect.

Except that day was the previous Saturday…today is actually Monday and that launch did not happen. Memories of that Saturday are fresh because of the video I had recorded to document what was supposed to be a monumental day of my life. So, what happened? Well, let’s rewind back to how I got to this day in the first place.

Hello, my name is opportunity

It was 2012 and I was working as a marketing engineer in NYC. My job was 2-pronged: managing the engineering aspects of marketing campaigns; as well as managing the marketing aspects of product development.

While on that job, I came across a problem a certain big company I can’t name due confidentiality agreement was experiencing with integrating its latest product into a particular niche but vast market. For reference, let’s call that company “ABC.” It so happened that I had experience and client relationships in that particular market and I thought this would be a perfect opportunity for me to kick off my entrepreneurship dream.

So I embarked on developing a solution. After just 3 months of coding and testing, I had it. And my plan was to sell the software to ABC’s clients independently.

On that aforementioned Monday, I told myself, “oh well, the weekend of tinkering with the landing page and code was needed. The offering is certainly better now and I will launch it next week.”

Except, the same sequence of events also happened the following weekend, and the one after that. As a matter of fact, that became the story for each weekend for about a year. Why?

As James puts it in his post, “Dreams die at launch. Before launch, you can tell yourself a fantasy that users will love it, and your product will go viral just because you opened the doors."

Not good enough

As cliche as it sounds, it is nonetheless true that entrepreneurship had been my dream since I was a little boy. And this was my first real attempt at it. So failure (or success) carried huge implications.

I was terrified.

What if no one buys it? What if it is just not good enough? What if I am not good enough? I just could not bear to find out. So I used every excuse in the book to delay launch.

Each day I would tell myself that if I just add this new feature or make the old one better, then it’d be ready. In my mind, the more I could ‘perfect’ the product, the more I would decrease the chance of it failing.

Oh...just how I wish I had a mentor back then to tell me that perfection in this case is a bottomless pit. What I also did not realize at that time was that not launching is in itself a form of failure; perhaps a worse one for that matter.

What’s luck got to do with it?

“Is what we earn just desserts of hard work and deferred gratification? Or is it, in large part, the result of existential luck - where, when, and to whom we are born”- Lily Batchelder, NYU School of Law.

When I finally gathered the courage to launch it after about a year, I surely wasn’t expecting what happened next. Merely 3 months into launch, I got a call from the vice president of ABC company interested in a partnership.

They paid me $20k at the gate just for signing and agreed to pay me a percentage of all the transactions my software facilitated (TPV). In addition, they agreed to market the product and that was huge.

In the end, I sold the product to the company and my entrepreneurship journey had officially began. I have not looked back since then.

So, yes, some dreams die at launch but it is at launch that all dreams become reality!

Thank you for reading my story. Much appreciated.