It's been a long time since I have put anything out on incolumitas.com
That's sad, since I owe so so much to this blog and my past work on it. This blog gave me customers, this blog gave me employment, this blog gave me readers. Thank you.
It's also funny to write blog articles nowadays, since you kinda have to force yourself not to use the help of Cursor or other AI editors. For this blog post, I won't use any AI help, not even to fix the grammatical mistakes. There is a place for non AI content, and a personal blog post is such a case.
Human errors and nuances are the reason we are drawn to human writing anyway. I believe that my flaws and my personal touch of the blog posts here and there made some people chuckle. I mean it's a technical blog, so that effect must have been limited anyway. But you as a reader can understand my character by reading this blog post, I won't say that this is necessarily a good thing, but at least you are not indulging in machine produced content.
But I do feel philosophical today and I want to talk about some things non stricly technical. After all, we programmers are humans as well, hard to believe sometimes, ehh?
What I always wanted to Achieve
I started programming when I was 16 years old. I am now motherfucking 33 years old, almost 34 years old. I first started learning PHP and then I switched to Java. Then later when I was 18, I finally started using Python. Initially Python2 and then later on Python3.
I think I started learning by following a Java online course and thought myself programming step by step.
But what motivated me to learn coding?
From the very beginning, it was the feeling that you can create something. But there was this other thing as well, maybe a bit darker in nature. The Internet also allows your to hack other people and to break in, eavesdrop and steal data from other humans or businesses. I was always deeply fascinated by this hacking culture and the sheer power that coding skills and baseline cognitive abilities gave you in the Internet.
My coming up was in the the late 2000s and early 2010s and I still remember how I was hunting SQL injections and stored XSS day in and day out.
Here and there, I probably also crossed some lines and did things non strictly legal. But to this day, I never actually stole money or credit card data and broke into systems driven by finanical motivation.
The Internet is (still) a scary place. But honestly, nowadays it resembles a fucking crack house, where people look on their screens for hours daily without realizing why. Large platforms such as YouTube or Tiktok or Twitter are immensly addictive and people's brains are deeply affected by the Internet nowadays. I would even go so far in my opinion, that I would say that the negative general mood and the heighted tension in our world nowadays is due to the Internet and social media in general. Negative attention is what raises people's interest.
It's like you slowly drive by a car accident. You cannot not look at it. But luckily car accidents are rare, but the Internet gives you a never ending stream of content that hooks your brain. Scary.
Anyway, I digress heavily.
So since I was a young man, I was driven by two motivations:
- Learning how to hack (requires coding and is a strong intellectual challenge)
- Finding a way to create passive income in the Internet so I don't have to work a job I don't like (turns out I almost never had a bad job)
After a couple of years I realized that in fact I was not the brightest hacker. There were things that were simply too hard for me, like advanced buffer overflows and heap overflows where you have to use strange techniques to overcome defenses like stack cookies or Data Execution Prevention (DEP). I never actually achieved finding AND exploiting such a low level binary vulnerability. Also you need to be really motivated by this low level systems programming world to achieve significant success there. I simply lacked a deep fascination of everything low level that you need to be successful in this area.
The second goal, to create and find some kind of way to achieve passive income in the Internet was also always in my head.
I tried many different things over the years:
- A web scraping SaaS in like 2016 - Never had a single client
- Another web scraping SaaS in 2020 named scrapeulous.com that never really took of. But I had my first subscriptions, althought I never had more than 150$ MRR and there was no real growth.
and then I also freelanced for other companies. In hindsight, freelancing was a waste of time money wise, but I learned a lot by working for my clients. Also some clients later on became meaningful connections.
So what I always wanted to achieve is to create a company that made enough money so I don't have to work a real job anymore.
But I always wanted to create something that is:
- Horizontally scaleable, without limits
- Can be 100% automated
- Does not require a lot of interaction with my clients
- Can be done by single person (me)
Achieving the Dream
I think I did achieve this dream with ipapi.is
I never would have dreamt that at some point I would easily make 15k MRR with a fully passive online product and it did happen.
I don't want to go into detail how much work it was and what the real milestones were (that would take another blog article), but I want to write about how this "success" made me feel.
First of all, I was BY FAR the happiest when I reached 1000$ MRR (and growing) in a true and solid way. This was roughly 14 months ago.
For some strange reason I always wanted to barely survive on this passive online product. An outlet that would allow me to take a break from work, If I needed to.
I actually didn't really imagine that I would achieve 15k MRR like I have now. It still feels a bit strange.
I now have responsibility over 250 clients and it's growing each month. Of course there is also churn, a problem I right now cannot address for time reasons.
How you Feel
How you feel when you work for 15 years with this one dream in mind and then you suddenly achieve it?
- Owning such a thing is also a burden. It leads to a lot of bureaucracy, different taxes and regulations, communication with clients
- I guess I am not rich yet, but the potential is definitely here to also reach 100k MRR at some point
- It is actually fully automatic, updates require sometimes human supervision, but this also can be automated
I think the biggest realization is that after achieving this LIFE LONG DREAM I don't particulary feel happy or satisfied.
Yeah I am free. I can do whatever the fuck I want, travel, get up when I want (I do get up on average at 1:30pm in the afternoon).
But no one really cares what I do. I have no manager that annoys me (just joking, I only had lovely ones). I have no work collegues. It's a lonely thing, you know?
Also I cannot tell my friends too much about my business anymore. I did this a lot in the past. It's probably a better idea to shut the fuck up.
It's cute when you tell them I make 1500$ with it per month.
Your friends don't care when you reach 3000$ MRR. They think you have to work accordingly for it. They don't understand SaaS growth. They do not understand how extremely difficult it is to reach 1000$ MRR with an Intenet SaaS. They do not understand that 3k MRR with a certain growth is already extremely valuable.
They look at you like you had a lucky month when you make 7000$ in a certain month.
And when you tell them that you make 15k per month fully automated and it grows by 1500$ per months, their facial expression slowly changes.
You start to become a person that is hated, a bad capitalist. Especially in the country I live in. In my country, they think you are necessarily evil when you make more money. Like you need to rob someone to get something.
Of course I could also simply shut the fuck up, but you also want to kinda share your success when you made it. Isn't that one of the reasons why you even put this immensive amount of work into something so you can later tell innocent and kind people how good of a boy you are???
Money is of course nice. But what I am really looking for is the status and respect. But what you often get from people is hatred and jealousy. A lot of humans feel good when they can compare themselves to you and think "at least I am not like him".
Maybe that's overly nihilistic but that is how I feel.
Conclusion
The main conclusion is that money does not bring happiness. It's not that I am super rich, but I certainly achieved independence.
You actually can only buy very little with money.
You cannot buy friendships, you cannot buy a partner, you cannot buy nice experiences.
Even travelling with money is kinda sad. So you want to stay in nice hotels. How will you meet cool people?
I think the best way for me to move forward is to accept that my life long dream probably simply wasn't that important.
It could be that this is the case with a lot of dreams :)
Some Things I Learned Building a Business
- I am not a fan of marketing
- You need to create something that people or organizations NEED. They must hate you and still buy from you.
- B2B is very chilled, most companies are very reasonable to work with
- Don't try to lock in, give them always an alternative to subscriptions.
- Do not bargain.
- Your customers must immediately understand what you offer.
- Ignore clients that talk to much
- Only automate something when 3 independent clients complain about it
And last but not least:
The biggest reason I fucking hated working as an SALARY MAN was the following:
As an employed software developer, you do so much stupid work. People will give you meaningless assignments, they will threshold your way of thinking. Corporate IT is like 80% of the people do fucking nothing and the other 20% do everything.
Also a slightly disturbing belief I hold: The only REAL developer is one that can build something, sell it and live from it. This goes to all the motherfuckers out there that thought they were smarter then me :D