#17 - Solopreneur in Bali Generating $2K MRR
From Consultancy to Solopreneur Journey
Erwin is one of the popular solopreneur guys on Twitter who is building his product in public. I got a chance to discover him through his Twitter Space session where he hosts other bootstrappers mainly digital nomading.
I am testing a new format where I share all of the conversation without editing and summarizing. Hope you like this version.
So right now you are in Bali. Before that you were in Bangkok. Uh, what are you doing in Bali at the moment?
Erwin: I would consider right now, Bali, my home base. So, when I'm not traveling, I'm usually here. I have been in Bali for about five years on or off.
And what were you doing before Bali?
Erwin:
So the two years before, you know, the pandemic hit, I was traveling a lot. And then the last three years I've been here more than before those five years. I had a career for three or four years in consultancy, straight out of university.
And, why did you decide to move to Bali or why did you decide to traveling? What happened while you were working for a consultancy company?
Erwin:
So there was, an opportunity within the company when I was 25, I think, or 24, and it was that, uh, there was going to be a new office in Kenya, in Africa,that they wanted to open. And the structure of the company was so that every location was quite independent.
So really everything had to be started up from scratch. And, I was asked to become, essentially to become a technical sales and team lead of the teams there. Back home in the Netherlands where I'm from and that was remote. That was about a year and a half of working remotely between, you know, Kenya and the Netherlands flying back and forth.
And I got a bit of experience with remote work. Sincerely like this, and this is interesting. And so after one and a half years, I decided to quit the company, um, get rid of most of my stuff, and start traveling. And that's how I ended up with Bali because it was frankly, it was on the top of the nomad list.
And I loaded the page, looked at the first destination. I was like, okay, I guess, I guess I go there. And I guess the rest is history.
You had your savings when you arrived in Bali, I guess.
Erwin:
I had quite a bit of savings, yeah. And a freelance career. That's how I started.
And when you arrived to Bali, did you start coding? What were you doing at that time? I mean, did you start your own software service company or freelancing? How did you earn money in that case?
Erwin:
Yeah, the first two years, I was mostly dreaming of building a product, but I didn't actually, you know, end up working on it. I had some side projects that were never released, as it goes quite often, so the first years, two years, I was really just freelancing and I made websites, mostly websites and also some Android apps. And then after two years, I tried, you know, like becoming more public about what I built, and that resulted in the very first project that I had called sparkly.
Which was a Slack integration. And I learned, first of all, I learned a ton doing that and I made quite a few mistakes in a good way. Like you know, as you should, learn from your first launch. It's never, never crazy success, right? It went very well for the first few months when I launched it.
Some quite big companies turned out to be customers for a few months, and this was also during the pandemic. Um, so, you know, more people were moving to Slack because they were working from home and stuff. So it was good timing in that sense, but I did not have the business skills.
So I ended up having a pricing model. Pay per user, you know, makes the bill variable month to month. And I realized later on, I learned that companies don't like that. They want to have a specific price.
And then you sold that company, through which platform?
Erwin:
I'm not entirely sure how long micro-acquire was around, but, I think I was rather early with that.
It was still the time when, you know, it was called micro acquire which I listed as pre-revenue. I did make a couple of hundred monthly recurring revenue off of it, but realistically it was a zero again when I sold it. So I marked it as pre-revenue. I sold it to a company that wanted the integration for leads because they have, they wanted to transition the tool to free and then use that for their consultancy business.
I sold it for, I think, 13K. It wasn't a big amount, but it was enough to recycle my time anyway.
And then you decided to focus on another project or you continue to travel for relaxing. How was that journey?
Erwin:
I took, I definitely took a week off after that. For sure, just to enjoy myself a little bit.
But it wasn't maybe a few weeks after I already started. The next thing was a brand management platform. I've always loved branding and, you know, organizing assets and all that kind of stuff. So I had affinity to the product. But what I didn't do was talk to people.
I basically didn't launch it for the first six months when I did. Uh, I had some responses. I had maybe a hundred trial users, but I never actually converted anyone. I had the syndrome of if I build one more feature that is going to make everyone want it. And what I realized now is if you can't make the core of your product, interesting enough for people to get it, any extra feature won't matter.
But back then I didn't know this, so you kept on working on it for 10 months. And then you uploaded that, right? It's the name of the project, it's Basestyles, right?
Erwin:
It's Basestyles, I actually took it offline because I didn't even want to pay the Heroku bill of 20 bucks a month anymore. But I think on my personal website it's still, listed as a project.
I basically just stopped that one.
You decided to stop doing that project because you didn't get the marketer's right?
Erwin:
I realized that I wasn't the right person for this industry and this product. You know, after 10 months of doing this. If you can't make something work, I got bored too, but then if you can't make it work after 10 months, then honestly, it's probably, especially if you're independent and alone, like I was a solo entrepreneur, it's just best to call it quits.
And you also believe that there should be a founder product fit, right? Rather than product market fit, there should be a founder product fit.
Erwin:
Yeah, which I thought I had. And I was passionate about the solution turned out, I was passionate about the solution, about what I built, but I wasn't that passionate about the problem.
Not enough anyway, to know how to sell this or know how to approach it.
And after that time, did you get demotivated or how was your moral situation?
Erwin:
Yeah, not so good to say the least. I was not very motivated to continue and the money was running out. What I used to do was freelance a bit and then run off my savings to do one, one project.
Once I needed to, you know, once my runway was small, I would start freelancing a little bit again. And I wasn't one of these cycles where I just ran out of money and I was like, either I can work hard again and then try another couple of months with the base styles or just stop and find something else.
I see. By the way, how do you find your freelance projects? I mean, do you use a platform or with a friend's recommendation?
Erwin:
Yeah, the last it's usually friend recommendations from a network as a consultant, actually is quite useful. All the people I used to work with in companies, they all spread out to tons of other companies over time.
So my network now is very diverse.
It's easy for you to find some clients because of the network situation. I see. You made some savings and then you made some freelance project and then you focused on a new project, right?
Erwin:
Right. It was August, 2022. Basically giving up on bass dials and I was already freelancing a little bit, by the way.
So I had, you know, I was increasing my runway a little bit slowly. But I was, it was a net positive month. And I decided, you know what, why am I not just, you know, I've been hearing the advice all the time. It's like build fast, validate fast, you know, like throw away the project if it doesn't work.
And there's a difference between understanding and doing it and hearing about it all the time. And I thought I was doing this. But then I looked myself in the mirror, I was like, I'm actually not doing this at all. I'm actually doing the opposite. So maybe I should really stick to what's being said and advocated and just give myself one week, and try to build anything.
And I ended up grabbing an extension that I made to make it easier for me to work on base styles because I was using Tailwind and I wanted to change visually very quickly. And so I made a Chrome extension in the browser for myself to like adjust the styles a bit quicker. And I was like, well, I suppose I can just grab that and.
Make it a bit prettier, make it a bit more usable. And then, you know, maybe release that I gave myself a week to try it. And so I built a prototype very quickly within a week, actually it was like 10 days and then, um, I made a demo video of 15 seconds, give or take, uh, put it on Twitter and what do you know, like it had like 500 likes and I had maybe more than 20 people in my DMS.
Asking how to get it, how to buy it, that they wanted something like this. And that, that was, that was wild. It was like night and day.
So, and then you think that you've found the right product to focus on. Am I right?
Erwin:
Once you start getting DMS of people saying I want this and it's not just, you know, a couple of friends, it's actual strangers. Um, then yeah, I think it's safe to say that you have something interesting going on for sure.
It was all through Twitter. That's where I validated it because, you know, for a developer tool that I built, it's, it's a good place to.
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You said that you started to focus on that project, August 2022. And I think it's almost 2 years.
how is that going? How is your business skills? How do you market the product? Uh, do you use Twitter or any other platforms to promote it?
Erwin:
I started in August and kind of dabbled into it. So September and October were still a little bit. I think honestly I did the challenge at the start of October for that week. And before that I was like, kind of like working on the tool anyway, once it was released, you know, it went very well, the launch went very well.
And, tailscan has been alive now since the first product hunt launch for almost 2 years. And over that period of time, I've had quite a few ups and downs, but I would say there was reasonably consistent growth. I think for the first six months, it was pretty static, like, you know, just continuously climbing linearly.
And then somewhere in June or July, uh, of 2023, I decided to change the pricing model and start offering both monthly and yearly, then a one-time licenses as well.
And that changed like, the recurring revenue situation all of a sudden it shot up like maybe 300 percent more growth than the months before. Um, so, uh, that's one of the lessons that I also learned is like, don't stick to your pricing. Like, you know, just start on what do you think is potentially a bit cheap, but you know, good enough.
And then just see, eventually see if you can increase it and see if people, want to pay for that. And in my case, people did. I think my conversion dropped a tiny bit. But yeah, revenue increased by 300%.
So before that, you only had yearly pricing, right? And you tried the monthly one and the perpetual license.
Erwin: Yess.
What's the source of your growth, Erwin? I mean, how? Your clients find you through twitter or through organic channels. You have a specific source.
Erwin:
I do have multiple sources. So for the first six months, it was mostly Twitter. And I made a couple of those.
And so I made a couple of tweets about, you know, special effects for buttons and stuff like that, like sharing free content, um, to help a little bit. And that was the first six months that worked very well. Um, after about six months, I think the SEO started kicking in. So I wrote a couple of articles and those are ranking pretty well these days, all tailwind related, of course.
And right now I would say 40 percent of my traffic is Twitter, 50 percent is SEO. And the other 10 percent is you know some other sources like newsletter mention or other stuff.
I see. And, did you write all of the articles by yourself or did you find a contractor to write the articles?
Erwin:
No, I have a philosophy.
I simply don't want to spend any money that, I'm earning right now because, you know, at that time I wasn't growing profitable. So I had the philosophy. I want to do everything myself. I want to learn everything myself. Up until the point where I am around profitable and then, you know, potentially after that, whatever money's left, I can start using for contractors.
So I wrote it myself and I did use AI to help me summarize, you know, what I should talk about or like bullet points or a bit of ideation, I suppose. But after that, I pretty much wrote everything myself. Including articles, coding, social media posts, you are one boss wearing multiple hats. I am wearing quite a few hats.
Yes. I see. I see. I mean, and right now, um, how is the situation of Tailscan? Are you going to focus on this project more? And what do you have on your mind?
Erwin:
So I just released Tailscan 2, which was meant to be the Tailwind 2. Uh, the version that was pretty much including everything I wanted to do for Tailscan didn't really work out that way.
So there will still be coming on another version out with the last few things. I will consider the project mostly feature complete after that, unless there are specific developments within Tailwind that I maybe should be supporting in the future, of course, but I want to focus on improving Tailscan.
Um, and then after that, I would, I would like to move into a different product that's related to Taillwind as well, which helps because, you know, there's already some audience and already have existing customers. So it's easier to start that one up. Um, but I think that that's what I'm going to do in the next couple of months.
I see. So you would like to develop a new product for the same or similar personas or clients, right?
Yeah. Because it's better to grow. It's, it will be easy to grow and also generate revenue.
It's this, this stair stairway approach where you have the one product to like build an audience. And then the second project to like, make money. And then the third one to potentially conquer the world or not really, but like, you know, dominate the niche anyway.
And, you have been living in Bali, as you said, for almost five years. And right now, how are the money things on your side? I mean, are you a ramen profitable, or profitable or still using your savings, how is your situation? And yeah, maybe you can share some struggles if you face any.
Erwin:
So right now, as it sits, tailskin is making just over 2,4K a month. Now this is gross, of course. So, you know, to make it net there, I still have to pay some taxes over that, and then it sits after taxes, maybe at like, 2K or so, which is right around the ramen profitability mark for me.
So I can say tailscan is profitable enough, to support my lifestyle, and to support all my spending. The amount of customers has also been slowly increasing. So, you know, I feel like I can, it's a bit more hands-off now, like a little bit more. And, if anyone's interested, they can always look at my open dashboard.
I published all the metrics publicly. It's all there for everyone to see, including the spending that I do business wise, by the way.
So you can also check out what my profit would be, or what products I use.
Let me think about the struggles.
One is to not continue to build features all the time and consider something feature complete. Because we all know this, right? We have a product we use, we love, and it just gets more complex over time to the point where we don't want to use it anymore. And then we find a different product that is simple again, right?
And it's this weird cycle. It's, I think it's good sometimes to consider what you should and shouldn't build for your product and perhaps keep it more simple.
Um, so I think this is more business mindset, right? I think the one you said is much more business mindset because when you, when you in a developer mode, you, you always want to develop, and release new features.
Erwin:
Right. You also need to sell those features. It's your ROI on your time. And that can decrease if you build too many features or too many niche features.
It has the potential to suck up your time more than it's worth.
And then the second struggle is marketing and automating it as much as possible. So marketing takes a lot of time, especially when your personal branding is attached to it. Which is the case for me. I have to still figure out exactly how to, uh, do marketing more efficiently, um, and more continuously so that I can be hands-off a bit more.
I see. Marketing actually for indie hackers, it's one of the challenges.
I have one specific insight that I always tell everyone, and always tell everyone to also really take to heart.
As a programmer, like I really listen to that and that's that there's a huge difference and correlation directly, pretty much of the people that seemingly are successful with products and building it and end up, you know, living off of it, etc. And then the people that try, but fail. And the big difference between those two is:
The ones that make it are writing.
They're actually writing. And, so often do I hear, you know, fellow indie hackers go, but I am writing. And then it turns out to be something like documentation or they're working a day on one headline.
On social media, like human writing is you can't do enough of that for your product and you really have to do more of it. In order to be successful and all the, all the great people that we know, they write. And the reason we know about them is because they write. So they share what they have on their minds.
Yes, but I do know quite a few people that we know in our startup bubble that are quite introverted in real life.
So if you read this and you're like, I'm introverted does not matter. It matters how well you can put your thoughts on the paper. As efficiently and well as possible.
So I have two questions left. I've been one of them is something regarding to advise. You can share to other bootstrappers, uh, because it's a tough journey and, uh, both of the money wise and also mental wise.
So it's good to hear your advises. So advice can be different for each other and, you know, it's. People's choice to apply it to their life, but, you know, to have it on their mind.
Erwin:
Yep. There's, there's two more things. The, the first one is, I would definitely try to look into something called flywheel marketing. Because it's one of these things that I think can help indie hackers massively gain new customers without that much work.
Normally SEO is the holy grail because it's automated marketing. And once it's out there, it just works. Any other marketing doesn't really work that way. Um, or as easily Google ads does, but you know, you have to pay for that. Flywheel marketing is the other way, uh, if your product allows it. For free, get more leads, which is amazing.
And flywheel marketing essentially is, making sure that there's some repetition, some cycle, which attracts more people over time, every iteration that you do, and that could be a link on the bottom of your chat widget, where people go like, I like this chat widget. Let me check what services.
That will be one way. But the other way that I did was post about features continuously on Twitter, with the demo video, take a screenshot of that, put that in my newsletter and mention it in the newsletter. If you want to see the demo video, click here. People would go from my newsletter to Twitter.
They would look at the video or would interact with the post. Because of that, the algorithm would pick it up and show it to more people. And those more people would be subscribing to my newsletter again. So that I would end up with more people. And I would do the cycle a couple of times, to increase my, my newsletter for example.
That's one thing. It's the flywheel that you created. And it's quite underrated, but anyone reading this, definitely look into it. Number two is to take care of your mental health. I always wanted to say this. It's a tough thing to do this. It's one of the hardest things in my opinion to do.
Um, there's a lot of, you know, mental struggles and emotions coming with it sometimes and frustrations. Um, but you know, the one that, that holds on, tries to learn and hold on, and keep on going is the one that wins. The ones that quit, you know, you don't win when you quit. But take care of your mental health, take a break when you need it.
Don't neglect your health, basically, this is first hand experience, it's not worth it. How do you take care of your mental health? Um, so that's why I've been saying for the longest time, I didn't do enough. Um, and so I'm very good at not feeling stress in my head, but putting it inside my body.
And that costs some health issues that are resolved right now. It's fine. I'm good again, but, stress is something very dangerous. And sometimes we don't think about it enough, how bad it can impact you. So, it's very important to have things to, to release stress. And, you know, for some people that will be going to the gym, other people like to hike, other people like to do other sports or maybe have a hobby or whatever.
But never have only work in your life. You have to have some, some other thing that goes to burnout. I was pretty close to it, I luckily didn't, but I was close to it. I feel like.
So, uh, any books, any people or anything that you would like to recommend to other people, like styles, bootstrappers, let's say.
Erwin:
Oh, so this is a weird thing about me. I don't read books, no book recommendations. But, I don't have that many recommendations for who to follow either.
I think it's quite apparent in the space who to follow, but I would say. If you get the chance, then look at the previous episodes on BootstrFRM, you can listen to them back on Twitter. I think that's a solid recommendation, uh, as to who to follow and to learn.
Thank you very much for having me.
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