My Many Failures and Eventual Success (coming soon)
TL;DR
I reflect on the many “failures” I have had with my side projects and talk about my current project and my plans to turn it into a $10k/month passive income side project. Best of all, I am not trying to SELL YOU anything (at least not yet).
Failures
The other day, I was reflecting on all the side projects/startups/experiments/products/businesses that I have worked on over the years. It hit me how many “failures” I have created. Failure is very much relative but in this case I am defining failure as financial failure i.e. the project did not succeed financially on its own. They were successes in other aspects. For example, I learned a ton, they generated other work, they resulted in new clients, they contributed to my portfolio and so on.
Active Projects
I am not going to list all my products here but you can see some of them on my website. The actual total was somewhere north of 35 projects. My latest creations — they have NOT failed yet:
- Frontend Weekly — a curated weekly newsletter of front-end developer news — 1600 subscribers.
- Ember Daily Tips — an (almost) daily tip for Ember JS — 550 subscribers.
- Hire JS — a job board for JavaScript developers — still beta testing.
- Freelancer Bundle — a list of products and services for freelancers, entrepreneurs and startups that will eventually culminate in a kick-ass and deeply discounted bundle.
Reasons For Failure
To be completely honest, I am not 100% sure why they fail. I think there are several possible reasons:
- Lack of focus — I am always working on multiple projects at once PLUS my day job and time for family, friends and myself.
- Bored — I get bored after the initial excitement and slowly stop putting in more effort.
- Bad/No Marketing — I am not marketing enough or not doing it right.
- Market fit — I am simply building something that no one needs.
- Something else — if you know what it is, please save me the time and effort and enlighten me.
Not Giving Up
With all these “failures” one would think, I should have given up a long time ago. You are wrong. I am as determined as before to keep trying and hopefully I will keep learning and improving with each attempt until one day, I have my “overnight” success.
What Is Success?
Success is very personal and subjective. For some, it might be financial gain, for others it could be recognition or fame or something entirely different. For me, I measure success in multiple ways:
- Money. I am not shooting to be a billionaire. I will call it a success if it makes me $2000 per month or more.
- Passive income. The income needs to be 90% passive — I do not want to trade my time for money.
#2 is very important because the whole reason I am doing this is to free up time so I can do the things I love without worrying about my bills.
My Validation System
I have come up with a system to validate my ideas and increase the chance of success. It’s not really rocket science but I don’t want to turn this post into a mini book, so I will be blogging about my system in detail over the next few days/weeks. I will walk you through the steps I take to validate my ideas and test them out for 90 days. After which, I will decide if I should take the idea out back and shoot it or keep going with it.
If you are interested in following along, you can signup here and I will notify you when a new article is out. Do NOT worry, I am not selling anything and will not be spamming you and you can unsubscribe at any time.
Coming Next
In my next article, I will talk about how I setup a domain, email, a website and hire and manage an army of freelancers to create and validate my idea with content marketing, social network marketing and much more. I will be specifically talking about Freelancer Bundle.
Progress
I will also occasionally blog about my progress, including how much money it cost to validate, how much money I am making, how long it took to get it up and running.
Why?
Why am I writing about this publicly? There are many reasons:
- To give back and help others, the same way so many others have helped me.
- To increase my audience and build my email list
- To get feedback from others on things that I might be doing wrong.
Stay tuned for the next article.
Originally published at Emad Ibrahim.
