What am I doing today
April 27, 2024
Nevo David
Today, I thought about making a different newsletter that might inspire you and give you some ideas on what you can do with your Product by telling you what I am doing today.
In 2021, I worked on a startup called Linvo (a LinkedIn automation tool). It’s not open-source (even though I open-sourced some of it later)
I made a terrible mistake; I worked on the Product without income. It caused me stress, and every day that I didn’t get a new subscription was a day that I lost money. So many of my moves were short-term because I needed money.
I am not sure about your country, but in Israel, there is something called “minus.” It’s basically like a loan, just sugarcoating it by writing that you are in “-1000₪ to the bank,” I was in a big minus and previous loans.
My stress level was on the roof, and I promised myself I would never do that again.
Employee again
Fast forward, I was hired by Novu and worked there for two years.
During my last year at Novu, I opened a newsletter about open-source marketing, and up until today, I was very consistent with it - 1 newsletter per week every Saturday (people are already kind of expecting it)
When I left Novu, I already had too many people who wanted me to consult them every month. I onboarded three customers: Taipy, CopilotKit, and Wing, and today, they all pay me more than what I made in Novu, with fewer hours of work.
I schedule all my consultations between Monday and Thursday so I can work on other projects on other days.
So, what am I up to today?
Consulting is where the money comes from; so far, I have managed to take some companies to the next level, so I am super happy with this. Working with the companies also pushes me to learn new things and promote them in the newsletter.
Gitroom platform: Everything I teach in my newsletter I try to implement in my platform; so far, I have one “mercy” subscription from a customer who’s not using it 🙈 that’s alright—it’s all part of the plan with the new features coming up soon. However, I am considering moving the platform from the free tier to the trial because I can’t afford to onboard unlimited customers who don’t pay me—I am not VC-backed.
Growchief and Clickvote were supposed to be projects I wanted to work on, but then I neglected them. (Maybe I have ADHD.) I start with a lot of new stuff and then throw it away. I am considering converting both of them to paid templates on websites like Envato, from which people are making tons of money. I also really like Marc Lou. He is making around $120k monthly selling a boilerplate. I mean, WTF? 😂
YouTube Channel—This is the hardest thing at the moment. I record two videos per week and send them to an editor, not to mention that I need to create a thumbnail picture. At the moment, it gets fewer views than DEV.to, but I genuinely believe that YouTube is the platform with the most immense growth.
💡 PRO TIP: I found a good Fiverr editor. I pay him $80 per video, and I get the highest possible quality (it’s like magic). Tip for life: Delegate, delegate, delegate. I usually delegate simple tasks like Video editing, Figma to HTML conversions, and designers.
💡 PRO TIP 2: I convert people from DEV articles to YouTube. It works like a charm.Weekly DEV article—My DEV articles still get between 8k and 15k views per week, so why not use them? I like to feature different companies every week.
Gitroom Course (soon): Everything I know in one course and a little bit more tactically. I will show you how I do different stuff. it will probably be priced like all the other course builders—$150 for the course and a 50% discount for the newsletter, scarcity, and urgency, and all that sh** 🫠
Affiliate marketing - I want to start pushing deals through Gitroom to different open-source companies, so if you have any affiliate platforms, let me know. And if you don’t have and want (and use Stripe), I recommend something like Rewardful.
Gitroom community—it’s this newsletter and Discord. Trying to make it more lively is hard, man.
Saying no to customers
Too many people offered me to do some service-based business for them, and obviously, a lot of money is on the line things like:
Writing articles
Launching products
Money-wise, it’s good to do it.
Fun-wise, I hate it - it requires me to scale 🙈
I am working too much
People are telling me that I work too much - I agree.
Last week, I visited South Korea (Seoul) and learned about something called “walking” or re-learning it because I sit all day 🙈
It was a really lovely experience; everybody looked young, and there were nice locations. I don’t like the food. I hate Viniger. Sorry for all the olives/pickles eaters 🥹
I hope you like my personal newsletter - it’s kind of my first one, and maybe I will do more in the future. See you next week! Check out the last video from this week:
