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.
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.
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.
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 🙈
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:
Grow your open-source community