Let me give you the best advice you've ever had. Go to your manager right now. Then tell him to go fuck himself! When you've done that, setup a company and become a solo entrepreneur. You can thank me later.
Why? Because it's never been easier to be a solo entrepreneur. I would know, I've tried it for 30 years and failed every single time until recently.
My Journey
In 2021 I was laid off, together with my entire software development department. A month later I had VC funding for a startup. Initially it was a dream, and I made more money as the CEO of a startup than I did in the job I lost - But with time it turned into a nightmare.
For almost 2 years I tried to make my startup work, but it was impossible. My VC guy would spend 2 hours on the phone with me, every single day, asking the same stupid questions 5 times every day. He was literally driving me insane. In April of 2023 I finally lost it and told the guy to go fuck himself. A couple of months later I had doubled my income working as a solo entrepreneur. Today I've quadrupled my income.
Since I quit working for others some 3 years ago, I've quadrupled my income. According to my current projections I'll be looking at 5x income in a month and 10x income in a year. Today I'll buy myself a Mercedes SLK 😊
Warning
I'm not saying it'll be easy. It's crazy work. Since I started my own company I've basically been working around the clock. I literally work every single hour I'm awake, but I work for myself, so I don't mind that much.
I'm also an experienced software developer, so I can create and maintain my own IP. This allows me to create a PaaS platform through which I deliver software and services. My income model is also recurring and based upon subscriptions, so every time I get a new client, I increase my monthly recurring revenue. Basically ...
As long as I can get more new customers every single month than I am losing, my income steadily increases every single month
Since I am developing my platform, and making it better every single day, most of my clients are choosing to stay with me. I'm loosing about 5 clients per year, and I get about 4 new clients every single month. So my growth is 10x larger than my losses.
How?
I've got an accountant, and I've got half a dozen servers at DigitalOcean. In addition I spend some few hundred bucks on OpenAI API tokens per month. My monthly expenses are roughly $1,000 per month in total. I spend very little on ads, maybe some $500 per month, and most of my new clients are coming in either as referrals from existing clients or through organic traffic.
In addition I'm using Stripe to invoice clients, so the overhead of "running the company" is almost non-existent. This allows me to focus all my energy on improving my value proposition, and I work from home.
I've got zero employees, and the only ones "working for me" are partners that are re-selling my stuff to their clients in return for revenue share. Since I don't have employees I don't need an office and I don't need to "manage people". In fact, every time I log on to LinkedIn and I see somebody saying stuff such as; "Thank you to our amazing team for pulling this off", I am tempted to comment as follows ...
Fuck teamwork! Teamwork is retarted and leads to mediocrity!
Seriously, Teamwork is Retarted
Let's talk about teamwork for a while. But before I explain why it's retarded, realise that Five9 has 2,500 employees according to their LinkedIn profile. They probably paid Gartner millions of dollars to have Gartner lie about them and claim they're "the leader in customer experience". In addition they're probably paying golfers and other sponsored athletes the same amount every single year to "promote Five9." Still they're literally retarted, and my product as a solo entrepreneur, is 1,000 times better. I would know, I've measured.
I don't mean to pick on Five9 specifically, the same difference can be seen regardless of who you compare my products with. SalesForce? Retarted! HubSpot? Retarted! Zendesk? Retarted! Intercom? Retarted.
Every single Fortune 500 company competing with me is basically delivering retarted products measured on neutral parameters
In fact, the only competitor remotely capable of delivering anything even resembling my quality is CustomGPT, but even Alden hasn't been able to keep up with me - And after he started hiring dozens of people, his velocity on features and quality has been reduced by 95%. Today I've got "a bajillion" features they don't have.
Why Teamwork leads to Mediocrity
When one of my clients wants a new feature, I ALT+TAB from WhatsApp into my IDE. Then I start hammering my keyboard, and some 5 minutes later I'm done. I QA test it myself, triple check my code, before I deploy and create a new release. Then I update the client's POD / cloudlet, and I triple test again. If I find bugs, I fix these and continue the process. When I'm done, I deploy the updates to all Kubernetes PODs next Sunday.
On average it takes me 5 to 50 minutes to implement a new feature, and I can move it from my backlog into the "done" column sometimes in 5 minutes
If I had "a team" the process would be as follows:
- Write up a use case explaining what I need
- Contact my program manager and inform him of the task
- My PM would write it up for the next grooming session, which is probably 2 weeks down the road
- A couple of weeks later, my entire software development department spends some 20 minutes discussing the feature in their next grooming session
- Put it into a sprint according to their priorities
- A couple of additional weeks, and the sprint is finally over
- The feature can be QA tested, and if it passes all tests, it can finally be deployed
Now I've taken what's a 5 minute job for me personally, I've added cognitive noise to my entire company, some 30+ people maybe - And they've spent a total of some 250+ hours on the same job that would take me 5 minutes to simply do myself. In addition, I'm paying these employees on average maybe $4,000 per month. This results in a financial overhead that I somehow must send to my customers to avoid bleeding money. Seriously, I am not kidding ...
You hire "a team" you've got a 100% guarantee of mediocrity becoming the final outcome. And you're ending up spending 1,000x as much time to deliver 1% of the quality
The Mythical Man Month
Fred Brooks explained the mechanics of the above almost 60 years ago. Today almost 60 years later, nobody believes him. If you ask the average CTO today what needs to be done to increase velocity, his answer will always be the same; "Hire more people" - Even though 60 years of research have proven again and again how hiring more people reduces velocity!
One man can do in one month what two men can do in two months
The above being one of his most famous quotes. Seriously, fuck teamwork!
Synergies, the Holy Grail to Profit
A couple of weeks ago a new client told me he wanted to build a SaaS company. I told him I could leverage my existing IP, in particular the AI Expert System, and deliver the whole project for about $10,000, in addition to an enterprise subscription plan. I told him a criteria for doing it this way was me keeping the IP, but we'd sign an agreement preventing me from using the end result to compete with him.
He was happy and I was happy. And since I get to keep the IP, his product will continue improving long after his project is delivered. From his perspective he's literally getting a SaaS company built from the grounds up for $10,000 in total development costs. From my perspective, I get paid to work on my own IP. If this guy was to go to others and ask them to provide a quote for what I'm delivering to him, he'd end up having to pay maybe $1,000,000 instead of $10,000.
The guy saved 99% of his software development costs by choosing to work with me
The point about the above is that I get to implement a "generic SaaS for hire" type of product, which I can resell to others wanting similar SaaS companies in the future. He gets the additional advantage of that I can spread out the costs associated with developing his solution amongst potentially 100+ clients over time.
He gets a SaaS company entirely built for him "from scratch", for an initial investment of $10,000 and hosted for $498 per month - While I get an additional value proposition I can sell to others, over and over again.
The only real alternative for the guy was to hire an outsourcing company. This company would easily have to spend months delivering, and they'd need a Kubernetes engineer, a frontend developer, a backend developer, a prompt engineer since it's an AI solution, a program manager, and a QA test engineer. These guys would probably have to spend somewhere between 9 to 18 months, and the TCO for delivering something such as the above would easily cost him a million dollars. In fact, you could hire low-cost employees from Bangladesh for $15 per hour, and you'd still have to pay 100 times as much as the final price I gave him.
Outperforming Bangladesh on Outsourcing
When I deliver a quote, I always tell my clients that it'll be $170 per hour. That's at least 5 times as expensive as hiring a software developer out of Bangladesh. Still, I'm able to consistently underbid low-cost software developers again and again and again. The reasons are simple, when I start a new project I'm already 80% done!
This allows me to deliver quotes for custom AI software development that's consistently at least 90% less expensive than whatever everybody else out there can deliver the same system for. And since I only do jobs where I can host the end result, and I charge for hosting, my monthly recurring revenue is slowly increasing for every single job I accept. So once the job is done, I've increased my monthly recurring revenue by a couple of hundred bucks. I can do about 1 to 5 such jobs per month, resulting in some 30% revenue growth per month in theory (and in practice).
Seriously, Quit your Job!
I told a friend of mine a couple of days ago that I could probably bring this model of working up into the low 6 digits monthly income before I'd have so many clients I can't handle anymore. I'm currently at 5 digits monthly revenue. At that point the amount of customisations will be much less, since I'd have a mountain of IP that I can leverage, over and over again. But at that point, my overhead of supporting my clients would be so large I can't handle anymore. Acccording to my current financial projections I'll reach that point in 24 to 36 months.
Of course, once I've got 6 digits monthly recurring income, why would I need to hire people? At that point, I could simply spend 40 hours per week supporting my existing clients, and I'd be making 100 times as much per month as I used to earn before I was laid off. So I'm not hiring when I've got too much work to be able to do it myself, I'll simply stop growing. Maybe onboard more partners to do revenue share?
I'm in a "special position" here since I'm a software developer. If you're not able to create software, you need to find alternatives. Remember that guy I told you about that I'm building a SaaS company for? Well, the end result of that project implies I get to deliver "pre-fabricated AI SaaS companies", where you can create your own AI SaaS company, charging for access to ChatGPT and OpenAI. A crucial point in this equation is that you get to feed ChatGPT your own data, and you can also integrate with your own AI Agents logic.
In a way you can think about this as "being able to monetise your GPTs"
The way it works, is that we're using OpenID Connect to allow people to authenticate with Google and other OIDC providers. Once they're authenticated, you've got their email address, and you can immediately start marketing to them. They get to ask your AI chatbot some 5 to 20 questions for free every single day, and once they've exhausted their daily free questions, a payment form automatically pops up and tells them they'll need to pay to continue using the system. When they pay, they're creating a subscription, which will automatically deduct the subscription fee once every month from them - Resulting in that you've got monthly recurring revenue from them using your AI. Below is a screenshot of the system.
You'll pay some $5 per month for their OpenAI tokens, and make some $29 per month in revenue from them. And the only thing you need to get started is a great idea and some custom data to create an AI chatbot from. I will of course help you for my hourly fee, $170 per hour, and I can probably set up everything for you in some handful of hours. Implying your total cost for starting your own SaaS becomes roughly ...
- $498 per month for a cloudlet
- Somewhere between $340 and $5,000 in setup, depending upon how complex your AI SaaS needs to be
- A couple of days of QA testing and configuring the system for you to setup a Stripe account, and configure your OIDC providers
You'd probably be looking at a maximum of 3 days and a total initial cost of less than $1,000, at which point you'd have an AI chatbot SaaS company, where you can sell subscriptions to people needing access to your specialised AI Expert System. There's a joke in the startup community which goes as follows.
- Great idea
- ???
- Catching! Be rich!
The thing is kind of funny because nobody knows what step number 2 is, and it's individual for every single entrepreneur. Well, if you're dedicated and hard working, I'm here to tell you we've figured it out - Assuming you're building an AI chatbot SaaS company. The steps are as follows.
- Great idea
- High quality data + AINIRO + Market like Crazy
- Catching! Be rich!
Literally, I'm not kidding! And this is a window of opportunity in time and space, because none of the big guys have any idea what so ever about how to deliver great quality - Because they believe in "team work". I'm here to tell you ...
Fuck Teamwork! It's ridiculous! You can do it alone!
If I can outperform every single Fortune 500 company on AI, then certainly you can deliver an AI chatbot based upon your own custom data and outperform ChatGPT and charge for subscriptions.
Wrapping up
If you're willing to take a chance, and you've got a great idea for an AI chatbot, I'm here to tell you that you can make money on selling access to it using our platform. It'll be hard work, and I can't guarantee you that you'll succeed. Maybe you'll regret everything 3 months down the road, but I suspect you'll regret it even more if you don't try.
None of the Fortune 500 behemots can do it, obviously! Don't believe me? Follow the above links to see the type of junkware they're delivering. You can do it however, as long as you don't fall for the "teamwork bullshit", and you're willing to do it alone. Below is the recipe.
- Quit your job!
- Contact us and let's get started!
- Then whenever some outsourcing company contacts you on LinkedIn with "resources for hire", then tell em' to go fuck themselves!
- Catching! Buy a Mercedes SLK! 😊
Teamwork fucking sux! Fuck Teamwork, you can do it alone!
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