But is there an overnight success?
We hope it's already widely known that there is no such thing as an "overnight success." Success, if you want to call it that at all, is just a step in a much larger process.
The big valuation. The grand exit. Reaching $50K MRR.
Whatever the "success" is, it's just a result, or rather a point in time, of the small steps this person took, starting from birth.
Like how Josh Pigford sold Baremetrics for $4,000,000 in cash after working on it for 7 years. What we usually don't see is the 51 projects (not to call them all startups) that came before Baremetrics.
We’ll walk you through how Adam and Steve started Tailwind and made $4M+ so you'd understand what's behind "an overnight success."
In 2015, Adam told Steve about a side project idea (website where companies can share links with their team and outsiders can subscribe). They were both excited and Adam took a week off to build a prototype.
He started to make decisions about the tech stack. One of the first questions was, which CSS framework to use? So Adam would have normally used Bootstrap, but as they had just replaced Less processor with Sass, and Adam liked Less processor more, he didn't use Bootstrap and spent the initial week building his own small CSS library.
Then, they got busy with other projects and as it often happens, they lost the initial excitement. But on every new side project, Adam kept copy-pasting these styles from his own small CSS library, using them as a starting point.
A few years and many side projects later, Adam and Steve started yet another side project called KiteTail (Checkout-as-a-Service for Developers).
They were used to building in public and sharing everything along the way, so this was naturally something that they continued to do. And people started to ask about the CSS framework.
And then, 5 years later in 2020, they launched TailwindUI, making $500,000 in three days.
We’re telling this story to show you that building a microstartup is nothing more than living your life and letting life play itself out as it does.
Yes, TailwindUI made half a million dollars in three days, but it wasn't planned like this. Adam and Steve just lived their lives, started and abandoned side projects.
We know many more stories just like these, but we’ll leave them to the next time. It's always about how life plays itself out. Want to succeed with a microstartup? Have an intention to do so, live your life and it will happen.
When we see that overnight success stories aren't a thing, and it usually takes years to make the founder that reaches $5,000/month in a year, what's there left to do?
There's only one thing left to do – to work on something that you enjoy and find the joy in working with it, not the big valuation or grand exit. They will come, but that's not the goal.