"I feel embarrassed to say it, but I have been working on my app GreenBooks (a personal finance app) for the last ten years." – 🌱 GreenBooks ($1.5k/mo) by Yi Lin
Time flies! Sometimes we get caught building our projects without reaching the goals we’ve set for ourselves.
And this is the reason why "The Microfounder Way" is to:
🛠 build something minimal
💰 monetize from day one
📈 marketing > features
The idea is to not get stuck building your product for years without finding the product-market fit and making enough money to go full-time on it.
This means that when this particular product doesn’t work out, it’s fine, you move on to the next one. Becoming a microfounder is not about succeeding with your first idea, but the idea is to succeed with at least one startup as a solo developer.
And more often than not, the first startup is not the one that "succeeds."
But this doesn’t mean that you should abandon your projects quickly and without much thought. Sometimes it takes time.
In general, microfounders try to live without deadlines. It’s part of the lifestyle. But sometimes, having a deadline for a project can be a good way to force yourself to focus. It doesn’t mean you have to abandon the project after the deadline, you can still decide based on the progress you’ve made.
Yi Lin is now focusing more on marketing and this was also his advice for others when we asked him:
"Definitely have a marketing mindset from the very beginning. Although building a great product is important, you need to spend at least 50% of you time thinking about how to get the word out about your product." – 🌱 GreenBooks ($1.5k/mo) by Yi Lin
We’ll be keeping an eye on Yi Lin’s progress with GreenBooks on MicroFounder. The plan is to reach $4k/mo to become ramen profitable in the next 6 months with the $16k+ savings (that he keeps track of on GreenBooks of course).
