Forem: Alex Bezhan

How to wisely invest your time and money in your startup. Here is what options I see

Alex Bezhan — Sat, 16 Jan 2021 21:19:29 +0000

How much do you value your time when working on your startup? Let's say you can be earning $10k/month as a full-time software developer. But instead, you quit your day job and spend all your time working on your startup. And you do all kinds of stuff: from marketing to finances to programming, etc.

Does it mean you put these $10k/month in your startup? Meaning you could be earning your salary on a job, but you quit, so it means you invest this cost of opportunity in your startup.

Let's look at this from another perspective.

Let's say you don't quit your job and keep working full-time and spend these $10k(or whatever your salary is) on hiring a bunch of cheap overseas employees(but still high quality) and let them work on your startup. And you spend 1-2 hours a day coordinating the team.

Will the project move faster? Will the ROI of money/time spent be higher in this case?

Honestly, I've tried both ways and still don't have a strong stance on this.

I would say: "it depends." It depends on the project itself, whether the team can drive it on autopilot, and how much of your involvement is needed to move with a reasonable speed. And how much of the project work requires your unique expertise.

What would you choose for your startup?

Keep working on your day job and invest your salary into hiring a team and spend 1-2 hours a day coordinating the project?
Or quit your day job and work on the startup by yourself? Other option?

What do you think? Tell me in the comments or let's discuss on Twitter thread

How I got 6804 views on DEV for $8. It's so simple I can't believe almost nobody is doing this...

Alex Bezhan — Thu, 14 Jan 2021 19:16:03 +0000

Let's dive right into good stuff...

I wrote a post about my 5-figure side-hustle and posted it on Jan 10th.

I launched Facebook campaign to drive traffic to the post and spent $58.14 on ads

Ads drove 775 clicks to the post averaging $0.08 per click. Ads traffic boosted my post rating and increased organic reach on DEV to 6804 views.

My Twitter account got +51 followers. Even though the account is almost empty.

My post made it to TOP 7 of the week and DEV.to sent me $50 gift.

Math results:

TOP post of the week
6804 views on DEV.to with 293 likes and 21 comments
+51 Twitter followers
$58 ads spent
$50 gift from DEV
$58(spent)-$50(gift)=$8 total cost

Takeaways:

Write a decent post. Publish it on DEV
Drive enough ads traffic to the post so that it becomes TOP post of the week. If the post doesn't take off with $10 in ads, stop everything and write another post, which hopefully will do better. Profit.
Put a CTA at the end of the post, so it converts to followers on Twitter

My CTA(giveaway):

Go follow me on Twitter and send me a DM. I will give away $50 gift for DEV.to shop to a random follower.

How I launched a 5-figure business while working as a full-time software dev. And how you can do the same

Alex Bezhan — Sun, 10 Jan 2021 20:44:40 +0000

As a software developer, I’ve been dreaming about having my own “passive income” for years. I was fascinated by this idea of money coming to my bank account while I sleep. This post will tell you my story of how I started my first business while working full-time. And why you can do it too.

Decided to find a co-founder

I tried to build a side hustle many times and failed miserably. Then I decided — okay, if I can’t make it on my own, I need to find another crazy guy and partner up with him, and maybe then we can achieve something.

I figured that I needed to visit places where other founders go and meet them. And since I’m quite an introvert, I decided that going to webinars is good enough.

I went on a webinar where a speaker talked about this super-duper cool system for launching startups that he had developed. I didn’t listen to this sh*t. Instead, I just wrote in a chat that I was looking for a co-founder.

This way, I found one guy who responded in the chat room. We had a short call, and the next day we met in a cafe, talked for a bit, and decided to try and build something together.

Dedicate 2 hours every day. No matter what.

We both worked full-time as software developers and decided to dedicate 2 hours every day to work on our project remotely over Zoom. We didn’t have an idea for a project yet. But we committed 2 hours, no matter what, to try and do something, anything that would bring us closer to our financial independence.

Now I realize that I was fortunate to find a great business partner from the very beginning, in hindsight.

I heard a lot of bad stories about finding co-founders. But yeah, take it for what it is. You can try and find someone or just do it yourself. At the end of the day, it’s your decision and your life. I’m just telling my story.

Hiring a guy to help us get started.

From the beginning, we were struggling a lot. Then we decided — f*ck it, let’s hire a mentor. We decided to go back to the webinar guy and hire him. He sold us some video lessons where he explained how to pick an idea. And here is how…

We listed a bunch of things that we were experts at. Then we chose one that had the best chance of success and customers with money. It was Amazon FBA. My partner is an expert on that. He sells some stuff on Amazon, not overly successful, but enough to know all the business’s ins and outs.

The “mentor” sold us this Google spreadsheet called “Launch System” that we used to launch our first business. It’s real simple, but it worked for us. Here is how it looks:

Next, we listed 3–4 problems that we saw that the Amazon sellers experienced regularly. We then went on Facebook groups with Amazon sellers and started private messaging people. We sent Message 1(M1), then M2, M3, and so on.

Message 1(M1) — figuring out problems that a potential client has
M2 — what issues are the most urgent and painful?
M3 — would you use our service that fixes this problem precisely?
M4 — asking for an email
M5 — offering the service and asking for money

We were sending 30 messages a day. After messaging over 100 people, we got bored and hired a student VA to do it for us.

After 3 weeks, we have messaged about 650 people, and we picked a problem with the most demand among Amazon sellers. And I’m going to tell you exactly what the problem was.

We solved this problem precisely…

The problem was getting reviews on Amazon FBA products. Reviews are a crucial factor in ranking your products on Amazon. So every seller needs them.

We decided to build a solution that could bring reviews to sellers in a more or less ethical and ‘white’ method. I cannot tell you exactly what solution we built. It was a combination of manual and automated work involving Facebook ads and driving traffic to Amazon pages, selling the product, and converting it to review after some time.

How we launched and the hardest part of business

After having built this ‘system’ and testing it on my partner’s Amazon product, we decided that we were ready to launch. We sent out a message offering a life-time -30% deal to our launch list, and some people agreed to test our service and became our first customers.

The hardest part was coming next. We were continually measuring and adjusting our system until it started producing more or less stable results. It was really hard. Here I learned that business is a slow and tedious cycle of doing, measuring how it went, and improving so that it will be better the next time it will be better.

If you skipped the previous paragraph, I will repeat it. I want you to internalize it:

Business is a slow and boring cycle of doing, then measuring how it went, and improving so that it will be better the next time.

Hiring a COO(Chief Operating Officer)

After getting to a more or less stable process, we learned that we were not good at building a stable, repeatable business. It was working okay, but we knew it could work better.

So we hired a guy who eventually became our COO. He was working as a sales rep at the time, and we knew him for 2 years before that, so we could trust him. He agreed to quit his job, and started running our business full-time. We paid him in equity.

And stopped spending our time and switched to strategic planning instead.

Fast forward 2.5 years and the business grew 300% and is bringing a stable 5 figure annual revenue. Yes, not millions, but hey, I personally don’t do anything on it. I just show up once a week for a 1–2 hour strategic planning meeting, and that’s all. And this is the model I am using when building new businesses.

Takeaways:

Everybody can build a business while working full-time.
Find a co-founder. Go where startup people hang out(webinars, slack, etc.) and tell everybody that you are looking for a co-founder. Check if you share similar views on the world.
Pick a niche where you or your co-founder are an expert.
Ask people in your niche what problems they have.
Block at least 2 hours every day no matter what and work on your business. Be patient, don’t rush. It’s a long-term game. Quick money is only on info-products sales pages.
Build a list of potential customers and solve a problem that has the most demand.
Find all the hiccups and glitches in your business and fix them one by one. If you are not good at it — hire someone to do it. You can pay in equity.

Want to hear more from me? You can follow me on Twitter as I will continue my journey to financial independence and self-improvement.

PS: If you liked this post, give it some hearts for good luck :)

Info products suck - gain your own experience

Alex Bezhan — Sat, 09 Jan 2021 21:34:54 +0000

The best way to learn is through your own reference experience.

Info gurus will tell you that the best way is to buy their stuff. Even though it is a good option, it's not the best one.

If you want to become great at what you do, you have to be willing to do what most people don't. Go out, do the thing on your own and gain your own experience.

Info products are overrated.

Looking back at how many info products I bought(a lot), I can say that I only got value from a small fraction of information. And the more products I consume, the less importance I give to them, the less effort I put in.

Over time info products stop working.

The most important part of an info product is not the product itself.

It's you practicing and implementing stuff. Practice drives your progress.

Do. Reflect on how it went.

Reflection is underrated. It's essential. Let me repeat. Reflection is essential. Reflecting on your progress gives you an x10 advantage easily.

Reflection is hard because you cannot buy it. It has to come from within. It requires effort. The good thing is that it's a muscle that you can train, and you just become good at it over time.

Doing it on your own makes you see what others don't.

When you learn and practice by yourself, it forces you to discover things on your own. You are not anchored by a group think.

You approach a problem from unique angles that may not be seen before by others. You gain a unique perspective on the situation.

It makes you different.

Explore unique angles.
Have a unique perspective.
Be different. Be creative. Be you.

Write about it.

Writing about what you do is a great way to reflect. It forces you to reconstruct what you did and how well you performed.

Writing it in a way that other people can understand forces you to structure your thought process. It will make you see the gaps in your experience. Maybe you did something wrong. Perhaps you forgot something. And all of that becomes clear when you write about it.

Takeaways:

Practice drives your progress. Not info products
Reflection is essential
Write about what you do: start a blog, tweet, whatever Want to hear more from me? You can follow me on Twitter as I will continue my journey to financial independence and self-improvement.

Want to hear more from me? You can follow me on Twitter as I will continue my journey to financial independence and self-improvement.

Lesson learned: How UpWork disabled my account

Alex Bezhan — Fri, 08 Jan 2021 05:02:58 +0000

Recently I decided to increase my rating on UpWork and boost my visibility on the platform.

I decided to make my UpWork profile specifically targeted on Scraping/Crawling/Data extraction, since I’ve got a lot of experience with it. So I updated my profile like this:

I also lowered my rate to $20/hr, since I wanted to get as much gigs as possible to earn more reviews from each.

After that I went on Reddit and wrote a post offering my automation help in exchange for reviews:

Results: the post got 9 upvotes and 5 comments.

The post took me 5 minutes to write.

And even though moderators removed the post:

… I still got private messages from Reddit users who read the post and were interested:

Results: 4 potential clients to work with via UpWork.

Some clients wanted to pay, and some wanted to work in exchange for a review. Nice :)

So I was really happy with how a simple post got me the clients. But the next day I’ve got a “happy” email from UpWork notifying me that my account was suspended:

It was such a disappointment to lose my profile since I’ve earned $30k solely from the UpWork.

So it turns out UpWork is monitoring the Internet and looking for people who try to do work in exchange for reviews.

Takeaways?

Never offer your work in exchange for reviews publicly. That’s my mistake that I wanted to share with you. Learn from it and don’t risk your own account.

Want to hear more from me about freelancing and getting to financial freedom as software developer? You can follow me on Twitter as I will continue documenting my journey.

P.S. If you liked this, give me some hearts for good luck :)