Because making is not selling.
It took a bit more than a year to have enough logos to launch, design the product and code the platform. In part because we were such perfectionists (which we aren't as much anymore).
But launching was only the beginning, and soon the real challenge presented itself: how to find customers. Had to figure out a distribution and marketing strategy which we had no experience with, all the while improving the product. And this is why it's now been 5 years.
Then I started being active on indiehackers.com and reddit to first ask for feedback, then eventually sharing my learnings and lesson in blog post format. This showed promise and got us to a couple sales per week as other founders got curious about us and then considered us when they needed a logo.
Eventually what really helped is twitter. I started tweeting in summer 2021 and talking about what I was going through, and noticed people cared and it led to more traffic to our site. So I decided to go all in and dedicated hours per day on it, trying to bring value and grow. After a few months we 10x revenue and it hasn't came down since (although it fluctuates).
The other thing from twitter is that I met so many people in the industry, this led to hundreds of SEO backlinks from people's blogs writing about us from interviews, podcasts, recommendation articles and so on. This was really the spark that made us go from invisible to visible.
Now this year the big push is to write high-quality blog posts about branding for startups. Hopefully to get some SEO traffic and grow sales even further.
This is why I do it as well, at least in part. The other part is that I get to control what projects I get to work on.
I find it very interesting that you value 'any startup' more than owning your own flat for example
Took us 6 years, we are revenue positive.
When I look at where we would be if I had kept the job, we would be homeowners, be able to buy new clothes regularly, go to restaurants and take awesome vacations a few times a year.
But the missing thing would be autonomy. The reason why I’m willing to sacrifice so much is because i fundamentally don’t like having to follow orders from a boss or manager. I’m arrogant enough to think i know better, and want to prove it by actually building my own thing.
Regardless of how silly it sounds on a financial level, the calculation makes sense once we look at the sense of ownership and autonomy over our own work. It’s worth more to me than any money I could make.
Ps: if you’re curious, the startup is logology.co