My goal is to attain wealth by owning assets that earn money while I sleep. To accomplish this goal is difficult because there is lots of competition with many other people who are seeking the same goal. Whatever product or service that people want to pay for at least some business is solving that problem. The options I have are be first, do it better, or select a growing market that has an opening for additional competitors. Being first is a challenge because it requires me to seek product market fit, meaning finding a product that people want. The last two option are not mutually exclusive. I can search for a market that have existing products, which proves the idea has product market fit, then I could either build a better product with own unique positioning.

I recently finished the Almanack book of Naval Ravikant, shared to me by a friend whom I met in Costa Rica. The e-book gave me a better understanding of how to achieve wealth. I must focus on creating things that have leverage. Leverage is like a scaling factor. It multiplies one’s ability to produce business value with the limited amount of effort they put in. According to the book, leverage can be acquired in four forms either labor, capital, code, or media. Both labor and capital require permission meaning that one has either get permission to obtain a lot of capital or have the ability to purchase labor or someone else’s time. On the other had, media and code are permissionless forms of capital, meaning that if I have the skills I can just make the product and it doesn’t require an overwhelming amount of capital.

I seek the latter, because I have the skills to build digital products and I can create content (which I’m doing by practicing now). I choose indy hacking as a the path to get there, meaning that my intention is to seek a lifestyle business, not a fast growing multi-billion dollar company. (Admittedly, I like the idea of being a founder of a fast growing startup, but I don’t like the idea of having lots of pressure to grow fast.) Moreover, I find satisfaction in building something that many people want and find business value.

I have built many to digital products such as Effct and VoiceRhythm. My failure is communication and marketing finding the right channel. I have read many books about the process, but reading is different from actually doing. Also, my I have a fear of missing out makes me feel unfocused on a single idea. I think to myself what happens if I choose the wrong product to focus my time and effort on marketing for a year and not get any traction.

I decided for the next couple months to focus one of my products I believe in VoiceRhythm. I had the idea for VoiceRhythm many years ago, after listening to a WNY podcast on challenges with marketing a podcast on social media. With social media such as publishing on Twitter, for example, one can’t easily post audio and share; However, audio merged with an image to create a video works better. The audiogram can be used as a trailer led to the full content.

I believe in VoiceRhythm, because I know the target market, podcasters, and there are a few competitors who have proven that people are willing to pay for such a product. The challenge is finding feature where I can position the product as unique and finding a channel that I could market the product.

I built the product during the pandemic as part of a suite of other software products. My idea for marketing was to post it on a 3rd party related sites and watch the sales arrive with little effort. I had trouble getting the oauth2 working and I gave up on that part. (I should return back to getting that to work.) Took me a while, but I eventually completed the product to a stable state. I have this anxiety. After not working on something for a while I procrastinate, days become weeks, weeks become months and I imagine getting things done, but nothing happens.

A few weeks ago decided to a micro-conf Mastermind group. The reason I joined the Mastermind group is to become a member with a group of people who share a similar goal to get traction on a product that I believe in. So it’s accountability and mentoring by group. I’ll document my feedback and report my progress in future blog posts.