I have way too many valuable skills, interests, and passions. I'm only monetizing one of them as a full-time job.

Leverage my knowledge in web development and marketing to build a one-person business system to help me monetize everything else. 

Start implementing AI and Automation tools into my day-to-day workflows.

Learn about marketing and sales along the way. 

A set of tools and workflows that I can use to deploy, market, and monetize any type of digital product

Focusing on the ability to deliver digital products and services, as they are the easiest to build, market, and sell. 

Dropshipping physical products is still not out of the question but might come later as an add-on to the brand, rather than the main focus of the business.

🔥 Indie Business Hacking - Right up my alley

Start something from scratch and measure the results I can get on a prototype.

After the results are validated it's time to polish, improve, and automate the system, and apply it on a larger scale.

After brainstorming over many topics and markets, I decided to go with a Foodie brand.

I love food, everyone loves food. Actual literal "starving crowd"

I can leverage countless copyright-free stock photos for content

I can leverage GPT to write me countless recipes for all types of cuisines

I can leverage any type of existing diet and meal plans as affiliate products

This way I can focus purely on applying what I'm learning about marketing and growth 👍

Metrics and Analytics - Google Analytics, MS Clarity

I'll be engineering a full stack software to support all of this, in the meantime, I want to get familiar with marketing and advertising tools, schedule and automatize as much of that as possible, and grow the brand while I develop the software.

The Setup

After the first couple of months, I was able to:

Build a full-stack software engine that can fit any digital product

Of course with a ton of technical and life setbacks along the way. Here are some lessons I learned 👇

Without going into much technical detail, here's what the first version of my software can cover:

And that's the minimum viable product that I need to be able to service.

The food brand prototype was perfect to dip my toes in social media marketing, and the idea was to have a website for recipes and sell affiliate products on the side.

Not much passion or effort was put into it

The revenue from affiliate products was nice pocket change but I needed something more impactful

I was using an AI tool to generate tons of food recipes. This was a subscription-based tool that deleted all my content when I canceled.

I messed around with all kinds of tools to figure out what would work best. 

The main thing coming is AI, all these new AI tools are insanely powerful, they can very easily generate text, images, code, and voice by themselves, and assist with video editing in many different ways.

I had to drop most of them for production because you need to stack a few different ones to complete a service, I can't spend all the tokens for every subscription by myself in a profitable way yet. 

For non-AI tools, I was able to set on and master a few different ones:

Create Logos and other Branding assets with Canva

Setup Databases, APIs, and Automation with AirTable

Setup Social Media Analytics, Scheduling, and Automation with Metricool

These tools alone helped me scale my output without compromising quality, to test this I released a couple more brands and was able to keep everything going with minimal effort.

I got all the lessons and the results I needed from the prototypes and can't waste more time with cheap affiliate products. 

These prototypes are still valuable assets that I can use in the future, but the new plan consists of building a brand for each skill that I have mastered and am able to service with:

The idea is to build a customer-facing brand that brings everything together as a service, while each service is delivered by a separate entity, and each entity has its own brand.

And the plan is to set up all of these agencies over time and have them all connected to each other.

I can grow many different assets at the same time

Decentralized audience for each specific brand

But the fact that I can grow multiple assets over the long term, and build a heavy portfolio in the short term are the main reasons that I will go over more in-depth in a future blog post.

The First Loop

About 5 months into the Marketing course and it has completely blown my mind and changed the way I perceive any type of media.

I've been going crazy with the full-time job, the bootcamp, reading books, building the software, and designing the brands throughout this entire time.

When the dust settled, here are the results:

Blog about what I learned in sales and marketing

Blog about how I use AI and Automation tools for my business

Fulfilling Web Development and Frontend Engineering for Digital Products

The customer-facing brand which brings all those together with the addition of AI-Powered Web Design to create the full Digital Agency experience.

There could and will be more brands coming, but for now, I need a break from engineering and design to just be productive.

Each brand represents one of my skills / interests and will be an ever-growing hub of content in the space.

The next steps are now to draft as much content as possible when I feel like writing, and later polish and publish these when I feel like publishing them.

I also need to document all my market research for 

Build an actual offer, customer journey, and put it into practice.

Content > Indie Business Hacking

The Second Round