I quit my job and I have one year to get to profitability

Andrey Azimov

7 min readMar 16, 2018

In March 2018 I 😱 quit my job and I have 1 year to get to 📈 profit as Indie Maker.

Update: May 2019

I launched 7 apps, achieved my goal and become 🏆Product Hunt’s Maker of the Year:

Hardcore Year is done: My journey from quitting my job to building 7 apps and $1,000+ MRR.

Hard to believe it’s been a year, but I’m happy to say that finally I achieved my goal of $1,000 monthly recurring…

medium.com

Story

I have a dream — I want to ship products and earn $1,000/month (recurring) doing it.

Why $1,000?

I’m currently living in Bali, where I can live comfortably off of $1,000 per month. This isn’t San-Francisco or Dubai where $1,000 moves quickly. In Bali, $1,000 can pay for your rent, scooter, eating out three meals a day and most importantly all the coffee you could possibly drink.

OMFG STOP!

Mr. Aj if he is reading this he is probably facepalming because he said “OMFG STOP” to a similar guy.

This dream started at a crucial moment

Struggling through the drowning effects of a tough headache, I entertained myself by chatting with my users of Dark Mode List and trying to offer ads to them. That’s when this happened.

I took those $4.00 as a sign 🤑

Later, I’ve got the advice from my friend, Pieter Levels while we sat in the local Balinese cafe at 4AM:

It is better to be a 26 year old man who hates his job and quit than to be a 36 year old man who hates his job.

I didn’t hate my job but I knew that following my passion, instead of just daydreaming about it, was going to be the road to success.

I felt the looming urge to take the jump, but the logistical part of me was terrified.

I have too small coding experience :(

Before, I coded only time to time and in period of Dec 2017 — Feb 2018 (15 months) I launched only 3 products:

WhenToSurf — web app that shows best time to search based on your location: Revenue: $16 from donations.
PushToDeploy — physical big red button that allows you to deploy your site when you hit it. Revenue: -$77.13 (didn’t get enough money in pre sales to start manufacturing so I refunded all)
DarkModeList — list of apps that support dark mode. Revenue: $100

I don’t know how I will code something complicated, but I think I will learn on the way :D.

Fears

I feared randomly being fired from my job, emptying my bank account and wasting my time on a dream that didn’t pan out.

I wrote down these fears and realized that on paper, they weren’t so scary. My fear was coming from an emotional state. I feared the unknown that would come with quitting my job and attempting to create something on my own. Looking at my fears, I wrote down the worst case scenario for each situation.

Worst case scenario, I spend all of my money and have to move back in with my parents (Hi Mom).

It was hard to leave my job in Railsware. But hardest was to say this face to face to my boss Yaroslav Lazor.

After 2 months of thinking and fighting with my fears I finally did it! I felt much more released. But what was more unexpected is boss reply:

If you have a goal doesn’t matter how long it will take. Time will pass in any case. Only matters how you will spend this time: not doing and regretting or die trying :) So get the fuck outta company and follow your true passion :D

Thanks you for support. That was the final straw :)

I decided the time was now.

The first step in successfully shipping products is to find a product that people genuinely like and are interested in buying.

The main problem is finding this mysterious product/market fit. The key to my success was going to lie in discovering the intersection between pain point and a product somebody is willing to pay for.

The infamous YC quote states, “Make Something That People Love.”

But how do you actually do that?

Do you really need to be a domain knowledge expert with 1,000 years of experience prior to creating your startup?
Should you do it AirBnB style and work on a single product launch for two years and don’t give-up?
Do I create one new start up every single day, throwing virtual spaghetti at the wall and hoping something would eventually stick?

These questions are the start up trap. Thinking that I have to analyze each move and make sure that every action I take is perfected is going to paralyze me.

I have to cut my fears and go head first into the startup world.

Quitting everything and attempting to create something has led me to realize some existential characteristics that reside in myself and other new entrepreneurs.

I don’t finish everything that I start. I have yet to finish any of the ten coding courses I have registered for.
I’m not overly disciplined. I struggle to organize myself and complete boring tasks like CSS that never work out. I know they are necessary to achieve my bigger goals but procrastinating them is so much more enjoyable.
I don’t have consistency. Catch me working in a coffee shop for 14 hours on Monday. Catch me watching 14 hours of pointless Youtube videos on Tuesday.
I’m not the best coder. I only know basic HTML, CSS, JS and PHP. I don’t use Git and I host everything in Dropbox (everybody stay calm!).

All of these characteristics might point to failure, but I have a secret up my sleeve.

My friend Pieter Levels, the guy who created 12 startups in 12 months earns five figures by creating indie startups, is insanely inspiring.

Spending nights with him and Marc and watching how they are built their dreams from code and scratch showed me the possibility.

Seeing somebody else succeeding in the same path that I desired told me everything I needed to know.

The time is now!

I officially quit my job and made a commitment to myself to make product(s) with $1,000 / monthly revenue by shipping full time for 1 year. I’m going to leave the results of my experiment open for other entrepreneurs to watch.

In these upcoming 365 days, my plan is to become a hardcore shipper. I’m going to make as many products as I can in these few weeks and cross my fingers the parachute will deploy.

I’ve made a conscious decision to be as open with my goals as possible. It’s this accountability that is going to force me to finish what I started, practice discipline and learn to be consistent.

Here are the parameters:

Period: 17 Mar 2018–17 Mar 2019
Goal: $1000 / mon revenue
Minimum expenses as possible around $500 /mon
Chart with revenue: AndreyAzimov.com/open
Progress in WIP Chat
No relationship for better focus and avoid drama :). Success first and girls later :)
This blog is not going to be my main focus. My main focus is going to be creating products and using this blog as an accountability update.
My plan is starts with launching Sheet 2 Site and see if people want this if no I will go to a next idea

And now, it is go time! Warning: Do not try this at home :D

Want to see if I reach my goal?

And follow me in Twitter

And if you’re feeling really generous, you can buy me a pack of ramen by sending $2 to my PayPal address

or become my Patron

🔮 Check my new project

Applicant AI — AI Applicant Tracking System (ATS)

AI Body Transformation — FAT2FIT

Web3 Jobs — Find a job in Web3 and join the future.

UPD: Check what happen next month 👇

Hardcore Year First Month — Getting press coverage and reaching $361/m revenue

I recently quit my job to follow my passion. I gave myself one year to find success and a two step plan.