Hey, Albert here.
Today, I want to share a personal story with you. Back in 2022, I was making around 17,000€ MRR online.
How It All Began
When the pandemic hit and we were all stuck at home, I, like many others, got interested in the stock and crypto markets. At first, I was clueless and kept losing money steadily. Then, on a friend’s recommendation, I bought a trading strategy / course that turned out to be profitable if followed strictly. Before you think this is another "crypto bro made it big overnight" story, hold that thought.
Discovering there was an Income Source
I quickly realized the strategy had a major flaw: it required manual tracking of all tickers and staring at the screen for hours to spot the right signals.
This process led to subjective interpretation and was extremely exhausting.
So, I automated it.
Instead of creating a trading bot, I built a tool to track the entire market and alert the user via push notification when the strategy indicators were aligned, allowing them to decide whether engage in trading or not.
I had all set up three different PayPal accounts for three system variants:
- The original system for the stock market.
- A replica for the crypto market.
- A third one for long-term strategy.
In total, these brought in roughly 17,000€ MRR.
The Slow and Painful Decline
How did I go from 17k to zero? Expenses and not having the dominant hand. I was good at programming, not marketing. So, I partnered with someone who was, giving him 60% of the MRR since most of the leads were his. This seemed like a great deal at the time.
Eventually, things started slowing down. Not drastically, but enough to notice. I ignored the warning signs until my "partner" decided to stop promoting our products and focus on something else.
Why Not Keep the Users?
My partner’s "something else" was a bad replica of our product, full of flaws and bugs, which he rebranded as the "2.0 Improved Version." The audience fell for it, and since they were his leads, I couldn't do much about it. Gradually, my 17,000€ MRR went to zero.
Lessons Learned
First, never put all your eggs in one basket. Second, business is business. Most importantly, having a great product isn't enough if you don’t have an audience. The products that replaced mine were buggy and caused many complaints, but they still sold at a higher price, believe it or not.
Third, if you have an audience, you got the 80% of the work done. It is important for your costumers know who is behind the apps.
That's why I started over, building public apps that genuinely add value. Sharing my journey with you. Making you participant.
A note on the tech side
Believe it or not, this was all built using PHP on an Apache server pulling market data from unsecured endpoints via cron jobs 😅
Feel free to DM on X if you want a post with the details on how I built it.
See you soon!