💸 My Best month ever

So July ended up being my best month in terms of product revenue.

I have made more money selling services like product consulting and ghostwriting. But services have very little leverage.

Your still trading time for money.

I didn't want to keep selling services all my life.

So back in June I made up my mind that I am going to have more product revenue and less service revenue.

I dusted off my old product idea list in Notion, said no to a bunch of clients, and embarked on the crazy 25In25 challenge.

Today I want to share the top 3 insights that have pushed me to take on this challenge, and get the little success I have achieved.

Insight 1 : Learning happens at the intersection of product and distr.

There are broadly 2 places you learn in business:

1. When building product (your core skills and what you can make from them)

2. When building distribution (marketing and sales of what you're making)

Once you're past a certain skill level, you cannot learn more by building products. The learning after that is incremental, not exponential.

Then new learning and growth happens when you try to do marketing and sales of your product.

You observe how the market reacts to your product and then go back and improve it if necessary.

Like most introverted makers, I am uncomfortable with marketing and sales.

That's why I felt like my growth had stalled after I released my writing course back in May.

I felt like I was repeating myself on Twitter and in this newsletter, I needed to push myself to learn new lessons.

Which eventually culminated in the 25in25 challenge.

And I'm learning so much from it. Because I'm trying to market and sell a new product every week. (Apart from building it 😅)

Let's hope I can sustain this for the next 17 weeks 🤞

Insight 2 : Ideas in your head are worthless

I've had many ideas in my head or in my notes for a long time. And when you conceptualize something it looks all hunky dory.

But when time comes to actually ship a product, to materialize an idea, that's when you realize just how damn hard it is.

You face new challenges which you had never thought of before. And then you start learning new things to solve those challenges.

That's growth as an entrepreneur.

But if you keep ideas in your head all the time, you will not learn anything new.

Sure you can feel good about yourself about having those ideas, but they are just random thoughts, with no real value to them 🤷

Insight 3 : Momentum is underrated

You don't realize how easy things become once you have momentum behind you.

I've been able to ship products in 7 days, that would have taken me almost a month before. But because I'm in that flow state right now. And I've almost mastered the drill of Launch > Sell > Build > Repeat that I'm amazed by my own output.

Sure the first couple of launches were a grind. And took me a while to sort them out, but after that it feels like my mind is not programmed to launch something new every Wednesday, and ship it by next Tuesday.

I kept doing this all through July and ended up making $817 from 5 products.

If I had written a script of how I wanted this month to go I couldn't have written it better 🤩

I don't know how good or bad August will be, but I know that my shipping muscle is getting stronger and launching a new product is becoming 2nd nature to me.

And it's this momentum that is allowing me to do this.

If I stopped shipping for 4 weeks, then I will be back to those sluggish launches I had initially.

Want to keep this momentum going right now 😀

Maker Toolkit Launch

So last night I launched a new product - Maker Toolkit.

A database of 50+ Tools for creators, founders and makers to run a profitable business.

It's like a creator starter pack. My friend Jason asked on Twitter why I'm launching this, and I said that I wish something like this existed back when I was starting out.

It would have saved me so much time.

If you're a creator at the beginning of your journey, then I think you will find value in this.

And guess what, you can get it for free!

No coupons, no deadlines nothing.

This is a free product and will remain so forever 😄

34 Life Tips for my younger self

I turned 34 earlier this week and wrote the mandatory "34 life lessons" post on my blog.

Do check it out, people have said good things about it.

34 life tips I would share with a younger version of myself.

I also got some brilliant life advice on Twitter, do check out the replies to this tweet -

✍️ Pro Tip of the week

5 Simple Writing Rules to Live by ✍️

• Write every day

• Write to 1 person

• Write like you talk

• Write drunk, edit sober

• Write with your legs - take long walks

Being able to write well is superpower, it can be a game changer for your personal and professional life.

But honing the craft requires daily consistent effort.

It's a muscle you need to exercise regularly to remain good at it.

I've found these tips to be useful in my own writing journey. And I think you will find them valuable as well.

Checkout what people on Twitter said about this.

👋 Bottomline

These were my best performing tweets from last week-

This one really resonated with people -

Everyone says you should reply more on Twitter to get the best out of the platform. I wanted to test this thesis.

So I took out some time earlier this week and wrote a data packed thread about how the 8 of the most impactful Twitter accounts use Twitter.

Spoiler alert - Most of them have 90%+ content as replies, and rest of it is Tweets and threads.

Check the thread -

If you're looking to quit your job and go solo, then this tweet is a good framework to start planning your "escape" -

Thank you for reading 🙏

That's my time this week.  See you next week 👋

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Cheers

Ayush