Jovan Cicmil's Blog - Entrepreneurship

The Only Certain Way To Never Be Replaced by AI

March 15, 2023

How worried are you about AI replacing you? Many people are worried about losing their livelihoods to the fast-approaching robot invasion. Many people are right to be worried. However, there’s a way to be robot-resistant. You can prosper in the age of AI - assuming you take this advice seriously. Is this article genuine? First of all, most advice on this topic is written by people tr...

A Recession Is the Best Time To Start Freelancing

March 1, 2023

Are we in a recession or aren’t we? I leave the speculation (and arguments about semantics) to economists and TV panels. What I know is that the situation is complicated for the working person: companies are firing people wholesale, inflation is brutal, essential goods are painfully expensive, and debt is a huge burden. For many people, it’s hard to find silver linings. But, it is often ...

90% of My Freelance Work Comes From Recurring Clients and Referrals

February 15, 2023

Most freelancers dread the process of looking for new clients. It can be frustrating and time-consuming. Worse still, it can take away our focus from what matters most: delivering superb results for our existing clients. The first several years of my freelance career were a constant tightrope walk between working and finding more work. However, in the last 3 years, this changed. During this ...

The Time a Guy Spent $600 in 5 Minutes on My Freemium App

November 17, 2022

I used to run a fantasy football (soccer for Americans) game that I built myself. I learned many different things from that experience, from bootstrapping a company to negotiating an exit. This morning, I remembered an interesting tidbit that I’ve never written about — the time a guy logged in and proceeded to spend $600 on upgrades for their fantasy team. Context About 97% of my use...

Five Lessons I Learned Bootstrapping a Fantasy Sports Company

February 21, 2022

I was a bootstrapped founder before it was cool. Back in 2013, when it was all about building a startup and jumping through the funding loops, I bootstrapped a fantasy sports company. It was profitable from the first month. I ran it for a few years before finally selling to a larger competitor. Along the way, I learned a ton of important lessons. Here are the main ones. If you’re thinki...

Inside the War Between Domain Flippers and Startup Founders

November 26, 2021

No, not the real world. The digital world. I observed the latest battle personally so that I can report to you from the front lines. A well-known entrepreneur recently announced that he had bought a .com domain for his company. That’s not big news until you hear the rest: it took 6 years of negotiating and $100,000 to get that domain. His announcement prompted a war of words between his fe...

Why MRR Is Misleading To Potential Investors

November 11, 2021

MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue) is an excellent metric for operators of subscription products. It’s an easy way to keep track of your company’s recurring revenue, especially if you offer several subscription packages. What it is not, however, is a measure of a company’s value. A concerning trend in the world of indie hackers and bootstrapped founders is to use MRR as the main metric for c...

5 Ways To Transform Your Freelance Work Into a Scalable Business

October 27, 2021

One of the most common questions up-and-coming freelancers ask is: where can I take my career once I’m a successful freelancer ? In the corporate world, career-building is a predictable pursuit. Do great at your job, climb up the ladder, do great at that job, climb further up the ladder, and so on. For freelancers, it’s a dif...

Why You Should Hire Freelance Workers for Your Startup

July 16, 2021

Those of you who have been reading my work know that I’m a freelancer, entrepreneur, and writer. But did you know that I’ve also hired over 20 freelancers on various platforms over the course of the last decade? Hiring remote talent can be a daunting prospect. Many still shy away from it because a simple Google search can reveal a hundred hellish experiences suffered by other would-be freel...

Why So Many Startups Fail Miserably After Raising Money

June 24, 2021

Roughly 90% of startups fail. This statistic isn’t surprising, but the way many founders lunge into business, you would think that the failure rate is more like 2%. Having been following the industry for over a decade, I have noticed some patterns — ideas that sound enticing, plausible, or even brilliant. Ideas shiny enough to attract massive investments before crashing into the ground like...

How to Turn Your Employer Into Your First Customer

June 3, 2021

Imagine this. You drag yourself out of bed in the morning. It’s a rainy day and your commute to the office is hell. The soundtrack you play in your car doesn’t even come close to drowning out the sound of horns and engines. By the time you arrive at the office, you are stressed, apathetic, and counting the seconds until you can drive home again in that same rush hour traffic. In the mean...

Community-as-a-Service: A Business Model for the 21st Century

May 13, 2021

It’s 2021 and it seems like every software developer in the world is building their own SaaS (software-as-a-service) products. There’s a revolution of bootstrapping your products and building in public. And that’s great. But, in the background, there’s a different paradigm developing, one not so easily defined and underst...

Most Entrepreneurs Fail To Understand Competition

May 10, 2021

How many ventures do you think fail because of infighting? How many fail because of market changes outside the founders’ control? How many fail because the product just isn’t good enough? If I had to venture a guess, I’d say your answer to all the above questions is “many”. Maybe you’ve been a part of one such story. But have you ever considered how many ventures fail becau...

The Rise of the Indie Hackers

April 12, 2021

Remember when half of the tech world were startup founders and the other half were aspiring startup founders? When startups became all the rage, they redefined how new companies are built. Terms such as product-market fit, idea validation, and growth hacking became part of the day-to-day English language. And who could forget the mom test? The lean startup methodology took over the world, an...

Six Ways Emotions Can Make You Fail as an Entrepreneur

March 19, 2021

Entrepreneurs talk a lot about common problems: building a product, reaching customers, getting funding, and hiring the right people. On the other hand, there is little talk about the things going on within the entrepreneur’s own mind that can make or break their plans. Here are some ways psychology can stand in the way of success. Being prepared for potential problems is half the cure. Wh...

Five Rules for Taking Your Project From Idea to Deployment

January 26, 2021

How many side projects have you started and then quit? Software developers are always learning new technologies, trying out new things, and building their ideas. They also build teams, launch startups, and create paid products. However, most developers I have talked to report an abysmal completion rate on their projects. Many have 10 or more unfinished side projects, and most have participated ...

The 4 Most Important Lessons I Learned Growing My Business in 2020

December 31, 2020

This was an eventful year for the world, to say the least. For me, it was an echo of the immortal words of Charles Dickens: it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was the year I started creating content in addition to my regular freelancing work. I wrote close to 40 articles and published my first course on Udemy. It was also the year of lockdowns, Covid-19, and frustrating soc...

How I Negotiated the Sale of My Bootstrapped Business

December 2, 2020

There are probably more articles out there about starting a business and running a business than you can read in a lifetime. But, what about selling a business? If your business is successful, you will eventually want to cash out. For major successes, this can take the form of going public by listing the business in the stock market. For minor ones, you will usually be acquired by a larger competi...

How to Choose a 21st Century Career

September 17, 2020

How many times have you heard a sentence that started with the words “I wish I had…”? College graduates wish they had understood how the world works before they chose their majors (or, indeed, whether to attend university at all). Middle-aged men and women wish they had chosen this industry over that. Everybody has 20/20 hindsight, but peering into the future is a completely different ani...

Applying Lessons From Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” to Your Business

June 17, 2020

One doesn’t need to be a literary expert to understand one thing — if a literary work survives for millennia, there is value in it that is intrinsic and timeless. There are messages within that have found application to the lives of people across centuries and continents. Thus, such works must not be ignored by anyone seeking to educate themselves. The Art of War isn’t merely a collection...