22 | quit crypto to build podex with my brother. documenting all of it.
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Joined March 2024
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In my crypto days I used to grind X like my life depended on it.
Averaged around 500-1000 replies a day and I grew really fast because of it.
Wonder if that same strategy still works..
Mark Cuban’s son was showing him get-rich-quick schemes from social media.
Your dad is a billionaire and someone on your phone is still convincing you they’ve found an easier way.
Cuban told the story on The Diary of a CEO. His son would bring him videos about dropshipping, shoe drops and other ways to make money.
Cuban’s reaction was to question why someone with such a profitable opportunity was busy telling strangers about it.
I wouldn’t dismiss every business someone teaches online. But I would want to know how much of their income comes from doing it, and how much comes from selling the instructions.
Later, Cuban described starting MicroSolutions.
He was living with five other guys in a three-bedroom apartment. He didn’t have his own bedroom. Getting to $15,000 in unpaid customer invoices felt like progress towards moving out.
He says the company was profitable every month of its eight-year existence.
That gives you a useful way to check the next business idea that looks irresistible on your feed.
Say someone promises you can make $10,000 a month running an agency.
Before buying anything, write down what one customer would actually receive for their money.
“AI automation” isn’t enough to work with. Which task gets done? What do you need from the customer? Who fixes it when it goes wrong?
Then find someone who already pays to get that task done.
Ask what they paid last time, what annoyed them and whether they’d let you quote for the next job. You might discover the work is worth far less than the video suggested. You might discover a more expensive problem the video never mentioned.
If you get an order, keep track of everything it takes to deliver it.
The sales calls. The software. The revisions. The messages on Sunday because the customer can’t get something to work.
A $1,000 payment feels different when you realise you’ve spent 35 hours earning it and still owe a contractor $400.
Then ask for a second order at a price that makes the work worthwhile.
That’s the part I’d want to see before getting excited about ten clients a month.
You can spend a weekend choosing an agency name, building a website and imagining what you’ll do with the money.
Getting one person to pay you, delivering what you promised and having enough left to want to do it again takes longer.
But at least you’ll know whether you like the business once there’s actual work in it.
My brother and I built Podex for the podcasts you keep saving but never finish.
Get the key lessons and practical steps from an episode: getpodex.com
I think the biggest advantage you can have at 22 is knowing what you actually want.
Most people my age don't. Not because they're lazy, but because they never sat down and asked themselves.
So they default to whatever's in front of them. The degree their parents picked. The job their friends applied for. The life their feed tells them is normal.
And then they spend 3 hours a day scrolling content that has nothing to do with where they want to go.
I'm not judging. I did the same thing for a long time.
But once you know exactly what you want, everything gets easier to filter. What you watch, who you listen to, what you say no to.
Most people aren't behind because they're not smart enough. They're behind because they're running hard in no direction.
Things I've learned this week as a founder:
- Building the product is the easy part
- Traffic can drop right after you ship something good
- People can still find you even when you don't know how
- Nobody has the marketing answer, they're all testing too
Traffic is the lowest it's been since we started.
Weirdly, people still sign up every day.
I've been trying a different marketing thing every few days, and honestly, I don't know what's working yet.
We just shipped a new feature too, so the timing is great lol.
Anyone else just figuring it out as they go?
Zoost retweeted
Stop taking advice from people who have never done the thing.
Your uncle who "knows business" but has worked the same job for 20 years.
The guy in your class who has a take on every startup but has never sold anything.
The YouTuber telling you how to make $10K a month whose only income is telling you how to make $10K a month.
It sounds obvious, but almost everyone does it.
Because those people are easy to find. They're everywhere, and they love giving advice.
The people who have actually done it are busy doing it. They're not in your group chat. They're not at the family dinner.
So you end up building your whole worldview from people who never left the starting line.
The fix is simple and a little uncomfortable.
Before you take any advice, ask yourself one question:
Has this person gotten the result I want?
If not, it's just an opinion. Treat it like one.
game changer
I LITERALLY copied over TikTok's exact algorithm for my own software product.
My brother & I started our own micro-learning platform about 7 months ago.
Millions of people consume podcast's daily, almost none of them apply what they actually hear.
So we made it easier.
Podex gives you actual knowledge from people like Elon Musk, Andrew Huberman, Alex Hormozi.
All from their actual podcast's (so you know its legit lol).
Now I've gone a step further.
I built a TikTok like swiping feature using TikTok's exact algorithm.
Imagine scrolling through short-form content but actually learning something from it.
Saving plays, liking them, following huge names. It's all possible.
Go check it out, you will not be disappointed.
Stop taking advice from people who have never done the thing.
Your uncle who "knows business" but has worked the same job for 20 years.
The guy in your class who has a take on every startup but has never sold anything.
The YouTuber telling you how to make $10K a month whose only income is telling you how to make $10K a month.
It sounds obvious, but almost everyone does it.
Because those people are easy to find. They're everywhere, and they love giving advice.
The people who have actually done it are busy doing it. They're not in your group chat. They're not at the family dinner.
So you end up building your whole worldview from people who never left the starting line.
The fix is simple and a little uncomfortable.
Before you take any advice, ask yourself one question:
Has this person gotten the result I want?
If not, it's just an opinion. Treat it like one.
Zoost retweeted
I started Podex with my brother 7 months ago.
When I started I thought that building would be the hardest part.
Believe me when I say that it wasn't.
I'm building this startup alongside college and producing music.
My brother & I quickly figured out that marketing wasn't gonna be as straightforward as we thought it would be.
In these 7 months, we've had one client. That equals to $30 in revenue.
Our problem has been recurring usage, how do we get clients to come back?
It wasn't building fancy features or giving our customers crazy discounts. We tried that, believe me it doesn't work lol.
You have to use your own platform as a consumer. That's when you'll realize what your product is missing.
That's what I've been doing. I've gotten a lot of product feedback recently.
Feedback that's literally worth MILLIONS.
I want this post to be something I can come back to in a few months. I will show the progress we've made, the milestones we've hit & of course the lesson's we've learned along the way.
See you soon.
i'm a uni student running a startup with my brother
our whole "team" is the two of us and a bunch of these bots. one runs linkedin, one does seo, a few run tiktok accounts
founders, how many of your employees are bots now?
The most expensive thing you can own at 22 is a comfortable life.
Comfortable means you never get desperate enough to figure it out.
Nobody talks about how lonely it is to build a startup while you're still in university.
My friends are worried about exams and weekend plans. I'm sitting at my desk at midnight, after a full day of lectures, arguing with my brother about a button.
I don't have years to "figure it out." I have a few semesters before everyone expects me to get a real job. That clock is always ticking in the back of my head.
Every day I wake up not knowing if this will work. There's no boss telling me I did well and no paycheck proving it was worth it. It's just me, a laptop, a stack of assignments and a product most people haven't heard of yet.
Some weeks I feel unstoppable. Other weeks I open the dashboard and want to close my laptop forever.
People see "founder" in a bio and think it's cool. They don't see me skipping nights out to fix bugs, or explaining to my family for the tenth time why I'm not just focusing on my degree.
But every time I think about quitting and taking the safe route, I feel sick. It's not because that path is bad. It's because I know I'd spend the rest of my life wondering "what if."
So I keep going. We just launched the biggest feature we've built yet, and I have no idea if anyone will care.
If you're building something while studying or working a full-time job, and nobody around you gets it, reply and tell me what it is. I want to find the other people who are this crazy.
Zoost retweeted
We've been building something I'm actually scared to show people.
I'm addicted to TikTok. You probably are too. Hours of scrolling every day, and I can't remember a single thing I watched.
So we asked a simple question: what if the scroll stayed, but the content actually made your life better?
It's called the Discovery page.
You scroll it exactly like your For You page, with short videos and quick text cards. But everything on it is picked for your goals. Want to make more money, get fitter or be more disciplined? It only shows you that.
Same dopamine, except you close the app knowing something you didn't know 10 minutes ago.
It's almost done, about 95% there, and launching to the public soon.
If you'd swap your FYP for this, reply "Discovery" and I'll get you in first.
