M&Ms: The Real Wins from the Internet Game

My two year anniversary making my first dollars online.

I put out my first paid product on January 11th, 2022.

This was the launch tweet:

Two years and 3 days since my first paid product went live online.

Since then, I started taking this internet game a little more seriously, earning a little over $300k in internet dollars.

But although it's been exactly two years since my first internet bucks, the money hasn't been the real win. I need to take you on a ride to understand the real win.

The last cohort of our Newsletter launchpad had 158 people live on the first night's Zoom. Can you imagine me, an awkward and introverted engineer, teaching a 3-week class that large? It's hard even for me to believe it as I write it. But here we are. Not only did it happen, but it was a ton of fun.

And that was cohort 5 of Chris and me teaching it live. Since starting, I have taught hundreds of people live and thousands through my recorded courses. Here are just the gumroad numbers for the recorded classes, not counting the stuff I taught through Small Bets.

I am not telling you all this to brag, I have a point I'd like to make, just bear with me.

In these two years, I somehow got twenty-seven thousand followers on Twitter and close to seven thousand subscribers to this newsletter. I wrote 300+ articles. 17k+ tweets. And 132 editions of this newsletter.

During that time, I learned frameworks and models I never knew about. But I did not just learn them, I put them to work. (And this is the key!) I spoke to 100+ people on one-on-one walk-and-talk calls, especially after my successful recorded engineering course. Thanks to those calls, I got a peek into countless engineering organizations at numerous companies. And I managed to help more than a few people get promoted.

But that's not all. With my partner Daniel Vassallo, we have created a support network in Small Bets with thousands of community members. And it has hundreds of lessons on skills people need for this internet game. And lessons on how people can think about entrepreneurship today, basically how they can make their first dollars online.

But recorded courses, live classes, and one-on-ones are not all I did.

I built software, too. Multiple apps, most failed (Some of you may remember ThreadX or TapeX; thank you for being on the journey with me that long if you do). But the small bets site, which is evolving into one of the best community sites I have ever seen, is perhaps the most successful piece of software so far based on usage. Our site now has its own event management system, recordings, a community directory, Discord integrations, etc. And because it's been a winner, Daniel and I have added features, each one a small bet itself.

But that's not all. I made friends on this journey. Real friends, many I talk to regularly, some I meet up with in person. I've even learned some sales and marketing. All this may not be that impressive because there are other people who are doing much better. But you gotta understand as an awkward, introverted engineer who is an immigrant and comes from poverty, I come from a huge deficit on a lot of this stuff. There are numerous fears I had to face off against on this path.

But at some point, I also fell in love with this style of entrepreneurship. The freedom and the ability to spend time with my young family. The growth. All of it. I got so much more than I thought I would from this journey.

My goal is to never take a big corporate job again. But having done that successfully for over a decade and managed many teams and people, I can confidently tell you that if I were to go back into that world, I would absolutely crush it now. No, scratch that, knowing what I know now, I would demolish it.

Now, I am bragging a little bit.

But the growth and skills I've picked up in these last two years are worth their weight in gold—skills like sales and marketing, teaching, presenting, writing, relationships, coding, product, and on and on.

But the real reason I am sharing all this with you on my anniversary of making my first few dollars on the Internet is to motivate you.

If you are on the fence about getting started in this internet game, I am a living example that you've got little to lose and a lot to gain. More even than just money. If you really do this, I am convinced you will be more valuable to the market, more anti-fragile in the world, and freer in a few years than you would've ever been sitting on the fence.

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Three Things: GPT-5, Programming with AI, Community Tooling

This statement by Sam Altman, the co-founder and CEO of OpenAi, is a fairly profound one if it happens.

A lot of things could be disrupted soon.

But the things I am going to prioritize in a GPT-5 world are human first things, like communication, community, and relationships.

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Now, the only thing that can compete with a Software Developer who is using AI is another Software Developer using AI.

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A huge reason Daniel and I have had to build a lot of things from scratch on Small Bets, and why we will do more this year, is that while the off-the-shelf community tools are pretty good to get started, they are pretty bad long-term.

At first glance, the Small Bets site is deceptively simple, but that’s only because Daniel is proving to be an amazing product manager.

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Three Memes: Vibe Shift, Thirsty for Remote Work, Silicone Valley Clip

Humor is akin to philosophy, for they are both viewpoints born of a large perspective of life.

—Will Durant

The world is, in fact, changing fast. And Dads have good intuition and gut instincts.

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I can’t blame the guy; it's better to suffer in the desert than spend hours commuting, burning fossil fuel, only to work in a cramped space and login to Zoom calls for a little more water.

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A great little video clip from the comedy show Silicone Valley that is now turning out to be true for a lot of startups.

Taking less money from VCs, or no money, means you are free to run your business the way you want to and to do what you want to do.

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Thank you for reading!

—Louie

P.S. You can reply directly to this email; it will get to me, and I will read that and try to reply.