1. How and when did you make your first dollar online?
I made my first $ online in 2008 when I was 18 by building a content management system for vehicle sales companies in my local area.
I created a website for them and allowed them to add/remove their cars & vans. So it wasn’t completely online, but a few of my customers I never met 🙂
2. How long did it take between the idea and this first dollar?
I built the first version in a few months by reading books and magazines(!) on PHP & MySQL. After it was live, I got in touch with a few companies in my local area and got a sale soon after (£30 per month).
3. What best actionable advice would you give someone who wants to start TODAY?
Don’t start building straight away. Instead, use something like ahrefs to determine if there is demand for your idea.
After this, build a simple landing page (e.g. Webflow, etc.) and drive traffic to the site (e.g. Google Ads, Linkedin cold outreach).
If you get a few sign-ups to your landing page, only then start building. And when you start building, build as fast as possible! As the saying goes: “If you aren’t embarrassed by your first version, you launched too late.”
4. What resources would you recommend to a beginner?
Ahrefs has totally changed the way I think about building products. It’s amazing for SEO and determining what blog posts you should be writing, but it’s also great for finding “easy” underserved product ideas.
If people are searching for it, but the top results on Google aren’t very good, then you could be on to something. Ahrefs is great for checking this.
5. Who would you recommend to follow?
About Phil
SEO, indie hacking and the 4 day work week
Building 4 Day Week and Blockchain Devs in public
– Phil
4DayWeek.io – The place to find jobs with a better work-life balance. Jobs with a 4-day work week (max 36 hours per week) only!