From a social runaway child to a Solopreneur earning $1.5 million a year. 📌

Mark Lou: From a social runaway child to a Solopreneur earning $1.5 million / year with the "Ship Fast" core.

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This is the story of Mark Lou, who failed with 30 startups to get back to his job in a position that made $9,000 a month, but finally returned to his personal business as a Solopreneur (the only entrepreneur) that made $1.5 million a year. Let's see how he did it and what interesting lessons he learned.

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1.The Path Full of Failure: The First Step to Success

Mark Lou grew up in a family of engineers who valued studying, but he felt like a black sheep and wanted to walk a different path. His dream of becoming the "next Mark Zuckerberg" led him to start his first startup at the age of 16 and spend nearly 5 years failing 30 projects, not having money, and living in an apartment full of cockroaches.

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The worst point in his life was the COVID-19 period that caused his start-up business to collapse. He had to return to his parents' house at the age of 28 with a feeling of anger and failure, which led him to question himself, "Why should I be an entrepreneur?"

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2. Lessons that Change Thought: From Building Products at Will to Solving Real Problems

Mark's early failure stemmed from creating products from "great ideas" in his own head without examining market demand, but a major turning point came when he learned to:

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Let's start with the "problem" first: focus on the problem the customer really has, not just the ideas that sound good in the head.

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Selling Before Building: Mark received a life-changing tip, "Why not sell it before building it?," which allowed him to get his first customer for a product that didn't exist yet. This proved that he didn't need a beautiful website or a perfect product. Just have a strong idea and a customer ready to pay.

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After he was fired from his regular job that provided mental stability and high income, he revisited his past failures and realized that "each failure is not a failure if you don't give up, but it's a lesson that leads to future success."

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3.Entrepreneurship's New Philosophy: Do What You Love, and Don't Do What You Used to Hate

Mark decides to return as an entrepreneur, but this time he acts consciously and learns from past mistakes, setting himself a new iron rule:

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It won't take months to build a product.

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It will not raise funds from investors.

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Won't hire employees.

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He is determined to make "small bets" on many ideas, and most importantly, to make everything public "to build an audience base at the same time, even if these projects fail again.

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4.Shipfast: From Small Ideas to Life-Changing Products

Mark created six small projects in seven months that focused on solving real customer problems rather than just fun, and he discovered that he often did the same thing repeatedly in every project, such as creating landing pages, payment systems, e-mail systems, and account management systems, so he decided to create a small set of code that could be used in every project, and that was the origin of "Shipfast."

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Product-Market Fit: The launch of Shipfast was incredibly successful. He earned $500 in the first two hours and $40,000 in the first month. After that, sales skyrocketed steadily to $50,000 per month and sometimes to $135,000 per month, which led to a total revenue of $1.5 million per year as a single operator.

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Free Tool Marketing: He implemented a creative marketing strategy by creating "free tools" (such as logo creators) featuring Shipfast banners to attract customers, and creating content on YouTube to broaden his audience base.

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Summary: Mark Lou's story is a powerful lesson that success is not a matter of luck, but of uncompromising perseverance, learning from failure, daring to change ideas, and quick action with the "Ship Fast" philosophy to truly find a Product-Market Fit.