Book one is the origin story: two years of flailing, roughly twenty launched products, and a goal of $500/month from his own projects that he never hits. It sits at the very bottom of the arc, the failure log that makes every later success legible, and it ends with him taking a job at an MIT startup because indie hacking has not paid off yet.
Why marketplaces and communities kill solo founders
The single most expensive lesson of these two years is that a solo founder should never build a product that is worthless until other people show up. Alex burns two years before this book even starts on “City Vibes,” a nightlife map where bars and clubs upload real-time photos so people can decide where to go out. It needs venues uploading and crowds watching to have any value at all, and with neither it is a graveyard. He perfects it for two years, prints business cards and posters and a global expansion plan, launches, and it is dead within weeks. He then repeats the exact mistake twice more: “TalentShare” (companies share the top candidates they could not hire) and “RemoteJuniorClub” (a leaderboard-and-chat community for junior devs looking for remote work). Three of his first four products are marketplaces or communities, all stuck behind the same cold-start problem, all abandoned near zero.
The counter-evidence is sitting right in front of him. The one early product that worked, “MultiNewTab,” a Chrome extension that lets you run several New Tab extensions at once, delivered identical value to every single user regardless of how many others existed. It quietly passed 100 then 200 installs while the “important” marketplaces died. His own framing lands hard: a network-effects business is all-or-nothing, either you go viral or you die, and that is a game built for funded companies, not for one person.
The shotgun strategy: fast launches beat big ideas
After killing City Vibes, Alex adopts what he calls the shotgun strategy: build many products, launch fast, throw virtual spaghetti at the wall, and double down on whatever sticks. The pattern that emerges is almost insulting in its clarity. Every grand, serious, “next Facebook” idea he pours himself into fails, and the throwaway ideas he barely respects are the ones that hit.
- GitGardener (auto-commits to keep your GitHub graph green), built in a week from the easiest idea on his list, launches to number 3 on Product Hunt with 400 signups and his first 100 Twitter followers.
- MakerFeed (a directory to follow the best makers on Twitter), built the following week, lands at number 1 on Product Hunt with 350+ upvotes.
- Meanwhile the ideas he “thought of the least,” MultiNewTab and GitGardener, become his two most successful products, while City Vibes, TalentShare, and RemoteJuniorClub go nowhere.
The lesson is not that ideas do not matter but that attachment does. The moment he lets go of expectations and just ships something small, results appear, which is the opposite of the two years he spent daydreaming about podcast interviews for a product nobody used.
Building in public as forced accountability
The mechanism that makes the shotgun strategy actually fire is building in public, and Alex treats it less as marketing than as a self-discipline hack. With zero Twitter followers he starts tweeting out loud about what he is building and publicly gives himself a week to ship, and he notes that saying it out loud made quitting harder even when literally no one was listening. The compounding is real: launch by launch he climbs from 0 to 100 to 200 to 300 followers, and getting praise from the very people who inspired him just six months in is what makes him feel like “one of the guys.”
Building in public also hands him his monetization by accident. A follower asks whether GitGardener could work on private repos to hide the automated commits, so he ships it as a $5/month premium feature with low expectations, and within a week GitGardener goes from $0 to $50/month entirely from free users upgrading. The formula he keeps repeating - low expectations, a fast feedback loop, and building in the open - is the only thing that reliably works for him across both years.
Sell first, build second
The hardest wall Alex hits is that building was never the problem; selling is. He assumed marketing would be the easy part and left it for last, and product after product punishes that assumption. “Telemonetize” (connect Telegram plus Stripe to instantly monetize a channel) takes two full months of all-day coding across Telegram bots, payments, a website builder, and webhooks, goes “viral” with hundreds of thousands of impressions, and produces zero customers and zero free trials for a week. His own verdict is brutal: a fake landing page with a “buy now” button would have done the same job in a fraction of the time. He even builds a whole crypto payment gateway because channel owners swore they would subscribe if he supported crypto, and of course none of them ever do.
The inversion comes with the TV-channel chapter, and it is the most sophisticated move in the book. A new Greek law would force TV channels to warn viewers about flashing content dangerous to photosensitive epilepsy, and Alex, armed with his Epilepsy Blocker algorithm, works contacts until the ex-CTO of a network phones the current CTO in front of him and books a meeting. This time he explicitly refuses to build first: he will cut the deal, then build the solution to fit. Industry pricing was about $350 to analyze a single video file, so a network-wide contract meant millions. The deal collapses anyway (the CTO laughs that the law has been “coming” for five years and never arrives), but the discipline is the point: he validated demand and a decision-maker before writing a line of production code.
The customers you attract versus the ones you want
Money, when it finally trickles in, arrives attached to people Alex does not want to serve, which forces an early reckoning with who a business is actually for. Telemonetize’s free-trial users turn out to be, almost entirely, unethical operators: sleazy crypto scammers, betting “gurus,” a man trying to sell Thai prostitutes, someone he believes was dealing arms (AK-47 profile photo, Central Africa), and a German amateur pornstar selling premium content (he notes he was accidentally building OnlyFans). 99% of his trial users were running shady businesses, and they were also textbook bad customers: needy, rude, stingy, demanding custom features and free-trial extensions on burner cards.
The mirror image is Epilepsy Blocker, a browser tool that hides seizure-triggering content, priced at just $10/month to cover server costs. His would-be customers are often disabled, unable to work, living on benefits, and $10 is too much, so he keeps giving it away and calls himself the world’s worst salesperson. An anonymous message needles him that he does “anything for money,” and it forces the uncomfortable realization that every one of his revenue products is controversial: GitGardener is a cheeky hack, Telemonetize serves scammers, Epilepsy Blocker charges disabled people. He resolves it by making Epilepsy Blocker free, killing Telemonetize, and shelving GitGardener, choosing his conscience over his only revenue.
Markets over ideas
The closing turn, and the thread that quietly sets up everything after this book, is the shift from chasing ideas to choosing markets. By the end of year two he is out of tactics, so he studies what actually works: Justin Jackson on the power of a good market, Steli Efti on sales and feedback. He tries the method for real, cold-emailing not to pitch but to ask for advice, and books roughly one Zoom call a day with penetration testers and security engineers in the cybersecurity market, who are generous and open once their guard is down. The experiment is imperfect (he can see the trees but not the forest, and a follow-up run at the web-accessibility market meets people demanding $150/hour), but the reframe is permanent: he stops asking “what should I build” and starts asking “which market is healthy and full of buyers.” He ends the two years at $100/month having launched around twenty products, with one profitable, taking the MIT job and moving to Italy, but market-thinking is the seed that later grows into CyberLeads.
Lessons worth keeping
- As a solo founder, avoid products worth nothing without a crowd; City Vibes ate two years and died in weeks, while single-player MultiNewTab worked from user one.
- Ship small and fast with low expectations; his two least-loved ideas (MultiNewTab, GitGardener) won, while every “next Facebook” idea failed.
- Build in public to make quitting harder; tweeting from zero followers and self-imposed weekly deadlines carried him to 300 followers and drove GitGardener from $0 to $50/month in a week.
- Selling is the job, not building; Telemonetize cost two months and returned zero customers, when a fake “buy now” landing page would have told him the same thing.
- Validate demand before you build; on the TV-channel deal he refused to code until the contract was real, in a market where analyzing one video sold for ~$350.
- Watch who your revenue attracts; 99% of Telemonetize trials were scammers and worse, and he chose to kill it rather than serve them.
- Pick the market before the product; the year-two pivot to studying markets (cybersecurity, then web accessibility) is what eventually leads to CyberLeads.
Sources
- Read the full book: alexwest.co/book-one
- Full text: startups-01-shotgun-years
Part of the Solo Founder series.