After two years of launches that went nowhere, Alex took a salaried job at an MIT-backed startup in Milan and cried the night before starting, terrified it would swallow his ambitions. Instead it became the field research that produced CyberLeads, his first profitable business, which reached $2k/month six months after he had no idea at all.
The golden cage as field research
The job that felt like surrender turned out to be the most useful thing Alex did. An MIT startup found Epilepsy Blocker, a browser extension he had built for photosensitive epilepsy, and offered him a role in Milan on EUR 2,000/month after tax with a wall of perks: free lunch, gym, weekly massage, Sardinia summer offices. Almost every perk was hollow (the “free lunch” was a salad bowl, the massage was a man named Fabio with a foldable bed), and the reality was eight hours a day building an internal logistics dashboard in a corner. But sitting inside a company taught him three things he could never have learned from the outside, and each one dismantled a fear that had kept him small.
First, companies are not the monolith they look like. Competing against a 50-person company means competing against maybe 5 motivated people and 45 who are quietly managing their own lives; everyone optimises to do the least work and pass the ticket to another team. A solo founder can pivot 180 degrees in a day while a big company holds meetings to change a button colour. Second, company budgets are enormous and irrational: his employer paid hundreds of dollars a day just for lunch, while Alex had spent two years failing to get individuals to pay $10/month for software that could save their life. The lesson was blunt: sell to companies, not people. Third, the “sexy” life-saving product was ugly up close (refund demands, bug reports, servers that could fail with lives on the line), which cured him of the belief that his business had to be noble or even software at all.
Rewiring the philosophy before writing a line of code
Three ideas from Millionaire Fastlane (read alongside Atomic Habits and The Alchemist) reordered his priorities in his first month at the desk. Making your passion your job mixes up your incentives: Alex caught himself hoping a “miracle epilepsy cure” was clickbait, and was disgusted enough to make Epilepsy Blocker free forever and stop building “passion” products. What he wanted instead was a boring, profitable business that funded his freedom to explore passions off the clock. The second idea was to change your own world before the world’s, and the third was to enter a large B2B market at all costs, because a market that is not winner-take-all always has room for a solopreneur chasing a humble $5k-$25k/month, not a billion-dollar exit.
Pretend work versus true work
The sharpest recurring concept in the book is the distinction between motion and progress. Living on 2-3 genuinely creative hours a day, Alex first tried to work in the exhausted evenings and couldn’t; the fix was moving side-project work to 05:00-08:00 before the gym and the day job drained him, and the constraint of a short window forced ruthlessness. He started cataloguing “pretend work” everywhere: restructuring code with zero users, A/B tests at 300 visitors a month, redesigning a landing page that already converted, business cards. “True work” was almost embarrassingly simple: email ten potential customers, post in communities, stand up a landing page with a payment button, launch. Each of his early failures had taught him to cut another piece of fat (the .com domain didn’t save him, the logo didn’t guarantee success, extra features didn’t matter), until all that remained was a landing page and a way to charge. His test for spotting the difference became a thought experiment: someone holds a gun to your head and says generate revenue by the end of the week or you die. Everything non-essential evaporates.
Idea hunting, market first
Rather than dreaming up a solution and praying a market existed, Alex went market first, hunting for already-validated ideas he could copy and take a slice of. He worked through three healthy, non-winner-take-all markets he actually understood (cybersecurity, recruiting, lead generation) and shipped tiny probes: Cyberflake (a pentester collaboration tool, abandoned because the audience was too technical for him), Scrapcat (an uptime monitor for scrapers, no real interest), Cyberhound (a way to find developers to pitch, silence on every channel), and Birdleads (Twitter keyword alerts, skipped because it required coding). CyberLeads itself arrived with no epiphany: scrolling Reddit while off sick, he saw a popular post listing recently funded startups. Funded startups, he realised, are cash-rich and desperate to grow, exactly the buyers his day job had shown him spend freely, and at least ten businesses were already selling this “who just raised money” data as lists, databases and newsletters to investors, salespeople and journalists. It was product number 20, and the breakthrough was psychological: instead of treating a taken idea like an occupied bus seat, he was glad it existed, because existing meant validated.
The product, channel, system trinity
Having an idea was maybe 20% of the job; distribution was the rest. Alex chose a newsletter format (no code, low friction), built the site on a no-code tool, and launched on Product Hunt with no product yet built, landing ten paying customers at $29/month for $290/month, some with business emails: his first real B2B revenue, no idea to $290/month in two weeks (or two years, both true). He then built the first monthly list in 20 chaotic sleepless days, waking at 04:00, and shipped it March 1st; even after heavy automation the lists still take 50-100 hours a month. The missing piece was a repeatable channel, and he nearly sabotaged himself by spending most of March building a second product (a list of active investors) that got zero customers and taught him to double down on the gift he already had. Guided by Traction, he committed at least half his energy to marketing and tried every channel, watching revenue sag back toward the cursed $100/month. Then on April 21st a throwaway tweet (“Got my first $50/mo customer!”) to ~600 followers hit 2,000 likes and 100,000 impressions and brought 10 new customers; a follow-up monthly-update blog post reached the top of Hacker News and brought 10 more. The winning move was to focus only on CyberLeads and Twitter, sharing the honest journey rather than selling, because the best marketing is no marketing. Once product, channel and a repeatable system were in place, the work changed from being an artist (creative, different every day) to being an athlete (disciplined, same reps daily): two hours of marketing in the morning, two hours on the lists at night. CyberLeads hit $1.5k/month at four months and $2k/month at six.
The honesty about luck
The book refuses the clean narrative. Alex insists the outcome depended on a long chain of luck he couldn’t have engineered: being sick the day he found the Reddit post, launching during a pandemic that killed his social life and cleared his calendar, having a funded-startup day job that made the idea click, sending that one random tweet. Readers who copied CyberLeads step for step (same product, landing page, Product Hunt launch, Twitter, even a daily blog) all quit within weeks, because the idea has to match the person and the world is more random than we admit. His reconciliation of this with effort is the durable point: you can’t predict when the stars align, but if you show up every day for two years, one day you get lucky.
Lessons worth keeping
- Sell to companies, not individuals: Alex spent two years failing to get people to pay $10/month, while his employer paid hundreds of dollars a day just for salad-bowl lunches.
- A big company is 5 motivated people and 45 who are managing their own lives; a solo founder pivots in a day, so you are faster and not even on their radar.
- Copy a validated idea in a market that isn’t winner-take-all; being “taken” is proof it works. CyberLeads was product number 20 and a straight copy of ~10 existing businesses.
- Kill pretend work with the gun-to-the-head test: if you had to generate revenue by Friday or die, only a landing page, a payment button and direct outreach would survive.
- Launch before you build. He got ten $29/month customers on Product Hunt with no product, then built the first list in 20 days because paying customers were waiting.
- Distribution beats product: no idea to $290/month in two weeks, but real growth only came once a repeatable channel (Twitter) locked in, taking CyberLeads to $2k/month by month six.
- Once you find the product/channel/system combination you only need to find it once, so stop being an artist and become an athlete: same reps, every day.
- Protect your 2-3 best creative hours by working first thing in the morning, before the gym and the day job spend your brain power.
Sources
- Read the full book: alexwest.co/book-two
- Full text: startups-02-first-profitable-b2b
- Part of the Solo Founder series.