CyberLeads was working, and that was the problem. Because Alex published his revenue and his playbook openly, competitors cloned him word for word, resold his lists at a third of the price, gave them away free, and ran ads on his name. He was terrified he was watching his financial freedom get stolen off his plate. Then he noticed the numbers kept climbing anyway, and the real lesson of the year revealed itself: competition was almost entirely in his own head, and the way out was not to fight harder but to aim narrower.
The competition was mostly imaginary
The clones should have killed CyberLeads. They didn’t. Alex kept growing “as if nothing was happening,” which confused him until he looked at where customers actually came from. Most of them weren’t comparing him to anyone. Many had no idea the competitors existed. For the typical buyer, the real alternative to CyberLeads wasn’t a rival product, it was “their time, boredom and a spreadsheet.” Only Alex was losing sleep over the copycats.
That reframe is the spine of the book. He was competing against his “evil twins,” young hungry founders with no rules, and it felt scarier than competing against slow companies. But the fear was disproportionate to the threat, and he eventually treated it that way: where he once spied on people who copied him, he learned to simply mute them and stop thinking about them. The energy he spent on competitors was, in his words, the definition of insanity, focusing on things you cannot control.
Listen to behavior, not opinions
Alex launched CyberLeads generic on purpose, casting a wide net with the tagline “Find fast growing startups to do business with,” because early on he genuinely didn’t know who would pay. After a few months of growth he had something better than a hypothesis: a paying customer base spanning SaaS, freelancers, consultants, agencies, journalists, investors and solopreneurs.
He ran surveys and found them nearly useless. Having been burned before by asking for opinions, he chose to watch what people did instead: who pays the most, who stays longest, who gets the best results, who he enjoys serving. Agencies won every category. They were the largest segment, paid the most, stayed longest, and were the most successful, with one closing a $50k deal off his leads.
The data even overruled his own wishes. He had quietly hoped freelancers and consultants would win, because a single client could transform their lives, but they didn’t want it enough to pay. He had learned this contrast painfully once already: he couldn’t persuade epilepsy sufferers to pay $10/month for a tool he was sure they needed (Epilepsy Blocker), while strangers found and paid $10/month for a throwaway tool (GitGardener) entirely on their own. Wanting beats needing. The winning move was to sell into an audience’s number-one pain, not their second or third, and a poll confirmed that finding new clients is the single biggest pain for agencies.
Positioning beats building
Escaping the entire competitive field took almost no engineering. Alex “didn’t build much,” he made a few small changes to homepage, copy, pricing, and product.
The first change was one line: the tagline moved from “Find fast growing startups to do business with” to “Find new clients for your digital agency.” He added agency testimonials naming real outcomes (a $50k deal, a $25k deal, a $10k deal) and redesigned the landing page so it “looked like a real business” instead of the boring newsletter he’d been embarrassed by. Months later he shipped a single feature aimed only at agencies: an extra column, “Likely to outsource to agencies,” with values like Design, Development, and Marketing, compiled by hand. People loved it.
The payoff was immediate and specific. The questions “how are you different to X/Y/Z?” and “why are you more expensive than X/Y/Z?” dropped to zero. Not fewer, zero. His broader takeaway is that you don’t have to be radically different at first, and you shouldn’t panic when competitors come for your scalp: tweak the copy, niche down, maybe build one feature, and revert if it fails. Worst case you lose nothing; best case you escape the crowd entirely.
Being a one-person business is the pitch
The clearest illustration came from week one, back when CyberLeads was at $300/month and a Canadian agency owner wanted a phone call before committing to the $29/month plan. Alex took the call from a park on his lunch break, panicking that the buyer would realize there were “no systems, no team, no AI, just silly old me compiling the lists by hand.”
Remembering a Jason Cohen talk on running a business like a boutique rather than a supermarket, he flipped it 180 degrees and owned it. He pitched exactly what he was: exclusive, brand-new leads, updated and verified and handpicked one by one by a human, him personally, not outdated garbage scraped by robots and resold to thousands. The buyer subscribed on the spot, admitting that at $29 it had sounded too cheap to be real. The counterintuitive lesson landed hard: the low price was the objection, not the hook. A boutique needs boutique prices.
This reframed everything Alex had been ashamed of. A simple newsletter beats a bloated platform and takes ten seconds to set up. Not being a big company is what makes the leads genuinely exclusive. Compiling by hand is what makes them verifiably fresh, a promise no automated competitor can make. With that positioning and social proof, he raised prices from $29 to $49 to $99 a month, and conversions went up as prices went up.
Turn the screws that matter
Once the positioning worked, Alex refused to add complexity and instead concentrated on a few high-leverage inputs.
He noticed MRR was “a mirage,” customers stayed only two to four months, so he shifted focus to raw revenue. The math was blunt: at $49-$99/month for an average of two to four months, a customer was worth about $150, so he offered an annual plan at $299/year. He doubled the revenue per customer, collected it upfront, and buyers felt they got a steal. It was popular enough to push him past his roughly $2k/month salary, month after month.
He also picked his battles on channel and metric. Competitors, he realized, quit because of bad marketing, not bad product, so he cut “pretend work,” posted on Twitter, and ignored every other channel and metric. A Black Friday affiliate deal with his friend Dru, a $1k lifetime access offer sold into a 30,000-founder community, brought in more than ten lifetime customers and over $10k in a month, 30% of which went to Dru. He doubled his salary in profit in both November and December, once waking up to two lifetime sales overnight, “I made my salary overnight.”
Nuance is only learned in the fire
The year was the most stressful of his life, and the emotional lessons matter as much as the tactical ones. A HackerNews pile-on branded him a criminal for running a lead-gen business; he refreshed the thread all night. Days later the mob had moved on to attacking Google, and the relief was philosophical: “I may be the hero of my own movie, but in everyone else’s I am nothing but an extra.” No one cares about you, which means you can fail without fear, so he doubled down. His operating conclusion: it’s easier to get ten times luckier by increasing your shots on target than to get ten times better at predicting the world.
He managed the stress deliberately, borrowing from Epictetus (separate what is up to you from what isn’t) and from daily running, and from a fighter’s trick of relabeling fear as excitement mid-warmup. The Muay Thai analogy carries the closing argument. Fundamentals get you far, but the nuances, timing, distance, reading an opponent, are only learned by actually sparring and getting your nose broken, not by drilling technique or studying tape. He was one of the best at a technique-only gym and got beaten by beginners who had merely practiced in real conditions. Books, this one included, can’t teach the nuance either. So the last instruction is to close the book and go build, because progress compounds and looks slow right up until the breakthrough arrives.
Lessons worth keeping
- Your real competitor is usually inertia, not a rival. Most CyberLeads buyers were choosing over “time, boredom and a spreadsheet,” not comparing vendors.
- Watch behavior, not surveys. Agencies won on payment, retention, results, and enjoyment; freelancers said they needed it but wouldn’t pay.
- Sell into the number-one pain. A poll confirmed finding new clients is agencies’ top pain, which turns a product from nice-to-have to must-have.
- Niche with copy before code. A single tagline swap plus testimonials, then one manual feature, took “how are you different / why so expensive” to zero.
- Price like a boutique. $29 read as too-cheap-to-be-real; raising to $49 then $99/month increased conversions instead of hurting them.
- Chase revenue, not vanity MRR. Customers lasted 2-4 months (~$150 each), so a $299/year plan doubled per-customer revenue and pulled it forward.
- One channel, one or two metrics. Twitter plus a $1k Black Friday lifetime deal drove $10k+ in a month; competitors died from bad marketing, not bad product.
- Nobody remembers your public failures. The HackerNews mob moved to attacking Google within days, so increase shots on target and stop optimizing for prediction.
Sources
- Read the full book: alexwest.co/book-three
- Full text: startups-03-niche-down-escape-competition
Part of the Solo Founder series.