Alex finally quits his job on a rainy Milan morning, expecting smooth sailing, and instead spends six months getting burned. He learns taxes the hard way, nearly loses $40k to a frozen bank account, pours half a year into an SEO experiment optimised on bot traffic, and grows revenue by a grand total of $1k/month. Yet he ends the book happier than he has ever been. The through-line is that this chapter is not about scaling a business at all. It is about what happens to a person when the safety net disappears, and about deciding what success is actually for.
Freedom is not less stress, it is a different animal
The folk wisdom Alex grew up with says you trade money for stress: work for someone else and stay calm and poor, or work for yourself and get rich and anxious. His lived experience refutes the framing entirely. The quantity of stress barely changed. What changed was its texture. Employment gave him chronic, low-grade, predictable pressure that never switched off: standing meetings, deadlines, reviews. Self-employment gave him acute stress that spikes and vanishes, terror when a new competitor appears, followed by weeks of sleeping like a baby. Crucially, the volatile kind made him feel alive, alert, sharper.
He reaches for Paul Graham’s essay “You Weren’t Meant To Have A Boss” and its image of the wild lion versus the zoo lion: same species, but the caged one drools and waits to be fed while the savanna one stays smart because its hostile environment forces it to. Alex is convinced this applies to people, and to himself specifically. Had he never shipped side projects before his corporate job, he would have believed you need a full team of designers, marketers and investors to build anything, and he would have built nothing. Because he already knew what the real world looked like, quitting was a return to the wild rather than a leap into the dark. The unpredictability, competition, shifting channels and “extinction events” are not the price of freedom. For him they are the point.
Revenue is a vanity number; take-home is the truth
The first storm is bureaucratic. A call with his Italian accountant reveals he understands nothing about tax, so he buys two books and studies them, not to learn but because he has to. He had assumed his 90% expat income-tax exemption meant near-zero tax, then discovers income tax is one line among many: social contributions, regional tax, corporate tax, VAT, capital gains. Running the numbers on paper, he finds that even with the cleanest possible online business, zero employees and a huge tax break, he keeps only 70 to 75% of revenue.
This cracks something open. If he keeps that little under ideal conditions, what is everyone else actually taking home? He posts the realisation that goes viral: a $10k/month solo business at 90% margin nets the founder $9k, while a $1M/year business with two co-founders at 25% margin nets each of them roughly $10k, yet the world calls the first a side project and the second a real company. Critics fired back with fair points, that the second scales, can be sold, and runs without you, but none could argue with the arithmetic. Further simulations of Western million-dollar companies land on the same uncomfortable truth: taking home $5k to $10k per month is considered great even at that scale, with most founders living on a salary and reinvesting the rest. The lesson lands personally. At 25, consistently keeping about $5k/month with a life he loves and no alarm clock, Alex is arguably already successful. Revenue and money made have been permanently decoupled in his head.
Survival first: diversification as insurance, not a hobby
Then life punches him. He had consolidated more than $40k of his $50k into one account in a single transfer, wanting one big tidy number to look at, and the transfer instantly flagged the bank’s fraud system. Customer support turned out to be non-existent, the forums were full of horror stories about accounts frozen for months, and his own paperwork was rejected twice before the account was frozen outright. On the third submission, at 11pm, it cleared, and he poured a glass of wine with red cheeks and relief.
The scare is less interesting than his diagnosis of it. He knew he should never keep all his money in one bank, and he did it anyway. He knew he should never move it in one transfer, and he did that too. It mirrors how it took him two years and 19 failures to accept that he should launch fast and charge from day one. His honest conclusion is that he learns almost exclusively by getting burned, like a child who only respects fire after it blisters a hand. Suddenly he sees risk everywhere: frozen money, broken tech, a payment provider cutting him off, a marketing channel dying. He responds concretely by rewriting CyberLeads in code instead of fragile no-code tools, tightening security, splitting money across banks in multiple countries, moving from a merchant of record to a payment provider, and starting a second distribution channel because over 90% of customers come from Twitter.
Left unchecked, the paranoia could run forever, so he reasons about it from first principles. The film “Big Fish” gives him the frame: the biggest fish in the river got there simply by not getting caught, by avoiding death and continuing to grow. Diversification is insurance, and its only job is to buy time to recover or rebuild a broken option. If his main channel has a 10% chance of failing and a second independent channel also has 10%, the odds of losing both at once are just 1%. That 99% safety is enough; anything beyond it is paranoia dressed as prudence. His rule settles at two of everything that matters: two bank accounts, two marketing channels. “And two girlfriends,” he adds.
When the data lies: chasing metrics versus talking to humans
With survival handled, Alex hunts for a growth lever that does not depend on his daily motivation, because posting on Twitter every day is exhausting and repetitive. He frames the progression as hunting with a spear (direct sales), fishing with a net (Twitter), and finally planting seeds (SEO). Using code, he auto-generates pages for all 25,000 funded startups in his database, gating the contact data behind a paywall, copying what his competitors were clearly doing. Ranking proved brutal: near-duplicate pages, bot-heavy traffic, rankings without clicks, titles that either blended in or ranked for the wrong keywords. So he went fully data-driven, split-testing 25 title variants across the companies and then testing the pages themselves down to navbars, popups, FAQs and CTAs, thrilled to make ego-free decisions on numbers alone.
Then the floor gave way. A session-recording tool he had forgotten about revealed that most of his “users” were bots, which meant months of data-driven optimisation had been steering on random bot clicks. A control test of two identical pages produced a clear “winner,” confirming the noise. Two adjacent discoveries deepened the disillusionment. Correcting a wrong data point, he found every competitor shared the exact same error, proof they all pull from the same sources and merely repackage it, no matter what proprietary genius they advertise. Maybe the giants with hundreds of employees are blind too, in which case copying their strategy is worthless. The real turn is a question he had suppressed: would he personally pay to unlock one gated data point? Absolutely not; it is clickbait.
So he abandons the scientific nonsense and goes back to talking to humans with common sense. Reality is messier than the whiteboard version once again. Most collected emails were garbage and would not deliver until he built a custom validator. Survey data was corrupt because options B and C always won regardless of shuffling, curing him of dropdowns for life. The live chat box finally surfaced real humans, though mostly the wrong ones: people mistaking his pages for Amazon or company support, founders threatening to sue unless their data was removed (he deleted all founder pages), and people treating him like the yellow pages. A colossal disaster, and then, inexplicably, it started working. Last month three paying customers came from Google, almost matching Twitter, and they converted with no funnel at all. It feels like a fluke, but so did Twitter in its early days. The prize is asymmetry: Twitter demands a post every single day, Google demands nothing, and if it holds he can scale to millions of pages.
A timeless life beats a bigger business
Underneath the tactics runs the book’s real argument about what all this effort is for. It surfaces first in a housing decision in Palermo, where his cockroach plan of the cheapest possible Airbnb left him depressed in a dark studio watching people shoot heroin outside his door. Choosing between a $500 flat where he would be miserable and a $1,000 flat where he would feel like a king, he reframes the “100% more expensive” gap as merely $500, or three CyberLeads subscribers, and asks whether feeling happier and more productive would earn those three back. His grandfather decides it. The man worked the same London printing plant for 50 years toward a retirement that arrived and then, the very next morning, became chest pain, lung cancer, and death inside a year. Alex rents the apartment by the sea, stops checking grocery prices, and stops feeling guilty about taxis, refusing to keep waiting for a life that may never come.
The reflection widens into memory and time. Living in flow felt great day to day, yet looking back his mind saved almost nothing, and five years vanished between glancing down at a screen at 20 and looking up at 25. New experiences and travel are what actually get written to long-term memory, so he deliberately breaks his beloved routine to run a triathlon, train Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, learn Italian, and road-trip Sicily. He also confronts the limits of focus: training progressed while Italian stalled, dating derailed training, and doing everything at once starved CyberLeads. A museum in Crete crystallises the theme, where gold jewellery from 3,000 years ago still looks new while stone and bronze pieces crumbled, prompting the idea that things tied closely to our slow-changing biology age like gold while technology-bound things rot in a decade.
The closing thought experiment names the target directly. Transported to ancient Athens, two men stand out: a materially successful elite with carts, coins and slaves, and a self-employed trader who is healthy, strong, well-travelled, close to family and friends, thoughtful, and free. Asked at gunpoint whose life to take, Alex admits his mind wants one but his actions chase the other. The trader’s life feels timeless, enviable in ancient Rome, modern New York and future Shanghai alike, so he adopts it as a compass. The verdict on the year is that his business did not grow much, but his quality of life grew enormously, and that may be more than enough.
Lessons worth keeping
- Judge stress by kind, not amount; volatile, self-directed pressure can energise you where chronic institutional pressure only grinds.
- Revenue is a vanity metric. Model take-home after all taxes and expenses before you compare yourself to anyone.
- Diversify as insurance, not as a hobby. Two independent options give ~99% safety; hunt catastrophic risks, accept the rest.
- You mostly learn by getting burned, so spend your caution budget on the mistakes you cannot recover from.
- Data-driven decisions are only as clean as the traffic behind them; bots and bad surveys will confidently lie to you. Talk to real humans.
- The giants often just repackage the same sources you have. Do not copy a strategy you would never pay for yourself.
- Spend money to protect your mental state and make memories; a happier home or a real trip can pay for itself, and the alarm-clock retirement is not guaranteed to arrive.
- Aim for a life that would be enviable in any century, not just a bigger number this quarter.
Sources
- Read the full book: alexwest.co/book-five
- Full text: startups-05-quitting-and-survival
Part of the Solo Founder series.