Six years after starting “The Next Facebook,” Alex sits between a lawyer and an accountant in Cyprus, signing his company into existence. This is the book where the scrappy experimenter decides to stop swinging and start running.
The two-year rhythm of compounding
Looking back from the incorporation table, Alex sees his career as alternating blocks: one year stuck, the next year exploding. 2016 he learned to code on City Vibes and made nothing. 2018 he shipped fifteen products in fifteen weeks and clawed to $100/month. 2019 he burned a full year trying to grow a favorite and had to take a job. 2020 he found CyberLeads, hit $2k/month and quit again. 2021 nearly ended as a failure until a single email to his list launched a new offer straight to $100k/year.
What matters is not the zig-zag but the slope underneath it. Each cycle he got faster and more expensive at the same time. A product that once took two years to build and earned $0 became a landing page built over a weekend, then an offer launched with one email. In parallel, the value of a single customer climbed from $0 (free product) to $240/year (at $5/month) to $5k/year (at $100/month) to $100k/year (at $2k/month). Same person, same effort, radically different leverage. The lesson he draws is not that he is a genius but that the game rewards staying in it long enough for speed and price to compound together.
Shotgun, then sniper
Strip away the narrative and Alex says his entire method reduces to one repeating move. Fire a shotgun of cheap experiments until something hits, then snipe that winner with full focus until it plateaus, then shotgun again for the next lever of growth. It took 20 product launches to find CyberLeads, 20 experiments inside CyberLeads to find Twitter as a channel, and 20 more to find the productized service that became the business. He now plans around an assumed hit rate of roughly 5%, which reframes failure as budgeted inventory rather than personal defeat. The finding process itself had a bias: for CyberLeads he went channel-and-market first and deliberately picked an idea that already existed and was validated, rather than inventing something novel. He is careful to say this is not a recipe, only what worked for him.
Running instead of swinging again
The emotional core of the book is a baseball image. Nineteen swings missed; the twentieth, CyberLeads, sent the ball high into the air, a clear chance at a home run. Instead of running the bases, Alex got cocky and sat down, convinced he could hit that same perfect shot again and build a whole portfolio of CyberLeads-like products at once. Reality smacked him with a few failed launches, and he snapped out of it. Going all in meant accepting he might be a one-trick pony running the same business for decades, and being genuinely fine with that. He no longer needs to prove, to himself or anyone, that the success was repeatable rather than luck. Crucially, he redefines the home run itself: it is not the best product he could ever build, but a business that works, keeps working, and grows slowly, buying him money, time, and the freedom to take risks or step back at will.
Simplicity beats sophistication
The same instinct governs where he sets up his life. Italy had looked perfect with its 90% tax exemption, but the language barrier, bureaucracy, and a six-month residency requirement ground him down, and staying meant losing nearly half his money to tax. Burned once, he grew cautious. Consultants pushed multi-country structures, holding companies, and fly-in-fly-out schemes promising zero percent, but those setups were more expensive and far riskier than advertised. Alex ignored individual tax rates entirely and optimized for a single number: how much lands in his pocket on $100k, $250k, $500k of profit. Cyprus was not clever or cool, but it won every category that counted. They speak English and Greek so he can look his accountant in the eye, it sits inside the EU near family, it keeps $85k of every $100k in profit, and it demands only two months a year on the island. He carried the same discipline into investing: one year of cash in the bank, the rest in index funds with a little crypto, resisting the urge to overcomplicate there too. The final setup is deliberately global and boring: business in Cyprus, customers across the US, EU, and UK, banks scattered through Europe, broker in the Netherlands, investments in the US market, and himself living anywhere.
Lessons worth keeping
- Speed and price compound together: the same weekly effort went from $0 over two years to $100k/year from one email once leverage was in place.
- Budget for a ~5% hit rate. It took 20 launches to find CyberLeads and 20 experiments each to find the winning channel and offer.
- Shotgun to find, sniper to grow; alternate the two rather than doing both at once.
- Don’t sit admiring a home run. Chasing a portfolio of CyberLeads clones cost failed launches; focus rescued the business.
- A home run is a business that keeps working, not the best product you could build.
- Optimize tax for money-in-pocket, not headline rates: Cyprus keeps $85k of $100k versus ~$50k in Italy, with less risk than “zero percent” structures.
- Keep the money simple too: one year of cash, the rest in index funds plus a little crypto.
Sources
- Read the full book: alexwest.co/book-seven
- Full text: startups-07-going-all-in
Part of the Solo Founder series.