Ertiqah Diaries Part 1: Behind the Scenes

Disclaimer: Every Sunday, I will be sharing what we’re up to at Ertiqah, the challenges we faced, wins, losses - and more importantly, the learnings. If that's not something you’re interested in, please feel free to skip the Sunday editions (including this one), or just scroll to the bottom, there’s a poll where you can indicate that.

In today’s issue

• How I finally quit my job to start a business 🧗‍♂️ 

• Setting goals & milestones 🎯 

• Key metrics that we’re optimizing for ⚙️ 

• My biggest pains (so far) 🙃 

Let’s dive in.

How I quit my job

Alright, for those of you who are still here, let me tell you a quick story for context.

Short Story: Take a piece of paper, write down what you want to do, why you want to do it, and if you were living in an ideal world where money wasn’t an issue, how would you go about doing it?

Long Story: 3 months ago, I took the first (official) step to working on my own business. I had been “toying with the idea” for the last 18 months or so (the close friends reading this would know).

It wasn’t easy - but here’s what helped me take the leap:

• Made a Whatsapp group about 6 months ago - with my secondary number, started dropping voice notes with thoughts & plans on what I wanted to do. Short term + long-term plans.

• … that’s about it.
  (+ for the last ~ 4 years, I have been making a one-pager on paper of any idea that came to my mind).

What I think this did was convince my subconscious mind that it’s not just a pipe dream - I could actually do it, because the plan got more and more refined with every voice note that I sent in the group, and the excitement levels kept going up to implement it. I had a plan.

The 6 months plan

I will continue that story later on, for now - let me share what my 6 months plan was (Disclaimer: NONE of it involves revenue goals. Call me stupid, but it is what it is. I optimize for my strengths, and my circumstances. Not what the world thinks as the “norm”).

1. Start a newsletter → Write at least 10 editions (articles).

2. Start a YouTube channel → Upload 20 videos & try out YT Shorts.

3. Post consistently on LinkedIn → At least twice a week.

4. Give back to the community → Offer meetings to assist in “any capacity you can” (I wasn’t able to do this at all.. in the past 4-5 years).

5. Build one MMP (Minimum Marketable Product) - don’t search that term, I don’t think it exists.. anyways.

6. Get the legals & logistics of company formation out of the way.

Next, I’ll share with you how I’m doing on each of these easy-to-achieve KPIs, but before that let me quickly tell you why “revenue goals” were not part of the overall goals:

I’m not in it for the short-term. “I” is the keyword here. Everyone has different circumstances, mine were:

• Netted ~ 500K+ USD after tax in the last 5 years from salaries alone (includes freelancing, 2 jobs and 1 startup where I was drawing a salary + had a 15% equity stake), as a bachelor.

• I have 0 dependents, zero rent, bare minimum misc expenses.

• I do not just want revenue, I want recurring revenue. From products.
  If the former was the metric I was optimizing for, I’d consider myself stupid for exiting the job market .. because if I think of “myself” as a product, I was netting more than what most small service businesses do in profits per year.

Purpose of sharing this with you is that everyone has different err … “circumstances” and you should accept the strengths & weaknesses of your particular situation. Play the best game with the cards YOU are dealt.

Tell me, if you were holding these cards - would it be a “priority” for you to make 50K USD in the first 3-6 months of starting your business? Or would you be more interested in getting to 10M+ ARR in 5-10 years? I’m more inclined towards the latter - because that works better for my situation in the long run.

What are we building exactly?

I’ve firsthand seen the impact AI delivers in workflows within organizations. And we’re using them heavily internally - so our first few products are basically ones that we’re building for ourselves. It gets the “MMP” status when it’s in good enough shape that it gets the job done for us.

Back to the 6 months “kiddie” goals:

1. Newsletter: Superseded the goal. I think I’ve published ~20 editions in 3 months.
   (Don’t Care Metrics: Got to 1500+ unique subscribers, ~ 640 on beehiiv & 1400 on LinkedIn Newsletter).

2. YouTube Channel: Superseded the goal. 20 videos published in the last 3 months.
   (Don’t Care Metrics: 190 subscribers, 7K+ Views, 250+ Likes). (60 came from my job exit post on LinkedIn, the remaining came organically).

   

3. Post on LinkedIn regularly: I set 2 as the weekly goal. My standing average is ~ 4 per week.
   (Don’t Care Metrics: ~400K impressions, 3K+ Profile Views, 1K+ New Connections/Followers).

4. Give back to the community: 70+ Free sessions delivered via TopMate.

5. Build one MMP: The MVP is done - I’m polishing it up right now to turn it into MMP. Lots of sprints to get that done - more updates on that in the coming days. Clocked ~200+ hours on that, and loved every second of it.

   

   
   Plus, there’s about 3x side quests that I’ve opened (I couldn’t resist + they align with the long-term direction) and they’re pretty much done too.

6. Company formation, etc.: Don’t know why I even included that as a “goal” to be honest, but yea - that was done in the first month.

Why call them “Don’t care metrics”? 

Because.. I didn’t have control over them. What I did have control over is the work I put in. And that’s my success parameter. And you can see in the above stats, the “vanity metrics” came in anyway… and this is just the beginning. I assure you, the stats we will get in 365 days would be way higher, because with majority of these things, it’s an exponential curve.

I think I got sold on this approach from a book I read about 4-5 years ago, “The Power of Habits”. Don’t remember the exact verbiage, but the gist of it was:

Why did I set the bar so low on most of these goals?

Human (my) psychology dictates that we want to do more of what we’re good at, or are succeeding at + a wide majority gives up after the first try because they don’t see the results. I didn’t either. The first youtube video had about 50 views, same for the second one, third one got I think 800, fourth one again around 100. And then I don’t remember which number it was, but that one broke the 1000 views barrier and is sitting at about 4K in the last 40 days or so.

P.S: This isn’t the first time I’m doing it. Back in 2018, I started a faceless YT channel. I’ve probably spent an aggregate of 100-ish hours, equivalent to about 2 weeks “full-time work”, made about 50 videos (mostly short ones, under 5 mins). I was super inactive on that, but anyways - here’s the stats for that one:

(Note: Last upload I made on that channel was about 1.5 years ago, and you can see it’s still getting a fair amount of views):

Biggest Pains I’ve come across so far (that I can remember)

• Moving all the newsletter audience to one platform.

  • That’s mostly done. Many of you would have received an email or a LinkedIn DM from me. I appreciate you sticking around ❤️ 

• Deciding on a single “project/productivity management tool”.

  • ClickUp is.. amazing.

• Do we want to offer services on the side, while we build the product(s)?

  • Depends on the service. Btw, I got about 7 inbound leads on LinkedIn from people who watched that “one youtube video that did relatively well”. More on that later. Maybe in a post, we’ll see.

• Do we build multiple products in parallel, or focus on one and get it out first.

  • Build multiple, but keep one as the prime focus.

• Consistency.

  • This.. is hard. But honestly, one of the main reasons I suck up to AI as much as I do is because.. if I had to do this 2 years ago (and I did do it 2 years ago, 3 years ago and 4 years ago as well 🙂), everything would be 3x harder. With AI, the right automation helps with 30-80% of the work, that means you can do more with less.

• Alignment.

The last one is the most important and the hardest to achieve. I wish to share more on that but that would require me to say things that aren’t about myself and I don’t want to go down that road, so lets put a pin on that one for now. If you’re struggling with that in your own business, or do so in the future - ping me, that’s one thing I’m fairly good at → rallying the troops 😄 
(Might be able to offer some advice that might help).

It’s 5:26 AM, I don’t use AI for this edition (hypocrite!) and my morning juices aren’t flowing anymore.. so I’ll cut it here. But before you go:

Poll

Would you like to continue to receive the Sunday edition? I’ll opt you out of the Sunday edition of the newsletter if this is something that doesn’t interest you. No hard feelings man - I overcame the spotlight effect a long time ago 😄 

Grazie Mille,

Junaid

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PS if you missed the announcement of our Personal Branding Cohort 2024, you can check it out (and sign up) here: