5 years, not out — How startups really survive.

It’s been 5 years since I founded OneSub and I would be lying if I said it hasn’t been tough.

In that time we’ve:

• shuttered a successful digital agency
• closed out some big government contracts
• weathered the Covid storm
• bought a farm
• brought on three rescue ponies, including 2 very young foals
• converted our old offices, by hand, into four new apartments
• homeschooled three preteens
• … and launched 4 new hyper-personalised news products

This week, we launch product number 5 💌 Inbox by Charlie

We’ve done this all on a raise of £106,000 and a lot of sweat, tears and grit.

5 products in 5 years. Wait, what!?

5 products in 5 years might sound a bit crazy, but as I’ve written about before, OneSub was founded mission-first, users-second.

This isn’t a particularly conventional way to build a business. Conventional wisdom will tell you to find a gap in a market and exploit that gap to make money.

I’m not trying to exploit a gap — I’m trying to fix one people don’t really notice exists. I’m trying to find a way to deliver interesting, insightful, informative public interest news to the masses … which doesn’t exploit our natural senses of fickle attention, fear of others or surreptitious voyeurism.

So I started with the technical engine (the API, the news ingestion, a proprietary natural language comprehension AI and our own autonomous clustering engine) … and then set forth to try and find that illusive elixir of life:

Product. Market. Fit.

How have we survived?

Running an AI product of any kind is not cheap. Running 5 products is harder still. Running an AI product that ingests new data every minute, that serves a multitude of use-cases and that has had to run as a proof-of-concept for over five years, with no guarantee of revenue, has been a serious challenge.

But there are strategies that have helped us and I’m happy to share those with you in case they help you think differently about your own business.

1. Bake your own bread — It’s so tempting these days to sign up to the latest tool and get up and running in no time. But whatever the exuberant indie hacker, X influencers tell you about their overnight success … for 99.999% of startups, playing the long-game is the key to survival. If you cut corners early, by using third party tools to do your work for you, they will take any success you have and more besides. Write what you can yourself. Do more with less. Don’t use ChatGPT for everything (we actually use it for very little).
2. Do less with more — Which leads me to the importance of running lean. Somewhere, deep down in your business, is a kernel of truth that you’re trying to sell. Make sure you know what that is and avoid anything that distracts from that truth. Don’t add features that don’t improve that truth. Don’t measure KPIs that don’t directly measure that truth. Don’t spend any money on anything that isn’t directly about doing that one thing that you’re focused on.
3. Assume nothing — Don’t assume that your vision fits with people’s expectations of the solution they seek. Don’t assume that those who recognise the need for your product don’t also see them selves as exceptions to the rule. We have no shortage of people who try our products, who are positive about our mission, who invested hard cash in our seed round… but in the end, if the product you deliver falls too far from their expectations, even they will not stick around. So never assume that people believe what they say or know how they feel.
4. Experiment, ruthlessly — So now you’ve thrown away your assumptions you’re free to experiment with everything you do. Be fearless in trying new things. Be ruthless with the things that don’t work. It’s the reason we’ve built five separate products and it’s taught us an immense amount about our customers, their desires and their expectations. Nothing you do is wasted if everything you do is an experiment.
5. Put all the things together — These steps don’t work in isolation. If you know you’re going to experiment, if you don’t make assumptions, if you know you need to run lean… then you bake your proverbial bread to suit. Yes, we might be running 5 apps across dozens of domains but there’s a single, reusable model and a combined API behind it all. That makes everything super-efficient and it’s the principal reason we’ve survived this long.

The joy of fruit

What this approach means is that, despite all the other distractions of life (running other businesses, converting property, training horses, feeding kids and so on) … we have managed to build 5x successful apps, each with their own audiences and each with their own potential.

Oftentimes, when one improves, they all improve — because the underlying model, the API that runs it all, delivers improvements in personalisation and news quality to them all.

Oftentimes, when we find something that works for one audience, we can translate that to others — because often it’s far more about the emotional relationship with the user and the resonance with their expectation than it is about the new feature you think it’s about.

Keeping true to our core mission, never loosing sight of our original Theory of Change, running lean, experimenting, shaking off our assumptions and doing as much as we can ourselves, as cheaply as we can has allowed us to cultivate our own way of creating insightful, balanced, safe and well-written original news content that feeds thousands of readers their news each day.

It’s a truly inspiring place to be after all this time.

2024 and the year of the election

As we plough headlong into a record-breaking election year, with over 4 billion people worldwide going to the polls, our responsibility to deliver balanced, well sourced, accurate news has never been more acute.

But we couldn’t be more excited. We’ve a complete revamp of the old OneSub platform (which, 🤫 shh!, you can watch take shape live on this super-secret URL: onesub.io/new) and we’re super-excited to be launching a completely new product — our fifth, if you’re paying attention — called 💌 Inbox — by Charlie, a hyper-personalised daily news digest based on your direct instruction and written just for you.

Surviving as an indie-hacker is never easy … but very little that’s easy is worth doing in life and very little that’s worth doing is ever easy. I wouldn’t have it any other way and I’m guessing, since you’re here, neither would you?

I’m delighted to share my journey and please feel free to ask me absolutely anything about that journey. If I can help you take the next step on yours, I would love to lend a hand.