They say I make $45K/month just by pure luck and just by posting my MRR on X
Published in 2023, this chronicle by @donutshop details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing. Key verified financial milestone: $45K/month.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Charging customers from day one acts as the ultimate filter for building software that solves genuine, high-urgency problems.
Keeping fixed overhead low and leveraging lean infrastructure allows founders to stay alive until market tailwinds kick in.
Small, repetitive improvements in customer retention and conversion rates yield massive returns over multi-year horizons.
Community Debate Themes:
The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.
CATEGORY Bootstrapping & MRR →
HISTORICAL ERA Post-ZIRP & AI (2023–2026)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 25 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 5 comments
What this guy is doing takes a lot of skill: effective marketing, brand building, the online audience, his initial sales, his product instinct, his tech skills. Overall, this guy is super talented and it's obvious he knows how to put in the grind. And he probably has that advantage some humans have where he enjoys doing that.
You can do all that and fail. It's true. That's how it works. But about the most pathetic thing to see is someone unsuccessful put down another person's success as just luck. You just know the guy saying it's luck is the excuse maker, the guy who would have succeeded if not for someone, the unaccepted genius misunderstood despite his mastery of comments about how Google always kills projects.
And the worst part of it all is that if you read this guy's blog post, you don't get a feeling of "Wow, he really just cracked it!". I got a feeling of "Bloody hell, mate! That's an absolutely tremendous amount of work." Not only did it not seem easy or lucky, but it felt like something I could never do myself. It's so hard, I originally shared it with a friend to show him how hard it is.
I do have to credit him with turning this into another content marketing journey, though. Clever ;)
It's rarely luck alone, off course, someone has to have the guts to play, to risk losing something, and often must put in the work too. But out of everyone who does, luck can often make the winners.
That said, in his case, there's a few repeat accomplishments. More than once he thought of a product, built it, and seem to have gotten traction with consumers.
This is different from say Jeff Bezos, and how he famously said he doesn't think he could make it again, because he was kind of at the right time, right place. And he wouldn't know what in the current time and place would be the next Amazon.
But in OPs case, he seem to be able to replicate these small-ish but still successful products. So at the very least he's got a knack for good ideas, identifying products that don't have a good offering, and building them quickly to a point that people will pay for them. That takes some talent, and hard work to accomplish.
Luck plays a role in pretty much everything. The key is being happy/successful with the amount of luck you end up getting. Looking at luck as sort of normally distributed, chances are you will have some amount of it and, if you're well positioned, that little luck could propel your life forward.
Most people should be thinking about that random day where you'll meet someone who works at your dream company, or an investor, at a party. It will happen once or twice in your life. If it happens tomorrow, are you going to be able to make the best of it?
I think it depends on what people mean by lucky. I doubt he would have gotten to 45k/month if lives in North Korea (or many other terrible dictatorships) even if he did just as much hard work. Or maybe just have bad luck/genes and be born with a severe mental disability.
Maybe we should have said he wasn’t unlucky instead?
Basically just getting to live in a western/first world democracy already makes you luckier then most people on the planet.
It's the 'I could have done that' vibe. Yes, you might have been physically able to. But you didn't. That you actually did not do it is a pretty good indicator that it is not, in fact, easy.