If he worked 2 hours a day, 5 days a week, for 1 year (52 weeks), thats 520 hours.
He made $6.73 per hour before self employment and income taxes (if applicable). Or $13.46 per day.
I’m not sure how you get a good lunch and tuition from that unfortunately.
Still, everyone values their time and talents differently, they also have different goals in terms of education and what they consider to be a financial success.
I guess, given the money he’s made, what he’s actually learned is a long list of things he still needs to learn. Because what he’s saying he’s “learned” hasn’t been validated yet. Maybe if he’s making ~$70k by the end of this year we can assume these things he’s learned have value, otherwise, they are mostly observations about the current state of his business and how making adjustments in these areas have mildly impacted his bottom line.
I wish him the best of luck.
On the education side, my first 3 years as a maker, I didn't grow beyond 1 paid user on any product I sold. I still learned with every failed launch, and every product I shut down.
See "Year in review" at https://maxrozen.com/
The learning has been cumulative.
I went from "Hey if I just copy Pieter Levels, I'll be rich immediately" to "If I build it, they will come" to "Maybe if I write about the problem, people will come?" to "If I talk to people about their problems, maybe I'll understand them well enough to solve a problem for them".
I'm not trying to convince you to take up the life of a bootstrapped founder, I just wrote an article about what I learned from a couple spare hours before my job each day over the last 12 months.
That being said, I think I'm at a point where I could spin off an API from OnlineOrNot and make it similarly successful within a month or so.
Do you plan on going the API route?
I would cancel a project if it couldn't pay its own infrastructure bill after 6 months.
If I had to name a goal for the second year, it's to reach $1k MRR across everything I sell online. I still have plenty of ideas for OnlineOrNot, but there are a few APIs I built internally that I could see others paying for (that I'll be testing if people would, actually, before building).
Oh well…
So they haven’t been working for $6.73/hour. They’ve been building a money printing machine that currently prints $13.46 a day.
Even taking it as working for $6.73/hour though, I’d make that trade plenty often even though I’d never consider regular employment anywhere near it. The flexibility of doing it whenever, whenever. No bosses or coworkers to be accountable to. These things count for a lot.