Lessons from my first exit

how many businesses you run?

Right now, I just have one business that makes money. It's an ingredient parsing API that I wrote in 2018.[0] It was not a good idea, but it still makes $100-200/mo without me doing anything. Until a few months ago, I also had a website about the keto diet that made about $100/mo, but I sold it because I wasn't doing anything with it.[1]

I'm currently working on a book about writing as a developer, and that's my main focus for the next few months,, but I don't know if I' call it a business because I haven't sold anything yet.[2]

[0] https://zestfuldata.com/

[1] https://mtlynch.io/notes/buy-is-it-keto/

[2] https://refactoringenglish.com

Imo, you can make good money, and do some good, guiding the numerous laid off developers on the business pastures, if only you figure out how to scale beyond the usual personal couch model. Perhaps some sort of QA platform with paid access: free-tier for read-only users, basic-tier allows asking questions, and premium users get occasional 1-1 guidance? Just a random idea. This might work because they can relate to you and thus trust you, unlike yet another MBA suit.

Thanks for the article. Great read. Can I ask how you sold the website making $100 month?

Just through that blog post linked above. I put up an interest form and got a lot of responses within a day, so I turned off submissions and offered it to the best bid. We did it through Escrow.com, which worked okay.