How We 2x'd Our Business And Grew Revenue From $15K To $30K/Month
This is a follow up story for Geocode.xyz. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published about 6 years ago, check it out here.
Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.
I’m Ervin Ruci, a tinkerer and researcher mostly interested in the areas of NLP and Computational Geometry.
Since 2005 I’ve started an average of 1 new business per year with many flops and some successes. One such success is Geocode.xyz (started in 2016) and Poidata.xyz (a pivot of geocode.xyz started in February 2021.) All my businesses are run under the umbrella of Geolytica INC, my incorporated entity with exactly one member, me.
My customers range from researchers creating quick dashboards of geodata to Fortune 500 companies. I sell API access, data products, and software both directly and indirectly via the AWS and GCP Marketplaces. I did pretty well financially in 2021, and it looks like 2022 will be even better with several large contracts coming down the pipeline.
Although this sounds like the typical hedonic treadmill, money is not the main motivator for me, but solving a problem I’ve been at for a long time is: finding ground truth at the speed of life.
I’m not saying that financial success in a solo bootstrapped business is not important, it is also important to receive validation. I’ve been in this dance for so long that I can see beyond the rivalry that my peers revel in dollar numbers and percentages of growth, the main focus of this publication.
Tell us about what you’ve been up to! Has the business been growing?
Business overall has doubled in 2021, if I include profits from new businesses I’ve started this year (poidata.xyz). I continue not to bother thinking about increasing traffic and/or sales. I know that readers of this publication love to see figures about SEO, marketing, etc. to get ideas about emulating such efforts in their businesses. Well, my efforts in that direction have been zero since 2005, so I have little more to say.
Just do what you enjoy doing and you might very well stumble upon a rewarding experience along the way.
I also suspect that if someone found a marketing trick that works, they would not tell, because once everybody else knows it doesn’t work anymore. Not that I’m that someone, just saying that you are not going to find that information from others, but rather from your intuition.
What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?
I’ve been in this field for so long, that most new lessons are not much of a novelty but rather just a refinement of an existing lesson.
Just do what you enjoy doing and you might very well stumble upon a rewarding experience along the way.
I currently make more money than I need and I’ve not stood idle, but I’ve built something of value to others out of nothing plus my time. That’s what I’ve desired all along.
Even if I became a billionaire at this point it would not make any difference in my general outlook. Life is a fun race and you might get a few medals along the way, no big deal, what’s most important is to always know who you are, the desires driving you, and what they are good for.
What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?
I’ve developed some really neat AI processes this year for finding and validating ground truth geo data. I think I’m on the right path due to the relative success of these methods thus far. So I’ll keep doing what works well and see how it goes in the upcoming year.
I don’t make 5-year plans like the totalitarian communist regime I lived under in my younger years in Albania; just like back then, even now, making 5-year plans is a futile exercise and anxiety-producing an incoming train of expectations.
Have you read any good books in the last year?
I read many books on my ReMarkable last year. Isn’t it great that we live at a time when such technology is available? What has remained a constant throughout the ages though, is the general availability of inspiration.
This summer I went on a trip to Greece and Albania and spent some of that time reading Marcus Aurelius Antoninus - Thoughts. It is amazing how his millennia-old wisdom is relevant in our time.
He says among other things: “The circle of a man’s knowledge is very limited, and the largest circles do not wholly include the smallest. The intersection of any two circles is very small, and whatever lies outside this space does not exist for both.”
We should strive to both expand our circles into what does not exist for anyone and include more of the other’s circles inside our own. The former is what is called cutting-edge research, the later education.
Reading books is an activity of the second type, and it also makes the first activity easier, if the inspiration is also present.
That’s why I read books, but nothing is more rewarding than going where nobody has gone before.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?
Find what inspires you, which may most likely not be the same as what inspires me, so I won’t go into that.
But if you are struggling with anything, whether it is a business or a relationship, you must be doing something wrong. Either figure out what or change something.
Where can we go to learn more?
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
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