September Bucharest Retreat - Road2Ramen 2.0

I’m leaving France to Romania in two days. After three months nomading with my family, I need to seclude myself to work on my main goal for the following 12 months: reach ramen profitability from my tech products, before I run out of savings.

If I can’t predict what will work and what won’t, I have to experiment faster. In order to increase my iteration speed, I have to design a strict routine supporting my goal by dramatically sharpening my focus. In other words, I have to work like an athlete monk - to align my daily tasks with my needs, objectives, and environment by living a (temporary) monastic life.

It might sound a bit extreme, but it’s obvious the more time I spend crafting and marketing, the more my business grows. The question is, how can I spend more time toward my quest without endangering my health? Monks and athletes share the same methodology: 100% of their time is dedicated to the pursuit of transcendence, spiritually or physically. It’s all about creating a virtuous cycle that works for you.

I want to reach ramen profitability by growing my already existing income sources and by making by-products, not by creating new ones from scratch. In other words, I want to focus on my tech product 200WaD, my content, and my personal brand as a maker.

200WaD is close to reaching the state I want for the version 2.0, which means it’s time to add a new income source in the form of sponsors (sponsored posts, sponsored categories, sponsored writing prompts, sponsored pages, etc.) and work on increasing the traffic. The website is attracting 1k unique visitors per day but it’s stagnating, time to develop an outreach/retention program.

My content is still an untapped opportunity. I tried to release a book, but it didn’t go past the pre-orders/soft-launch stage. I have to work on the re-design and finally publish it on Amazon and Gumroad. My daily content is never leaving 200WaD, which is not productive. I have to curate and transform it to launch a dedicated blog hosted on my personal website. Daily written content can easily be turned into a daily podcast and a weekly newsletter as well. The possibilities are many, but I have to execute.

Last but not least, I have to work on my personal brand to explore donation-based business models (Patreon, Buy Me A Coffee) and experiment with productized services. I live a peculiar life, I have a peculiar expertise: there must be a way to create wealth.

That’s it for my Why and my How for the following months. Tomorrow I’ll write about my micro-habits.