From $0 to $100K in 10 years
A recap of all the videos I published over the past decade, sharing my progress along the way
Today, my SaaS business is making $100’000 per year, of which $30k are spent in freelancer and server costs, which leaves me with $70k pre and $50k post taxes.
This might seem little to some of you (the tech bubble really is a bubble), but is actually well above the European median, and more than sufficient to live very well in any European city.
100k is the goal I set myself 10 years ago, when at 15, I decided to become an entrepreneur. Looking back, the path feels short and long at the same time:
Roughly, the past ten years can be summarised as follows:
2016-2017: Getting very lucky with a viral ‘Rate your teachers’ website, followed by a super awkward 'visualise your goals to become rich’ phase, influenced by self-help books like ‘The Secret’ (ouch), ‘Rich Dad, Poor Dad’ (better), and ‘The Millionaire Fastlane’ (good).
2017 - 2019: Starting physical businesses (such as selling cookies and juices), service businesses (such as a niche travel agency & an ‘Amazon but for renting’ website) and online courses & communities, mostly around helping other entrepreneurs (such as entrepreneur communities, paid masterminds and courses on how to buy crypto).
2019-2021: Pivoting into tech, learning to code, starting to work with a small team and building my first SaaS (personal CRM).
2021-2025: Building my second and third SaaS, focusing more on distribution, on solving a clear pain point and operating in an existing market (as opposed to creating a new market/need à-la-Airbnb )
I started a Youtube channel at 15 with the explicit goal of sharing my progress along the way and continued posting throughout the decade, which allows me to go back in time and understand how I was thinking at the time and set myself back into the shoes of that 15, 17, 20 or 22 year old Nathan: extremely cringe and interesting.
One weird thought I had from re-watching those videos is that today’s Nathan would not become friends with the 15 year old Nathan. He was extremely annoying, arrogant, and honestly quite skill-less, clueless and had gross misconceptions about how the world worked (he hadn’t even read Milton Friedman!) - but that is the whole point of those videos: they will speak to people who are at a different stage of their development in a way in which I couldn’t anymore today as I wouldn’t relate to them - and through those videos, my audience can move back and forth in time through the stages of my learning!
In this post, I will go through that short history of mine, outline the main learnings I went through, the big mistakes and just generally try to find out what makes me ‘me’ and what made it possible to succeed and reach that goal I’m very proud of.
2016: ‘Rate your teachers’ website goes viral
In my first year of high school, frustrated by the lack of feedback loop between students and teachers, I decided to build a platform (really a group of Google Forms stitched together) where students from my school could write constructive reviews for their teachers.
After a successful initial test with my class, we created some marketing content with friends and launched. Within a weekend, hundreds of students had submitted thousands of reviews and the following Monday, the school council pulled the three of us out of our class and ordered us to shut the website down.
Long story short, I eventually got expelled for three months after leaving the website online (having checked with my godfather and lawyer that everything was legal) which lead to the site becoming even more popular and multiple news articles being written about the story.
While it wasn’t a commercial success, it definitely was a marketing success and biased my next ventures because I had learned with an n=1 that when you ‘build it, they will come’.
2016 - 2017: Teenager, alone in England
Looking back at my videos from those years, I realise how disconnected I was from my peers: it was the time boys started to smoke, girls would start to dress up for halloween parties and I was wearing shirts, publishing videos about how you shouldn’t give unwanted advice and that passive income was the way to go.
At 16, you can’t choose your environment yet and I wonder how much easier things would have been for me had I gone to San Francisco instead of Canterbury, England for my exchange year.
I was posting extremely regularly, a video every day or two.
I was quite different/weirdo back then already (funnily, it seems like my humour has remained mostly unchanged over the past decade). For example, I negotiated with my principal to get one week off to go to some week long business seminar - who does that and which principal would say yes? From my memories, I think I just overwhelmed them by being too far out there and the school just did not know how to deal with me.
There was no food for lunch available at that business seminar, so I offered to cook and bring lunches to attendees - that’s the first $ I made.
Another surprising learning for me from watching those videos is how much of the basics I knew already:
Building something people want.
Start small, make one customer happy (MVP)
and yet, it still took me another 6 years to actually build something someone wanted…
Awkwardly, my second business was pretty much a course on how to become an entrepreneur. I really have a hard time understanding how I could justify wanting to teach others how to make money when I hadn’t done anything myself?
I wonder if this, again, is a consequence of the environment you’re in. In my case, most of the content I could find online about how to become entrepreneur/rich was posted by people selling courses on how to become rich - and so through mimetism, I probably just copied that (if only I had been in SF.. sigh..).
I then found a job on some freelancing platform as a cold caller in Australia (paid on results only) and started to wake up at 1am to call small business owners in Australia to ask them for their email. This again, is so out there that I wonder how much being in another country and away from my parents enabled me to explore weird things like this without fear of being judged or questioned.
In the spring of 2017, due to all these projects, my grades where so bad (I had a 70% class attendance, when the expected minimum is 95%) that my school in Switzerland started to say I’d have to redo the year and my reaction was to publish a video saying that since I’d be kicked out, I now had no other choice but to succeed in business. This is starting to sound like bad parenting to me but at the same time it did work out. I wonder what’s the right thing to do as a parent: being to strict could prevent me from exploring further, but had I been kicked out, that would have had other consequences as well.
In one other video, I describe the kind of people I met at networking events and from a parent’s perspective, it all sounds very scary: all more of less failed business people using networking events and apps to sell their courses and coaching. I wonder how it must have looked, that 16 year old kid walking around. I’m glad I met great and kind people like Alex Pawle; the wrong person could really have taken me down a bad path.
I then started my first ‘software’ business: ‘Gloud - Amazon but for renting things’. The MVP was leveraging Amazon’s refund policy and logistics infrastructure: someone would order something to rent on my website, I would buy it on Amazon, ship it to them and then send them the return instructions and they would return it to an Amazon Locker and I could get the money from Amazon back + whatever they paid for the “rental”. I managed to get 3 people to rent something from me.
Looking back, I had created a huge time pressure for myself by expecting to become financially independent in 60 days, which focused my marketing strategies on very short term ideas (leaving leaflets in busses, hiding business cards in library books, ..) instead of SEO which would have worked so much better by targeting keywords like “rent projector in London.”
Another project from that period that went on longer was a mastermind: I found people online who also wanted to start their business or become freelancers and we started a weekly call. The business model was that people would bet on their goals and if they didn’t reach them, I would cash-in the money (bad incentives! the video in which I rejoice from my group’s failure as it makes me money is wonderfully cringe).
In 2017 is when I heard from Bitcoin for the first time. I can’t remember how exactly (probably my dad) and I bought my first two ETH for $60 and $80 - good times. My videos of that period are hilarious as I was giving investment advice such as ‘wait for the price to triple, then sell a third’.
I also decided to build a social media app during that spring, probably because I felt like I wasn’t connected with people like myself and wanted to build a platform to find those people and connect. I didn’t know how to code at the time, so my plan was to do a Kickstarter campaign that would pay for the development costs. It kind of worked out and I was able to get an MVP off the ground for $1K by hiring some Indian agency but as expected no-one ever used the app.
My room at the time, with a huge sign on the wall that says “I have the time and money to realise my dreams” - check ;)
This concludes that first phase of my business life. If you’re curious (and speak french), you can get a more in depth review of that period I recorded at the time here which includes many more side quests I went on such as selling wooden flip flops.
2018-2020: Falling in love and becoming adult
After this year in England, I came back to Switzerland for my last year of high school. It was the period when Bitcoin went from 2k to 10k within a few months, which made any of my other revenues (from the mastermind) look ridiculous in comparison to the value gain of the $300 I had invested in crypto. In parallel, I finally accepted and understood the causes of why launching a social media without any good user acquisition strategy was not going to work.
I early 2018, I created a course on how to buy crypto currencies, in which I showed how to use crypto trading sites (which was pretty complicated at the time) and sold it on Udemy (which made about $1k over a year). I also launched my first Chrome extension (a youtube feed blocker - developed by some freelancer). I like to think that both experiences made me realise how one can leverage existing marketplaces (Udemy’s audience & the Chrome Store) instead of relying on ads or one’s own audience.
As my last year of high school was wrapping up, I started to apply for jobs all over Europe, fiercely decided not to go studying and this 18 year old kid did manage to convince a British startup to hire him! How proud I was! I still remember the final hiring call with Oleg (the company’s CEO) where we discussed Asimov’s books.
As a funny side note, I also applied for a senior growth role at Revolut and did make it to the first interview with Andrius (the current deputy CEO / Growth head). How absurd that call must have seemed to him, but he was wonderfully polite.
Throughout that spring, I also got more into no-code tools, learning to build chatbots and Zapier powered apps. Specifically a legal advice platform and a coaching chatbot. They didn’t go anywhere due to a lack of good customer acquisition channels but both earned me around $50.
London
So here I am, in London, on a Saturday night, in my company’s offices, recording a video. What a lifestyle.
I was extremely lucky to have the best manager I’ll ever have straight on my first job - Jack Bartlett was both extremely funny, kind and taught me a loooot. In any conflicts or issues, he would always have my back, which was really awesome.
I don’t recall much from my time at Sweatcoin and the videos from that time aren’t that explicit about learnings but it’s clear that I was (as always) a rogue element: skipping hierarchy, just asking other team members to do things for me without informing management. I wasn’t hurtful to the company but just impossible to manage. I would have hated to have myself as an employee given how bad I was at communication.
At the end of the summer, a month into my new job, my friend and girlfriend who I had fallen in love with back in Switzerland took a big leap and joined me full-time in London.
We lived together in the British capital for half a year, me working for Sweatcoin, and her working in different coffee shops, learning english and always bringing those wonderful leftover chia puddings back home.
London did take it’s toll on us and both her and me were tired and not seeing much progress anymore at our jobs, so we took another leap: leaving everything to go travel 3 months to just have time to work and do stuff.
South East Asia
I had planned to use that free time to really get serious and finally build my businesses into something real - unfortunately it all failed, I didn’t hit any revenue milestones but found a new job: remote project manager, paid $4’000/mo!
In hindsight, this was another big fork in the road. Had I not found a job, I would have run out of money then and would not have been able to continue on that path.
While this period of my life didn’t teach my any business skills; it clearly showed me how wonderful it is to have time and the arbitrage opportunities of earning in one country and spending in another (which I still leverage actively today!).
Warsaw
I only lived in Warsaw for a couple of months and yet it still resonates in my mind as one of the best and most important times of my life. While it wasn’t a time of entrepreneurial success, it was a time of everything-else success:
Earning a great salary
Living in a beautiful place
and of course… Being happily in love
Additionally, my job gave me this perception of being cool and important, with “business trips”, going to conferences, team building workshops and so on.
The salary combined with the costs of living in Warsaw turned me into proper consumer, going out to restaurants every week, bars and so on. All those things that had not been possible in London.
After only 4 months of that idillic lifestyle, the software agency I was working for had to fire everyone as the customer pipeline had dried up and we went back to Switzerland.
Switzerland
While it isn’t really perceptible from the videos or photos I took from that time, the summer of 2019 must have been a pretty rough fall from heaven.
Back to living with my parents, without revenue, projects or plans. I got one internship offer at Unit8 which I declined and decided instead to start studying. Me who had been against studies my whole life. I explain the decision in this blog post. Tldr - nothing better to do + gives me financial support from my parents + potential startup grants from the university.
While I do remember this period being particularly tough due to studying very hard, the videos, the 10k startup grant from my university and getting into Pioneer’s accelerator program show that I was still spending 20 hours a week or so working on my new software startup (personal CRM).
Needless to say that I failed my exams and thanks to COVID kicking in and the chaos it created was able to spend the spring semester of 2020 working full-time on my startup and finally got my first to paying customers, paying each $5/mo for my personal CRM!
Pioneer was my entry point into the world of startups, of creating businesses and through the people I met there, I realised how wrong I was about many things: when your cohort buddy goes from $5K to $20K in revenue within weeks, you start to question your strategy.
I was extremely lucky to find Stefano & Mari-Lou in that year as well. Developer and designer, both were looking for a side project to work on and we would have a weekly call to discuss tasks and next steps. I could never afford to pay them but invited them for a team get-together in the Swiss mountains. I now had a team!
By the end of 2020, I had dropped out of this elite university and signed up for a bachelor in a second tier, much more relaxed university. That way I could work on my business while still being financially supported by my parents as a student.
By then, through Pioneer, I had a small network of people who had actually built somewhat successful software businesses to be inspired by.
Finally, through the startup grant, I was less cash constrained and renting a $7/mo Heroku server wasn’t that scary of a prospect anymore and most importantly, through working with Stefano, I had now learned how to code.
In hindsight, this is when everything came together. Instead of learning from my failures in years, I’d now learn in months and would eventually reach my goal.
2021-2025: Fail, learn, repeat. From $100 to 100K MRR
2021: Getting to 10K in revenue
In early 2021, the relationship with my co-founder broke apart (partly due to an incredible freelancer I found - who set new standards for how fast good software can be shipped - and with whom I still work to this day) and the personal CRM just wasn’t growing, which was demotivating the rest of the team.
In parallel, we built Vocal.email in 2021 with Fahad (the awesome freelancer) and launched it on Appsumo - a lifetime deal platform for software, which made us a thousand dollars within a month.
So by the end of 2021, my total revenue for that year was about $10K (up from $300 in 2020!). The team had been trimmed down to just Fahad and myself.
The revenue ‘explosion’ can be explained by user acquisition being so much simpler with Vocal, SEO starting to work for the personal CRM and Appsumo of course.
The company was now profitable and on top of paying Fahad, I could now start to cash out the money I had invested into the business.
2022: $10K in recurring revenue
In 2022, I complete my bachelor, while still living in Switzerland, now in a studio with my then girlfriend.
While revenue is the same as last year, this time the revenue is generated from subscriptions to my products instead of selling lifetime deals via Appsumo.
On top of those sources of revenue, I work on multiple projects as a consultant, from a large insurance company to a tiny startup. This brings in another $20k or so in revenue and allows me to live well without having to find a job.
I spend a month in San Francisco for the first time to meet other Pioneers and discover the Disneyland of startup people. Some people in my cohort are making $20K a month - making me feel both ridiculous but also more motivated than ever.
2023: Travel, travel, travel
In 2023, freed of all study ‘chains’ I go on a travel spree, first to meet my coworker and friend Fahad who lives in Bangladesh and then continue to most continents to see the world, find a place to settle down and meet more of my online friends.
This is the year I will sign my last work contract, for another software agency, working 3 days a week - enough to cover the bills but leaving me enough time to work on my businesses.
I launch a third software business: Magic Heidi - invoicing for Swiss freelancers. More boring than ever but the market is clear, the problem is clear and the acquisition channels are clear (SEO + App Store). I get my first paying customer within weeks of launching.
By the end of 2023, I’m now earning enough to set aside $1’000 per month, getting close to paying the bills as long as I live in Italy or some other non-Switzerland country.
2024: Zurich & Bologna
In 2024, I lived 6 months in Zürich and 6 months in Bologna. It’s the first year that I did not do a single freelance job or contract for anyone.
The big change in that year is that we raised prices for our software, both for new and existing customers (from $97/y to $197/y). This got me from ‘nice side money’ to ‘I can live from this in Italy’.
My software business was now paying me about $2.5K per month (70% of the revenue coming from Vocal, and 30% from Magic Heidi) and making $50k/y in total. While I wasn’t profitable yet, I was burning through my savings slowly enough that I knew I’d break even before having any cashflow issues.
2025: Settled in Prague
In early 2025, due to a new free trial we added to both Vocal and Magic Heidi, growth picked up again and we hit the magic $8’333/mo revenue number.
Appsumo (the lifetime deal platform) has been generating $1.5k-2k/mo since the beginning of the year which means we’ve been generating about $10k/mo in 2025.
I’ve now settled in Prag, bought a couch & plants and plan on living here for at least a year.
It is hard to predict how things will continue but it seems reasonable to me that my company will hit $200k in revenue by the end of 2027 - which will be more than enough for any family plans I can imagine, for both Fahad and me.
Summary & Takeaways
While re-reading this, I can’t help but be super proud of the journey. I think of Asimov’s biography: ‘It’s been a good life’ and happily apply it to myself: It’s been a good decade. To close off, a few notes I took while reviewing all that footage.
What I would have done differently
Do NOT burn the boats
Over and over again, I’ve heard this idea that you need to put yourself in a super stressful situation to succeed. YC is full of those founder stories, racking up credit card debt until they eventually succeed or leaving their job to live in a tiny apartment while eating canned food.
This is a typical survivor bias situation. You don’t hear of all the unhappy endings and what’s clear from my own story is just how long it takes. There is only so much you can learn every day. You want to give yourself that time so don’t leave your job or burn the boats, go gradually instead.
Had I avoided consulting or passed on university, things would have looked very ugly.
To clarify, university was a only means of financial support through my parents, the content was useless.
Fail fast(er)
Had I started to work on Vocal a year earlier, I would have realised much sooner that my personal CRM was not solving a problem. Had I started the invoicing app two years earlier, I would have realised that Vocal didn’t have Product Market Fit.
The reason I didn’t start those businesses earlier is because I didn’t know that something was wrong with my current business. It’s only once I saw the data from Vocal that I realised that my personal CRM had very high churn and it’s only once I saw the conversion rate from my invoicing app that I realised Vocal had terrible conversion.
This is where the 12 startups in 12 months concept is so great. Had I used this, I’d have reached 100k ARR two years earlier.
End notes
And finally, my own conclusions:
I’m extremely lucky
Luck is sometimes provoked, and sometimes it’s just there. I’ve had a ton of both. Being born in Switzerland to kind and well off parents who paid for my studies was a huge plus. Being able to speak english well, on top of german and french is one of the reason I got some of the jobs and consulting projects which paid for the years in which my company wasn’t earning enough.
I’ve provoked some of the luck as well, from applying to every job I saw, to setting up a personal website, publishing content regularly and staying in touch with people.
On the luck scale, I definitely got an “above average” on both provoked and unprovoked luck.
I’m extremely optimistic
This is related to being lucky, but the level of optimism in my videos is surprising. Every time something went terribly badly, I was super chill and positive about it. This trait (that runs in the family) has been reported by friends and partners as well and while it leads me to persevere stupidly sometimes, overall it’s been extremely helpful as it leads me to just keep going and focus on the good parts.
What’s next
Strangely, becoming profitable made me realise how little I actually care about money and business. The goal was always to just have time to live. Friends of mine at similar revenue levels dream of growing their team, want to reach 1M ARR, … that’s not my goal at all. I’m happy to continue growing the businesses to build more stability around my life but I never want to hire more. I love our lean little team of two and hope we’ll keep going for the next decade just like that.
Thank you for reading this! While proofreading, I realised how narcissistic this post can sound, and full disclosure, there is a certain amount of it in there. But then, you can’t write that kind of article without a certain amount of ego and self love <3