Building, failing, learning: my story of reaching 8 figures from scratch

This post was first published on https://www.theopenprojects.io (in Spanish)

Maybe you know me from Twitter (@DanielPeris) and my absurd puns. Or maybe you don't... I'm 40 years old, very happily married and father of a beautiful boy who is now (today) 4 months old. I live in a town near Barcelona, I'm 100% self-taught, I've been "doing things" on the Internet (and I LOVE it) for a long (LONG) time and I'm going to tell you about my story. Summarized, because otherwise this content would be very long and you would not spend your valuable time reading it to know me a little more / better.

Coca-Cola, computers, programming

It is important to know where we are going, but also where we come from.
I love Coca-Cola and I love computers. I have always lived surrounded by computers (lucky me!) and I have always liked to "do things" with them. When I was born (1983) my father had a computer at home - A Sinclair ZX81 like this one:

After that computer came others: some other Sinclair, some Amstrad, some Commodore (including the Amiga 500 which was my first own computer in 1990), PCs, Apple, but when I was 3-4 years old and I couldn't read or write, one day my parents saw me playing with a Amstrad CPC 464 - Yes, with cassette tape.

How surprised they were when they saw what I had written on the screen:

"cocacola"

It was the fault of this "plaque" that hung on the wall of my father's office:

How? Nobody knows, but I guess I simply looked at each letter that appeared on the plaque, searched for them on the computer keyboard and clicked on them in the same order in which they appeared. I imitated what I had seen my father, Paco, do so many times: type on the computer. Why did I do it? I have no idea, although I also imagine that I wanted to try Coca-Cola, which didn't happen until many years later.

I'll wager a shot with you that you don't know many people whose parents are named Paco and Paca, do you? That's right, Paco and Paca 😍. (This is funnier in Spanish, BTW)

My parents were civil servants (they are now retired), but my father, who never professionally dedicated himself to anything related to computers, was the first "geek" that I knew. Computers, electronics, mechanics, carpentry.... My father could assemble anything and fix anything, from a car to a TV. MacGyver was an amateur next to him. He really was. And if my dad didn't know how to do something... He'd get on and do it.

Unless I'm mistaken, I have no "entrepreneurial" background in my family.

Until 1990 I really liked playing with the computer, with the NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) and in the arcades (😍), but almost more than playing I LOVED to see how the games were made: the sound, the music, the graphics, the animations... I WOWED about it (and I still do). And one day, when I was 8-9 years old, I thought I wanted to make computer games. If there were people out there making them, I wanted to do that too. I wanted to make games. Games were MAGIC to me.

"Dad, I want to make computer games."

"To make games (which is not easy) you have to understand how computers work and learn how to program.... Here you have a lot of books. I recommend you start with BASIC."

My father had a closet full of "very strange" books: BASIC, C, Pascal, Turbo C, QuickBasic.... What was all that stuff? 🤔

And you know what I did?

Well, I started reading and doing things with those books and with the computers I had at home. Every day, as much as I could, I started programming. And do you know how I learned to program? BY PROGRAMMING. Reading, chopping code, messing up, understanding.... Again and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again.... I programmed lots of (crappy) things, even viruses (sorry, friends).

I played, assembled / disassembled, programmed, designed... I did everything with computers. And programming made me VERY HAPPY. Creating made me VERY HAPPY.

Did my father let me do all that when I wanted to? NO... Only when I had finished my school homework and had finished his math worksheets: my father would give me sheets of paper with operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division) and the challenge was to solve them mentally in the shortest time possible. I had a blast with that! 🤓

And then, in 1995, one day my dad came home one day and said:

"Now we have Internet connection at home and I have bought an HTML book".

Internet? HTML? What 's that?

Internet, education, early business

The concept of the Internet made my head explode; it was similar to when I look at the sky one starry night, I get abstracted and think about the immensity of the universe (I don't know about you, but I could be days long like that).... I COULD MAKE THINGS (web pages) and anyone from anywhere in the world could access them and see them.... WONDERFUL.

"Daniel, to create web pages you have to learn HTML, it's akin to programming..."

So I took the HTML book and read it. And I made a (crappy) web page in which I perfectly remember that MIDI music was playing in the background. After that page came many more, but I'd better not get ahead of myself. And yes, one of the first things I did on the Internet was a web page.

It was a pain to write HTML by hand, to be honest. So I opened Visual Basic and created an HTML editor. Very basic (IMG, A, bold, italics, background image... there wasn't much more haha), but it saved me from writing every tag and also saved me from possible errors in tags, file paths, etc.

It was called "CutrePage" (Spanish name 😅). Remembering this name has generated a very happy thought. Besides creating things, I love to name them. A thing without a name is just a "thing", an unfinished thing. A thing with a name is poetry; a thing with a name is fantasy.

Except for a few (very) rare occasions when I was very motivated in school, high school and college, I was never a good student (mom and dad: sorry). I failed almost every subject and on quite a few occasions I got kicked out of class for talking, being disruptive, distracted (I would spend classes drawing things or writing code by hand) or for asking too many questions.... The thing is that in the end I passed everything, even the SAT test. After that, between several stumbles, I started 3 different college careers and I didn't finish any of them. That was not my thing... In any case, I always liked (and still like) a lot reading and drawing. I devoured any book I could get my hands on and any scientific magazine.

But, I earned money at school, how? Doing works for others (Internet) and getting paid for it. I also earned some pesetas (there were no euros) by "backing up" PlayStation games, but I'll tell this story some other time.

I really liked playing Counter Strike and, "mysteriously", I had in my possession the users and passwords of many customers of many cybercafés in Valencia (Spain), for which I never paid... Maybe I'll tell you about this some other time 😜

For not to be much longer in this block, between the late 90's and early 2000's I kept learning a lot about the Internet, I created many websites (nightlife in Valencia, a “Facebook” with thousands of users, Counter Strike, etc.), hacked a few things, cracked many others and started to earn money making websites for others.

I worked as a DJ, graphic designer, warehouse worker, selling bed sheets in a store…

Club Byte, DimeQuien, more business

The truth is that with what I was earning making "web pages" (flash + other various tricks) for third parties and the rest of "business" in 2007 I did not get enough to live on, buy more computers, more consoles and more video games. Honestly, I didn't know what to do with my life... Coincidentally, a friend told me one day that a computer store in Valencia (where I lived 30 years), Club Byte, was looking to hire someone to assemble and repair computers. The perfect job for me! I had been doing that for "all my life"..... 🤩

I went to the store to be tested to start working there. When I got there I found 2 other people willing to take the job just like me.... Carlos, the boss of the store, asked the 3 of us some questions. Questions about Windows XP, about drivers, about graphic cards, about backups… Everything was a piece of cake! In the end they hired me, because the other 2 people had never seen the inside of a computer in their lives…

In parallel to working in the store, I was still doing "my own thing" on the Internet: a page for YYYY, another one for menganito, etc. And, although it is true that I had already tried making business with my own websites, I had never succeeded... Until 2009.

What happened in 2009? The social network Tuenti was ON FIRE in Spain, I discovered a security hole that allowed to know who visited your profile (real, not fake), I built a "web analytics" tool (DimeQuien) with that bug and I got something like 50-60,000 registered users (I don't remember the exact number) in a week, thanks to a video on YouTube and a couple of blog posts. Many MANY people wanted to know which people visited their profile on Tuenti! (note: the same happens today with IG, TikTok, etc...)

That's what the first website that generated me income on the Internet looked like - NEFAST naming by the way 🤣. In English: "TellMeWho"

With that website I earned several thousand euros. Until Tuenti soon after fixed its security hole and my service stopped working....

Then I thought: I can build my own online business and make a living from it? It won't be easy, but here I go. And I stopped working at the computer store to dedicate myself 100% to my stuff.

In 2009-2010 I was still making websites for third parties and learning anything that passed through my hands, and I launched several projects to try to replicate what I achieved with the DimeQuien project: make money. NONE OF THEM WORKED. I had to keep trying…

iPadizate > PICKASO + Mobile Apps > one of SaaS

January 27, 2010 - my 27th birthday

My father calls me on the phone:
"Daniel, Apple has announced a bigger iPhone.... The iPad."

Will the iPad be a big hit like the iPhone? What if I launch the first iPad content website in Spanish? I took a gamble and I did it. I registered several domains, among them "iPadizate.es" (I had read that having keywords in domains was good for SEO) and I set up a WordPress. Previously I had already set up some WP and I had done the BASICS, but iPadizate was the first WP I got serious with.

I launched iPadizate on February 6, 2010 and it was an ugly website. But it was done and it was launched. I "only" needed to fill it with content... So I spent a year writing (almost) every day 10-12-15 articles... PIM PAM, non-stop. I assure you that many times I was on the verge of quitting... But I saw that, little by little, the traffic went up and up.... And I knew I had to be constant.

And I started reading about SEO:

• You need backlinks
• The content needs to be optimized
• etc. etc. etc.

And as I went along, I was doing it all... And learning.

Traffic started to grow more and more, SEO started to work and suddenly the website was generating 1,000,000 visits / month from SEO and social media (I learned a lot about this too). I couldn't handle it all anymore, so I started collaborating with some external copywriters.... And the website kept going up and up and up....

Then, in 2012, SHE showed up 😍.

We both won 2 tickets to the Internet es Tuyo event (online marketing event in Spain) and met on Twitter. And we started talking.... And one thing led to another..... She helped me monetize (much) more and better iPadizate. And I ranked her blog TOP 1 for the search "Miriam". Meanwhile, iPadizate kept growing…

In January 2013 I went to Madrid (Spain) to meet Miriam Peláez. I stayed a weekend at her house and we have never separated again. We lived together in Madrid for 6 months. In the middle of the year my friend Jaume Ferre (RIP) proposed me to build one of the first mobile advertising networks in the world. So I came to Barcelona, and Miriam came with me. The ad network project didn't work out, but Miriam and I decided to stay in Barcelona, the "mobile capital of the world".

And we continued to grow iPadizate, together. We made it grow to 150,000 visits / day (with peaks of 300,000 / day) and a revenue of 15-18,000€ / month.

In December 2013 Miriam and I launched something that we had been thinking about for a while: a marketing services company for mobile apps. We called it PICKASO. (The name came up while I was making the bed, but that's another story....)

When PICKASO started to grow, we decided to look for a buyer for iPadizate and sold it for about 190,000€ in 2015. We reinvested all that money in PICKASO.com.

PICKASO, that has a team of 20, has allowed me to work with a lot of wonderful people, meet people from Google, Apple, Meta.... Work with very TOP companies, give talks with Google, learn (hard) a lot about SaaS, about customer management, team management... Learning about legal and financial issues... We have organized events, congresses... We have done lots of different things!

In 2017 we decided to build our own ASO (App Store Optimization) SaaS (TheTool), we grew it to 27,000€ MRR (with SEO and various growth strategies) and sold it in 2021 to a company in Austria (App Radar). It was a project that didn't go well (it didn't go bad either), but it allowed me to LEARN a lot (A LOT).

PICKASO will be 10 years old on December 3, 2023.

Along the way, I have built hundreds of apps and mobile games that have generated +1.000.000€ and, without going any further, at the end of 2022 I sold a portfolio of apps for about $100,000 to a company in Israel.

Along the way I have also built websites, Chrome extensions, Facebook pages.... Some worked and some didn't. And I've met LOTS of people - made LOTS of friends.

What about now?

In June 2023 Miriam and I became dads: little Adrian arrived. Adrián is our most important project 👶

We are still going full steam ahead with PICKASO. I'm going full steam ahead with The Open Projects (a newsletter about biz ideas in Spanish I run with @MarioArmenta), I'm building several SaaS (GOAL > 30K€ MRR in 1 year) , I help some SaaS with SEO and growth in general (no ads), I have mobile apps (and more to come), I teach in several business schools…

Feel free to take a look at INDEXED.pro, the #SEO SaaS for super fast website URL indexing (and deindexing, and more) on autopilot created by @ricki_io and me. INDEXED is coming soon; I invite you to subscribe so you'll be notified when we launch. The first customers will be able to benefit from the special launch price.

A week ago we run a "Pre-launch" campaign on Twitter + Linkedin (no ads) with a super LIMITED Lifetime deal ($89) of INDEXED with only 50 slots available. The 50 slots were sold in 5 days 🚀

Conclusions

All my businesses (the ones that have worked) have generated +22.000.000€ (8 figures) since I started building "things" in 2009. This does NOT mean, far from it, that I have earned that amount of money.

Here I have talked about some projects that worked for me and some that didn't, but 90% of the things I have built have not worked. The key to the latter: invest little, launch fast, kill fast and try to figure out why they didn't work. Learn FAST.

Do stuff. Do things that you enjoy and motivate you, although there will be times when this will not be the case. This is inevitable. Be consistent.

Never think that what you do is worthless. EVERYTHING you do, even if it doesn't seem like it, is worth something.

All great things start small. ALL OF THEM.

Happiness is not at the end of the road; the road is happiness.

Better done than perfect.

I love my family, I love Coca-Cola, I love computers, I love building stuff.... And I LOVE video games.

Ask me anything 😊

PS: And I did get to develop games, both in the early 2000's and not so long ago. BUT, someday I'll make a game I'm really proud of.
PS2: my english is not as good as I'd love to... I learnt it playing The Legend of Zelda, Chrono Trigger and Monkey Island.