(In the last 15 years, I have been keeping my journal at the end of each year since my birthday is in December. I do so in Japanese, my mother language, so I can fully express my thoughts. Below is a machine translation by DeepL Translator, and I edited it a little where it sounded very awkward. This year has been great learning, and I hope you read my journal and share your thoughts with me. If you understand Japanese, please read the original.)

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Tahoe Ski Trip

My birthday has passed without a major incident this year. However, I had a bad sciatic nerve pain in November, I had to take a break from hiking and jogging, my favorite activities, to focus on the treatment for the year end. I am writing this diary while resting my back in bed.

I would like to share my experience with solopreneurship and scalable lifestyle business.

Forming a new company with a great friend

The best thing that happened to me at work this year was creating a new product and forming a company with my friend Omar.

Two Sea Lions Inc.

I didn’t think too long before creating the company in September. I’d like to summarize how the company, which wasn’t even an idea at the beginning of the year, came to being in the blink of an eye.

It was a year ago that I, an engineer, and Omar, a marketing specialist, agreed to work together on a project. Omar had been inspired by me, and started his own business. He was just getting his business off the ground. Omar and I are both solopreneurs. It is an experiment to see what happens when two solopreneurs in different fields of expertise cooperate. I build and he sells…we agreed.

The name of the company is Two Sea Lions Inc. I came up with it on the spur of the moment. The photo above was taken when I visited Omar in San Diego at the end of the summer. While eating at Georges at the Cove restaurant overlooking La Jolla Beach, we saw large sea lions gracefully lounging on rocks on the beach, oblivious to the divers and tourists nearby. The sight of this unassuming creature reminded me of two solopreneurs who are doing their own thing. That is the origin of Two Sea Lions.

Riding the wave of personal branding and social selling

Before launching Two Sea Lions, Omar and I created OmniCreator (OmniCreator.club), a membership service that provides the tools and community to become a trusted professional on LinkedIn.

[OmniCreator]](https://omnicreator.club)

LinkedIn is the best social network for solopreneurs to develop customers and generate sales. Centered on LinkedIn, social selling is becoming an important keyword not only for solopreneurs but also for marketing and sales in large companies. The key to this is the posting from personal accounts instead of corporates’. IT giant Cisco announced in 2022 that it had begun training 84,000 employees on how to use LinkedIn effectively. It is gradually becoming recognized that sending information from an employee’s personal account is more likely to attract sympathy, reaching to more people than sending information from a corporate page.

Omar has 34,000 followers in the medical device sales field. I have one-tenth of that number of followers in the engineering field. Both he and I post useful information and personal stories to our followers every day. By having our profile pictures and names appear daily on the timelines of those we connect with, and by talking about our areas of expertise, we achieve two things: The first is to stay in minds of the existing customers. The other is to have potential customers associate our faces and names with our areas of expertise and keywords.

The timeline of LinkedIn users is busy with various posts. So we need to create compelling content that stops their scrolling fingers. Individual LinkedIn posts reach only 10% of all followers. Therefore, you need to repeat the same message on day-basis. OmniCreator provides the tools to schedule daily content that will grab attention and be useful to everyone.

Individuals post to LinkedIn for a variety of reasons. They can become well-known in their field of expertise to get a better job or career opportunity, sell educational content, or become an independent consultant. Some sales professionals also use LinkedIn to expand their network and help in their sales activities. Some lawyers, financial advisors, and doctors use it to enhance their personal brand. OmniCreator started as a content creation tool, but has grown into a supportive community of people working hard for the similar goals. There is a saying in online product development, “Come for the tool, stay for the network.” We want to realize this in the form of a community.

Steps from the product creation to monetization

Having earned a PhD in the US, worked for a large company, built a product from scratch in a startup, and started my own company, I have a full set of methods for getting an idea for a digital product and giving it shape. It is not a golden rule. It’s my own way of doing things, but I would like to summarize the process.

I, an engineer, I would take the following steps to launch a digital product:

1. Create what you want

I don’t want to waste my effort, so I try to make something that I would use. The idea comes to me when there is no existing tool to make my work more efficient or when I am not satisfied with the existing products. At this stage, it is enough if I can use it. Even if the project stops here, you will still have the satisfaction of having made something useful yourself and learning from it.

2. Ask a friend to try it

If you want people to use it, you need to make it into a web application and let them create an account so that they can log in. After painstakingly making it available to others, you introduce it to your friends. Most of your friends would say they like it, but don’t believe them. They say it’s good, but they don’t use it repeatedly, and that’s where the real story lies. That’s why we measure who is using our services and when they are using them. We also measure the time it took from sign-up to task completion and realization of value.

Where are the people who have the same needs as you, and who will use the software? And even if you think you have designed your software to be intuitive, you will discover that there are many parts of the software that cannot be used without explanation. Realize that it takes many times more effort than in Step 1 to bring the software to a level of perfection that will allow people other than yourself to use it.

3. Recruit initial free users

After you have squashed all the problems and bugs based on the feedback you got in Step 2, reach out to more people. Remember, even though it is free, you are asking people to give you their time to try out a product that has no reputation.

At this stage, find someone other than a friend who might be an ideal customer and ask them to try it out. So you have to introduce yourself and briefly tell them what it can do for them. Continue measuring usage as you started in Step 2 and respond to any feedback as quick as possible. Make an effort to interact and respond to users via e-mail, chat, etc. so that they do not lose interest, and get a favorable impression of the service. Once you have gained a small number of fans, you should ask them to write testimonials.

4. Start charging

Calculate the cost of acquiring users and managing their accounts. If you cannot cover those costs and make a profit, you are not in business. Is it possible to lower the cost? Or, can you increase the value of the service so that you can charge a higher fee? How much do other similar products cost? Is it possible to raise the price by narrowing down the target clientele and creating a sense of luxury? Taking these factors into consideration, decide on a billing structure and price, and try to recruit paying users.

At this point, again, do not use ads or run a flashy product launch. Manually recruit a few dozen users, and continue dialogue and improvement as in Step 3. At the same time, learn what it is that your target customers’ ultimate desire beyond product solutions, and reflect that in your copywriting. If you don’t sharpen your copy and present the joyful testimonials from the initial users, it will be difficult to attract more users. If you run ads before that is solidified, you will fail and waste money. Strictly adhered to first perfect the product quality with a limited number of users before expand marketing and sales activities.

5. Succeed in retaining the paid users

In the case of online tools, or SaaS (software-as-a-service), customers enter their credit card and start paying monthly after a month-long free trial. The first few months are critical for the new customers. It will be failure if they feel that the service is not worth their time an d money. You must continue to communicate the value of your service to the users through emails or in-app content, tailored for each customer’s maturity.

6. Gaining Word of Mouth

The most effective sales channel is word of mouth. Customers must love you because of your highly perfected products and great support. Customers who love you know similar types of people. Ask them to talk about your product with their friends. Also, create incentives with referral-based fee reimbursement and affiliate programs.

Choosing the right segment is also important. Trying to deal with the entire market will not work at the begining. It is more effective to find places where people of a certain country, industry, profession, age, or other commonalities are gathering and conversing. Focus your efforts on them. If someone influential or majority of people are using it in a small group, it is easy to make others think, “I should jump on, too”.

Scalable Lifestyle Business

By following the above steps carefully and without haste, monthly sales have stabilized, although still small. The number of followers on the product’s LinkedIn page has also increased and we have received a lot of good feedback.

OmniCreator 2023 Progress

Omar and I, each earning income from our separate businesses, launched the OmniCreator project without hiring anyone and with limited time and a minimal budget. We do not need to bring in outside funding in the future.

What we want to pursue is a scalable lifestyle business.

The evolution of the cloud computing over the past decade has been remarkable. One full-stack engineer is all that is needed to develop new services from experimental deployment to monetization. More businesses can be created without having to go through the process of raising funds from venture capitalists and angel investors, hiring people, and finally launching the business, as has been the case until now. By not bringing in outside funding, keeping costs low, and focusing on monetization potential from the outset, businesses can grow gradually at their own pace without overworking ourselves.

At a minimum, the startup only need someone to make, sell, and provide customer support. I can create, but I am not good at selling. Fortunately, I was able to team up with my good friend Omar, who became independent in his ability to sell. Omar and I will be like sea lions on La Jolla Beach, slowly building a business next year that will scale beyond our time while putting our family and lifestyles first.

2023 was the year generative AI like ChatGPT began to accelerate the creative activities of ordinary people. AI programming and marketing while a single human acting as an executive. Such a future is already here. The groundwork for a successful scalable lifestyle business has been laid. We believe that more and more people will succeed in scalable lifestyle businesses. And it will be considered more as an alternative style to the startup boom with large scale funding that has lasted for 15 years since 2007.