Solopreneur Grind Podcast episode 118: Starting, buying and selling tech businesses with Ilya Novohatskyi

Another episode of the Solopreneur Grind Podcast is live!

In episode 118, I talk to Ilya Novohatskyi about:

  • How he got into entrepreneurship by starting a successful agency after being laid off at the beginning of Covid
  • The exact steps he took to start his agency and then a tech company later on
  • Tips and advice on buying/selling businesses and the benefits of starting one with a partner

And much more.

You can listen to the episode on your favorite podcast platform here, or watch the video/read the transcript below!

Ilya’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/ilyanovohatskyi

Microns website: https://www.microns.io/

episode 118

[00:00:00] Josh: Hey everyone. This is Josh for the Solopreneurgrind podcast episode 118. I’m happy to be joined here by Ilya.  Ilya, thanks so much for coming on the show today,

[00:00:11] Ilya: Thanks Josh for inviting me.

[00:00:14] Josh: Awesome Ilya. I’m looking forward to jumping in. Can you give everybody just a quick background, a little bit about yourself and what you’re working on these.

[00:00:20] Ilya: Yeah, sure. Originally I’m a front end developer. I started software engineering in university. Then I started my career as a front end developer.

Then I created my software agency and finally working on the marketplace called microns.

[00:00:41] Josh: Awesome. And that’s actually how I found you and, and reached out. I actually couldn’t remember, but I think it might have been from another email list that recommended microns, your, your website, which we’ll talk about a little bit on the episode basically kind of buying and selling for, for micro SaaS products, which is really cool.

That’s how I found you. Join the email. And then eventually it was like this guy’s really cool. Gotta reach out and, and have him on the show. But let, let’s go back before microns. You started as a software developer. How did your first entrepreneurial activity begin? I think in your case it was a, it was a development agency, right?

[00:01:20] Ilya: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It all started when one of the development agency hired me, I worked for them almost three years. And then when the COVID started, it was like March months. I remember this, they They they’ve lost a bunch of customers and they fired me. That’s how I decided not to move on like nine to five jobs.

And. Tried to start my own agency line because I already know how workflow works. In agencies. I already knew how for example, development management worked out. So I just needed to understand how sales works, so how we can get new customers. And I partner up with one of my current partners in the agency.

He knows how to. Get customers like we started, we started our upward campaign and right now we have seven developers and around 20 K in monthly revenues. So everything is going good. Awesome. I very glad that I’m very glad that my previous company fired me and I finally started my own entrepreneurial journey.

[00:02:39] Josh: Well, it’s funny because many, many of our guests have a similar scenario where something happened that sounded bad, right? Like getting fired or getting let off or anything laid off and it ends up turning into something really good. Right. So sometimes. Bad things on their surface. Don’t don’t always necessarily end up badly in the end.

Was it a tough decision for you? Like when you got laid off, was it a hard decision to decide to start a new company? Or did, did, did you already kind of have it maybe a little bit in the back of your mind? And then my second question is how did you find your partner? Because it, it sounds like a really great way to get into business is a partnership between someone who’s good at doing so.

And someone who’s good at selling. Right. And you put that together and that’s a really good team to start. So would love to hear more about the decision making to actually start the company and then how you found your partner.

[00:03:34] Ilya: Yeah. Great, great questions. And for the first question I had the idea about agency, I think, from the university.

And then when I when, when they just employed me, I, I just created some plan how I can reproduce something similar to their agency, how to improve different processes, like in management development. So I, I had, I had this idea back of my mind. And when they fired me, I already know that I need to start implementing this because I just crafted some notes.

I created some different structures, but I didn’t get any action on this. So I think this trigger, like when they fired me, it played crucial role in to start in this, this kind of business, because previously I didn’t do any business at all. But my father did. So I think this came from my father. So I think this, this played very important role like gradin, but when they fired me, I got a bunch of requests from Linkin that different company, different companies wanted to hire me.

So I needed to decide how, how, how can I move on? And I rejected all of these inquiries. I decided to, to change and move into like business direction instead of getting and finding another job. So I had a little bit cash so I can like experiment for, I would say three months. So I have cash for three months and I think.

I thought that this, this could be enough to start agency and like start something up. And in terms of second question. I understand how to manage, how to onboard developers, how to just study them, how to develop projects how to do everything except sales. So that’s why I reach out to one of my colleagues from my previous companies and attracted him to our project, like to our agency.

So I proposed him 50% of the company. And we just started out after a few months founder of my previous company figured out that this guy work works for me and for him. And he fired also he fired him. So my partner started focusing on our agency full time and I would say, We we found our first customers in like four months.

It, it was our first customer, but previously we hustled a lot to, to set up everything to we. We’ve got a bunch of calls with different customers. We’ve tried to find like our first project to start building testimonials and like spread the word about it. But I would say it’s a perfect way where you can specialize in something like tech and find a person who can help you like in sales or marketing.

And this is, I would say. Very important because you just syner, you have pretty good synergy and you can power up yourself and your company. So if you are good at marketing, I think you should find tech related founders. So if you’re a non-tech founder, you should find like Tech founder, if you’re a tech founder, you should find a salesperson or marketing guy who can help you set up the system and you can just start working.

So don’t be afraid to share some of your revenue upfront, if you want to like set up everything in a good way. So you don’t need to learn another field because it could take you a lot of time.

[00:07:39] Josh: Yeah, that’s great advice. And, and you could ultimately spend a lot of time and never even be 50% as good as a partner that’s doing, you know, been doing sales their whole career, just like you’ve been doing tech your whole career.

So would, would you recommend that then Ilia, because now you have a website where you’re kind of talking about and promoting the, the sale of, of small SAS businesses. Do you think, do, do you recommend to people in your community to form partnerships when they’re starting or growing or, or buying these businesses and, and the other part too, is, do you see a lot of solo founders and, and do they run into problems that maybe they wouldn’t, if they found a partner.

[00:08:21] Ilya: Yes. Exactly. So in terms of the first question I recommend, and I encourage in our newsletter to find a pipe partner. So if you are just starting your business at the first time, even at the like second, a third time, I recommend you to find a partner who can power you up and. You can build successful company together.

And H how did I find this idea is just based on my experience and also I’ve got different requests, like from job boards to promote their you know, inquiries, but I decided to reject them because what, how I see entrepreneurship it’s about, it’s not about jobs. It’s about. Like partner app or finding a mentor or consultant that can help you build this business.

So that’s why I rejected jobs from posting in our newsletter and encouraged to post like different partnership request for free. So I try to build this kind of community where people. Build something together. They sell something together. They promote something together and this ecosystem could Could highly impact for small businesses and professionals that wanted to start their entrepreneurship, but they didn’t get trigger like me, like firing from their job, but they always wanted to start this.

So I want to build this kind of ecosystem where people partner up, they selling projects, their marketing data projects, and microns. It’s the first step where you can buy and sell. Micro startups and find appropriate partner for your existing project or like future project.

[00:10:04] Josh: Absolutely. And, and if you are interested, definitely check it out.

microns.io. We’ll put the link in the description. So if you’re watching on YouTube or listening on the podcast, just check the description and you’ll you’ll see the link right there. So Ilia, one thing that, that popped up to my head is at the beginning, you said you had about a three month runway.

And it took you about four months to get that first client. So can you walk us through maybe like the second and third month of your journey? Was it becoming very stressful? You were, you know, seeing your bank account, go down a little, you weren’t bringing in new clients, how stressful was that first part of the journey and, and then what was, you know, what was it like signing that first.

[00:10:46] Ilya: Yeah, it was a very stressful part. I would say the most stressful till this time I moved to my parents because I didn’t have enough money to pay my rent. So I moved to my parents. I, I talked to them and I’m so glad that they supported me. So they didn’t claim something or they didn’t, they just.

They just get this news because many of their relatives got fired from this period. Just because many investors in entrepreneurship are, are very like scared about economics. So they fired people and they supported me. They provided me a place where I can like stay for free. They bought me some food, so I ha I had money for.

Like some, some food, maybe some kind of small purchases and some kind of subscription that needed to run our agency because to start agency, I, I would say four, four months, I only spend 300 bucks. So that’s not a big investment when you have a partner. And till that time we’ve generated hundreds of revenue.

So I would say those period, those four months is they were so stressful. Not only for me, but also for my partner, for my parents. But I’m glad that they supported me. My partner supported me because at the same period, my grandma passed away. So I’ve got a lot of stress. And I got fired. My grandma passed that I spent many times, so that was very hard for me.

But Beautiful time comes around. And I found that when you get used to it, when you get used to the hard times, you can build the beautiful times. And right now even when you have like some kind of recession or crisis. We, we don’t even feel this because we don’t have like revenue lockdown.

We have everything set up and everything just fine. It was like this period that you need to move on and skip, I would say, but right.

[00:13:02] Josh: Yeah, I, I can only imagine how, how that must have felt. I mean, I, I, I feel like most of us. who’ve started a business can at least relate a little bit, because I remember the first four, five months actually, very similarly when I started my first business, probably four or five months before getting my first client.

And it’s not fun, but anyways, it makes you appreciate the good times a lot more. Right. So, so you guys signed that first. what was it like, or, or maybe another way I can ask this is what are some tips you would give people that are maybe about to start or thinking about starting a business? What are some key, maybe two or three things you, you would advise them to try and land those first couple clients.

[00:13:47] Ilya: Yeah, sure. The first thing you should be professional in your field. So when we onboarded our first client, I perfectly understood the tech that this project was built. So I understood the problem. So the second point is to you need to listen. First and then ask appropriate questions. So listen to customer’s problems and try to provide valuable feedback, try to provide just value to these customers.

Suggest something that could help improve UI user experience, like something that could improve their overall experience of the platform. And my third And my third point is to Understand how to, how you can benefit and how you can get your customer benefit at all. Because we, we, we not only provided the development services like front end, backend But we also provided some kind of advices about business model, how, how, how we can improve this part of the startup.

So your project just spent less time for your customers, how you can like spend less money of your customers. To get more value to, to earn your customers more money. So we try to be helpful as, as we could, like, based on our previous experience, based on, on our previous work, on different other agencies.

And I think that’s, that’s helped to lend our first customer. We worked together for around two years, and that was really great experience.

[00:15:30] Josh: Very cool. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. So Ilia, you, you start growing this agency and it’s, and, and then eventually you start, you know, you’re getting into the five figure MMR.

At what point does microns start? Like where does that part of the story begin? How, how is that influenced?

[00:15:49] Ilya: Yeah, sure. I described this part in, in our first I’ll say issues and it started when I. When I see that scaling an agency, it’s much more efforts because to scale an agency, you need to hire more people.

You need to get more projects to get more like revenue. So it’s a linear dependency between so. I decided not to move with with such kind of things, because when you get more people on board, it’s also effect on your quality. I wanted to build like high quality agency where we have like only six or seven developers and we provide great experience for our customers.

So we didn’t, we didn’t want to. To log down our quality that’s I would say the first thing. So I tried to find different ideas, how we can like benefit like running some kind of tech company or like business. And I thought about son’s business. I thought about different kinds of. For media companies, I would say like YouTube channel, you know or newsletters.

And I thought about marketplace business model, and I found this one very challenging for me because I saw it running a sauce. It’s Much more easier than running a marketplace. And I didn’t know many things about marketplaces, but I already used a bunch of it like Airbnb, Uber different places for booking restaurants.

So I really wanted to build something for founders. And that’s why like microns was. So I, I wanted to scale my agency and I decided to move on with the marketplace business model. So ran it simultaneously with my agency. And I just take a look at different fields and I found different places like Philippa microwire.

So I inspired and I just found that there is no like small and friendly place for anti hackers for makers for like smaller size transactions. And I decided to build this one for, for these people. So that’s why this is how microns was born and also about its name. I have two cats. One cat is called Lucas.

The other one is micron. So that’s how I created the name for, for my company. So, I guess

[00:18:36] Josh: one piece of advice could be don’t overthink the name because yeah. In, in this case it kind of makes sense too. Right? Coincidentally, the cat name kind of matches enough, right? With, with, with what the product actually does.

Ilia, can you give us an idea of. like there there’s a lot of our listeners let’s say that are nine to five ERs. They’re thinking about starting a business or really anybody who’s, you know, at the beginning and thinking about how to evaluate a business, like, can you talk us through what type of research you did before you started microns?

Like. Did you do a, a few weeks of research, a few months of research, what was the process like of evaluating the different options? And then what kind of triggered you to actually be like, okay, this is something that’s a good opportunity. I’m gonna start, I’m gonna buy the domain. You know what, whatever the first few.

Decisions were.

[00:19:29] Ilya: Yeah. So I, I spent around one week on their research and I wanted to find a place, a business model that I didn’t work previously. So I worked on different sub solutions. So I already know about like metric that SA uses. I already know how to build like basic SA project.

But I didn’t know anything about marketplaces in terms of development, in terms of business model, in terms of like users in terms of even challenges. So I just found this interesting to learn. The first point is to learn the second point You need to check your competitors first. So I started just Googling if there is a place for like micro projects or like small site projects where you can just sell, buy them.

So, and I found a few different places. I analyzed, I analyzed different feedback from users like just public feedback from Twitter, from Reddit from different feedback sites. And I found the niche, the niche that relates to this such kind of small projects that was available. And that’s how I started microns.

The first point is to learn, to learn something new. The second point is to find a niche that that has pretty much of you know total addressable market like potential users. So I already knew that FIPA have around 2 million of buyers and sellers. I already knew that a microwire conducted around hundreds of deals every month.

So. I already knew that these merges and acquisitions filled is potentially a great place to start. So I just needed a niche, a category where we can just start like a wedge and start building, start the truck and start getting some traction. So. Just be curious about something, you start learning something new and don’t be afraid if something doesn’t work.

Because when I started microns, I spent six months on development and then I stop it up. And I started audience building. So. Six months were just, you know, spent on something that I didn’t use because it was a full version of microns. And I don’t want to show you . So I started with audience building and I found that I really like to write.

That’s why I started newsletter. But you can always start a podcast or you YouTube channel. So you just need to build initial stage of your audience. You need to attract audience and tell them something valuable. So I started newsletter and then I found different, great people that helped me to build microns and we are working together and I’m so enjoying working with them.

So just start building audience and you’ll find not only your audience, but your. Right.

[00:22:31] Josh: Yeah. And I love the way you put it because you, you can use that market research to obviously prove that there’s a need, but then take that extra step and, and pick a, either niche or even a sub niche that then separates you.

Like the, the reason why I find microns interesting is because Flippa and micro require now have kind of gotten really big and tend to attract some of the bigger projects. But if, you know, let’s say you’re someone who’s just looking for a kind of, like you say, like a micro SA right. Something that’s very small earlier on lower price tag, you’re building out a sub niche there that separates you from, from the other players, which is, which is really important.

So Ilia, and, and then the last part that you said about not necessarily building first or building the product first, build the community first, build an audience first. Can you walk us through that? Did you, was it started by the newsletter? And then can you walk us through the steps of. how you started growing that I, myself as have a newsletter, newsletters have obviously become very popular, especially in the last year or two.

It seems they’ve kind of email marketing through newsletters have had a bit of a resurgence. How did you go about starting that and, and any tips for early growth for someone who’s early on, or maybe has a smaller newsletter tips for growing a newsletter?

[00:23:53] Ilya: Yeah, sure. So I started the newsletter because of two reasons, the first reason I really like to write, and the second reason I already read other newsletters, I, I inspired by the example of the hustle.

So I, I read every newsletter from the hustle and that’s how I’ll say I stopped my development because I saw that I just waste my time. I didn’t get any feedback. I didn’t get any traction like users or something. I just spent some time off the, on the development and I would. You don’t need to do this, just start your audience first find your like.

The the strongest sides like writing or discussing asking questions. So start the podcast. If you like writing, start a newsletter, if you like filming something, start a YouTube channel. So it’s fully up to you or like start building audience on Twitter or other social media. So it’s fully up to you.

What you like, just start and In terms of deeps we’ve started promoting microns organically. So the first our users were through Word of mouth. And a few of my friends. So we’ve got around 20 people on board. Then I started promoting it on Twitter, like writing different content threads, tweets This, this help a lot.

Then we posted on different directories. Like it could be startup directories, like better east micro startups.co or product hunt. So, and I would say other thing that, that help us a lot is to start Interacting in different communities. We started interacting in indie hackers and that’s helped us a lot to attract loyal people to the product.

So they provided great feedback about not only about the UI, but also about the, how it should like work what they expect. So try to be active on different communities like in the hackers. Spread your startup in different directories, like better list micro startups. And don’t forget to launch launch as much as you can.

We started launching microns on product hunt when we have 200 subscribers in our newsletter and we. Emails about please guys, if you like the product, if you like the newsletter support us on product hunt today, and a hundred people clicked and supported us. And that, that just Pick up us to the front page of product count and then organically, we’ve got to the third place.

And after this lounge, many different newsletters covered microns. At that time microns just has. Just had lending page and it was fully free. So we didn’t have any monetization under it. You can contact sellers, you can just buy startups for free and the hustle And the hustle saw us, the hustle saw this product hunt launch, and they also covered us, which gave us around 300 of new subscribers.

They said that check out this useful place for micro startups. And this gave us huge amount of traffic. And this mention is really worked out for us after these many. Small creators and newsletter writers started the same thing. They just shared our idea, our landing page, and this help us a lot to build around thousand of subscribers without like paying for, for ads or something.

So mostly organic.

[00:27:44] Josh: That, that must have been cool coming full circle, where you’re inspired by the hustle to kind of start the, the, the newsletter. And, and then next thing you know, well, probably longer journey than that, but next thing, you know, quote unquote, they, they mentioning you so that that’s awesome to hear.

So Ilia, I wanna talk a little bit about micro SAS acquisitions. Is this something you do as well? You obviously run this website microns that helps people buy and sell micro SAS. Do you take part in that activity as well? I believe you do. Cuz I read your newsletter, but can you talk a little bit about your experiences buying and selling micro SAS, C.

Yeah,

[00:28:23] Ilya: sure. We are helping our buyers and sellers. If they don’t know how to start or they don’t know like steps, we provide them with the resources. We provide them with the different answers. If they have like particular question about their own acquisition. So every situation is unique and you need to ask like, appropriate questions about your situation independently.

But what I see the most a lot of people just already acquired or sold a few startups. So they have some, some of the experience about this. And I, I think this niche is trending right now and will be trained in around. Like 10 years at least. So I see high potential in this and many buyers.

They have like a small onboarding process from our end. If they don’t know, they can ask questions. So we are responding very quickly. So in terms of stories, I, I think I could share one story that happened around two months ago. One of is, it’s also one of the biggest deals till now 4,000 K for the Microsoft project.

Iceland attorney. Bought this project for 40 K it’s a multi-cloud backup Microsoft project that already generated around eight or nine Cal revenue. And the, the, the most interesting part that this founder, this buyer who bought this project, he’s non-technical person, he just He just L liked to read like tech crunch and different other startup sites interviews.

And he always wanted to change. His job because he got borrow a fit. He didn’t want this. And, you know he started his entrepreneurial journey from this. And the most important part is that our sellers, I always ask our sellers to provide at least one month of this support for buyers. That’s how they can like maintain and run the business later.

They, they can discuss different like, you know requirements. But Basically we don’t charge any commissions from our sellers and we can ask for one month of support to provide better experience for buyers and this buyer from Iceland. He appreciated this because sellers provided him as much support as needed.

And he also started writing a code. He always wanted to start writing a code, but after like, you know, starting a few courses It just, don’t give you a perspective of real project that, you know, generates revenue. And he started writing a code. He started working with the customer support, like doing different improvements to decide.

And this, this story is, is so inspir. So I covered this in our newsletter. I really like it. I really like to share with different people about this story. So even if you’re known technical founder, you can. Leave your job. If you get bored, you can always start the business. And there are a lot of people who can support you, not only sellers, but your own customers.

So this is very important.

[00:31:42] Josh: Yeah. That, that’s a great point. Yoyo. What do you think. Is is buying a really good opportunity right now? Like maybe what are some of the key, let’s say someone’s thinking about leaving their nine to five they’re maybe they’re considering starting a new business versus buying a business.

Why do you think buying is such a, such a great opportunity right now?

[00:32:06] Ilya: Yeah, I think buy any business. This is just one of the ways how you can approach. So this is not I would say the best way, but most of the people who buy a startup, like not only on microns, they are share that this is for the great experience of starting their entrepreneurship.

I like this because you get some project with initial traction because like building a project from scratch, you need not only to handle the development, you also need to handle the marketing. And for this reason you you need, you either need to have a partner or you need to be. Pro in this field, like pro in the marketing pro in the development.

So to handle everything from scratch, or you need to hire an agency or freelancer to handle the development. And it’s very expensive. Currently, if you check listings on microns, we have 5k project with Like south end in annual revenue and to build, to build from scratch such kind of project, you need to spend maybe even more like 10 K, but you won’t have any customers and traction by buying a project, you get not only a project with subtraction, you also get a support from the sellers and you also learn something new.

So learning something new. Getting investment that can that you can like get a return in a few months. That’s very important. One of our stories marks. Founder of AEO agency from France. He bought a small project like to south end in asking price and he flipped hi this project in one week.

And he said that return on the investment just in one week. So he just bought it. He grow it with his own audience, like, and selling to his SEO customers and then flip it. So that was really interesting. Yeah. I guess

[00:34:09] Josh: a few ways you could go at it, right? The, the, the buy to build yourself or the buy.

use your expertise to increase revenue and then just flip it. Is that, is that common? What would you say is the breakdown between buyers looking to flip versus buyers, looking to build a long term business?

[00:34:28] Ilya: Yeah. I think it’s around 60 to 40, 60% of people won’t just earn by flipping projects and 40 per 40% of buyers there like some kind of strategic buyers.

So they’re buying not only to hold the business, but to grow it for long term perspective or to synergy. With their existing business. So we’ve had a story with one of our buyer who bought a project just to have a synergy with his own main product. Like, and this project that he bought, he didn’t have any revenue, but he has free customers.

Three users. There were active. They were engaging with the product. They were using this product on a daily basis. So he bought this even without any monetization, but he Al always knew that he can merge this customer base and improve his own main product. So there are a lot of different ways how you can benefit from this.

And I think like buying a product, Brian buying like this Microsoft project is one of the best way for newies to start.

[00:35:42] Josh: Right. I totally agree. And, and it’s a, it’s a great point about synergies. Maybe, maybe you have a. An agency and you can buy a micros or a C. That’s making $0, but then you can market your agency services to those users and start monetizing it from day one.

Whereas the previous owner couldn’t so you could still, you know, get it at a good price and, and probably get, get some pretty good returns pretty quickly. This is, this has been really great. My, my last question is about balance, especially as you know, entrepreneurs who largely are their own bosses.

You have your agency, you have microns. It also sounds like maybe you do some micro, SAS buying and selling. How do you balance all of these different projects? How do you stay productive? How do you, how do you, how do you keep your head on straight with with all this stuff going on?

[00:36:37] Ilya: Yeah, it’s I think perfect question.

Before starting the microns, I automated and delegated most of my S for agencies. So I would say 85 or 90% of work. For my agency is either automated or delegated. And I only spent around 10% of my time. Like I would say I can spend around six hours a week and get the same amount of revenue that I worked on the nine to five job.

So before starting a microns, I wanted to like cut this time spending on my agency and I would say cut it as much as I could. So I only spent around 10% of my time. It’s about different complex decisions. It’s about strategy of growing agency or like maybe sales calls, but that’s it. And because I, I, I always knew that when you start something.

That you don’t know, for example, marketplaces, I didn’t know anything about this such kind of business model. So I understand that I needed to dedicate full time. I needed to dedicate like a lot of my time to this project to, to make it great because I didn’t want to build another platform like usual platform I wanted.

To, to, to work for people to solve real problems. So that’s why I cut all of my time on agency. I delegated many things. I, I created instructions for people. I created rules. I created our values in the company. So everyone knows how to do with the different situations. So I covered most of the cases.

For agency, like for developers, for managers, for mentors. And that’s why it worked out for me. And then I started microns, like I dedicated around 30 hours per week of my time into microns and around six to eight hours per week to my agency. So it’s pretty forward to 40 hours week. But right now I would say one year.

Some, some kind of this work I spend around I would say 15 hours on microns every week and the same amount for agency, like six, eight hours a week for agency. So, but everything is going good. We are keep growing right now we have. Like micron started with one person. And right now we have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 people.

five people already. But I think even when we get to milestones, like, you know, 1 million, $2 million, we can keep our team small, like five people can work on microns and no matter of the size of the, you know, In terms of revenue because we’ve built our company this way, where we have a person who can dedicate itself to different field.

Like we have a person who handles customer requests. They have a person who help me to grow the product. I, we have a person who just write. Some post for us and we just added it. So when you grow I think you will hire people to your company. It’s eventually if you want to grow, but try to keep your company like small.

So you don’t have like managing headaches. And try, try to optimize for your time. So to spend more time with your family, with your loved ones. So with your, like, with my wife, with my cats. So I try to optimize for my time. I try to do this, not only for my agency and right now, I’m I start doing this for microns.

Because previously. I had like 40 hours working week. And right now I have like 20, 25 hours working week. I plan to decrease it to, I would say 15 hours. That would be great for me. Maybe 20 hours. That would be also optional optimal for me. So my biggest advice here is Try to optimize for fun and try to optimize for your own time, because time it’s unrecoverable resource.

So you always can get your money or always can earn more money. But the time and the reputation are most important parts of your business and your like personality.

[00:41:14] Josh: Yeah, no, I, I totally agree. And, and I like the approach you took where like what’s what some people might do is put their hands in a whole bunch of different pots.

And then next thing you know, you have all these projects or companies to manage. You started with one optimized, one really well, then moved to the second and start working on exactly. Then move to the third. So I, I, I, I think you, you did that really intelligently whether it was on purpose or not. Sounds like a great job, Lia.

Thanks so much for coming on the show. This has been really interesting listening to your story, get getting some of these tips and, and advice. My last question is always, if, if there’s someone out there right now, they’re working a nine to five. They’re not happy they wanna get into entrepreneurship or they’re trying to get into entrepre.

or maybe they’re at the beginning stages, but it’s slow. They’re in those tough first few months, what are one or two pieces of advice that you would give.

[00:42:09] Ilya: Yes. Great. Ending. So my, the biggest advice don’t leave nine to five job unless you have enough cash to sustain yourself and your family. So. Aim to around a year don’t aim like 3, 3, 4 months aim around like six, 12 months.

So if you have enough enough cash cash for sustain, like your health lo like your operational expenses expenses on, on your like, you know Different activities only then you can start working on on your project because I encourage people not to leave their like cash flowing before they can sustain themselves.

So I had the situation where I needed to move to my parents. And I don’t know if it’s a great Solution or not, but they help me. So I just recommend you to, to, to have enough cash before you are moving into it doesn’t matter like buying a project or like creating your own project from scratch.

Just have enough money for you and for your family before you leaving your job.

[00:43:23] Josh: Awesome. Great way to end Ilia. Thanks again for coming on the show. If anybody wants to connect with you or, or learn more or check out your businesses, where do you recommend they.

[00:43:31] Ilya: They can connect me with O on Twitter.

So I have opened DMS and they, they can connect with me via email. So we have Ilia microns do email.

[00:43:42] Josh: Awesome. And we’ll link those into description as well as the microns website. Ilia. Thanks again for coming on the show. Really appreciate it.

[00:43:49] Ilya: Thank you so much, Josh. It was pleasure speaking with you.

Likewise. Great questions. Thank you. Great questions.

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