My Overnight Success Took 20 years.
Tags: discuss, career, learning, softwaredevelopment
Published: 2024-01-26 23:03:58

**2004:** everyone is going crazy about mobile phones, games on them, and Polyphony music. I learn that stuff and open a min biz where I upload this stuff on the phones. Made my first "smart" money.

**2007:** I realize most students are lazy shortcut seekers. I start "rush studio", the agency for students to get their coding assignments done. From small to diploma levels. I built the first version of marsx, an IDE to quickly produce assignments and randomly edit the code to pass plagiarism tests.

**2008:** Rush studio grows like crazy, in a year over 2000 clients. I've done the first 1000 just myself, then hired other smart students to help. Here I learned to do stuff that takes months in 2 hours. This has defined my future until this day.

**2009: Exit.** I get an email. They say: we are your competitor and very impressed by your studio. We wanna buy you. All your work, and you work for us for a year. I say: can't do a year but 3 months. I will do what you want me to do in a year in 3mo, don't worry.
I made tons of money for the stage I was (a student in a dorm room). From that day, I never had to think about money again as a means of survival.

**2010:** I drop out of school to start a dev shop.
We're early into this game, the Norwegian startup scene is just being born, my agency is building software for most Norwegian startups at this point.
In 3 years of insanely hard work I make millions in profits.

**2013:** I invest most of my money into startups, stocks, and currencies. In 2014 I lose 70% of it.

**2014:** I decided to join 4 startups I invested in as CTO. I spend the next 5 years working on 4 jobs, doing at least 100 hours a week, working all weekends, no vacations, no holidays. I just sleep and work.

**2018:** I got an email from crypto exchange: "we were hacked, the funds are lost." I lose all my btc again. Fu*k.

**2019:** my main startup back then is having serious struggles. At the start, I promised my people we would succeed, and they said no to all other offers all these years. And now we're at the edge of bankruptcy. I put my own money to save the company, I sold my house and spent $700k on it over the next 3 years.

**2022:** My cofounder, best friend and CEO loses his soul in crypto hype, turns into a person I cannot recognize, ghosts the company.
I do everything I can to save the company and it works out. By the end of 2023, we turn profitable, for the first time in over 10 years.

**2022(2):** I start MarsX in parralel. I raise the VC round, that I cancel right at the last moment to go for self-funding, I put my own money because I wanna go the bootstrapped way.
2 months after the VC scene crashes, I'm thinking: maybe I should have raised? it was the top of the market, and I was getting $3M on a $20M valuation. But I go on. I buy Unicorn Platform for 800k from a bootstrapped founder, to quickly learn what bootstrapped world is.

**2023:** I pivot the strategy for MarsX. Instead of launching it as a dev tool now, I decided to first launch 100 SAAS tools on top of MarsX, to make sure the world sees how good Marsx is. Because developers are so skeptical, they ask: will it scale? are there any serious projects done on it? Will it handle the load?
So I say, I don't wanna beg for users, I want users to beg for access once they see Marsx is powering 100s of famous tools, some of which they personally use.

**2024:** We start SaaS production on the scale in November. Every tool I launch gets traction immediately. I realize that I'm at the point now where I know so well what other founders need, that every tool I build for myself gets tons of love from the market.

I pivot [unicornplatform.com](http://unicornplatform.com), from a landing page builder to a website builder, the revenues skyrocketed, and the growth went crazy.
I launch SeoBOTai, and it got 4000 users signing up. People just love it.
I launched listingBOTT in Jan and in 2 weeks it turns into my best launch ever in terms of traction and revenue.
I launched Indexrusher with LTD and have sales every day.

**Future**

I'm launching 50 SAAS tools in 2024 for founders. 
All those years, all the suffering prepared for this moment.
I have such a clear vision now for MarsX and SaaS OS.
We're highly profitable and growing every day.

I'm going all in, investing all my personal money and profits into building the best SaaS tools for solo makers and small bootstrapped teams. 
To make makers more productive, and to help them grow.
**My dream world is where indie makers and bootstrapped teams take over the world run by corporations. **

The End.
Say hi to me [x.com/johnrushx](https://twitter.com/johnrushx)
My 20 projects are [here](https://johnrush.me/).

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