Life is too short

Meet Joschua Sutee.

Joschua is 23 years old and from Germany.

He always wanted to build his own stuff but never got his feet off the ground and after 6 years of tutorial hell he finally shipped his first website Lifeistooshort - in 42 hours. Joschua made 631$ in sales with 10 customers within the first month of the website being online.

This is his fast paced startup story 🚀

The story told by Joschua Sutee

My challenge

I told myself mid August 2024 that I would learn one tech stack and have something online by the last day of August.

15 days to learn the tech and launch something. An adventure this self-imposed challenge was about to take place.

I wrote down every idea I had and picked one that excited me the most. Many years ago I saw a “weeks of my life”-poster but I could not find a website that would let me generate this as a wallpaper. So I decided to build this as my first project and actually managed to launch it August 31st (the last day).

My project

I ended up with this really simple website that lets the visitor enter his/her current age and select the country of birth. Based on the average expected life expectancy in that country it visualises something similar to the “Your life in weeks”-poster and gives you a rough estimate how much of your life is left in years, months, weeks and so on.

Try it out at Lifeistooshort

Launching

Something weird happened on launch day. I wrote my first post on the subreddit r/SideProject. The title was Took me 42 hours to create this website. I forgot about it right away and went to sleep.

The next day I woke up to a storm of reddit notifications. My post got 22k views overnight. I was SHOCKED and immediately ran to my PC to check my website analytics.

1000 visitors! Just like that. I couldn't believe it.

More marketing

My initial success from reddit pushed me to overcome my dislike for social media in general and I made an X account to post about my experience in the “build in public” community. I knew about this community from different podcasts and YouTube videos.

Everything I had experienced so far on X proved my pre-existing beliefs about social media wrong.

After posting in the “build in public” community for a while I had a pivotal post (see below) that made me realise I could earn money from my website.

Monetizing

So many people said I should do sponsorships or affiliate marketing on the website. So I spent some time thinking about how I could earn my first Internet dollar with the website.

By chance I came across Janu Lingeswaran (previously shared his startup story on Fake Mayo) who is building Best Pastel de Nata together with Bernardo Raposo and a guy named Miguel.

I knew they wanted to get some eyeballs on their new project so I decided to shoot my shot:

It worked! They actually payed me 2 euros for the sponsorship. I was blown away. I would have never imagined that my first project would earn me some internet dollars.

I had to celebrate in public:

This kicked off a series of events.

In the following days people kept reaching out and asking for ad placements on the site. I did no cold outreach besides this and everything happened organic after that first sale.

I am now at 631$ in sales just from people wanting to display their website on Lifeistooshort.

All this momentum made me go all in on my website. I made a 1000$ dollar bet on it and spent it on an ad placement on another website, but that’s a story for another time.

I think the biggest lesson from my 29 day build in public journey so far is to just start and launch something no matter how small it is - and most importantly share what you build.

Don’t miss out on the amazing things that will happen.

You can get in touch with Joschua on X.