Founder Playbook · Starter Story
8 tactics from Ben Boz
My Side Project Makes $15K/Month (Quit My 9-5)
Watch the full episode“start off by building an audience. Don't wait to have the product before you build the audience. And it needs to be an audience that's interested in that topic, not just like your general social media following. You need to have like a pretty good customer list of pre-qualified people that would use it.”
Build A Topic-Specific Audience Before The Product So Launch Day Lands On Warm Demand
Ben spent roughly a year publishing free content and a Reddit post about his personal blocking setup before he charged a dollar. The pre-qualified audience meant every feature he shipped had someone waiting to use it — which sustained motivation and gave him a built-in launch channel his earlier failed projects lacked.
“Make sure that you have a way to get customers. The customer acquisition problem is a thing you have to solve before you leave your job. And you have to have a plan that you can kind of throw gasoline on — if I have 40 hours a week to throw at this, I know that there's going to be an extra output.”
Quit Your Job When You Have A Channel You Can Pour Gasoline On, Not An MRR Number
Ben argues the quit-your-job threshold isn't revenue, it's a proven, repeatable acquisition channel. The test: can you predict that adding 40 hours/week of focused effort will produce more output? If yes, you have a flywheel; if not, more time won't fix it — you'll just be unemployed and stuck.
“If you're juggling a full-time job and you're also trying to do customer acquisition through marketing, you should pick a channel that is energizing to you and that you can do reliably and that you don't dread doing. For me that was content marketing, but for other people it literally might be knocking on doors talking to customers face to face.”
Pick A Marketing Channel That Energizes You Rather Than The “Best” One
Limited evening energy means the wrong channel quietly kills the project. Ben matched the channel to his personality so marketing felt like recovery time, not a second job, which let him sustain it across years while employed. Channel-personality fit beats channel optimality when hours are scarce.
“I've formed a habit of waking up really early in the morning, prioritizing development tasks and stuff that just required more focus and attention in the morning. So I would do that between like 5:30 and 8:00, 8:30. And then if I worked on anything in the evening it might be more like marketing related because I could do those kinds of tasks without having to be hyperfocused and alert.”
Block Mornings For Deep Work And Save Marketing For The Tired Evening Hours
Ben treats a side-project day as two distinct shifts gated by cognition. Deep-focus building gets the pre-job hours when his brain is fresh; marketing — writing, posting, replying — gets the depleted evening hours after the day job, because it tolerates lower focus. Match the task to the brain state, not the other way around.
“I made a guide on how you can convert an iPhone into a dumb phone... I basically showed with a really detailed step-by-step guide how you can make it so that you can only access like a few key apps on your iPhone... That article alone, it's one of the top performing guides that I've ever published and it's been read hundreds of thousands of times.”
Publish One Deep How-To Guide That Pulls Hundreds Of Thousands Of Organic Readers
Ben's core SEO strategy was well-researched, genuinely helpful long-form guides given away for free. A single deep tutorial aimed at a specific painful behavior outperformed everything else and drove millions of organic visitors over two years — depth beats volume for niches where readers are stuck on a specific job-to-be-done.
“The thing with Reddit is you can't be overly promotional. So you have to be a little bit more subtle. So if I made like a YouTube video or I made a guide, I would put like all of the good stuff in that Reddit post. I would kind of just tack on a reference to like the YouTube video or the guide. But what I found was more people engaged with it, so it was more likely to go to the front page.”
Front-Load Every Reddit Post With Full Value And Tack The Link On At The End
Instead of teasing content to drive clicks, Ben dumps the full value into the Reddit post itself and only mentions his guide or video as an aside. Engagement goes up, the post is more likely to reach the front page, and curious readers still click through for more — the algorithm rewards giving, not gating.
“they either pay $15 monthtomonth or they pay basically $10 a month if they pay for an annual plan. Ultimately I want people to buy an annual plan but a lot of people give up after like a month So I provide that option.”
Discount Annual Plans By A Third Of Monthly To Capture Users Who Would Churn In 30 Days
Ben prices annual at a 33% discount to month-to-month specifically because a chunk of users churn within 30 days. Offering both lets him capture committed users on annual (better LTV, less churn risk) while still monetizing the dabblers who would otherwise quit before billing cycle two.
“I have a 14-day free trial which allows people to try things out set things up and decide if it's a good fit. And then from there they either pay $15 monthtomonth or they pay basically $10 a month if they pay for an annual plan.”
Use A 14-Day Free Trial As The Setup Phase So Users Self-Qualify Before Paying
Tech Lockdown gates a multi-step setup (content policy, VPN device connect) behind a 14-day free trial so users can fully configure the product before the paywall hits. The trial doubles as onboarding, ensuring people only pay once they have proven the fit to themselves and lived inside the configured setup.