Hey everyone! My project Chill Subs turned two years old this weekend and I thought I can’t keep making excuses not to share everything I learn while making it.
So much stuff happens every week and it all just disappears into the void without being properly processed and shared with anyone who could benefit from it. It pains me because I’m obsessed with archiving stuff and being able to follow my growth through these little snapshots. And right now, I just don’t give this to myself or anyone. Like a greedy overthinking weirdo. So I thought enough of this.
A bit about me
Hey, I’m Karina! I’m a software engineer with 6 years of experience. I worked in outsourcing for 3 years, then did freelance for a bit (like building a medical tourism platform during a global pandemic lol), and then somehow almost accidentally launched Chill Subs in two weeks, and well, my life changed. I also write sad songs, occasional poetry and nonfiction, and try to sleep at night with my psycho cat Earl and our newly adopted kitten Piskli (eng: Squeaky). I’m originally from Belarus, then at the end of 2021 my husband and I moved to Poland, and in the summer of 2023, we had to leave because we were both working on our startups and our income wasn’t enough yet to get the residency. So currently we’re living in Georgia (the country)
A bit about Chill Subs
Chill Subs is a platform with over 4,000 opportunities for writers and helpful tools to help them simplify their submission process, as well as connect to other writers and editors. I started it in January 2022 and so far it has:
- Almost 20,000 registered users, over 40,000 followers on social media (over 50,000 if you count our magazine Write or Die), and over 300,000 website views per month
- $110,000 in revenue for 2023, and we launched our subscription service and writing workshops only in May
- A fantastic team of 6 people living in different countries and overlooking development, content and relations, design and social media
Why didn’t I share stuff before?
- Overthinking and choice paralysis: I thought about it all so much that inevitably came to so many factors I was unsure about: where do I post? In what language? (I speak Russian) In what order? What if I don’t do it in the smartest most strategized way possible? And also of course no, “I’m not ready! When I have time to properly prepare everything, then I’ll share!”
- I have problems with consistency and I just let it be my personality trait instead of trying to fight it. Like “Who am I kidding, I won’t post every week. Let alone multiple times”
- Impostor syndrome (of course, our favorite): $110,000 per year? It’s like the salary of one American developer. And we’re a team of 6. We also don’t have any investors and are not looking for them, we don’t participate in any startup competitions/conferences/whatever and we don’t have an office or properly paid employees, so who am I to blog about business?
- “Everyone shares this stuff and better than me and everyone already knows everything”
BUT
- There’s never a perfect time and we all know it
- “Everyone shares this” only because I follow all these accounts. My friends don’t. Many people don’t. I’m in a bubble
- Consistency problems are something to train, not accept
- Our current revenue is only a start. We have launched only a tiny fraction of things we want to do, and our audience is constantly growing
- Fucking yes, I started Chill Subs without investors, without followers, without advertising. I only paid $10 for a domain. And that’s it. And we grew it the same way: all ourselves, just by the sheer power of a good product and good people. And all of this happened while I chaotically moved between different countries trying to get residency and adopting cats. And this is something to be proud of, damn it. And I have every right to share my experience because it’s a wild exciting journey that taught me a lot.
- I decided to do everything as low pressure as possible and just dump it on the website + share it with my Russian-speaking friends because this gives me the needed emotional support. And then if I want to grow this into something bigger, I’ll already have the drafts! And this is way easier than starting from scratch.
So that’s it! That’s the start.
P.S. If you have friends who might be interested in various entrepreneurial/immigration/life/music notes, please share this with them! I’ll appreciate it.