> I tried many things. Reddit. Facebook Groups. Quora. LinkedIn. Direct Sales. Twitter. ... On the 21st of April, completely unexpectedly, a tweet of mine blew

> I tried many things. Reddit. Facebook Groups. Quora. LinkedIn. Direct Sales. Twitter. ... On the 21st of April, completely unexpectedly, a tweet of mine blew up big time. "Fortunate favors the prepared." The highly random nature of internet karma should probably be more well publicized by now. If ten years ago, I gave myself all the blog posts I'd write over the next ten years, I would not have predicted correctly which ones would be most popular. Not that I write for the pageviews, or even write all that often. If you think of it as a multiarmed bandit problem, you kinda have to publish without a goal in mind in order to have enough arms to pull to find and iterate on the few good ones. This is why IMO, it helps to have a few input goals as well as outcomes. AFAICT, content marketing is basically posting good stuff and hoping some of the traffic rubs off on your sales funnel. Like that Sparkfun rotary cell phone from way back when, though obviously it helps when you sell the parts to your ironic nobody-would-buy-this product online. > I smashed my infamous $500 MRR goal. It was a huge mental barrier for me. The sad thing is that once again I was tricked. I was chasing this goal for more than two years, and now it means nothing to me. It's dead. Cold. Meaningless. Like it was never there in the first place. Elsewhere on his site Alex describes his goals as 'humble' but that may be part of the psychological problem here; even he believes they're not the same as even modest success. $500 MRR feels meaningless because it _is_. Why does 500 MRR matter? If you borrow the OKR framework, perhaps he would reframe the Objective (goal) as 'build a business capable of sustaining my preferred lifestyle', and then the MRR target would have meaning as a key result? The Objective/Key-Result framework provide two major benefits: First, it gives you the means to tie your metrics to something meaningful, and the ability to fact check your assumptions. Make more money isn't necessarily meaningful, but 'quit my day job' or 'send my kid to art school' can be. Perhaps the $500 MRR goal feels meaningless because the lifestyle goal _is_ the real Objective, but the $500 MRR Key Result is insufficient to meet it. The second thing it does is provide a process for breaking Big Problems into smaller ones. You'll probably need multiple strategies to reach any important Objective, and the KRs help you break them into smaller steps. Which themselves can be treated as Objectives with their own KRs. Using https://stripe.com/atlas/guides/business-of-saas#the-fundamental-equation-of-saas https://stripe.com/atlas/guides/business-of-saas#the-fundame... as a guide for how to break down the 'big number' can help, but there is no predictive formula for maximizing it.