Stop Trying to Build a Unicorn. Start Cockroachmaxxing.
My Mantra: Don't Die.
🍕 I’m JA Westenberg. I write essays about technology, philosophy, productivity, and what it means to be human. If you like ideas that take their time, you’re in the right place.
While you’re here, a few things I’ve built: Kerouac, a writing app | Post Through It, a solo microblogging tool | Distributism.ai, my MCP platform | Laterware, all the AI news you need | Studio Self, a thought leadership agency for founders x VCs.
You can buy my book Permissionless here.
We have the goals of going indie all wrong.
We keep glorifying the massive exit, the overnight success, and the hyper-growth as the only acceptable outcomes. If you don’t hit those milestones, if you don’t “make it” by the defined standard of Pop Entrepreneurship (the word according to yCombinator and Tech Twitter), you don’t count as a founder.
If you don’t have a book in Barnes & Noble and a Netflix-licensed show, you don’t count as a writer.
In fact, you barely count as a failure unless you manage to squeeze out a viral LinkedIn post about your “learnings...”
It’s a paradigm that almost guarantees failure for 99% of the writers, makers, hackers, and builders out there who aren’t (and will never be) lottery winners. The normal folks who manage to make a living doing their own thing, but don’t reach the level of success the media and trad startup wisdom finds satisfactory.
But we don’t all need to be unicorns.
Unicorns are glorious creatures, and when they die, they die glorious deaths. But they still die all the same.
I keep thinking about this tweet, from @dvassallo:
…it’s simple.
But it’s one of the most inspiring things I’ve ever read.
What if the goal is never to become a unicorn?
What if the goal is as small and attainable, as aspirational and brutal as this: become a cockroach.
Cockroaches survive. They survive disasters both natural and unnatural. They’d survive a nuclear winter.
And they represent the only meaningful level of success for the indie revenue Enjoyor.
Survive until tomorrow, and when you get to tomorrow, survive that, too.
The Cockroach Philosophy
I have spent the last week trying to embrace the cockroach as the ultimate entrepreneurial spirit animal. A cockroach has no ego, only the instinct to persist. A good many folks might find them distasteful and look away; I’m directionally okay with that. Being rejected isn’t something I’m scared of, and it’s hardly a deterrent.
The core traits I want to build are resilience first; then adaptability and then indestructability. These might be inglorious, but if they mean the difference between living on my own steam and my own skills vs. going back to a job on someone else’s paycheck, they’re more than enough for me.
I’m willing to scavenge for crumbs, if need be. I’ll chase tiny revenues and unglamorous niches, and I’ll sell whatever product and service I can deliver and get paid for, if it means preserving my runway and staying solo. Status has never appealed to me; if it did, I’d have stayed in law school instead of dropping out to hit the road and go on tour.
If I never make it out of the shadows and into the limelight enjoyed by the folks with an audience of millions, I don’t mind taking that L. As long as the L is accompanied by profit, that seems like a decent trade.
My focus is on longevity, not legacy.
Legacy means nothing when you’re dead.
The longevity of your business means everything while you’re still kicking around above the earth.
How to Not Die
I’m a writer, can’t you tell?
My financial survival comes down to this:
Does my monthly revenue exceed my monthly expenses by enough of a margin to breathe freely?
My mental survival:
How far removed am I from the crippling burnout and depression that dogs my footsteps (and don’t pretend that doesn’t apply to you too; you can’t bullshit a bullshitter, mate)
My creative survival:
Can I keep the projects I’m passionate about alive, whether I pivot or mutate, and find a new way to monetize without giving up?
Do Whatever it Takes
My goal now is to cut my personal and business burn rate to as close to zero as I can; to spend less every single month, until I am running on a shoestring budget - without sacrificing functionality, and without removing my own ability to scale.
Part of that has meant moving to open-source software, or rebuilding my stack on my own; part of it is just cutting out expensive foundation models and tools and using open-source and open-weight AI instead.
I don’t actually need to run Claude Max in order to grow a business as a writer and build indie apps; I can do the same job with Ollama, OpenRouter, and KiloCode at a fraction of the cost. I can switch to using Harper instead of Grammarly, and I can reduce my Google spend by moving to Proton, again at a much lower cost. Notion is harder to replace with a lower-cost tool. But Obsidian is right there…
I don’t have a coworking budget; I work from a friend’s cafe in exchange for helping them out with their tech setup, marketing, and analytics. When they’re closed, I work from my kitchen table or the public library.
Zero glamour, I’ll own that.
Glamour is overrated.
I’ve said yes to unglamorous projects and clients, too. I know the standard advice is to productize everything, say no to clients who don’t fit into a certain bucket, and be brutal with where you spend your time; and to a degree, I’d say I embrace that thinking. At the same time, I don’t reject opportunities out of a sense of ego either. If there’s money to be made, and it’s money that will support my addiction to the written word, I’ll take it.
It’s cockroach mode.
That’s the breaks.
I have swallowed every drop of my own pride. I’ll ask for help, and I’ll ask for support, and I’m ok with looking intensely vulnerable. I’ll borrow code and borrow time and barter where it makes sense. And I’ll tell the folks in my network if revenue’s tight this month and I need them to broadcast a callout for clients. I believe in the apps I’m building and the books I’m writing, and whatever it takes to keep them alive, that’s what it takes.
I know I’d get more clout bragging about MRR and ARR. I don’t play that game.
I tend to ignore vanity metrics. Followers and likes, shares and claps, boosts and whatever else the current platform darlings are pushing don’t actually pay for either rent or tokens.
So who needs them?
The Indie Survival Guide
This shit is a marathon.
Don’t sprint towards a cliff.
Your job is not to wait for the perfect post or the perfect book, the perfect app or the perfect course; your job is to publish the rough draft, launch the MVP, and optimize for revenue.
Sounds cold, right?
I prefer to call it realistic.
I’m working on a backlist of products, tools, and short books. One release doesn’t make a career anymore; you need every shot you can get, and the more runs you can take at it, the greater your surface area for luck. Artists can starve in misery pursuing their masterpiece, and good luck to them. I know what it’s like to not have cash to eat; I’m not going back there, no matter how much of a lousy sellout that might make me.
I’m not interested in a million followers or subscribers. That’d be nice, but it’s not a meaningful goal, and it’s entirely beyond my control. I can’t wake up in the morning and take a single tangible step toward it. What I can do is identify the 10 folks who’ve supported my work every week and reach out to them one-to-one with a DM and an actual offer of friendship. It’s a lot more sustainable than hoping for flash-in-the-pan overnight fame.
Doing things that don’t scale is a hack a lot of folks will ignore. But a personal message might mean the world to someone. (If you’ve subscribed this week and I’ve missed you, my sincere apologies! I’m on a staycation while my partner and my kid are away, and I’m trying to touch grass a bit more)
I tend to charge from day one. I ask people to pay me for my labor, and I’m happy to use that as a way to filter out the assholes who don’t value my work. I’ve learned the hard way that the people who get everything for free are the most demanding and the least supportive; they’ll shout and kick and scream all the way down, and never throw a dollar your way. I find them early, and I help them find their way out.
I don’t pocketwatch my competitors.
Actually, I’m not convinced I have any. There are other creators and writers and indie builders out there, and I don’t see the game we’re playing as zero-sum or fuck you so I can get mine. I don’t watch their subscriber count or envy their success.
When I read people like Paul Millerd, it’s purely because I love their work. That’s enough of a reason for me.
Finally - I make, write and build.
Every day and every night. I write at least 1,000 words every day on this blog, and 500 a day on The Daily General. I’m writing 700 words a day each on the two books I want to indie publish next. These are non-negotiables.
Re: Extinction Events
The extinction events are easy to anticipate:
Running out of cash, running out of runway, and going broke is number one. As much as I’d like to claim I’m so enlightened as to be able to let it all slide off me like so much water, that couldn’t be far from the truth. Some nights, I can’t sleep thinking about it.
Some mornings, I wake up in cold sweat with a sick sense of dread in my stomach.
But the solution is simple, and I know it well enough to follow and optimize for it in my sleep: bootstrap ruthlessly, maintain as many side hustles and revenue sources as possible, and refuse to deviate from the path.
Losing motivation is the deadlier risk. I know there are people my age with more stability and more wealth, people I know who’ve taken jobs at frontier model companies and big tech while I keep grinding. Some days, it’s harder to face the work than others. But the more I look for - and find - daily wins, the more habits I can build for motivation instead of waiting for inspiration as a gift, the closer I stay to the joy of being indie.
Why Outlasting Beats Winning
Markets change.
Competitors die, and new competitors are born; platforms evolve, and tech is a moving target, and the economy is variously fucked. But if you can survive, you are perfectly positioned, in the right place and at the right time for the next wave.
Effort generates compound interest. This is something I talka bout a lot: small, consistent steps build towards an unassailable moat more than any lucky break or moment of virality.
The cockroaches write the histories. The unicorns who flame out get buried and eventually forgotten, or simply held up as cautionary tales.
But actual success can best be defined as this: survival over time.
Cockroach style.