TL;DR
160,000 monthly users.
€0 in revenue.
Akash built a thriving Urdu poetry platform that became a massive success in his niche community.
Hundreds of thousands of engaged users.
Strong social media following.
Zero clue how to monetize it.
Now he’s in Berlin with one month of savings left.
He’s juggling three different business ideas - an AI agency, a home services marketplace, and desperately searching for freelance work to pay rent.
But there’s a pattern emerging that he can’t see.
When it comes to finding clients, he won’t spend €20 on a premium platform membership because “too many people are competing.”
This is the same entrepreneur who built a community of 160k users from scratch.
The disconnect is staggering.
And it reveals something deeper about why talented people stay broke.
What does it really take to go from survival mode to success?
FULL RECAP
Sometimes the most obvious advice is the hardest to take. Last week, I had a conversation with Akash, a 20-something entrepreneur from Berlin whose story perfectly illustrates why most people stay stuck despite having all the tools they need to succeed.
Akash: “I am a product designer. I’ve worked in design for about five years now. I did my first startup in 2019 when I was in college with my friends. It was a poetry platform, a UGC platform, so it has about 160k users still monthly visiting, more than a million Google events happening still, more than 140k on Instagram.”
Eli: “Is it making any money? Because the numbers are great.”
Akash: “There’s a bit of a gap there. It’s doing well, but the only way we could figure out to make money was advertisement, and Google doesn’t pay that much if your audience is from a certain country. We were targeting very niche poetry, Urdu poetry, which is called Shayari, which is like a dying art.”
Here was my first surprise. Akash had built something remarkable - a thriving community around Urdu poetry with serious engagement numbers - but he talked about it like a failure. In the world of online entrepreneurship, getting 160,000 monthly active users in any niche is extraordinary, especially on a first attempt.
The conversation continued as Akash explained how he’d burned out from juggling the platform, a full-time job, and freelancing, eventually discovering he had ADHD. He’d handed over his shares to his co-founder and moved to Berlin to start fresh. There, he’d launched an AI agency and planned a home services marketplace called HealthWell, modeled after India’s successful Urban Company.
But now he was running out of money.
Akash: “I realized we are running short on money, and investor money is not going to give us runway. We need to prove some traction before we raise money. So I posted on Reddit, and I actually took advice from people which says you need to freelance, build up a stable income and then look out for these ventures in your free time.”
Eli: “How badly do you need freelancing gigs? How long can you live without it?”
Akash: “To be honest, it’s very urgent. One month, one and a half months.”
This is where things got interesting. I offered Akash three paths forward: figure out how to monetize his existing poetry platform, focus on getting his marketplace to the 200 bookings he believed would attract investors, or solve the immediate crisis by landing freelance work. He chose the third option.
Eli: “Look, you’re a talented, well-spoken, and very experienced developer. What’s the problem? What’s going on? Why aren’t you overwhelmed with opportunities right now?”
Akash: “I tried going on to different platforms, and I see there are already so many people competing from Brazil, India, Pakistan, Vietnam. I cannot compete with their prices. So I tried niching down on European platforms for freelance, like Malt.de, Freelancer Map. But they also want me to upgrade to premium, to apply to more jobs. They just let me apply to one job, and they want me to upgrade. One job is nothing.”
Eli: “How much is the platform fee?”
Akash: “It’s 20 euros per month.”
Eli: “And you’re telling me that with your back against the wall, you apply to one project because to apply to more projects, you need to pay €20 and that’s too much?”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Here was someone who’s obviously an entrepreneur in spirit, one month away from financial disaster, refusing to spend €20 - less than what he probably spent on food in a few days - to access more job opportunities.
...
Eli: “If a platform allows 10 people to apply for free, then anybody who’s offering a project on that platform is going to get a lot of low-quality applications. The moment you pay 20 euros for this, you are in the top 1% just through the willingness of taking the risk. And if you then apply to 500 projects and you do it 8, 10 hours a day until your fingers bleed, you are in the top 0.01% and you’re guaranteed to get something.”
Akash: “I think it’s also inside me a bit of fear that what if I get the membership of the platform and there’s no new jobs posting regularly. Like I just see two jobs, I don’t get any.”
Eli: “That means you take a risk and it doesn’t pan out. Man, you’re a month away from being out on the street. What are you talking about? You’re an entrepreneur. This is what entrepreneurial life is like. You do many, many things and most of them don’t work out. That’s the point. If you wanted things to work out, you’d get a job.”
This moment crystallized something I see constantly in my coaching work. Akash was willing to spend €60 on a cold email automation tool - something with much lower odds of success - but balked at spending €20 on a platform where people were actively looking to hire someone with his skills. The psychology was backwards.
Eli: “What you get paid as an entrepreneur for is your capacity to take risk. Not your work. Not the hours you put in. How far are you willing to stretch out your neck under the knife? That is what you get paid for. And right now, you aren’t pushing it far enough to spend 20 euros.”
Akash: “Yeah, that’s a very interesting point. And the only thing that I think that’s like a brick in my head is like so many people like me, 100, 200, 300 people are applying for the same thing.”
Eli: “They are not, because most people are exactly like you. They don’t want to pay €20. The question is not how to do it as cheaply as possible. The question is, how do you do it as quickly as possible? If you apply to 500 jobs a week, because you’re all in, and you pay all the platforms whatever they need to get paid, and it’s sweat, blood and tears, and it takes a week, then that’s it. And you start to make money.”
I realized we’d hit the core issue. Akash wasn’t really willing to be uncomfortable, even when comfort was no longer an option. This is the fundamental misunderstanding most people have about entrepreneurship - they want the upside without the downside, the freedom without the risk, the rewards without the uncertainty.
...
By this point, I could see the conversation was more valuable as a wake-up call than as strategy session. We talked briefly about his other ventures - I was genuinely impressed by what he’d built with the poetry platform and offered to connect him with people who might help him sell it or the marketplace. But the real work was simpler and more urgent.
Eli: “In fact, I want to end this call early so you could go and do it. We can talk here for an hour and it will not provide the same benefit as you going and doing it. And then in a couple of months, we can do another podcast and you’ll tell me how wonderfully overwhelmed you are with freelance work and how much money you have to invest in your startups.”
Akash: “Yeah, it makes sense. Let’s get off the call. You will hear a message from me like whenever I do this. I did it, and fingers crossed, now I’m going like 10, 20, 30 applications every day, and let’s see how it goes.”
After we stopped recording, I reflected on the pattern I see constantly in my work. We want something, but we don’t actually go the distance to get it. We let procrastination, fear of small failures, or simple discomfort distract us from taking the actions we know we need to take. Especially when our backs are against the wall.
The truth is, Akash already knew what he needed to do. He didn’t need strategy or advice or coaching - he needed permission to do the uncomfortable thing he was already avoiding. Sometimes the most valuable thing I can do is simply voice the inner wisdom someone is already ignoring, and give them the push to listen to it.
And in this case, its’s about investing €20 in his future.
