Derek Johanson

I'm projecting to exit my AI startup Microwaves.ai in ~6 months (just 180 days after I started it today). Here's how and why I plan to sell it for $2.84M on @acquiredotcom A thread 🧵 👇 (ChatGPT helped me come up with this thread idea which is pretty cool)

A personal paid newsletter business is the best business in the world IF… and only if… 1) you don’t look at support tickets (VA needed) and 2) you have a steady stream of new people to sell it to (like w/ paid traffic). If you don’t have those BOTH… it’s the literally the worst business.

I’d run ads

If there’s one thing we can learn from billionaires it’s how hard they work to control the narrative & push things in their favor. Ie, the new taxes don’t just effect me… it’ll steal money from you! Most of us don’t work 1/4th as hard as these fools do to market themselves.

it's not the worst... it could be worse

The look on her face when she hears the launch number is priceless.

I’m starting to think that this is literally the worst advice a newer entrepreneur in 2026 can hear. Do the complete opposite. Run ads. Do SEO. Word of mouth is a unicorn. I say this as someone who has it.

I don’t think I’m alone in this but I always forget that the end of the month is whacky. I tend to get more support tickets, cancels, etc on the last day of the month. Plus, I’m seeing that my ads perform worse with other advertisers spending up their remaining budget.

There are just 2 stages to entrepreneurship: 1. BA (Before ads) 2. AA (After ads) Once you start running ads you realize there is no other way to live.

I’m learning that you can be a complete idiot and mess up multiple steps of an ads funnel and still get it to work. People want to buy good offers so they’ll put up with errors in their quest to spend money.

Started this project earlier this year: bodyagent.ai

Daily emailers quit bc they have to pick 352 topics per year. Send tutorial email sequences and you need less than 50 (and you can reuse them the next year and reuse them in your products). I sell a course on this: Tutorial.email

I've been watching the K shaped economy play out in SoCal. Lotta friends & neighbors putting in new pools and shopping for vacation homes and buying $10k+ family dogs from breeders.

These sponsorship offers in Kit always baffle my mind. I understand it from the sponsors pov, but what publishers are taking these offers? When does the math make sense?

Had a sprinkler break. Instead of getting it fixed, I now hand water some sections of the lawn. It is my new favorite thing.

Obviously this is the gold standard & where everyone wants to go… but hearing stuff like this used to stress me out. Audience building is hard as hell and a lot harder and slower than getting an ad campaign to break even.

If you’re willing to use your body and exercise, even a little bit, there’s virtually no competition in those incredible places.

Here’s how to get ahead of 99% of people. Ronnie Coleman said: everyone wanna be a bodybuilder. No one wanna lift heavy weights. That’s your starting point. You just have to IMPLEMENT to get ahead. Everyone wants to procrastinate, learn a skill, but most will never implement it. What exactly does it mean to implement? Let me give you an example. I’m running a promotion for people to join a 30 day challenge where they’ll film 1 ad per day. It’s an easy process, you don’t need to be perfect, the ads are dead simple (you and an iphone). The problem is - the challenge isn’t about just learning a skill. If you want to participate you actually have to participate and make some ads. Most don’t want to implement. They just want the skill of writing ads so they can procrastinate. Most people are worried about the tech, how they’ll look and sound. A deeper layer is people even worrying and saying they have nothing to sell. “I’ll go build the thing before I write ads.” News flash: they won’t do that either. So 2 things, the way you get ahead is to simply do things. Implement. And you understand that you won’t get it right the first time. You prepare yourself for negative feedback but do it anyways. Second, if you’re selling things to people, you want to satisfy both of these audiences: the implementers and the dreamers. Give the dreamers the info so they can dream. But you also need to give the implementers the ability to implement if they want to. And that means providing products like templates and tools that help save them time and make implementing easier. There you have it. - Be an implementer and you're ahead of 99% of people. - Make sure you have products that help your implementers because that’s how you make more money on the “backend”.

It is impossible to see every little problem with your writing until AFTER you hit publish. Your brain simply cannot see it. Same is true of a marketing campaign. Same is true with starting a business.

Adding friction to my sales process is working and I'm just baffled. I always used to subscribe to: make it as easy as possible to checkout. Don't add any extra unnecessary steps. Is that wrong? I'm starting to think... maybe. As an example, I started making ppl add their phone numbers at checkout. So the checkout page has Name, Email, Phone number all required. My past self would have said: just do email required, that's it... so it's frictionless. Turns out adding in a phone # requirement is increasing average order value... upsell takes... and total number of sales. wtf Also, uglier, messier, longer pages with an overwhelming amount of copy and additions to offers seems to work better too. The world is flat in 2026.

The "uglier" I allow myself to look in ads, the more sales my ads make.