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Daniel Vassallo
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Only Intrinsic Motivation Lasts

Why I quit a $500K job at Amazon to work for myself — Last week I left my cushy job at Amazon after 8 years. Despite getting rewarded repeatedly with promotions, compensation, recognition, and praise, I wasn’t motivated enough to do another year. I spent my entire time in AWS building tools for developers. I liked that field so much that I would…

Motivation

5 min read

Only Intrinsic Motivation Lasts
Only Intrinsic Motivation Lasts

Dec 20, 2021

Making the unpredictable, predictable

Everyone wants to decouple time from money. The problem? It’s an extremely unpredictable way to make a living. For every successful creator, there are thousands who make nothing or almost nothing. So, how do you make the unpredictable, predictable? Here’s what I learned: See, there are two very distinct worlds…

Business

6 min read


Dec 20, 2021

Variable income makes me smarter

December 2020 turned out to be a very good month, with $31,962 in revenue and $25,385 in profit. But it didn’t start that well. …

Business

3 min read

Variable income makes me smarter
Variable income makes me smarter

Sep 14, 2020

$210,822 in 9 months

I have two info products on the market: The Good Parts of AWS — A 173 page PDF, released on Dec 25, 2019 (with pre-orders since Oct 3, 2019). Everyone Can Build a Twitter Audience — A 100 minute video, released on Apr 22, 2020 (with no pre-orders). These two…

Marketing

9 min read

How I made $210,822 selling a pdf and a video on the internet
How I made $210,822 selling a pdf and a video on the internet

Apr 27, 2020

I sold $104,754 worth of videos and PDFs in 4 months

What’s my Twitter audience worth? Someone asked me this question recently. Let’s see if we can get to a rough valuation. On Christmas day of 2019, I released my first info product (a technical ebook). Earlier this week, I released my second product (a short video course). …

Marketing

2 min read

I sold $104,754 worth of videos and PDFs in 4 months
I sold $104,754 worth of videos and PDFs in 4 months

Jan 6, 2020

DynamoDB is Not a Database

Amazon describes DynamoDB as a database, but it’s best seen as a highly-durable data structure in the cloud. A partitioned B-tree data structure, to be precise. DynamoDB is much more similar to a Redis than it is to a MySQL. But, unlike Redis, it is immediately consistent and highly-durable, centered…

AWS

5 min read

DynamoDB is Not a Database
DynamoDB is Not a Database

Feb 26, 2019

From Employee to Bootstrapper

How I Prepared my Finances Before Bootstrapping — Earlier this month I left my cushy developer job at Amazon to work for myself. I am 35, living in Seattle with my wife and two small kids, ages 2 and 4. …

Work

8 min read

From Employee to Bootstrapper
From Employee to Bootstrapper
Daniel Vassallo

Daniel Vassallo

Being independent. https://twitter.com/dvassallo.

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