Six days before graduating from Grinnell College, at 21, Philip Kiely launched his first product on Gumroad. And 24 hours later, Kiely netted $20,000.

But it didn’t start there.

Philip spent his four years learning the ins and outs of Computer Science (CS).

But even as a CS guy, Philip came from a family of writers. All throughout his educational background, he had done work for the school newspaper and English classes on top of his CS coursework.

This gave him an edge.

But it wasn’t until Philip read Nathan Barry’s book Authority: A Step-by-Step Guide to Self-Publishing that his mindset started to change.

This inspired him to start creating.

It Started With Client Work 🔗

Before writing his own content, Philip started writing content for clients.

Within a few months, he was writing for some of the heaviest hitters in the tech magazine space like FloydHub, CSS-Tricks, and Smashing Magazine.

At this time, Philip was “just some college kid” who found an entry point that many developers didn’t feel confident about.

Many developers didn’t feel confident about writing long-form tutorials detailing how to do X in Python or do Y with JavaScript.

And he did.

Phillip was writing 2,000-word tutorials that were getting read by thousands of developers.

And In 2019 An Email Sparked An Idea 🔗

Philip received an email from an individual who hired him his sophomore year for an internship.

It said, “Hey Philip, I see you’ve been doing all this writing stuff, can you teach me how to do that? Can you teach me how to get published?”

So, he did.

He wrote a short ‘how-to’ guide and charged a consulting fee.

But it was the fact that someone who had ten times more work experience than Philip was asking him for help and was also paying him for the help.

Philip quickly realized there are other people who need help and would be willing to pay for it.

This sparked the idea to write a book for developers.

And when COVID hit, his school shut down, and Philip was keen on turning this into his full-time job.

Full Time Meant A Book Full Of Value. 🔗

An outline turned into a 10,000-page book, but after zooming out, Philip realized what he had created was less ambitious than what he wanted to deliver.

He had much more to create around the subject.

So, he continued to add content and also used the power of cold emails to interview some of the top developers in the game and add their interviews to the book.

With this, he added 11 interviews from individuals like Patrick McKenzie, Tracy Osborn, Cortland Allen, Daniel Vassallo, and Chris on Code.

Now, he was ready to package and deliver. 🔗

Over the course of the next couple of months, Philip cranked out all the needed work to make his book immensely valuable.

And six days before graduating, Philip launched his first product online.

He was tense and nervous.

But then the first sale rolled in.

And then another.

After the first hour, he made $1000, then $3000 in the next three hours, $10,000 in eight hours, and by the end of his first day, Philip had surpassed $20,000 in sales.

This is just a part of his goal to generate multi-generational wealth through family-owned small businesses.

You can read his entire story here.

You can purchase his products here.