23-year-old immigrant in Canada hopes to cross $2000/mo in revenue 

At 21, Kathan Mehta moved from India to Toronto, Canada for his post graduation studies.

He is now 23 and expecting to make over $2,000 in revenue this month once he launches his paid subscription on Easy UI.

"I moved from India to Canada with a student loan of 30,000 CAD and no backup plan."

Starting young

At 18, Kathan and his friends started working on a company that got funded by the Indian government but it failed as they were unable to crack the marketing aspect.

After completing his studies in August, 2023, he was sure that he didn't want to work a 9-5. So, he took a 5-month break and moved back to India to work on his idea. He saw AI apps, RAGs & SaaS taking off on Twitter. 

"I explored a term called 'Indiehacking' because so many people on Twitter were posting about it."

First $100 as an Indiehacker

Upon further exploring the trend, Kathan came up with a service based business idea called Reachactory. It was a service for sharing AI tools with 100+ directories.

"I wanted to crack the marketing this time, as my fund raised startup at 18 failed because we were unable to do that."

It took him just two days to build the site and add Stripe, expecting to be flooded by people ordering his service but that never happened.

This made him go back to the basics: learning marketing, storytelling, distribution channels etc. He started posting about Reachactory daily on Twitter and LinkedIn . 

It took him 1.5 months but he finally got his first order from a guy in Bulgaria that wanted help with his AI tool. 

"That day I made my first $100 from the internet."

Building Easy UI 

From his real world experiences, Kathan learned that people would only pay if you did one of these three things: save them time, automate a process or provide value.

Today, the 23-year-old solo founder lives in Toronto, working full-time on building Easy UI PRO.

Easy UI is a collection of 50+ NextJS templates and website sections to save developers and designers time on building components and templates from scratch.

Currently, Easy UI is a freemium product, with the premium model costing a one time payment of $29 which provides access to 50+ high quality templates. 

While Easy UI doesn't make any revenue yet, Kathan's optimism to monetise it comes from the 1900+ visitors and 90+ stars on Github. He hopes to cross $2000 this month in revenue once he launches his paid subscription.

"I counted only $2000 as I have 1900 visitors on the site and even if 0.5% of them decide to buy it at $29, I will end up with $2,204 this month."

Let's talk finances

Kathan managed to pay off his student loan of 30,000 CAD in the last 2 years. 

While he builds Easy UI, he says doing a full-time off field job on the side keeps him entertained. 

"My full-time off-field job gives me a break, allows me to meet regular people which helps me come up with new ideas."

• Full-time job: $2.5k /mo

• Founder pay: $0

• Personal bank account: $8,000

Business Expenses

• Hosting on Vercel: $0 

• Open AI API: $0 (Microsoft for startups $2500 credits)

• Domain: $4/year

Personal Expenses

Kathan keeps his costs low by only spending on the necessities. Citing Toronto's high insurance and traffic, he also does not own a car, relying instead on the good public transportation of Toronto. 

"I don’t spend on unnecessary and expensive stuff. I like to live a minimal lifestyle." 

Keeping in line with his minimalist lifestyle, his monthly costs add up to around $1.4k /mo. He spends only 40-45% of his pay while 55-60% of it, as well as any revenue goes into his savings. He invests some of this back into the business and some goes to ETFs.

Here are his monthly personal expenses:

• Internet: $39

• Food: $600

• Rent: $500

• Chill: $100

Investing in yourself

His advice for people in their 20s is “Invest in yourself before investing somewhere else."

"You are your biggest asset. Invest in a side hustle, try doing a business because even if you fail in 20s you can still recover."

He has also been investing in the stock market since he was 20 despite the risk and uses Questrade for this.

While it might be too early to think of retirement, Kathan puts $300/mo in ETFs from his TFSA. 

Like most young people, Kathan also sees spending on travel as an investment in expanding his horizons. He visited India and Japan in the beginning of the year and is now planning a trip to the US next week and Mexico in December. 

"Travel allows me to know a new language, culture, and specially food."

Use AI to your benefit

With the amount of progress and changing technology landscape, Kathan believes that bootstrapping is the way to go. 

Instead of hiring people, Kathan has invested in resources and tools first as they are cheaper and easier to manage. He believes that unlike tools, you cannot control people. Tools are more efficient and cost-friendly too. 

"AI is so cheap right now. Use it and become rich before it replaces you."

His insight on bootstrapping is never to pay yourself as soon as you are profitable. Instead, reinvest that money into marketing and making your product better. 

The international student turned entrepreneur believes this attitude has helped him hack it in a foreign country despite the lack of financial backup and family support.

"I truly believe if a boy with an immigrant status and no financial safety net can dare to innovate then anyone can."