How I made $27k in 2 months from 2nd
Startup
First Startup
As a solo tech founder, I worked on Howuku which was my side project back in 2019 and later turned into a full-time startup in 2020.
I didn't really know what I was doing, I was too shy to talk to customers, and REALLY BELIEVED that built and they will come.
So, for the first 24 months, I kept building, one feature after another. (I now realize it was a form of procrastination)
Feeling good about myself every time I posted the product on Indiehacker and got praised for it.
"WOW! I must be doing something remarkable", I thought! (It means nothing whether they like it or not if they are not paying for it and not your potential customers)
I got my first customer paying $100 after 12 months of building the product. My first sweet sweet internet dollar, paying for our highest-tiered plan. Took us about ANOTHER 12 months to break the $1K MRR mark.
Now, Howuku is growing on its own organically and most signups come from SEO and WOM with pretty decent conversion rates. Thanks to all the reviews and processes built up over the years.
Second Startup
About 3 months ago, I started a new startup Mida.so - a new A/B testing tool after Google Optimize announced that they are sunsetting in September.
I am really pumped to start doing it all over again because now that I am more experienced in running a startup, no longer obsessed with new shiny features. I want to prove that I've grown as an entrepreneur and that I can do it bigger, better, and faster!
1st month, we are building out the MVP and trying to get as many new users to test it out and give product feedback. Pretty rough product but it works, and reusing a lot of components from Howuku.
2nd month, we launched it in AppSumo (mainly for product feedback and actual users), it ran for a month and we made $17,000 in revenue.
3rd month, we closed our first few customers and reached $10k ARR within 30 days after the Appsumo campaign (we can't really sell subscriptions during the campaign).
The product is no way near perfect but we are making progress waaaay faster than when we started.
We have launched it with a lot of things that still require manual work such as subscriptions and even monthly usage limits.
Just launch it and make sales, you can improve the product later on.
What I learned from building my first and second startups:
- Get to the market faster. Make sales. Don't add another new feature.
- You don't have a business without sales and marketing, no matter how good your product
- Marketing marketing marketing: Learn SEO, learn SEM, learn to #buildinpublic, whatever works for you, just be consistent!
- No customers? It is not because you don't have features X, Y, Z. It is because you are not reaching out and selling it to the right person. Do cold email, cold DM, cold call, or whatever. You will get ridiculed by random strangers you pitch to, but that is totally fine you will survive.
- Cheaper and more affordable than your competitors is NOT a USP.
- ALL-IN-ONE is NOT a good business model for small businesses, you simply do not have the time and resources to juggle around 10 features that could be 10 standalone products. Just leave that to the big guys like Hubspot, ZOHO, etc
- Selling to everyone equals selling to no one. Who is your targeted audience? Marketing people? What is their title? How big is their company size? What industry and geography? What is their day-to-day process like? Be very specific about it!
- TALK TO YOUR CUSTOMERS - schedule a call and talk to them
- High ticket size product - it is easier to build and scale a business where you only need 20 customers to hit 20K MRR than 1000 customers to hit 20K MRR.
- Focus on one single USP and do it better than everyone else - inspired heavily by superhuman.
Anyway, if you're looking for a free Google Optimize alternative A/B testing tool, Mida.so is the fastest A/B testing platform with a forever free plan of up to 50,000 monthly tested users and AI autopilot testing to help you automate your web optimization.
Why should I choose Mida over VWO is also offering free plans? Because Mida is awesome.
Keep learning and keep grinding!
Thank you very much, I had no idea about appsumo I will be posting my side project there too, thanks.
Theee are very helpful tips, especially as I’m starting out as a founder.
Hey Donald, appreciate you sharing this!
I'm a newbie indiehacker and your story inspired me a lot. Huge congrats on the success and here's to more wins coming your way. Godspeed! 🚀
Very good content! Thank you for sharing. I've always heard to only focus on one feature when starting out. Let your product do one thing and one thing well!
SEO is Key. It takes time but it's really worth it.
Thanks for sharing the story. What is the difference between SEO and SEM? Are they the same thing?
Not the same thing.
SEO = the chance of people finding you organically through search engines (google, bing, etc)
SEM = Paid advertisement such as Google Ads, Bing Ads, etc.
I see. Thanks for your response.
What is your tech stack and how do you convert your raw ideas into tech product.
VueJS, NodeJS, ExpressJS, VanillaJS, MySQL.
Just use whatever you're comfortable with. Programming languages don't matter at this stage.
Thank you so much for sharing !
Congratulations on the success of your second startup. So, and the impressive journey you shared! Your story is filled with valuable insights and lessons for aspiring entrepreneurs. Here are some key takeaways and thoughts
I really like this article and like to disagree with some points..
There is no alternative to Marketing but depending on product types and goal, you must invest in where your current customers want. Word of mouth marketing is something you can only get if your product is outstanding and solve their pain. They will happily start marketing completely for free.. Strongest marketing channel is word of mouth. So you have to invest more in solving the pain with your tool
Is USP.. because huge amount of people are frustrated and angry paying a lot., If you can provide similar features or even better with cheaper price, definitely people are going to jump on you. For example, in our last campaign, we sold $80k worth of mobile apps in EzyCourse in just 10-20 days because it's cheaper and better than the competitors like thinkific charging $199/m and clearly plenty people doing full day job cannot afford it.. Only established business can. So knowing your customers' pocket size is very important..
All in one is indeed a great USP if customers can see you are competing against the big guys who charge huge and you are becoming better than them in terms of features and functionalities.. If you can reduce their cost by being all in one, it's a huge bonus for them and customers become very loyal...
All other items, 100% agree!
I would rather hear a story about how to acquire the first client rather than a summary. I don't know where to find it.
Literally, just DM people or send cold emails and get people to try out your product.
One example, on Twitter/Linkedin, go look up a specific keyword and reply to threads. For example "Google Optimize alternative".
https://twitter.com/donaldnzy/status/1717458844102836394
People are looking for a solution. Put your service in front of them, and if they find it helpful then you got yourself a customer.
First customer is the hardest part!!! Try AppSumo and the things will change too fast..
Thanks for being so open with your business journey!
Wow posts like this tell me I need to be moving wayyy faster than I currently am. Thanks for the inspiration today :)
Yes @AnuragBaddam, move faster!
All the best!
What a motivational spirit in your post
What an inspiring story. I just launched my website a few months back. Struggling to get my first client.
Just DM people or send cold emails and get people to try out your product.
One example, on Twitter/Linkedin, go look up a specific keyword and reply to threads. For example "Google Optimize alternative".
https://twitter.com/donaldnzy/status/1717458844102836394
People are looking for a solution. Put your service in front of them, and if they find it helpful then you got yourself a customer.
This is indeed a good advice, Thanks buddy.
Amazing job @donaldng! Could you please share more about your AppSumo launch?
I'm trying to do one for my app transcript (.) lol but they don't allow subscriptions. What did you offer in your campaign vs a your typical subscription?
Thanks in advance :)
We offered a "ridiculously" low amount for the lifetime deal compare to our typical subscription price ($1,800 ACV for the base plan). Also, AppSumo take a HUUUUUUGE cut from the revenue.
So, you MUST have a super clear idea of why you wanted to do this.
And, we do have very solid reasons for it:
For all of that in 1 months is why we decided do it.
Congrats. Thanks for sharing
Thanks Donald,
The advices are very useful
Hey Donald, huge props for your journey with Howuku and the quick success of Mida.so – $27k in two months is seriously fantastic! Your lessons are on point, especially about focusing on sales and marketing. I'm stoked to try some of your strategies for my business, Logomakerr.ai (https://logomakerr.ai/)
Keep rocking the startup world, and congrats on your achievements!
if any of you guys trying to write blog as part of your marketing effort, I built a simple tool for solopreneurs like us. The tool will analyze google data to comeout with the best automatically identify the best keywords, title and writing style to get more traffic from your target customer. You just need to specify the niche and target customer to get the analysis.
If you are interested can checkout creativeblogtopic.com
Stuck on safari-ios at 5%. Also keyboard on safari did not had space key. Have to write in notes then copy paste. Customers will only give one chance.
Thanks I am looking in to. I believe it is not stuck at 5% it just taking so much time as the data to crunch is quite big and happen on all device. I am trying to improve how the data is processed right now. For the keyboard with no space issue I will investigate about it more. Thanks for the feedback really appreciate it
Donald, what about paid ads ? How has worked for you ?
It works really well for us. Google Ad and sponsoring influencers.
Great!
Mida looks awesome 🤝
As a technical person, I relate to your first launch a lot. Adding more and more features felt pretty natural to make the whole thing feel more complete, but on reflection we were just moving the goalposts (e.g. adding self-serve sign-up, analytics, fiddling with the aesthetics too much, etc.)
Really useful learnings that I'll be yoinking going forward with my next startup!
I belive in building features on demand.. see how many customers asking for it, if its fall under your niche and your own vision, go for it and customers would love that as you did it for them.. On demand building works really great
One mindset shift I have:
You only build software to scale. If you have 1000 customers using your tool then you absolutely have to build software to automate the process. Otherwise, if you only have 10 customers and only takes you 5 min to do it for each customer then just do it manually.
Sell first, figure it out later whether you need to build the software or do it manually.
Don't use building perfect/beautiful products as an excuse to not start selling! :)
I agree with it!
Okay, I have been lurking around a lot and I tend to notice few common patterns in the community. The most of the time people are building tools for other businesses or dev. If everyone is doing the same, why is the market not saturating?
My next question is. How are you validating ideas? I understand it is easy to build but even building requires some quality and time, no? For example, I create a robust backend but use simple html forms, do you think people would use it?
What does it mean to create value, what does it mean to find target audience? Who defines value? These are very hard question I am facing even before starting. The reason? I can easily build but I do not want to sink my time building something people do not want.
I saw one comment the other day where someone posted about CENTS. Then do you get into the market if it is easy for everyone else to do it?
How do you define your moat? If I do it better the everyone else, I am sure big corps will kill the thing at one point in time, won't they? How to identify that one single USP? How to know it?
These are some serious questions which I can't find answer anywhere. It feels like some secret sauce that is being passed across different people and I am not part of the chain. How is it even possible to find something valuable?
The market will always be saturated. It all really comes down to your product positioning. Position yourself to stand out and away from the saturated market.
For example, OpenAI is releasing its own PDF function, PLUS every day there is a new ChatwithPDF app released on PH, how you can win is niche down and positioning yourself for a specific small group of customers to do things better in your own way. e.g. PDF for Finance & Modelling, PDF for Lawyers, etc.
There is a whole discussion about that topic by Farez.
Talk to your customers, get feedback, get paid, and repeatedly.
Answer these questions:
It doesn't matter if you just use simple forms OR you don't have any software built at all. It is all about what you or your software can do to help them solve THEIR PROBLEMS.
"I can easily build", that is the problem.
You SHOULD NOT start with building software. You start by talking to your potential customers and start selling first. You only need software to scale, if you're not serving a large number of users then a simple HTML form works!
Build a brand that customers love and trust.
Sure Microsoft can copy Notion and call it Loop. But, Notion has a loyal and diehard user base that Loop cannot replicate, and in terms of product quality Loop is also so much behind Notion in terms of UX and smoothness. Big Corp cannot copy everything.
That is like asking what should I build? No one can tell you the answer to that, you have to figure it out yourself. Ask yourself what you believe, what you want to do better? What is something that the existing market is not doing efficiently that you can do it 10x better?
I am thinking of building something, but I'm unsure where to seek advice. I really don't have anyone to ask, as potential clients are not in my social network. Where can I find people in that case? Most people suggest HN, Reddit, or X. However, if I'm validating my idea there, it means I'm exposing myself to vulnerability since I would have to disclose everything, including my competitive advantage! So does it mean how I have to be fierce after the initial validation?
Lets imagine you already have a ready product, the best product anyone have ever seen.
Ask yourself these questions and be very honest about it:
How do you sell it IF you're not talking to potential clients?
If you talked to your potential clients HOW do you know they won't copy it?
If you're not selling the product HOW do you build a business?
How do you sell the product without exposing it to hundreds of people and only if you're lucky enough to get 1 sales out of it?
The truth is your idea is not unique and you do not have any competitive advantage.
Idea worth nothing.
Thanks! It's time to execute now! Let's gooo!!
This comment was deleted a year ago
I had the same exact idea and was planning to start development. I am happy that you have validated that I can come up with worthy ideas (I know execution and marketing is a whole other thing).
Even though I won't move forward with it, you've given me confidence to believe in my next idea.
I hope you post your tech stack in future so that I also learn/validate that I was about to use the 'right' tool for the job
You're right. Anyone can have the same idea but marketing and execution is a whole different thing.
All the best!
Had the idea myself to create an AI-powered A/B testing tool. Awesome to see someone execute well on it. Thanks for sharing and best of luck 🙌🏼
good
All the best @lucasrantzau! 🙌🏼🙌🏼
Hello Donald, awesome article, really awe-inspiring, can you check out my landing page and give me some feedbacks https://www.thecurator.app/ thanks, would really go a long way, I started it to fix a problem of mine, now I want to sell
https://app.usebubbles.com/u87Yi2RF2wASqxxyhRE6aM/thecurator-app
I hope that helps!
thank you Donald for the feeedback
Like it!
What was the best way you found to acquire customers?
Word of mouth is objectively the best way to acquire customers.
Thanks for sharing, are you a solo founder ? Did you built Mida alone? I'm asking because it looks really good and I can imagine how hard is to built it alone :-).
I will definitely try it on my saas Billy.
Solo founder, built it mostly by myself.
Don't ask me how, I don't know how I did it, and it is a miracle to me. 😅
hahha nevertheless great job!
Thanks for sharing your journey. I am also facing quite a problem with my saas as i am not able to get people to sign up even though i am using paid ads, what do you suggest i should do?
Paying money to acquire customers works well once you have a clear understanding of your audience, the sales funnel stages and then updating your website to have messaging that connects with your audience. If you are spending money during an early stage of growth, I highly recommend organic instead of paid traffic.
Without knowing your product, I would assume that:
What can you do?
All the best!
Very inspiring, thanks for sharing
Amazing... thanks for sharing Donald. This is inpiring, especially the lessons, most of which I fail to do.
Glad you liked it, Farez!!
Nice man. So both startups are split testing tools? Which one should someone sign up for?
We have "split" it into a standalone product, Mida is the split testing platform and Howuku is mainly for heatmap and analytics.
This comment was deleted 10 months ago