From Frustration to $30k Profit - How We Turned Our Frustration into a Business in Just 3 Days

Hi indie hackers,

I am excited to share our story — a testament to how solving a personal problem transformed into a profitable business. In just one week, we generated an impressive $6,000 in profit, which grew to $30,000 of mostly passive income over the next three months.

A problem that screams for a solution

It all started when I was trying to get a visa for country X. After filling out the application, the next step was to book an appointment. To my frustration, there were no available slots every time I looked.

After searching on social media, we discovered that only around 50 slots were released every day at 12 pm, with over 1,000 people trying to secure them simultaneously. The demand for visas after the pandemic was overwhelming.

There were tutorials on how to maximize your chances by clicking at the right time, as well as forums where people discussed and complained about the issue. Some individuals had spent thousands on plane tickets without a visa, while others had emergencies requiring immediate visa processing.

It became clear that this was a problem that screams for a solution.

Building the most basic MVP

My partner (a project manager) and I (a software developer), started by studying all the tutorials and conducting trial and error. Eventually, we discovered the optimal strategy: solving a captcha after the slots were released (which varied randomly between 12:00:00 and 12:00:10 every day) and clicking on a date and time as quickly as possible. If we clicked fast enough and no one else had chosen the same slot, we would secure an appointment.

To maximize our chances, I developed a simple script that queried the API for time slots every second. When the API indicated that the slots were released, we'll solve the captcha and submit the form to get the appointment slot. This approach worked flawlessly for both of us and a few friends.

Validating the idea

The indie hacker inside me realized that people would be willing to pay for this service. As an experiment, we created a landing page with a form to collect necessary information and set the price at $200.

Within 12 hours, two people signed up!

Scaling Up the MVP

The next day at 12 pm, I anxiously sat in front of my computer, waiting for the clock to tick. The pressure was immense, knowing that the speed of my clicks would determine whether I made any money. But on that day, I wasn't fast enough and didn't earn anything.

Having a business with an uncertain chance of making $200 on some days wasn't sustainable. It wasn't worth the stress and effort.

To transform this into a profitable venture, we needed to improve the success rate and scale the service beyond one customer at a time.

Then, a brilliant idea struck me—what if we could automate the entire process, eliminating the need for manual clicks?

Since the website was a single-page app, we realized we could use the same booking data to recreate the API call when the slots were released. Furthermore, we could scale it up to handle multiple bookings simultaneously.

After spending an entire weekend building and testing the new MVP, we were ready to go. Meanwhile, we received an additional 10 signups over the weekend.

Note: we weren't scalping because we were only booking on behalf of customers, not taking up all slots and reselling.

Traction & the power of word of mouth

What's 10x more stressful than having $200 on the line based on how fast you can click? Having $2,000 on the line based on 1-second execution result of your code.

The moment of truth arrived at 12 pm. Our hearts raced, and our eyes were glued to the clock.

And it worked!

Words couldn't describe the joy and pride we felt at that moment. In just three days, we had built a business from scratch and achieved significant revenue on the third day. This is why people love entrepreneurship!

Our customers were also delighted. Many of them had been struggling to secure a visa for weeks. Some even shared their success stories on social media and referred friends to us.

Our inbox EXPLODED with inquiries.

We spent the next 13 hours straight (from 1 pm to 2 am) replying to messages. Messages were coming in faster than we could reply. The volume was overwhelming, prompting us to establish a queue and ask people to wait in line since we couldn't serve everyone in a single day. We even joked that there might soon be a market to book an appointment with us for booking appointments at the visa office.

The takeaway here is that when you build something that people truly need, traction will follow.

Growth

With our MVP proving successful, we had to consider growth channels. Other players in the market were still operating manually, serving only one customer per day if they were lucky. Consequently, they charged exorbitant prices (e.g., $2,000) and demanded deposits for an unreliable service. Additionally, there were numerous scammers who stole customer information or disappeared after receiving a deposit.

We already had product-market fit and what could be considered a technological monopoly within our niche. Our customers' primary concern was trust, given the time-sensitive nature of the service and the need to share private information (which could be sold for a significant sum on the dark net). We tested different channels using the Bullseye framework and found that informative social media posts performed well organically, while Google and YouTube ads backfired, causing people to associate our brand with scams.

To overcome the trust barrier, we designed our pricing as "pay after you are satisfied." We provided the booking first and accepted payment afterward. This approach helped establish trust, and we never encountered a customer unwilling to pay afterward.

An interesting challenge we faced was that every one of our social media posts, as well as some of our customers' posts, was maliciously reported by our competitors. We had to appeal to the platforms each time, and sometimes our content was taken down.

Given these circumstances, we decided to focus our efforts on word of mouth. Our next campaign involved offering free services for seniors aged 60+, where we simply created a post stating we are offering this free service, many seniors were referred to us by their family or friends. Since the system was biased towards younger individuals familiar with technology, making it difficult for seniors to navigate, this felt like the right thing to do. Additionally, this strategy made it impossible for our posts to be maliciously reported and taken down. It turned out to be our best-performing campaign, driving over hundreds of leads for the following couple of months.

Choosing the right growth channel combined with the quality of our service made all the difference. We made $6,000 in profit during the first week.

Player 0 entered the game

However, our celebration was short-lived. Just as we were starting to enjoy our initial success, a new competitor entered the scene with a significant volume of business.

To our astonishment, we discovered that this new player was an insider.

Our competitor was exploiting a system backdoor that allowed them to make bookings otherwise inaccessible to the general public. They were also charging five times our price!

It suddenly became clear why the visa office hadn't taken any action to improve the situation—they were profiting from it.

Mission-Driven Entrepreneurship

The discovery left us shocked and kept us up all night. We also began to worry about our personal safety. Taking a slice of their pie (and shrinking the pie in the process) gave them every reason to come after us. We had no idea what they were capable of.

We needed to rethink our next steps carefully.

We could have optimized for money and manipulated demand by creating fake accounts to secure all the slots, driving up prices alongside our competition, and forcing everyone to pay. Looking back, we could have made ten times what we earned—not enough to retire, but sufficient to travel the world. However, that wasn't the purpose of our journey.

We embarked on this journey with a mission to help more people reunite with their families. Now, we felt an even stronger calling to challenge an unfair system.

Our first instinct was to open-source everything, but that would only benefit our competitors and worsen the situation for the general public.

We also considered making the service entirely free since the marginal cost was practically zero. However, people preferred to pay. Many customers associated price with trustworthiness. Some even commented, "Their price is so low; it must be a scam." Therefore, we had to charge something to establish trust.

We also contemplated selling the business for an exit. However, we realized that the opportunity was short-term, we didn't expect the situation to last long. Moreover, we didn't want the next owner to engage in any unethical practices that could worsen the situation for everyone.

Ultimately, we made the decision to retain the technology ourselves but lower the prices significantly to help more people. Then we automated the entire process to create a form of passive income - we ran the code on a dedicated server 24/7 to monitor for new openings and periodically load new customer data from our database.

The End

After three months, the situation improved as most people planning to travel during the summer had obtained their visas. At that point, we made the choice to shut down our operations and embark on the next chapter of our entrepreneurial journey.

In the end, our entrepreneurial journey taught us valuable lessons about solving problems, staying true to our mission, and the power of creating positive change. While our venture in the visa appointment space may have come to a close, we're excited to embark on the next chapter of our entrepreneurial endeavors. Armed with newfound knowledge, experience, and a deep understanding of the impact we can make, we're ready to tackle new challenges, help more people, and create innovative solutions. The journey continues, and we're eager to see where it leads us. Thank you for joining us on this incredible ride, feel free to ask me anything in the comments.

Stack

• Landing Page - Carrd
• Customer intake - Google form
• Database - Firestore
• Scripting - A custom chrome extension
• Email - Sendgrid
• Payment - Stripe
• Automation - Make.com (Google form & stripe -> Firestore)