How I went from an idea to first paid user in just 4 days

With the power of no-code and TikTok, I managed to go from idea to first customer in just four days.

I also generated five figures in revenue in the first 30 days!

Not here to flaunt any revenue numbers, but my hope is to inspire. I truly believe that this is the golden age of building startups for indie hackers. Building a product has never been easier with no-code and now also with AI. And distribution is also cheaper and faster than ever with TikTok/Reels.

Here's the story.

Background

I was a Product Manager earlier in my career and been creating content in the tech/AI space for 3 years.

I have my brother as a business parter and we have 1 employee.

I came up with the idea of a chatgpt prompt generator. Spoke to the team about the idea and they also loved it.

The team spent few hours figuring out the prompt engineering behind prompts and came up with our first version of the model.
We were shockingly happy with the results.

Tech Stack

It took us roughly 1 day to put together the product with nocode:

• My brother's girlfriend came up the logo design using Canva
• Front-end was built using Carrd
• Used PickAxe for the backend
• MemberSpace to manage subscriptions
• And Tella for the first demo video

Pricing Model

It was a trial for a couple of days and ten $3.99 after. Credit card was required to sign-up.

This is to make sure we get real signal for the interest in the product.

Launch Day

We finalized everything by like 7pm in my brother's bedroom on Friday. We were thinking if we should wait until Monday or just ship on a Friday night lol
It turns out we're not patient enough so decided to launch it!

We decided to launch the ugliest looking product we've ever built on a Friday night.

We thought, if there's any signal, we will quickly move away from Carrd and build something better next week.

We created a new tiktok account and just posted a few videos. And I posted about the app on my IG story as well.

And that was it.

My story had a couple of thousand views and the new tiktok account video got a few thousand views as well.

A few thousand views turn into a near hundred website visitors which turned into a 10-15 sign-ups over the weekend.

Aftermath

After the initial signal, we migrated the app from no-code to a low-code model for robustness and more feature development.

Kept posting same tiktoks over and over again and the account somehow got 2k+ followers with one video going mega viral. Literally product demos and people still follow the account lol (not complaining though). We grew to 5-fig revenue in the first 30 days. I also posted it on my personal account (tons of followers so definitely helped to crack 5-fig revenue).

But this is the highlight reel, let's also look at the reality.

Our growth has slowed down since the initial hype. We've also experienced higher churn similar to most AI tools or GPT wrapper. We've got lots to learn but I am happy how we can ship fast and know how to market an app on social media.

Should probably do a Product Hunt launch soon.

The lesson is what you've heard a million times — just ship fast, if there's value, people will tell you.

Note: this was easier for us because I have 3 years of experience growing TikTok accounts including Zapier's.

The app I am referring to is called prompt-genie.com

If you want to learn how to grow startups using TikTok/IG, you can also subscribe to my newsletter. I don't write often

https://startup-tiktalk.beehiiv.com/

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https://twitter.com/ImKushanK

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