How we built and sold 2 micro-startups in 6 months, bootstrapped, having a full-time job
Hello Everyone! I’m Domenico from Italy. I’d define my personality as a wave that is always in motion, never stopping.
In my full-time job, I’m a Business Analyst for Mexican Fintech. I started this new exciting job in Jan 2022. I have a bachelor's degree in Economics and Management. As you can understand from these few lines, I love startups, I love the No-code movement and everything around the tech world.
In this short article, I will tell you how I co-built and co-sold 2 micro-startups in 6 months starting with $0, with no code, and having a full-time job. Note: this is only my experience, so yours could be different. I’d like to share my short story here, and wait for your comments!
Topics:
- The Beginning
- First Product
- Second Product
- Marketing Channels and what we used for selling them
- ROI
- How to manage your time
- OpenAI
- What I’m doing now
- The Beginning
It all started almost 1 year ago on Twitter. A new challenge was launched: The Build & Sell Challenge (https://twitter.com/BuildSell30).
Few lines about this challenge:
You needed to build and sell something in 30 days
You needed to validate your idea in 1–2 weeks
The challenge was open to everyone
A sequence of activities suggested by the organization
It was an interesting challenge (first edition). So we decided to join it, and challenge ourselves.
Oh, in this adventure there was also my friend Tanveer -> https://twitter.com/idonotwritecode — Follow him, he’s amazing!
- First Product
For participating in this challenge we needed to build and sell in a very fast way. The first part is very important: the building phase! You don’t need to waste a lot of time on it — check the last part of this article for all the lessons I learned.
For building the product in a quick way, you needed to use no-code. It was not requested, but if you want to build the first version of a product in 1 week, you MUST use it.
We decided to build the first product based on creating an automatic Pitch Deck starting from info like the Startup name, market, the team, the problem, and the solution. We built and shipped the website in 1 week (we were at the beginning of Jan).
This is the website -> https://pitch2point0.com/
We reached more than 100 users in a few weeks, having 3 paid users. To be honest, it was not a lot in terms of revenue, but this was just our first project together, so it was fine for us.
We never did ads. We spent $0 on marketing. All our traffic, also for the second startup, was all organic.
We built and sold this first micro-startup in 2 months. We closed our deal at the end of Feb.
- Second Product
After the sale of our first product, we decided to go on with the second one. It wasn’t planned, but we had gotten along well together. So we decided to focus on something else.
The second product we built has received good success: onetap.ai (Now https://lumelixr.ai/)
It was an AI product (GPT-3) focused on translating text requests into Excel Formulas.
For this product, we reached more than 500 users, with a total income of around $5k in 2 months (from Apr to May).
We closed the deal at the end of June.
- Marketing Channels and what we used for selling them
Since we have spent $0 on marketing, what did we use for our promotion? Here you can find a list of channels we used. However, they are subjective channels, so they depend on your product and the goal you want to achieve.
- Reddit -> Reddit communities are super useful, mostly in the validation stage
- Indie Hackers
- Twitter DMs -> search for people using hashtags (according to your target)
- Kernal Ideas -> the same of Reddit (validation stage)
- LinkedIn -> more professional
- Facebook Groups
- Online communities focused on your target
What did we use for the selling phase? We used the Microacquire platform. They are amazing, and you can reach your goal very quickly.
- ROI
Okay, it’s all beautiful, but how much do we earn from these adventures? For privacy rules, I can’t say the amount of money, but I can tell you the % of ROI we had.
Pitch 2.0 -> ROI 4000%
Onetap -> ROI 4600%
We invested a little amount of money since we used no code tech. The most significant expense we had was Bubble Plan at $39/m. That’s it.
- How to manage your time
Since we both have a full-time job, the most important part was managing this time. So what is the advice for reaching these goals by having a full-time job?
Be constant with your liabilities. Work every day, also for a small amount of h. For example, I dedicated at least 1h/day to my side projects. This is so important. Of course, I also used weekends for managing these projects.
Is it stressful? It depends on your point of view. I love this, so it wasn’t stressful for me, also because it brought so much satisfaction.
Use a time-management strategy. For example, I love SCRUM Planning. Use it!
- OpenAI
I want to dedicate a short paragraph to OpenAI. First of all, if you don’t know it, read here: https://openai.com/about/
We used GPT-3 for the last product we sold (Onetap). I believe that OpenAI + No Code tech is the best combination you could create for building amazing products, in a very short time.
It’s not so easy at the beginning, but you can find a lot of youtube videos for learning it very quickly.
Now a lot of products are borning based on this tech. Use it.
- What I’m doing now
After this amazing journey, now I’m focusing my attention on 2 main things:
- Selling my third startup (https://yourcoverletter.com/) — it uses GPT-3!
- Building my next startup venture focused on the AI model.
For contact & info, this is my Twitter account: https://twitter.com/DG_9_6
My DMs are open!
Bye!
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That is so awesome! Thank you for sharing your journey.
How did you come across these ideas? Was this something that was a pain to you and you decided to validate it with other people on Reddit and so? How did you get other people to share feedback/insights about your problem?
The first idea came from doing some market research. The second idea came from my problem at work.
For the validating phase, we have used a lot of DMs on Twitter and hashtags
for market research what do you mean? which steps have you done?
Awesome post! Thanks for sharing. In the idea/product validation stage, what types of strategies did you use? e.g. Did you interview potential customers, send them surveys etc. and what kind of questions did you ask in order to get helpful data? Thanks in advance
So, I did not send surveys, or I did not interview the users. During the validation idea, the best thing you can do is try to understand what is the main problem they are facing and ask them what they are doing to solve it today. So you can have a better vision of it. I just spoke with them on Twitter (DMs).
really inspiring story, thanks @dg96
You're welcome!
Super interesting to hear about no-code potential, especially since I have a tendency to only think in terms of code. Well done. How did you sell it? Did you use Flippa or a similar platform or did you actively search for a buyer?
Nop, always Microacquire. Good platform and we were not looking for buyers. They contacted us.
What was the impetus to sell vs. further growth?
A great startup story, I'm also working on internet promotion. We are an intelligent AI logo design website. Its name is Instantlogodesign. We are committed to showing people's initial logo ideas immediately because we believe that the first ideas are the closest to reality.
Realmente muy inspirador y motivador, gracias por compartir me inspira
Thanks for sharing!
Do i need proper knowledge of AI/ML to build such products? What course do u recommend if so?
Nop, you don't. I recommend Bubble courses (official), and youtube videos about the Open AI model
You really master the art of storytelling. I like your writing style and thanks for inspiring us
Thank you! I have always loved writing ahah
Thanks for sharing!
I'm curious how you did MKT on Reddit - aren't most communities have a policy against self-promoting?
Yes, you're right. You need to find ways to publish in communities. You can find them, for example discussing the market behind your product, with no self-promotion.
Thank you . Can you please share a link to your reddit post so may be we can have more idea?
interested to see an example too :) Well done btw, amazing achievement!
Thanks for sharing
It's a pleasure!
Thanks so much for sharing! great experience and awesome ideas.
How's your experience in regards of the feedback loop for testing with GPT-3? How fast did you knew your'e on the right path there?
good question. I think that if you are on the right path you can understand how much your users interact with you and your product.
This is really great information!
Yep!
Thank you
awesome work! how did you find buyers for your first two products? was the sales transaction pretty easy?
So for the second product yes, definitely. But also the tech (AI + No Code)
wow that was awesome
Thank you!
Wow . Amazing journey . Which subreddits helped you with idea validation ?
To be honest, yes, we used reddit, but not so much. The best one was the side project subreddit
I'll have to take a look at Bubble again! I did a while ago. It's interesting, but I got distracted. This is really amazing. Good job.
Yeah
What no code platform did you utilize?
Bubble
Awesome - currently building on that now! h
awesome
that was great and inspiring. Developing and selling two companies with no-code tools!
In your pitch2point how did you implemented team functionality?
When we sold it there wasn't this feature, but we were planning it. I think the team functionality is very helpful for this kind of product.
Impressive nice work! On the ROI calculation, I think you should include an hourly rate of your time.
Hey @AnGuRuSO, yes you're right. I just wrote a quick return based only on the investment. Thank you for your tip!
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This sounds really impressive -- congratulations on selling your startups.
The tech/building and validation parts make sense.
But the marketing part is still unclear to me -- lots of people grind away at content marketing & SEO for a year or more to get results like you did for your second product. So I am curious about how you reached 500 users and $5K so quickly.
Can you share which marketing channel or channels (from among the ones you listed) accounted for most of your sales?
And what actions through those channels got customers to sign up?
Grateful for any light you can shed on this.
Hey, thank you! So, 3 channels we've used:
1- Our Twitter profiles: I know that is quite simple, but with the #buildinpublic hashtag you can reach a lot of people
2- Betalist website: we've reached a lot of users there
3- Reddit communities
I'd add another channel that we experimented with in our last startup: Tik Tok. We went viral with a video (reaching 10k views), and we onboarded like 30-40 users in a few days (we are at 300 now)
Great, that is really helpful -- thanks a lot
@dg96
AI is the future how can we get these kind of ideas and start working on them to build a product?
Is you got the idea from the internet or see the problems and make product to solve it.
Good question. mmm it depends. For example, for my next product, I'm going to build something that already has a market. So trying to replicate it in the best way.
Like your journey!!! How you learn OpenAI and how long? and which model you use for yourcoverletter? Or you need to create your own model? I hear that its expensive and cover letter kinds of long and will cost more money to generate?
You can build your own model in hours. It's not difficult. About the costs, it's not expensive. For example, last month we spent 3 dollars (more or less) for yourcoverletter.com (we generated 100+ cover letters). It depends on your business and what you want to generate. It costs/token (1k) 0.06$ (Da Vinci model), where 1,000 tokens are about 750 words
Wow, thanks for sharing your experiences! Really gives me motivation to start working on new ventures again. I honestly think OneTap is one of the best micro-startups I’ve ever seen. Congrats on selling.
I do have a question though; how much validation and market research did you do before starting to build?
I'm curious -- what is 'Kernal Ideas'? Looked at Google some but couldn't find much that's relevant as far as MVP'ing a SaaS product?
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That was quite impressive man, loved the way you explained the whole journey and experience.
How was your experience on Microacquire? How much time did it take you for each product to sell off?
Great articel. Very helpful insghts and nuggets
Thank you!
Hello, where do you find a place to sell your business?
I have used Microacquire, and still using it.
Nice post. Does the ROI include the cost of your labor? If not, would you have had a higher return if you had put the same hours into freelancing instead?
Nop, it does not include the cost of my labor. I don't think I would have had a higher return, also because I have put not so much h into these projects.
Thanks for sharing a good success story!
May I ask, how did you come about the idea for your products?
The first idea came from doing some market research. The second idea came from my problem at work.
How did you go about doing your market research? :)
Interesting story. How much did you sell them for? 🤔
I can tell you more than 25k
Impressive 👍.
Great read @dg96. How did you go about the costs of using GPT-3 in a consumer product? If you offer a free trial, do costs not quickly ramp up to be unprofitable? Especially with your cover letter product, I can see how that can be an expensive query.
Mmmm nop. The costs are very small. For example, for the last product, your cover letter, we spent 6 dollars last month.
“We reached more than 100 users in a few weeks, having 3 paid users”
What’s the gap from 3 customers to sold?
To be honest, we didn't push a lot on the validation of our plans, that's why.
What would you say the learning curve of bubble is?
Steep! 2 months in and there is a whole lot left to learn. Responsive/mobile friendly is difficult to master for certain.
exponential, definitely
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So, this was just our goal. We wanted to build and sell it. We didn't want to hold the startup. Now I'm thinking of doing that with the next one. So it depends on your business goals.