From epic startup failure to a successful $16,345/mo portfolio by creating a business template

Rashid Khasanov started his indie hacking career with the audacious goal of making fintech more accessible. It left him broke, but it also gave him his next idea.

So he built another business. It failed, but he used it as a template for his next business — and that one worked. Now he has built four businesses from the template, and that portfolio is bringing in $16,345 per month.

Here's how he did it. 👇

Beginning the journey to startup failure

I always wanted to work for myself — even in my early childhood. During my teenage years, I even had a few hustles. I built and sold kites, bicycles, and petards. I even tried my hand at breeding and selling parrots.

After graduating university with a degree in finance, I worked odd jobs to maintain my freedom — driving for Uber, delivering groceries, selling cars, and long-haul trucking. Say what you will about odd jobs, but they gave me the flexibility to pursue indie hacking.

Honestly, though, I had no idea what I was getting into. Sometimes, I wonder if I would have started this journey if I’d known how difficult it was going to be.

Starting up with stars in their eyes

Back in 2016, I teamed up with another finance student to build a social investing app for millennials. We found investing boring and we wanted to gamify it. So Richie Invest was born.

Turns out, Richie was a very challenging business to build. The industry is highly regulated by SEC and FINRA, which means lots of laws to abide by. Plus, barriers to entry were very high, so it required lots of capital to build, run, and grow it.

Of course, we were newbies at that time, and we didn’t know any of that.

Blowing $220k and shutting down a startup

We raised a family-and-friends round of $90k and I personally invested another $50k of my savings. We hired 3 full-time developers overseas to start building the app. It took about 7-8 months. We built it, got our Series 63 licenses, and registered with the SEC. But we were running out of money.

We knew we needed VC capital or the product would die, so we manually built an investor list by doing a lot of Googling.

Long story short, that’s how we came up with Investor Hunt. We built it in parallel with Richie Invest, hoping it would generate enough revenue to cover expenses. But it didn’t, and we weren't able to raise the money we needed.

I burned through nearly $130k of personal money and maxed out my credit cards, ruining my credit. Plus, 90% of the capital we raised was from my own friends and family. So deciding to quit was really hard.

But that's the name of the game. And I figured if I could lose money with a startup, I could make it back with a startup.

Pivoting toward success

Investor Hunt is a categorized database of angels and VCs that helps founders raise seed rounds. We make revenue through subscriptions, as we do with all our products.

To build it quickly, I teamed up with five people. Each person was responsible for different aspects of the app such as the database, product, initial launch, and marketing. We all agreed to share the profits.

Manually collecting investor data from different sources on the internet was a nightmare. I personally spent about two weeks doing this boring and tedious work. Initially we’ve built a list of 600-700 investors. These days, there are over 110,000.

We launched it on Product Hunt and made over $2k in the first week. Everything was working well for the first month or so, but then we started having cofounder issues.

The person with Stripe admin access decided not to share profits and cut us out. I owned the domain so I shut it down. In the middle of this drama, I decided to build it myself.

Making the most out of another failure

So I built Angel Match from scratch, launched on Product Hunt, and it started generating revenue from day one.

Then we used Angel Match’s investor database to restore Investor Hunt since I owned the domain name. That’s how I ended up running two similar investor database products.

Angel Match and Investor Hunt were pretty much the same for quite some time. But we recently pivoted Angel Match towards CRM and rebuilt the entire platform.

Angel Match now allows users to email investors directly through the platform and track investor communications. This change has actually made them two different products today. But they still share the same investor database.

Currently, Angel Match is making $11,178 MRR and Investor Hunt is making $4,414 MRR.

Continually testing new products

Pitch Deck Database, which is at $753 MRR, is a complementary tool to Angel Match and was initially built as a free resource to generate leads. It performed really well and, after a year, we decided to turn into a small SaaS within Angel Match.

We improved it and added 1,400 pitch decks that raised funding and launched it as Pitch Deck Database 2.0. We put a paywall and it worked. People were willing to pay to use it.

Then we built Journalist Hunt. The hardest part was building the database. We thought about the most important data points needed for each journalist so that people seeking media exposure could benefit from it. Then we started aggregating those data points from different sources. It generated some revenue, but eventually, all the users churned.

It’s currently at $0 MRR, but it has a lot of potential for growth, so I’m still working on it.

Templatizing businesses

Making products that were similar — i.e. database products — and in related industries wasn't intentional, but it was beneficial in many ways:

• Being founders ourselves, we understand the hardships and challenges of other founders, so we have a decent understanding of our target audience.

• Our team members are experienced in working with, updating, and enriching data sets, so it made sense to us to focus on our area of expertise.

• We know how to create programmatic SEO which does the marketing part on autopilot over time.

• We don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time. Instead, we can use the same technical structure for every other database app that we develop.

The $3k MRR plateau

Going from idea to some revenue is much easier than scaling it. We launch on Product Hunt, Indie Hackers, Hacker News, 50+ relevant subreddits, 50+ startup directories, Facebook groups, etc.

I was consistently able to get to a few hundred dollars, all the way up to about $3k MRR. But beyond that was a gray zone.

Angel Match is a good example. For about four years, its MRR never went above $2,895. We couldn’t grow it further, simply because we didn’t know anything about growth.

Finding the path to startup success

At that time, we had about 60 people visiting our website per day. So I thought if we could 5x the web traffic, then we could possibly 5x our revenue.

That’s when I started researching heavily. I followed other founders’ journeys and learned about different ways to grow our web traffic. We tried Google ads, Facebook ads, Reddit ads, social media marketing, SEO, and other methods. It took a lot of trial and error to find out what would work.

SEO was the winner by far, so we put all of our attention there. Here's the data from the last 30 days.

• Blogs: 1.42K clicks

• Free tools: 1.65K clicks

• Programmatic SEO resources: 6.34K clicks

Thanks to these efforts, we grew our web traffic 250-400 visitors per day. That, in turn, increased our MRR.

Startup growth: Programmatic SEO

We have an in-house SEO specialist who takes care of the technical aspects of programmatic SEO. The main idea is to gather large datasets relevant to your app and then create content templates to generate content at scale.

It’s all done by humans. When we started writing programmatic SEO a few years ago, there were no AI tools we could use. Our developer wrote a script where one or two variables would change on a page, and then they would publish those pages at scale. After that, our in-house SEO specialist manually checks and fixes any errors.

It’s our largest source of organic traffic.

This applies to our other projects as well — since all of our projects are database products, we always go hard on programmatic SEO. It works very well for this type of content.

Startup growth: Cluster content

We also hired several blog writers and we started publishing blogs.

SEO from blog posts started to work after 6-8 months of consistently publishing. At first, we focused on foundational, pillar topics around startup fundraising without paying much attention to keywords. Once we did that, we targeted low-difficulty keywords and those that were ranked by websites with similar domain ratings to ours.

We also do a lot of cluster content.

Cluster content involves creating multiple pieces of content around a central topic, changing one or two variables to target different segments. It helps establish domain authority in Google’s eyes for specific topics. And that increases your chances of ranking higher in search results for related queries.

So, let’s say you have a website that’s related to selling cars. You can use this logic for cluster content:

Template:

Most selling car’s make and model in {US_State) is {Car_make and model}

Examples:

• Most selling car’s make and model in California is Tesla Model Y

• Most selling car’s make and model in Texas is Toyota Camry

• etc.

You can use this format to write cluster blog content for 50 US States, each focusing on the most popular car in that State.

Startup growth: Free tools

Free tools bring in a lot of traffic for us too. We’ve built a few:

• Accelerator Hunt: A categorized database of 1,950 startup accelerators and incubators.

• VC Search: A curated list of 5000+ VCs, Angel Groups and Micro VCs.

• Pitch Perfect: Common questions Angels and VCs ask founders.

• Pre-money and Post-money valuation calculator: Calculate your company’s post-funding value.

• Investor outreach email generator: Generate fundraising outreach emails with AI.

• Elevator Pitch Generator: Generate an elevator pitch for your startup in seconds.

• Startup fundraising glossary: Definitions of fundraising terms

• Best startup books: A curated collection of 600+ best startup books.

Many of the free tools you'll want to build already exist in some shape or form. Research them to estimate potential traffic. You can use tools like Ahrefs or Semrush to check how much traffic those tools are generating.

Every time we build a free tool, we try to launch it on every relevant platform: Product Hunt, Indie Hackers, Hacker News, reddit, etc.

It’s hard to predict which ones will do well, so just focus on making them super useful to your target market and build as many as you can.

Startup growth: Complementary tools

Complementary tools are the type of tools that add value to your main app. As an example, let’s take the fundraising journey.

We know that every founder who pitches investors needs a pitch deck, some knowledge about commonly asked investor questions, and an email outreach strategy. Here are 3 complementary tool ideas for my investor database:

1. A collection of pitch decks or a pitch deck generator tool

2. Investor pitch preparation app

3. Email outreach sequence generator

Once you have ideas, you can use Google to see who has built these tools and how much traffic they are generating. This will give you an idea how much traffic your app could potentially generate if you rank in the top 3-5 on the search results.

This is similar to free tools, of course, but these can be paid. In fact, Pitch Deck Database, which is at $753 MRR, started as a free tool, but we moved it to a “complementary” status when we put it behind a paywall since it was doing so well.

Startup growth: Multiple launches

Whenever we launch something new — including features — we post on every relevant platform where our target users hangout. And these platforms bring us consistent referral traffic.

Building a portfolio of successful startups

Thinking about the future, this quote comes to my mind: “If you want to make the god laugh, tell him about your plans.”

That said, I’d like to run a portfolio of 10+ SaaS products that generate revenue. To get there, I’ll need to keep shipping and testing ideas.

Startup success is a marathon — keep going

Russian people have a saying: “If you suffer long enough, something will work out.”

You need to keep pushing, making small improvements, and taking risks. The results of indie hacking don’t come right away. Success is not built overnight. Patience and execution is everything.

If you launch an app that is generating a bit of money and you get stuck like I did, don't stop. Talk to your customers. Learn about your competitors — especially the smaller ones. Analyze the market. And most importantly, try to be helpful to your ideal customers.

I guarantee you that if you do it long enough, you’ll figure out a lot of things and there will come a time when your app starts growing.

That's what I'll be doing. You can follow along on my X, Marat's X, or check out our products: Investor Hunt, Angel Match, Pitch Deck Database, and Journalist Hunt.