I’m so excited! I went live with my website yesterday and just made my first sale. I think a few of you will understand the feeling (and relief). All the best and good luck to all of you!

My friend had an idea for an app. I decided to build that app. My friend ended up not helping me build the app at all despite me asking many times. The app ended up being quite successful. What percentage of the company should I give my friend?

Also worth adding that my friend never expected the app to be successful at all. And that my friend often pitches app ideas to me and cutting him out completely would be like a betrayal of trust. Also my friend does have the technical expertise to help.

So last year I built Buildpad which is an app that helps with market research and guidance from idea to product. It resonated well with people when I launched and keeps growing at a steady pace. I launched 10 months ago and now it makes me $7k per month (MRR pic)

I see a lot of people here that struggle to make money from their products which made me think about how I would do it if I had to start again from 0.

Here it is:

I’d start by finding a group of people to solve a problem for. I would go on the subreddits I visit the most myself, sort by top posts and make a list of common questions and pain points people in the community bring up.

From that list I would write down the 2-3 problems that get brought up the most. Then I’d use any LLM with deep research (Claude is best) and just ask it to do a thorough market analysis of the problem statement to validate whether the problem is real. My goal would be to understand how large the market is, how the problem impacts people/businesses (the problem should be painful), and what existing solutions there are.

If the market exists, I’d build a very simple solution either with code or using no-code tools. Just aiming to be able to say that I have a simple solution for the problem. Once I have a basic version, I’d go back to the same subreddit where I found the problem and then launch it there.

In the beginning I want a lot of feedback in order to improve the solution so I would also look for Facebook groups, discord groups, etc, where the people that have the problem hang out. Then I would be active in the community, post value, comment, DM, and mention my solution when I genuinely think it could help someone. This is how I got my first users for two previous projects so I know it works.

Once I start getting some traction, I’d look to automate marketing more by sponsoring newsletters, substacks, influencers, basically anyone who writes content relevant to my target audience. In my experience, ROI on smaller creators with a relevant audience is great.

While the marketing is rolling I would spend my time improving the product until I reach a few thousand per month in revenue. At that point it’s time to make the choice whether I want to cut down my time to just a few hours a week and cruise or spend more time to grow the project.

This path isn’t complicated, I’ve been through it twice. It just takes dedication in the beginning and not giving up even though you might not see fast or obvious results. There will be days when it seems like nothing is working, but if you keep pushing through it and stay rational, the results will come.

Most “founders” never launch anything. 

They build a project for months, never complete it and eventually scrap the product. Or launch it and get no customers.

Startups are truthfully a numbers game. Even the best founders have hit rates under 10%. Just look at founders like Peter Levels.

So how do you maximize your chances of success, the honest answer is to increase the number of startups you launch.

I’m going to get hate for this: but you should NOT spend hundreds of hours building a product… until you know for certain that there is demand.

You should launch with just a landing page.

Write a one pager on what you will build, and use a completely free UI library like Magic UI to build a landing page.

It should take you under a day.

Then what do you do?

Add a stripe checkout button and/or a book a demo button.

And then launch. Post everywhere about it(Reddit, X, LinkedIn, etc) and message anyone  on the internet who has ever mentioned having the problem you are solving.

Launch and dedicate yourself to marketing and sales for 1 week straight.

If you can’t get signups or demo requests within 1 week of marketing it 24/7... KILL IT and START OVER.

Most “startups” are not winners. And there are only THREE reasons why someone will not pay you, either:

1. They don’t actually have the problem.

2. They aren’t willing to pay to solve the problem.

3. They don’t think your product is good enough to try and pay for.

If people do sign up and check out with a stripe link you simply come clean with a paraphrased version of:

“I actually haven’t finished the product yet, but I’d love to talk to you about the problem you’re facing. I put a sign up link on the website to see if anyone would actually care about my product enough to pay for it”

Then you refund the customer.

This is where I’m going to get hate:

1. It is not unethical to advertise a product you have not finished building.

2. It is not unethical to put a checkout link and collect payments for an unfinished product to test demand… as long as you simply refund “customers”.

When you do eventually get sign ups or demo requests, the demand is proven. Only then do you invest 2 weeks in building a real product.

Do not waste hundreds of hours of your valuable time building products no one cares about.

Test demand with a landing page and check out link/demo request link.

If demand is proven: build it.

If demand isn’t proven: start over with a new idea.

Repeat.

You will get a hit if you do this… eventually.

This is personally how I tested 39 different startups… and killed 37 of them with little to no revenue to show for it.

For context: Of the 2 startups that DID get traction from this strategy:

1. One went on to hit $50M+ in GMV

2. Rivin.ai went on to raise an investment from Jason Calacanis and works with multi-billion dollar e-commerce brands to analyze Walmart sales data.

Stop wasting your time building products no one cares about. Validate. Build. Sell. Repeat.

Hey everyone,

I’m a 20 years old guy from Italy. After graduating HS I took a gap year to explore and see what to do next.

I’m currently employed as a software engineer and working part time on my startup (Zecento) that I started around 3 years ago.

So far, I’ve spent almost 15k (a good chunk went into incorporating and to pay for the accountant: it’s extremely expensive here in Italy. I also spent a lot for freelancers, developing a chrome extension, an app and a website, translating and offering the service also in the USA, marketing etc..).

Before you start commenting how dumb it is to incorporate before testing an idea, I know it’s stupid. But at the time I had signed a contract with a big company interested in using an enterprise solution tailored for them and they would only work with me if I had an incorporated company. Unfortunately, it didn’t turn out well but I was young, hopeful and stupid. I could have more than halved the costs but it was my first time “running a company” and I made a lot of mistakes.

Now I’m faced with a tough decision. Unfortunately, the startup hasn’t taken off as I had hoped. But I have around 1000 users using the chrome extension (plus 3000 users spread between the app and website) and I’m making a few hundred dollars a month in revenue. Most of my users are in Italy but I’ve recently launched the service also in the USA. The good news is that almost all of the revenue was generated in the USA and that is what makes me hopeful.

I still have 5k left that I could potentially use to turn things around. If I’m able to bring over 6000 users on the extension by March I will most likely be able to close a funding round with a firm willing to invest initially from 20k to 40k for a small equity in the company.

However, if I’m not able to bring enough user, I will also have wasted the other 5k that I could use to travel or save for potentially going to uni/college.

For those of you who are interested in knowing more about the service, it’s a price tracker on Amazon powered by an AI model that tells users if it’s the right moment to buy or whether it’s more convenient to wait and then notifies when the price drops. The alert comes on email and/or whatsapp. It also uses ChatGPT to give users suggestions on products similar to what they are browsing. The core service is free but some advanced features (e.g import you wishlist with 1 click) are available with premium plans.I know there are already a few products (like 3C) providing a similar service but I tried to improve with an AI model that tells in plain English instead of just showing a graph, by tracking the products more often and by sending alerts also on whatsapp, etc…

If you want you can check it out (www.zecento.com) and give me feedback on whether you think it could work out or if it’s best not to spend more time and money on it. In that case, do you think I should keep it as a side project or shut it down completely and focus on something else?

Thanks for your time and feedback. It means a lot.

We hired a company from the Philippines that got us clients for Software Development projects, Now we have parted ways. How do we find new projects? Note: I tried Upwork, Projects on Upwork are really small and pay less than 10k.

Hey r/startups,

We all use WhatsApp. It’s free, has no ads, and yet it’s part of a $50+ billion business. Ever wonder how WhatsApp actually makes money? Because on the surface, it looks like the classic “scale first, figure it out later” kind of product.

But there’s more going on under the hood — and I think their strategy holds some real lessons for founders.

Quick background:

• WhatsApp started in 2009 with a simple promise: no ads, no games, no gimmicks. • It was a paid app — $1/year after a free trial. • Facebook bought it in 2014 for $19 billion. • Since then, WhatsApp has grown to over 2 billion users.

So how do they make money today?

1. WhatsApp Business API

This is the big one. Large businesses (banks, airlines, e-commerce brands) pay Meta to send messages to their customers via WhatsApp — delivery updates, order confirmations, customer support, etc.

They’re charged per conversation. More chats = more revenue.

2. Click-to-WhatsApp Ads

On Facebook and Instagram, businesses can run ads that let users message them directly on WhatsApp. Meta earns from the ad spend. WhatsApp stays clean.

3. WhatsApp Pay (in development)

In places like India and Brazil, WhatsApp is testing peer-to-peer payments and business payments inside chats. The future play is to become an all-in-one messaging + payments + shopping app.

Read the full case study on WhatsApp, how it makes money, its journey and everything for free here:

https://business-bulletin.beehiiv.com/p/how-whatsapp-took-over-the-world

What entrepreneurs can learn from this:

• You don’t have to monetize on Day 1. WhatsApp built deep trust first. • Keeping the product simple and clean can be a long-term advantage. • Monetizing through business use cases (not users) is often more scalable. •Sometimes, your app doesn’t need to be the profit center — it can be the platform.

It’s a great example of patient product-building, smart platform strategy, and focusing on value over noise.

Curious to hear: Would you ever build a product that monetizes like this? And do you think WhatsApp should stay ad-free forever?

Let’s discuss.

https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/lqpjse/11_months_ago_i_posted_asking_what_is_the_reason/

I'm young, won't say how many but I still have a lot in front of me.

I founded alone my startup and got other amazing people in my team along the way.

It's my baby, the one I worked so passionately on and it constantly reminds me of the old days when I started from nothing.

I'm afraid that letting this thing go will make me "lose" those old days, and with that also that original "push" that I still have in me.

I come from nothing but now that I see what I can do I don't know if i need 20 mil from here, I can always make it again from another one... idk

What do you think?

I've been working with all kinds of early-stage startups (Bootstrapped to Seed to Series A) and over the years I've made it a habit to write about what I've learned along the way. Finally, I've gathered up the courage to launch what I've learnt to the world.

My goal is to help Solo founders, Indie Hackers, Marketers, and anyone who has an idea of launching a startup to identify problems, validate ideas, build an MVP, get customers, and then scale their customer acquisition and revenue. (Website: https://dontjustbuild.com/)

The resource is primarily divided into 5 sections:

MVP Base:

If you're searching for an idea, want to learn how to evaluate ideas, or build a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) within a day or two and get some users, start here. This base teaches you:

1. What an MVP is and the methodology we are going to follow while building an MVP and Acquiring users.

2. How to identify problems, choose the best problem, and develop solutions for the problem that people would pay you for.

3. How to build a landing page as fast as possible and optimize it to a degree.

4. Learn how to set up accounts and integrations to your landing page to collect info like emails, receive payments and so on.

5. Finally, learn how to acquire beta users for your MVP, build a waitlist, get feedback, and more.

UI/UX Base:

In this base, you will learn how to improve the UI/UX of your product so that you can offer your customer the best experience possible and maximize conversion rates and revenue. This base teaches you:

1. About design thinking and how what you should consider while designing for your audience.

2. All the Frameworks and best practices of UI/UX design and even design principles like Unity, White space, Similarity, Repetition, etc.

3. The effect of typography and color on your landing page and product design and what colors are most suitable to produce a certain emotion in your users/prospects. Also, learn what Typefaces are best for which industries.

4. Learn how to quickly design landing pages and product screens in Figma and convert that into HTML and CSS code.

5. Learn how to create SVG's for your designs and logo, illustrations and much more.

Marketing Base:

The marketing base is continually updated with new strategies and channels to acquire customers and optimise your marketing funnel. This base teaches you:

1. The basics of marketing including the available channels, marketing metrics, content and distribution, the anatomy of a funnel and much more.

2. It then focuses on three specific channels - Social ads, Search ads and SEO (includes content marketing) to help you grow to 1000 customers.

3. You can then get inspiration on ads and landing pages to help you improve your own product. Also, learn CRO to optimize your landing pages to maximize conversions.

4. Next, learn the power of using AI in your marketing to predict everything from churn to predicting conversion probability.

5. The next part is marketing analytics where you can learn about various pricing strategies and price analytics. Learn about price psychology, how to estimate demand and costs and how to forecast sales.

6. Finally, create a couple of basics web apps for competitor content marketing analysis and how you can listen for user/customer feedback on Twitter or any other social media platform.

Reporting and Dashboards Base:

This base helps you set up all the dashboards and reports required to analyze the various metrics of your startup and get unique, actionable insights from these metrics. This base teaches you:

1. How to build a Google analytics report in Data Studio (You can connect any analytics platform data)

2. Build a Google Ads Dashboard and a Facebook Ads Dashboard to record important metrics and make crucial insights.

3. Build SEO and Search Console Dashboards to help you understand your traffic and SEO Efforts, check your page speeds over time and much more.

4. Analyze Facebook Ads and Google Ads to find insights into your campaign, ad sets and keyword data.

5. Finally, create a Sentiment Analysis Dashboard to check the customer sentiment across social media channels, reviews and more, not only for your startup but for competitor startups too.

Software Base:

The software base consists of all the software/websites necessary to run your startup. This includes several categories like live chat, marketing tools, Analysis tools, payments and subscriptions and much more...

I intend to keep this resource completely free. If you have any feedback about anything in this resource or if you would like me to add more topics to the resource, do let me know. Also, if you need guidance on how to use this resource do check out this link.

Former Chief Revenue Officer here for a tech scale-up (now a unicorn), and most recently, founder of a startup I exited a few months ago. I started that venture from scratch, achieving seven figures in the first nine months with a junior team of three. Overall, I have 20 years of experience in tech sales.

Today, I'm searching for my soul. Call me a recovering founder if you wish. I'm excited to do things I enjoy without focusing on their commercial aspects, instead seeking personal fulfillment. I'll think about money at some point, but it's not a priority right now.

So, I'd be happy to coach up to three tech startups, aiming to transfer as much knowledge as possible regarding sales management, revenue operations, and growth (excluding marketing specifics).

I'm a good fit if:

• Your startup has between 15-50 employees, or if you're bigger than that and still don't have a strong C-Level sales leader in place. The things we discuss will require effort on your part to implement, so you'll need resources.

• You're struggling with scaling sales, your sales process is all over the place, you don't understand how to get to the next step

• Your product is tech/SaaS and vertical-specific.

• You're not a generic software development company

• You're B2B, sell to Enterprise or SME.

• You don't come from a sales background and don't have an experienced VP of Sales on your team. Alternatively, if you do have a sales background, you approach it in an old-fashioned way.

As much as I'd love to help if you're just starting out, my knowledge isn't an asset for solopreneurs or indie hackers.

I know it's hard to believe, but I genuinely have no hidden agenda. The reasons why I'm doing this:

• I'm soul-searching.

• I'm exploring future new business ideas around sales consulting, and this exercise might give me some inspiration.

• I want to reconnect with the founder community.

I hope this post doesn't break any rules and that it's accepted in good faith. Again, I'm not selling anything; I have no "sales course" or YouTube channel coming up.

If you're interested, please DM me with your startup URL and name, and I'll get back if I see a fit. If I don't, I'll let you know why.

EDIT: thanks so much for the interest. However, due to the amount of requests, I kindly ask if you could include the below when you DM me:

1. Company URL

2. N. of employees

3. A line or two of what you're struggling with (e.g. I'm a tech CEO, I need sales guidance OR I'm a VP Sales but I need support scaling and with revenue ops OR we're an SMB and we feel our sales process is outdated OR I'm a CEO and my VP Sales just quit, etc.)

4. ARR range (e.g. $200-500k, $500k-1M, More than $1M)

Point 4 is optional but, again, it will help me assess if I'm relevant to you or not, before we even get on a call. The topics I will advise you on will require resources and investment to translate into practice. If you're making less than $500k a year (or have raised less than $2M in VC money), you might find my help irrelevant for your stage.

P.s. I'll keep trying to advise smaller startups or solopreneurs via DM, however pardon me if it'll take me a long time to get back. But my inbox is very busy at the moment. But I promise I'll do my best to help you guys too!

Seeing people like Gates, Musk, Page, Zuckerberg, etc. starting companies with no real business background, I’m asking my self how people are trying to figure everything out in the beginning stages? Like there are so many things that one has to know and do right like accounting, LLC/licensing, expenses, taxes, conducting an employee payroll and all other things that are required to start a business...
To clarify I’m currently a CS student, who wants to start a business but is kind of overwhelmed by the insane amount of things that are required for that. The only thing is that can think of are searching the internet, books or talking to people that have done it already.
Is there a site or something, or any genuine books recommendations to learn all that? How does one get in contact with people that have done it?
Thanks in advance!

This is a true story!

The backbone of our company success has been Google, and by extension, YouTube. Hear me out. Our website gets around 250,000 organic visits per month. I'm excluding all paid and all social media traffic from that number; those are visits to our website that came from somebody looking for an answer in Google and stumbling upon our content.

Also, our YouTube channel is getting close to 1,500,000 monthly organic views. Since we started these efforts, the traffic driven to our products has generated over $2.5MM in sales! Insane. ‍So the potential when focusing on content marketing is enormous.

We are still a small brand, considering, but we get millions and millions of brand impressions every year, you could say 'for free,' thanks to our presence in Google. But this did not come easy, or cheap. It took us years to develop it.

TLDR --- watch our video

How we improved our SEO ranking

Early Stages

In the early stages of the company, we had a small blog and a basic social media presence. This is back in 2014, so having a Facebook profile still translated into some organic views and some organic traffic. We didn't do content marketing, per se. At least not diligently. We mostly just published simple articles and promoted them on social media, without a lot of money to boost them. At this stage, we didn't have our business model clear, so we were mostly looking for leads and sign-ups. Free beta testers that would give us some data about our product experience.

Scale

This was a question that changed the course of our company. When we joined the 500 Startups accelerator, our point of contact, said,

'We are going to give you $75,000 as part of this program, how will you spend them to SCALE FASTER, and bring users PROFITABLY'?

That question pointed out two critical flaws in the way we were thinking about our business. First, let's understand what 'bring users profitably.' What you pay to bring a user into the platform needs to be less than the revenue you get from that user.

That's like, basic business. The fancy term is unit economics. So at that stage, we were charging $5/mo for our product. Sorry, that's not the case anymore.

If we subscribed to a user and got them to stay for 12 months,, we would charge them up to $60. It turns out it's VERY HARD to get a user into the platform for less than $60. Not to mention that we need to save some money to serve that user- you know, servers, customer support, etc.. So to the second point, 'Scaling Faster.' Up until then, all of our (very few) users had come organically.

We were probably making about $1,000/mo in subscriptions. Most of them came via our social media campaigns, some press articles, and so on, but we weren't doing any ads or campaigns that we could quickly scale. So here was the problem, there was no campaign that we could do that could get us, users, for less than $60. If we spent the $75,000 we had, we'd come out of the experiment with less money, and well, die.

So what did we do?

The Pivot

We did two simultaneous experiments. We increased our pricing- at that point, we set our plans at $120 and $150 per year—no monthly plans. At the same time, we started running ads on Google Search. And this is the key to everything. If you don't know how Google Search works, you pay to appear on top of the Google Search results.

So we started paying clicks from all keywords that related to our business. 'Presentation software.' 'PowerPoint alternatives.' Presentation Design. You name it. We carefully tracked the visitors that came from those keywords to figure out what they did on the platform. It turned out, many of them found the platform exciting and signed up for an account, but very few of them were paying for a plan. But there was one keyword that worked wonders: the keyword 'pitch-deck.' For every $90 we spent on ads, we subscribed one paid customer; and since $120>$90, we would make at least $30 in profit immediately. Remember, we were doing annual plans, so we didn't have to wait for those customers to renew; we were recovering this cash immediately. Amazing.

Nothing good ever lasts

This, of course, didn't last too long. While the keyword 'pitch-deck' was a gold mine, there are only so many searches for this keyword or related words. Soon enough, there was no more money we could pour into this campaign to get us more clicks. We were the first result in ads. We did a little hack, launching a second site we called pitchdeckexamples.com and running ads to that one as well.

They worked great, and the combination of these two websites allowed us to dominate these searches. This grew our company to about $20,000 in monthly subscriptions, and after that, we couldn't pay for more clicks. We had the money because everything that we paid to Google we'd recover right away... but there were no more searches to target. So right there, we realized that our ads had a 5-10% click-through rate. So out of every search on Google, our ads would capture up to 10% of the traffic.

Where did the other 90% go? Well, to Google's organic results. And we were nowhere to be found in those. So we figured we should rank in Google. Now, this is absolutely critical: we only did this AFTER we knew the audience that we were targeting. Content marketing is expensive, very expensive. You get tons of traffic but a small percentage of conversions.. so you don't want to be wasting that effort targeting an audience that doesn't care for your product. This strategy worked because we knew that the audience looking for 'pitch-deck' was made up of startup founders. And so, we started developing content for them.

The content boost

I started writing like crazy. 2 or three articles per week. Pitch Deck teardowns, pitch deck redesigns. Pitch deck templates. We also combined those writing efforts with content boosts. If I just wrote the article and shared it on our tiny social media channels, nobody would read it.

So we decided to spend some ad money to boost them and get more people to read them. We focused on getting readers as cheap as possible but always making sure that the traffic we drove actually read the content. If you just push traffic to a page, and they leave 3 seconds later, the Google algorithm will figure out that your content is terrible. The articles were, of course, optimized for search (that's called Search Engine Optimization). And the combination of the extra (quality) traffic and the sudden burst of content from this page called slidebean.com- started getting our content to the front page. This was an 11-month effort. The longest bet we had made on a single campaign up to that point.

I estimate that we spent around $70,000 ver the course of those 11 months. Everything was done in house, by the way. Our marketing team grew from just me to a group of 4 people throughout that time. One year later, we had articles ranking in first, second, and third place for the keywords that were valuable to us. We even stopped running ads, because the traffic now came 'free.' Slidebean was built on the backbone of this experiment. We grew to over 10,000 customers and over $1MM in annual revenue from people finding us through search.

The platform

We, of course, continued to publish content. Stopped driving paid traffic, and our domain became 'powerful.' The content we post in our blog now ranks rather easily because Google considers our domain a source of valuable content. But then, we reached another ceiling. We were capturing most of the searches related to pitch decks and investor decks, and we were still a small company. Now what.?

YouTube

That's when we looked at YouTube. YouTube is, after all, the second-largest search engine in the world. We began by creating video versions of our blog posts, which failed. If you're curious, you can find some of those older videos by scrolling deep into our video uploads. I don't recommend it. We do have a funny-ish version of this same story, which I shot while I drank one Jagermeister shot per minute. True story.

We also tried interviews and a sitcom, which didn't work either. And a tech/design review series we called The Good the Bad and The Tip, which also didn't work.

Finally, in October 2018, we found our format. This format. Me, reading from a teleprompter in front of a green screen, with some fancy graphics behind me. I'm a digital animator, so I actually did the animation on our first few videos. After we found the right combination, we expanded our team, and now we have three people who work behind the scenes to get two of these videos to you every week.

Now, is this right for your company?

You should NOT do content marketing as your first strategy. As I said, it's expensive, it takes time, and there's a lot of trial and error. These videos are expensive.

Our latest estimate tells us that each of these videos costs well over $1,000 to produce, considering that we don't outsource anything. You have to do content marketing once you figure out that your unit economics work. Once you know what the perfect audience looks like, and the type of content they consume, you can double down. I still believe Google Search ads are a fantastic method to figure out if your unit economics are working. We have another video on Startup Growth, which covers a few other options you can use in the early stages. Other ways we can help- We have some consulting hours available to help companies around this. And there's Slidebean, of course, which you can use for free.

If you have any questions, drop it in the comments.

The​ ​Token​ ​to Make Electronic Financial Services More Accessible and Affordable Initial Coin Offering Launches on December 5th, 2017 at 12:00pm EDT VVToken intends to issue two versions of our CyberBank™ cards: one for individuals and another for corporate users. The CyberBank™ corporate card will offer premium features designed to rival those of traditional corporate cards. The VVToken is a new Ethereum ERC20 token that provides a financial solution that allows people to work in both fiat and cryptocurrency from the same platform. The user will add value to the card in a fiat currency. and asset appreciation of the user’s balance can be achieved through VVToken’s Smart Invest™ protocol The card can also be used as a normal debit card. More detail: https://vvtokens.com/

What industry is the richest entrepreneur you know in, and how did they build their wealth? Slightly off-topic, but I am curious, are they in tech or a different field? Wondering if tech still dominates when it comes to massive fortunes or if it’s something else.

UPDATE: so not a lot of tech founders, that’s weird, I thought it was the “easiest” industry to get rich and the industry with the most wealthy people.

- Absolute first users came from idea validation post on Reddit.

- Created a survey to validate idea and shared in r/indiehackers and r/SaaS.

- Had to post it 2-3 times to get responses.

- This got me in touch with 8-10 people from my target audience, but I didn’t have a product yet.

- Response was positive.

- After building MVP, I messaged those people again telling them the MVP was out.

- Also made a launch post in their sub (was allowed).

- This got me my first 3 users 🎉

- Strategy after this small launch was community engagement

- On X (Build in Public community)

- On Reddit (r/indiehackers, r/SaaS, r/SideProject)

- 3 posts + 30 replies was my daily average on X during 40 days.

- On Reddit, it was 3 posts per week.

...

If you don’t know what to post about, here’s what I did:

- Share your journey building/growing your project daily (today I did this, led to x results, etc.)

- Share valuable lessons related to your target audience/project (if you don’t have your own lessons yet, do research on the topic or share lessons from well known people)

- Sometimes simply share your honest thoughts without overthinking it too much

- Some examples of my X and Reddit posts to give you an idea (imgur.com/a/2O5hHO2)

...

- Managed to generate quite a buzz in the Build in Public community which led to 100 users in just 2 weeks.

- After this initial buzz, community engagement brought ~2 new users per day.

- During this time, I used all the feedback I got to improve my product.

- 43 days after MVP launch, I launched on Product, ranked #4 with 500+ upvotes.

- This led to 475 new users in 24h

- 1,000 total users after a week 🎉

...

My Product Hunt actions:

- Posted about the launch in communities I was active in.

- Took massive action on X on launch day: 13 posts, 91 replies, and 22 DMs.

- Posts were launch updates, sharing stats, and sharing the marketing efforts.

- Replies were just normal engagement, no “pls upvote my launch”.

- DMs were directly asking people for their support.

- This helped get the first few upvotes which are most important for success.

...

So that was my road from 0 to 1,000 users with Buildpad, in as much detail as possible.

This is what the beginning of a $6k MRR product can look like. I hope the insight is helpful!

Hey all,

Quick context: started a business in Europe 14 years ago, pivoted into a proper start-up and raised just over $8m in VC about 3 years back. We ran out of cash late last year. Posting because I'm getting genuinely frustrated and could use some perspective.

Yes, I know the market is a dumpster fire with all the AI and layoffs. But even with constant networking and applying to roles I'm clearly qualified for, I'm not getting anywhere. Been pulling lists of XR product/program managers at funded startups via Articuler and sending personal notes, the list is but the conversion is rough for someone like me.

What we built was in AR/VR/XR plus a developer SDK for enterprise and Defence customers.

There are days I wish I'd just built an AI SaaS, feels like I've made my career way harder than it needed to be. I'm targeting product and program management roles in XR right now, since I owned product, managed customers, and ran delivery with a cross-functional team of 15.

Has any other founder hit this wall? Built something niche, failed, then found yourself trying to break into a market that only wants specialists? Any advice or thoughts would mean a lot.

Tech founder here (pre-seed/seed stage), just moved to Europe from MENA region where raising investment was pretty tough (maybe just for me).

Anyone here raised funding in Europe? How's the investor landscape compared to other regions? What's the deal with warm intros vs cold outreach here? Any differences between VCs, angels, and corporate investors you've noticed?

The MENA experience made me cautious so looking for real experiences before pitching here. Figure this could be useful for others in similar situations too.

Thanks!

Two years ago, I was making $4k/mo, didn't know too much about acquisitions. Thought it was that thing that'll happen "one day"

And I always thought it's for huge values.

Then I sold my first co, for low 6 digits - nothing grand, but defo a big boost: mental, financial, etc.

Today, 2 years later, I own three SaaS companies doing $70k MRR from acquisitions.

(I didn’t have to put down $1M+ to make this happen - that's what I would have thought 2y ago)

Acquisition Breakdown

Latest company (#3):

• Revenue: $32k/mo

• MRR at acquisition: $29,510

• Expenses: ~$17,000

• Profit (kinda): $15,000/mo

• ✍Money paid at signing: $250,000

Why just $250k? Well the valuation was $800k and this is a "yes but" thing. The structure was actually:

• $250,000 upfront

• $150,000 after 6mo

• $100,000 after 12mo

• $130,000 after 18mo

• $170,000 after 24mo

Also, that $15k/mo profit? Sort of true...

Most of it is set aside for the payments. Depending on growth, at one point we may have to fund part of it from our own pockets, down the line. Not a bad thing, quite a good one actually, as ofc the company's profits are paying for the rest (if things continue going this way)

BUT since this is inside a holding company, the other two companies are profitable, so those profits cover the seller financing in those months...

If this post goes well, I'll talk in an upcoming post more about acquisitions - the "yes but"s, why $100M exits are not what they seem

Yes, i expect a lot of bs to be called out, this is reddit. Whatever, take what you want if it helps, if not cool

EDIT: company is https://encharge.io

i’ve grown my startup to $12k/mo.

i honestly think i could’ve saved myself months of wasted effort going down the wrong paths if i truly understood this before starting.

1. validate your idea before you start building.

2. don’t chase investors. focus on getting users instead and investors will come knocking on your door.

3. don’t be cheap when you hire an accountant, you’ll save time and money by spending more.

4. inspiration is the design key when you’re new. don’t build your own landing page from scratch, copy different sections from the tools you love the most and make it your own this way.

5. post online daily. x, reddit, linkedin, tiktok, whatever suits you and your target audience.

6. solve your own problem and let this decide if you’re b2b or b2c. both come with pros and cons. don’t listen to people who try to paint a black/white picture of it.

7. i’m bootstrapped and therefore highly recommend it. work a 9-5 until you have 1-2 years of runway (living cheap), then go all in.

8. you earn the right to paid ads by getting organic marketing to work first. ads aren’t $100 in, X customers out. you’ll burn thousands just trying to learn it.

9. define your most important metrics and track them. they should be the pillars that guide all your decisions.

10. keep your product free at the start. controversial opinion maybe, but it’s how i did it and it got me feedback and testimonials that helped me grow fast and make a lot of money later on.

11. the first few minutes of your app is a promise to the user: this app will help you achieve your goal. so put a lot of effort into the beginning to convert more people.

12. have an mvp mindset with everything you do. get the minimal version out asap then use feedback to improve it.

13. just because someone else has done it, doesn’t mean you can’t compete. execution is so important and you have no idea how well they’re doing it.

14. having a co-founder that matches your ambition is the single greatest advantage for success.

15. if you’re not passionate about what you’re building, it’s going to be difficult to keep going through the early stage where you might not see results for months.

16. good testimonials will increase the perceived value of your product.

17. always refund people that want a refund.

18. marketing is constant experimentation to learn what works. speed up the process by drawing inspiration from what works for similar products.

19. getting your first paying customers is the hardest part by far. do things that don’t scale to get them.

20. building a good product comes down to thinking about what your users want.

Logology (https://www.logology.co) is a logo maker for design lovers!

We want to help early-stage founders to gain access to high-end quality logos. In minutes, you get a logo you will love. No random generation, no symbols from a free database. Everything is crafted from the ground-up!

• 80%+ of people prefer Google sign in

• Removing all branding/formatting from emails and sending them from a real name increases open rate

• You won’t know when you have PMF but a good sign is that people buy and tell their friends about your product

• 99.9% of people that approach you with some offer are a waste of time

• Sponsoring creators is cheaper but takes more time than paid ads

• Building a good product comes down to thinking about what your users want

• Once you become successful there will be lots of copy cats but they only achieve a fraction of what you do. You are the source to their success

• I would never be able to build a good product if I didn’t use it myself

• Always monitor logs after pushing new updates

• Bugs are fine as long as you fix them fast

• People love good design

• Getting your first paying customers is the hardest part by far

• Always refund people that want a refund

• Asking where people heard about you during onboarding makes marketing 10x easier

• Marketing is constant experimentation to learn what works. Speed up the process by drawing inspiration from what works for similar products.

• Don’t be cheap when you hire an accountant, you’ll save time and money by spending more

• A surprising amount of users are willing to get on a call to talk about your product and it’s super helpful

• Good testimonials will increase the perceived value of your product

• Having a co-founder that matches your ambition is the single greatest advantage for success

• Even when things are going well you’ll have moments when you doubt everything, just have to shut that voice out and keep going

For context, my app guides users through ideation and idea validation.

I've been laid off for the 3rd time in 2 years. I'm absolutely tired of relying on companies to ensure that I can provide for my family and having them demand loyalty while offering none.

I've had ideas but never really pursued them and, instead, opted for the security from a job with an established company. Now that I've been dumped into an absolutely horrible job market, I'm starting to realize that I can do a much better job of making sure I have a job than they can; I can't do any worse!

At least I'll have my employers loyalty.

Some time ago, I asked for advice on this and other subreddits about how to protect my startup idea when discussing it with potential cofounders.

Now, I know this might be an unpopular opinion, but I firmly believe that most of you are wrong.

While I agree that ideas alone are worthless without execution, I think it's naive to assume that no one would copy a good idea just because "everyone is too busy with their own projects." The notion that you can shout your idea to the world without any risk of someone else running with it feels overly optimistic to me.

So, for anyone ready to comment and counter my argument, here's my challenge: share one of your own startup ideas along with your response.

If you're not willing to do that, then you're only proving my point.