My cofounder
@MengMengDuck
and I have
- grown our IG/TikTok/Youtube accounts to +800k and +300k followers
- grown multiple SaaS accounts to thousands of followers with multiple viral videos
And we're launching a course on how to market your SaaS on social media 👇
The course
2 month MRR update on .
Honestly I feel embarrassed to say that this is my most successful SaaS product. When I first started on this whole solopreneur path 2 years ago I had grand visions that I would be able to make it big within 6 months, quit my day
next text editor
@zeddotdev
coming in hot with the sauce
this is not a sponsored post btw i just made it for fun don't flame me (or flame me too that's chill)
Building your 1st startup:
"We need to spin up a new k8s cluster to handle 1million+ users even though we don't have any right now"
Building your 3rd startup:
"Yeah let's just hardcode everything"
Goals for 2023:
- 200k followers on TikTok (currently ~170k)
- 100k followers on Instagram (currently ~20k)
- 100k subscribers on Youtube (currently ~20k)
- Build a saas tool that generates 1k MRR
Will tweet about my plans to make it happen.
Let's get it 🚀
Today, I decided to stop actively working on
@3MinJournal
.
Why?
Well, after 3 months of dedicated work on it, the retention just isn't there.
I've learned not to get too attached to ideas, so it's time to move onto the next one 🚀
Every time someone pays for one of my SaaS tools it blows my mind.
It's like, you really want to pay with your own money for a product I built?
the feeling never gets old
Kudos to
@supabase
for awesome customer support.
I experienced an issue with their service, and within 10 minutes of sending out a tweet the CTO
@AntWilson
reached out to me.
Another 15 minutes later a fix was merged and everything is working again.
Great stuff 👏
The single biggest mistake I see people make when trying to advertise their SaaS product on short form social media is that they only make content that talks about their product.
In 1 month I grew a social media account for my product to 2.5 million unique impressions (pic
Had a great time chatting with
@MarieMartens
and
@filipminev
about their journey building
@TallyForms
Listen down below if you're interested how they got started, how they grew, and some of the technical details behind Tally as well 🙂
I know Elon get a lot of heat for everything related to X/twitter
But imo he is crushing it with product decisions.
Job listings
Creator payouts
Long form text
View counter on tweets
App is becoming a better space for creators/business imo.
I've grown a TikTok account to 195k, IG to 30k, Youtube to 70k, 2 SaaS products to $150 and $450 MRR and I've come to realize there is only 1 key to success.
Showing up every day and doing the boring, unsexy work.
Build, market, sell.
Every.
Single.
Day.
That's it.
$200 MRR 🚀
and to think my only marketing is making videos roasting different colleges and their stereotypes
marketing to gen-z students is my favorite thing in the world lol
What is your benchmark to be able to confidently call yourself an entrepreneur?
my bar is if you are making at least at $1k/month
Anything below that is a struggling entrepreneur
I am a struggling entrepreneur lol
Just migrated my app to use Pinecone’s serverless offering
Cost went from $70/month to ~$10/month
And it took ~10 lines of code change
I essentially added $60 MRR 🚀
SaaS feels like a legit cheat code
I haven't added any new features in 6 weeks
I've posted on TikTok/IG twice this past month
And MRR increased by $100 from $200 MRR -> $300 MRR
I know this won't last forever but I'll enjoy it while it does
Just crossed 20k on Youtube 🎉
Overall very slow progress for ~2 years of work, but I'm getting better at it day by day.
Hoping 2023 is the year I hit 100k!
I am SO PUMPED for 2024.
I feel like the vast majority of 2023 I was really searching for some sign of momentum. I was trying lots of things (e.g. making different types of content, building different products, etc) and for the vast majority of the year I was struggling to find
It's crazy how quickly I've gotten close to my other founder friends.
Going through similar struggles really helps bring people closer together — gotta love trauma bonding 🫡
On one hand it's great, but on the other hand a part of me feels myself getting a little more distant
Had a great time chatting with
@JhumanJ
about how he got started building
@NotionForms
, scaled it to almost $200,000 ARR, and also about his train ticket marketplace startup that got shut down 👀
Watch the full chat below!
I spent the past 24 hours coding with the Apple Vision Pro
it was okay
youtube link if you prefer watching there:
High level thoughts ⬇️
lots of great potential, but not being 100% in the ecosystem (i'm around ~90% in the ecosystem outside of using
Building your 1st startup:
"We need to create a dev, staging, and prod environment and sync data across all instances every night and QA on staging before launching a feature"
Building your 3rd startup:
"Yeah let's just test in prod and see if it works"
Give your audience exactly what they want after watching your content.
No more endless scrolling to find a product/service mentioned in an old video.
Create your own personal search engine with
@Linkfiliate
.
Sign up for the waitlist here:
People are trying too hard with their social media marketing
People are digitally native now so they can see an ad from a mile away
I ran this as an IG ad and let's just say it was very successful
less is more w/ content imo
To build your own startup as an engineer you have to be kinda crazy to do it
- give up almost guaranteed $300k comp with amazing benefits
- fail more times than you can count
- get asked “how’s that little app going?” At the family dinner table
- look at peers your age traveling
Day 32 of
#buildinpublic
.
Just crossed $100 revenue for
@soli_team
, an audio journaling app that I built.
Livestreaming on TikTok has been a great way for me to sell the product to people.
This might be my sales strategy for now. Not scalable, but effective.
One thing I've learned from my failed startups is to get product validation fast by building/testing as fast as possible.
I'm hardcoding everything on my new app idea lol.
Is this...scrappiness? 🤔
Launching my new product with a video documenting my entire build. Note: it is raw and not aesthetic at all
— an AI powered mock interview service
Current only behavioral interviews, but looking to add more technical interviews
On Twitter you see these success stories of people building super successful apps and how they achieved their dream of becoming ramen profitable and beyond
However
I have built 5 apps over the past 2 years that have all failed
Here are somethings I've learned ⬇️
@imgyf
Totally agree. I think they've made it too "philosophical" and are trying to make it do too much.
I'm back on Apple Notes as my home for everything for maximum simplicity
Interested in going viral on TikTok? As someone who has grown to an audience of 150k+ on the platform, these are the metrics you need to optimize for.
Continued in the thread ⬇️
Had my first user onboarding session for
@LinkfulApp
.
Crazy how much you learn watching someone use your product.
I learned my onboarding flow is really confusing and users get confused on the features that it offers 🙃
Good to get a fresh set of eyes on the product.
I JUST GOT MY FIRST CUSTOMER FOR
@soli_team
.
Sure, it may only be a $3/month, but this is the best $3 I've ever earned in my life.
I'M NOT CRYING YOU'RE CRYING
Now it's time to add some speech to text transcription into the app 🙂
Day 24 of
#buildinpublic
Been heads down getting this final feature done where I transcribe the audio recordings to text.
Submitting the build to the App Store tonight and then I’m working on getting 50 paying users by October 1st. 🚀
Day 28 of
#buildinpublic
.
Spent all day doing street interviews and editing content for the week.
My social media idea is doing street interviews where I asked people what they're thankful for, what they think is beautiful, and what annoyed them today.
First post is tomorrow!
One of the biggest traps that builders get into is seeing someone making money with a product and then they go on to tell themselves "I can make that" and then they go off and try to build/monetize it themselves.
I did exactly this with trying to build my own chat PDF app and
Timeline of how this post got 300k+ views
Hour 1: gained only ~1000 views
Hour 12: stagnating at 6000 views — I thought the post flopped and was done.
Hour 24: wake up and it’s at 250,000 views and rapidly growing.
More analysis in the thread ⬇️
1/
I've created 7 failed products over the past 2 years.
And it really, really sucks. With every product I would feel like it was a waste of time and how I didn't learn anything from it even though people often say "you learn with every failure."
But now working on my 8th product
Well, my Product Hunt launch went pretty horribly.
I got a decent amount of upvotes, but my post never made it to the front page, so I wasn't able to get much traction.
Kinda confused and frustrated about it all, but no time to waste! Gotta find a new marketing strategy.
Day 21 of
#buildinpublic
It hurts seeing a steep drop off in DAU, but that initial spike was from my launch, so drop off is expected.
This is part of the process, and I just have to double down on growth and engineering the best experience for the users who keep coming back.
I was pretty embarrassed to announce my new project,
@LinkfulApp
.
I've been working on building a successful startup for 9 months, and all I have to show for that is 2 failed ideas.
But that's the whole point of
#buildinpublic
— to share the success and the failures.
Don't forget to celebrate your small wins.
It's too easy to see people bragging about huge accomplishments and feeling so small that you want to discredit yourself from feeling any sense of joy unless you also match a similar level of accomplishment.
The other day I reached
I was told the other day to stop being a loser and to go outside and touch some grass
So I built a VS code extension that lets me touch grass from inside of VS code
Work smarter not harder
I haven't posted the past couple days on Twitter.
Why?
I'm burnt out.
Working a 9-5, being a content creator, and trying to build a startup is a lot of work, and I've been struggling the past week.
It's okay to take a break sometimes.
Is Stripe really the best way to add online payments?
I've spent 3 hours trying to set it up and I'm about halfway there.
Can't tell if I'm a dumb (highly likely tbh) or if this is common lol
The downside of having user feedback calls at night is that my mind ends up racing a million miles a minute and I can’t sleep because all I want to do is take action on the feedback.
Anyone else? 😅
the hardest part about this entrepreneur (I hate saying this word lol) journey is picking what to focus on
so many ideas vying for your attention, but your
#1
responsibility is to pick the highest priority one and taking action on it
working on this skill every day
Question to all Indiehackers
Do you ever feel like bootstrapping puts you in a mindset to not go "big enough" with your product/ARR goals compared to a VC backed company?
Took the entire day off yesterday to just chill and relax
and I'm feeling more energized today than ever.
Learning that resting is sometimes times the most productive thing you can do for yourself.
My next potential idea is
@LinkfulApp
, an affiliate marketing tool for content creators.
I built a quick demo, but I want to get validation that other people want it.
Currently making a list of 100 influencers and going to cold email.
Not fun, but (hopefully) effective.
How I’m planning to grow
- 3 blog posts a day
- 1 short form social media post a day
- 1 free tool a week
- influencer outreach/affiliate marketing
Will give an update on Dec. 1 how it all goes.
Current stats:
- 3 paid users ($21 MRR)
- 156 total users
I really didn't want to build another link in bio product because it is such a saturated space.
And yet, I don't know a single creator that "loves" their link in bio product. They have loyalty to it whatsoever.
So here I am building another one with
@LinkfulApp
🙂
I'm done with SEO
In the midst of trying to grow I have been finding myself trying so many growth avenues — affiliates, SEO, blog posts, free tools, short form social media, etc.
But as a small team (myself + my co-founder) we don't have the bandwidth to
Creator-led SaaS products is going to be the biggest marketing advantage in the next few years.
With the barrier of entry to SaaS being lower than ever before and with differentiation between these products being smaller and smaller, users are going to be drawn towards using the
building something right now
and I'm in that intoxicating building phase where my body feels like it's in the 6th dimension and my fingers have a mind of their own
forget the runner's high it's all about the coder's high
Day 32 of
#buildinpublic
and lately I've been debating whether to stop actively working on
@soli_team
and to pivot to a new product.
DAU has dropped to ~15 users, ~5 total paying users, and beginning to doubt myself whether it really solves a problem or not.
Yikes, my first negative review.
It hurts, but it's a good reality check and motivation to make my app better.
The idea is definitely there, but the execution needs work.
@MrNick_Buzz
@Calendly
@calcom
Curious to hear what the game changing feature was? I also made the switch to
@calcom
but mostly because the individual free tier is more generous than calendly.
Day 29 of
#buildinpublic
Posted my new social media content for my audio journaling app
@soli_team
.
I made brand new social media accounts on TikTok/Instagram rather than using my own (which has ~160,000 followers).
Here are the results (very interesting and surprising) ⬇️
Here is a step by step guide on how to market your SaaS product with short form social media:
My credentials: I've grown social media accounts for SaaS products to 2million+ unique impressions in 1 month multiple times.
Step 1: Create a video that is 100% about your product and
Yesterday I submitted my app
@soli_team
for app review.
Today I am proud to announce...
It got rejected 🙂 Have to make a few more updates before launching!
I ran Facebook/Instagram ads for my audio journaling startup,
@3MinJournal
.
Results:
$84.81 spent
$0.76 cost per install** (explained more in the thread down below ⬇️)
But I stopped running my ads despite great metrics.
More details in the thread ⬇️
Feeling really great these days.
Lots of things feel like they're on the cusp of something really exciting.
Now it's time to put in the work to push it over the edge and get it all moving.
I thought I was a good software engineer, then I went on tech twitter and saw all the super impressive things everyone else builds 😅
Excited to build startups to help me to grow as an engineer!
Day 30 of
#buildinpublic
.
With the experience I have growing a following of 160,000 followers on TikTok, I posted 3 organic marketing videos on TikTok and Instagram Reels, and here's how they performed.
Thread ⬇️
The Youtube algorithm works in crazy ways 😅
Almost 8 months of virtually no views (~2000) this video starts getting traction.
FYI this is a short, not long form, but I suspect this also performs for long form content as well.
✅ purchased the Apple Vision Pro
do I necessarily believe in AR/VR? No
But if this has any chance to be the next iPhone, I don’t want to miss out.
Was too young for the original iPhone, not gonna miss out on this.
Doesn’t make the price tag hurt any less though lol
Does anyone have experience using
@copy_ai
? I’m debating whether to use them or hire a freelance writer from
@fiverr
to write some content for my next project. Would love to hear your thoughts if you have any experience going with either of these two options!
@dillionverma
@stripe
@lmsqueezy
Didn't know that lemon squeezy has an affiliate program built into it — that seems super helpful so you don't have to rely on 3rd party apps
I remember when I got my first taste of internet money.
20k followers on TikTok, and a company reached out to me for a brand deal — $10 for every 10,000 views.
Result?
1mil views. $1000 for a 30 second video that took 30min to film/edit.
The power of the internet is crazy.
Day 26 of
#buildinpublic
Just went live on TikTok to talk about my app
@soli_team
, and I generated 3 new sales.
Potential to try out this live selling more — it has potential to be a big acquisition funnel.
End of day stats: 6 subscriptions, $14 MRR, $69 ARR
Cautiously optimistic that this video will do well 👀
Leveraging
@MrBeast
audience + popularity of Python automations seem like a good combination.
Stay tuned for analytics to be posted in a few days!
I'm building , an ai-powered pdf note taking/reading solution.
Am I an idiot for building this when there are already huge incumbents and ChatGPT has support for this as well?
Probably. But here is why I'm still building it ⬇️
The Twitter view count is great for people on Twitter trying to grow their brand, but probably harmful/annoying for people who want to leisurely enjoy Twitter.
Would be great to have an option to toggle it on/off.
If you are making content to advertise your product, your content MUST do 1 of these 2 things:
1) Entertain
2) Educate
If your content isn't doing any of these, it is dead in the water and your marketing efforts will fail.