We Made $60,000 From A Product We Built In 3 Weeks
Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?
Hi, this is Sveta Bay, co-founder of FounderPal. We create AI-powered marketing tools for Solopreneurs.
Entrepreneurs struggle with understanding their target audience, defining positioning, and generating marketing ideas — we fix that.
Our main product is Marketing Strategy Generator. An interactive platform to find a unique marketing direction and then transform it into actionable marketing tasks. It brings us around $10,000/mo via one-time payments.
What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?
We started Indie Entrepreneurship two years ago with MakerBox. After years of working with teams, we both wanted to spend less on communication and more time on building good products.
That’s how we started to sell digital products around marketing. We had experience with it, but most of the time, we were figuring things out on the fly:
- Learn something new
- Use this skill in your business
- Productize it for others
This led us to $5000/mo. But after months of experiments, we couldn’t go beyond it. We noticed that Founders prefer tools over educational resources.
That’s when we added a sprinkle of AI. We launched Marketing Mega-Prompts — a paid collection of 40 unique ChatGPT prompts. BOOM, the sales are pouring in.
And this is when we realized — that many Solopreneurs want to outsource marketing badly. However, current AI products only focus on generating cheesy email subject lines and spammy blog posts for SEO.
- Solopreneurs need a strategic CMO, not a content marketing intern.
- People prefer clicking buttons more than texting with ChatGPT
- We know how to write unique mega-prompts
That’s how Marketing Strategy Generator was born.
Build for one audience. Our first MVP failed. We learned our lessons and built a second one for the same audience. It earned us $60,000 in 6 months.
Take us through the process of building the first version of your product.
We built FounderPal with no-code to move fast. Instead of spending 3 months to learn basic programming, we pay Bubble $32/mo to ship in 3 weeks. This approach allowed us to work alone without any external funding.
The first version was very minimalistic and only cost us $150 in the first month (Bubble + OpenAI costs). Launching a simple tool is better than getting stuck polishing an over-complicated mess.
This product flow was enough to validate the idea:
- Describe your business in 1 paragraph
- Get 10 audience segments and pick the best
- Get 10 value propositions and pick the best
- Wait for 5 minutes
- Get your persona description, product positioning, 10 distribution ideas, and 10 conversion ideas
Every strategy cost us around $1 thanks to expensive GPT-4 API and huge prompts. But in the world of crappy AI wrappers, it was worth it. Loyal fans with lower margins are better than angry customers with refund requests.
We decided to charge one-time payments to get early traction easier. Selling monthly subscriptions to AI products is hard — most users don’t need a new marketing strategy every week.
That’s why we sold access to create 1 strategy and unlimited strategies. If you need it today, you can create it today. If you plan to start in 3 months, you can come back then without thinking of recurring subscriptions. Simple and customer-oriented.
Describe the process of launching the business.
We kept the launch day simple. It’s only one day, after all.
Here’s our 3-step system.
1) Schedule Product Hunt launch
We prefer to launch on Monday because it’s not as competitive as Tuesday-Thursday, and it still has a decent traffic pump (compared to Friday-Sunday).
Here’s our post for Marketing Strategy Generator. And some useful tips:
- Write a straightforward tagline. Deleting all “unleash” and “streamline” will help a lot
- Add 3-4 visuals to make your product more desirable. Limit your images to 3-5 colors to be aesthetically consistent
- Write a short but storytelling-rich first comment. You want people to care about your launch
- Engage with every comment to boost activity under your post
- Share your launch in relevant Slack and Facebook communities. But instead of asking for upvotes, nudge people to leave you honest feedback
Winning on Product Hunt ultimately depends on 3 factors:
- Is your product relevant for the average PH user?
- Do you have enough of an audience to get early traction?
- Are there any huge companies launching on the same day?
Focus on getting into the top 5. This will be good enough to get traffic and free features from newsletters (for example, AI newsletters monitor every AI-related tool). If you can’t get past 100 upvotes, that’s a good sign to double-down on audience building.
2) Write a plain and concise email
At that moment, we had a 13,000 email list (now 25,000).
I don’t like fancy emails. The more distractions, the fewer clicks on your CTA.
So every launch email from me looks like this.
3) Tweet
Videos with Founders work incredibly on Twitter right now.
They are both attention-grabbing and nurturing. Don’t be shy to record yourself.
On launch day, we earned $1249. In the next 2 months, we added $18,709. Consistent marketing funnel > going viral.
Do boring marketing. I always thought SEO and email marketing were for old-school businesses. But done right, they outperform all shiny marketing tactics.
Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?
Side-project marketing was a game changer for us. In a nutshell, we build simple AI tools that users can play with for free. They get value, we get organic promotion of our paid product.
Here’s the 10-step system that we used for every tool:
1) Find an overlooked keyword that is relevant to your product (for example, user person generator)
2) Build a simple AI wrapper in Bubble with 2 screens: input and result.
3) Let users generate the first flow (generate persona) for free without leaving an email. Easy differentiation from greedy alternatives
4) Offer an additional flow (generate 9 marketing ideas for this persona) in exchange for an email.
5) Show your paid product after the user finishes the additional flow. It’s easy to promote because the connection is authentic (go further with your new marketing strategy)
6) Subscribe these users to simple automatic email sequences. Give more value for free and tell stories about your product.
7) Launch this free tool on Product Hunt and Twitter. Try to get as many people to try it as possible
8) Record simple TikTok videos about your free tool (with and without your face)
9) In the next week, you will get dozens of free shoutouts from newsletters and TikTok influencers because they monitor new free tools
10) In the next month, you will already get SEO juice because of the low-competitive keyword and backlinks
We built 5 free tools with the same approach: User Persona Generator, Business Ideas Generator, Value Proposition Generator, Slogan Generator, and Marketing Problem Solver.
And every day, they drive us 500-1000 unique visitors and 100 emails for less than $2.
Side-project marketing is perfect for Founders who hate invasive and high-maintenance marketing.
You can spend most of your time building products and still call it marketing — what a cheat!
How are you doing today and what does the future look like?
We launched a v2 of Marketing Strategy Generator last month. It was a big change for us:
- From one input personalization to high customization (most of our refunds happened because customers couldn’t personalize their strategy enough)
- From selling on the landing page to a free interactive demo that sells the product organically (more sign-ups and fewer refunds due to incorrect expectations)
- From basic marketing strategy reports to advanced assets (pricing strategies, content ideas, sales offers, etc)
Now, we are waiting to collect more feedback from new customers. But the direction is clear — deliver more marketing insights. We plan to add a brand marketing generator, landing page analyzer, and marketing copywriter.
For marketing, we double-down on SEO and organic TikTok. Building generous free tools is way more efficient than anything we’ve done before.
Current marketing got us 800 paying customers — around $10,000/mo with one-time payments. In 2024, we want to see 3000 paying customers and $30,000/mo while keeping the margins above 80%. A lot of work to do!
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
FounderPal taught us a lot. But here are my 3 favorite lessons
- Do boring marketing. I always thought SEO and email marketing were for old-school businesses. But done right, they outperform all shiny marketing tactics. Regular people still google and still read emails — it’s not too late to leverage them.
- Be weirdly generous. If everyone is email keeping their tools, give them for free. If everyone is using gpt-3.5 to reduce costs, use gpt-4 in your product. Not being greedy is the easiest marketing hack in 2024.
- Leverage one-time payments. Sure, everyone wants recurring revenue to have stable revenue. But, a good marketing funnel will give you stable revenue even with one-time payments. And it’s way easier to sell a $199 one-time payment AI tool than a $39/mo AI tool.
What platform/tools do you use for your business?
Our main tech stack is
Xano, as a no-code backend service, is way more powerful than Bubble. I can’t recommend it enough.
Here’s what we use for marketing and operations:
- Stripe (payments)
- ConvertKit & Resend (email marketing)
- Plausible Analytics & Mixpanel (web and product analytics)
- Senja (testimonials)
- Keywords Everywhere (SEO)
- Canny (Feature requests)
- Tella (Video tours)
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
There aren’t any books about growing an AI business. But good news — you don’t need one.
You only need:
- Good product idea (=know your audience)
- Good design (=any minimalistic Figma boilerplate)
- Good distribution (=follow Founders on Twitter to know what’s working now)
Is there more to study? Yes. Will you learn it along the journey? Also yes.
Instead of reading another book about building a business, create a simple AI wrapper in one weekend. You will learn x10 more.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?
Indie Entrepreneurship isn’t that hard. We make it harder ourselves.
Here are 5 simple tips that worked for us and others:
- Build for one audience. The first MVP of FounderPal failed. We learned our lessons and built a second one for the same audience. It earned us $60,000 in 6 months
- Limit the first version to 1 month. You don’t need 10 features. You need 1 good product flow that will either validate your business idea or not. Keep it simple.
- Find a way to get traffic beyond launch day. You won’t go viral or see word-of-mouth in the first years. Find out what distribution is working for your product or it will slowly die in 1 month.
- Leverage one-time payments unless you can’t. Too many AI products don’t take off because Founders try to sell monthly subscriptions. I don’t need an “AI haircut” every month — let me pay once!
- Spend 1 hour defining your product positioning. You can’t launch a commodity AI product and expect dramatically different results. What makes your product unique? Why should people care? A good answer might save you from 6 months of trial and error.
Where can we go to learn more?
- Follow us on Twitter: Sveta and Dan
- Play with our free marketing tools — FounderPal
- Learn how to build simple AI wrappers in Bubble
Thanks for reading!
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Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
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