It Took Me 20 Years! Everything I learned on: Startups, Zero to...

If only someone told me this before my 1st startup:

1. Validate idea first.
I wasted at least 5 years building stuff nobody needed.

2. Kill your EGO.
It's not about me, but the user. I must want what the user wants, not what I want.

3. Don't chaise investors, chase users, and then investors will be chasing you.

4. Never hire managers.
Only hire doers until PMF.

5. Landing page is the least important thing in a startup.
Pick an average template, edit texts and that's it.
90% of the users will end up on your site coming from a blog article, social media post, a recommendation. Which means they have the intent. No need to "convert" them again.

6. Hire only fullstack devs.
There is nothing less productive in this world than a team of developers.
One full stack dev building the whole product. That's it.

7. Chase global market from day 1.
If the product and marketing are good, it will work on the global market too, if it's bad, it won't work on the local market too. So better go global from day 1, so that if it works, the upside is 100x bigger.

8. Do SEO from day 2.
As early as you can. I ignored this for 14 years. It's my biggest regret.

9. Sell features, before building them.
Ask existing users if they want this feature. I run DMs with 10-20 users every day, where I chat about all my ideas and features I wanna add. I clearly see what resonates with me most and only go build those.

10. Hire only people you would wanna hug.
My mentor said this to me in 2015. And it was a big shift. I realized that if I don't wanna hug the person, it means I dislike them. Even if I can't say why, but that's the fact. Sooner or later, we would have a conflict and eventually break up.

11. Invest all money into your startups and friends.
Not crypt0, not stockmarket, not properties.
I did some math, if I kept investing all my money into all my friends’ startups, that would be about 70 investments.
3 of them turned into unicorns eventually. Even 1 would have made the bank. Since 2022, I have invested all my money into my products, friends, and network.

12. Post on Twitter daily.
I started posting here in March this year. It's my primary source of new connections and traffic.

13. Don't work/partner with corporates.
Corporations always seem like an amazing opportunity. They're big and rich, they promise huge stuff, millions of users, etc. But every single time none of this happens. Because you talk to a regular employees there. They waste your time, destroy focus, shift priorities, and eventually bring in no users/money.

14. Don't get ever distracted by hype, e.g. crypt0.
I lost 1.5 years of my life this way.
I met the worst people along the way. Fricks, scammers, thieves. Some of my close friends turned into thieves along the way, just because it was so common in that space. I wish this didn't happen to me.

15. Don't build consumer apps. Only b2b.
Consumer apps are so hard, like a lottery. It's just 0.00001% who make it big. The rest don't.
Even if I got many users, then there is a monetization challenge. I've spent 4 years in consumer apps and regret it.

16. Don't hold on bad project for too long, max 1 year.
Some projects just don't work. In most cases, it's either the idea that's so wrong that you can't even pivot it or it's a team that is good one by one but can't make it as a team. Don't drag this out for years.

17. Tech conferences are a waste of time.
They cost money, take energy, and time and you never really meet anyone there. Most people there are the "good" employees of corporations who were sent there as a perk for being loyal to the corporation. Very few fellow makers.

18. Scrum is a Scam.
If I had a team that had to be nagged every morning with questions as if they were children in kindergarten, then things would eventually fail.
The only good stuff I managed to do happened with people who were grownups and could manage their stuff. We would just do everything over chat as a sync on goals and plans.

19. Outsource nothing at all until PMF.
In a startup, almost everything needs to be done in a slightly different way, more creative, and more integrated into the vision. When outsourcing, the external members get no love and no case for the product. It's just yet another assignment in their boring job.

20. Bootstrap.
I spent way too much time raising money. I raised more than 10 times, preseed, seed, and series A. But each time it was a 3-9 month project, meetings every week, and lots of destruction. I could afford to bootstrap, but I still went the VC-funded way, I don't know why. To be honest, I didn't know bootstrapping was a thing I could do or anyone does.

That's it.
All my projects → x.com/johnrushx/bio

15 years in the startup world.
20 failures.
4 successes.

Lesson learned?

The biggest mistake - I've done it, my friends have too.
→ Building software that scales from day one.

Truth is, most of your code will be trash.
No user will ever touch it.

Most products you launch?
They'll die and fade into oblivion.

A project built to scale takes six months, at least.
But a quick one? Just weeks.

You might ask: "What if it blows up and my code can't take it?"
To that I say this: If your project takes off, you've hit the Product-Market Fit (PMF).

Got PMF? You could pause for a year. Return later, and users will still be there.
So just relax. Rewrite your project properly when you know it's worth it.

In reality though, often no one wants what you've made.
If you spent weeks on it - good news! You have time to pivot. Seven more times even, until you find PMF.

Spent six months or years before launch?
Pivoting then is harder.
Your team won't easily let go of their hard work.
They'll hold onto the code till the ship sinks deep into the unforgiving ocean.

Execution speed is everything!

Series A round Killed my startup!

[Seed]
After graduating from 500 Startups & raising seed, my mobile app startup pivoted into b2b saas.
We quickly found PMF, got a bunch of clients lined up, and our team was working 100 hours a week to deliver.

[2019] Series A
Our TAM was too small for a unicorn, so investors wanted us to expand it.
I had mixed feelings about it, but all I saw around were the startups in growth/unicorn mode.
So we expanded.
We added more verticals, more products, more people, lots of sales force, and hired super expensive sales experts and marketers.
We put loads of money into paid marketing, sponsored conferences, and media.
It was all done just like in the Silicon Valley playbook.

[2020] All IN
Covid lockdown. All our customers are closed and don’t know when to reopen. The whole customer segment is on the edge of extinction.
We’re burning cache like WeWork in their worst days.
The whole strategy fails. The product we offer turned out to appeal to users when it was offered by an innovative small startup. Now we’re a bold corporation and nobody wants to buy from us anymore.
We added a bunch of new verticals, and suddenly our product is not great for any of the verticals, just average, like the competitors.

[2021] Failed
We keep losing all the money we raised. We know the whole model failed. We know we can’t make it to work. But we can’t turn the ship. I don’t ever yet consider the pivot into a profitable model. I don’t yet know the “bootstrapped” word.

[2022] Out of cash
We run out of investor money.
But we still can’t turn the ship. At that time I was a CTO. The CEO ghosted the company. The whole thing is heading toward oblivion. We spend our last money. I put my own money to keep things afloat and pay salaries to the devs.

[2023] Pivot
I don’t know what to do. I can’t watch the company die.
I tell the board: we need to change the course. We need to give up on a unicorn dream. We need to turn into a regular mid-size profitable business.
It took me 1 year to convince the board and chairman.
Because it basically means they lose their investment in a vc term, since there won’t be 100x, because there is no ROI on such type of company. We won’t ever be sold, we won’t ever IPO. We go onto profitabily and dividend model.
I take most of the costs that year, together with the chairman. I buy back most of the company for this using the money I made on my other ventures.

[The Change]
I fire all sales and marketing people.
Cut costs on everything.
Stop all sponsorships and pretty much everyting that’s not development or support.
We transform into product-led company.
I jump on a call with each client and tell the whole story, as it’s. It turns them into a loyal friend and they turn into our ambasador and start bringing new leads.

[NOW]
In 3 months we turn into a profitable business that’s growing.
We have great margins.
We do only one product for one niche, but we’ve got the best product in the world for that niche and the sales are back.

[TakeAway]
Not all ideas can be unicorns and need investor money.
My company was pretty much killed by Series A.
I pivoted it at the end and managed to bring it back to life.

[FUTURE]
I’m not building unicorns anymore.
I’m not aiming for series A or IPO.
My mission is to build profitable businesses that do one thing really well for one niche. So that we’re the best in the niche.
It means most of my products won’t make more than 1M ARR. And this is fine. This is the new world.

[KILED then BORN new]
So Series A killed the startup.
Now we’re not a startup.
We’re a profitable business.

<100xfounder.beehiiv.com>

How I Go From Idea to Revenue in 13 steps.

[1] Idea.
I only build products that I would use myself. It took me many years of failed projects to stop building stuff for the users I don’t deeply understand.
So the idea = my own pain.

[2] SEO potential.
I spend hours on Google search console, digging into keyword traffic trends.
This is the single best way to see if anyone is actually searching for this solution/problem. Very often, the results might be the opposite of what my intuition says. I never skip this step.

[3] Pick least competitive
Once searching for keywords for the pain, I often come up with a well-formed list of ideas for solving the pain. I see what’s on top of Google search, and I pick the idea that has the least competition.

[4] Social validation.
The next stage is to see if it gets any attention on social media. I tweet, blog, add it as a reply in relevant threads. It must pass the threshold.
The final stage of validation: I pitch it to my wife. If she thinks it’s boring, I kill the idea.

[5] Waitlist.
I build a very quick landing page using Unicorn Platform with a waitlist. Spend 5 min on the Landing Page and 1 hour on inserting good keywords from the SEO research I’ve done on step #2.

[6] Organic Promotion.
I launch the waitlist following the same steps as when validating the idea: blog, social media, and replies under relevant threads.

[7] Paid promo.
At the time when I had no followers, I’d pay $100-$300 to an influencer who’d post it for me. Make sure to pick one who is relevant. Or buy an ad on a relevant directory.

[8] Directories & SEO.
I list the project on at least 100 directories. Can be done manually or paid using tools like Listingbott.
Also, I activate AI auto blogging right away, to make sure I’ll get some organic SEO traffic in few months. There are plenty of tools for this, I obviously use my own tool called SeoBotAI for this.

[9] Is there traction?
After about 30 days of doing the promo steps 6,7,8, I check analytics:
- Waitlist signups
- Total & organic traffic
- Social media engagement

My criteria before coding begins are simple:
- At least 100 people on the waitlist
- Total visitor count of at least 1000

[10] Coding MVP.
I define the simplest version.
I use a boilerplate and microapps inside marsx, but there are plenty for boilerplates for any stack that you’re used to, if nextjs, go for shipfast from Marc or shipp from Dan.

[11] Turn Coding into Marketing
While building MVP, I connect with those who signed up; share details, and get feedback even before they try out the product. I send them ideas, progress, screenshots, and demos inside the dev sandbox. Most get very engaged and supportive. I always give at least a 50% discount to all early adopters in appreciation of their early support.
All what I do above I share publically. Which serves great as marketing and turns out ot be useful for others.

[12] Iterate.
Once I launch my beta on prod, I keep it closed for as long as needed, and only onboard early adopters to gather their feedback over weeks/months to improve product features/fix bugs etc. I don’t rush to open it for everyone, because it will create too much overhead and support. I prefer having 100 early adopters who are very involved and care, than 1000 users who scream at me.

[13] Public Launch.
On Friday, I launch on Product Hunt or DevHunt for dev tools.
Also, I do all blogging again: social media, articles, hacker news, hackernoon and more.
This brings 10x more traffic and the real hustle starts here. Cold users are much more brutal with their feedback and judgment, some haters appear too. I cry for a bit and get back to real-time prod fixes for a week. Eventually, things get to normal. The project turns into a stable project with predictable growth. From here on, I onboard a co-maker who would keep building the project further and I quit the tech part and act as a product owner and marketer for this project, to soon go into a new project as a builder again.

[That's it!]
[100xfounder.beehiiv.com]

Best Growth Hack in 2024!

Directories Drive a Hell of a Lot Of Traffic.
People reach out to me on this topic at least 10 times per day. This morning I came up with the strangest idea ever.

Directory As A Service.
As a SaaS tool owner, you can launch a directory as a side project to drive traffic to your tool.

I've built an insane AI+Human engine that can produce directories on a scale
- based on SEO keywords research
- high potential domain
- custom cute design on @unicornplatform
- great on-page SEO based on research
- @seobotai connection for a blog on Auto Pilot
- Subpages
- Inner linking
- All media
- Backlinks by listingBott.com

It just can't get better than this.
I've done this with all my directories.

On similarweb
> AllGPTs scored over a million views now.
similarweb.com/website/allgpt…
> osssoftware is approaching half a million similarweb.com/website/osssof…

This year I plan launching 100 directories in total.
Also I wanna help 100 other founders to get their directories.

So I launch a "directory" product, where all what mentioned above is done for you.
The price is $999.

The process is simple: you send me your url.
I do all the work and you get the directory back.
No talking, no chatting, no calling.
I use all my methods, tools, humans and AI agents.
You get fully finished directory deployed to a domain filled up with initial data back. All SEO, content, articles, design....everything is done.

But there is one thing left to do for you: fill it up with more content beyond the default 16 items we fill it up with.

Or you can just do it all by yourself too.
Find my posts on this topic.
Anyways. Traffic is the king.
SEO traffic is the king of the kings.

The space is limited to 100.
First come, first served.

SaaS makers,
We are now all in the fashion business.
You want it or not. I explain why.

in 2024,
The competition for a user will drive negative margins for most SaaS products.
Customer Acquisition cost > LTV for most products.

It's a new game, called: be loved or ghosted.
Marketing and Distribution strategy in software is quickly adopting what's been adopted in most industries decades ago.

People use tools because it’s what makes them feel cool.
Not because of the ads, stats, or price.
But because it’s used by those whom the user wants to be associated with.

It's a status symbol.

There is one way to win attention in the world of infinite choice: make something remarkable.
It doesn’t mean technically amazing or visually appealing, it means it needs to be something worth sharing.

It can't be boring.

We need to stand for something!
Consistency, day by day.

People is your best sale force.
Not google, not X, not ads, not a website.

Shifting your mindset from targeting everyone to targeting someone who cares deeply.

For all these years indie makers and small niche startups were the "boring" guys.
But now the table has flipped. It's time for Ultra Niche products loved by a small group of users.

How I Write Viral Texts.

In the last 30 days, I produced 10 viral posts.
Many million views on Linkedin, Reddit, FB, HackerNews and X.

I've never been blogging or posting seriously in my life. Had no followers. Had no idea how content may go viral.

This is what I did ↓
1. Switched from Short form to Long form.
Until December, I had 6 short scheduled tweets a day.
It's not easy to give value in short tweets, so most of it was pretty boring stuff. Some got engagement and a few went viral. But when a short tweet goes viral, usually people don't care who wrote it, so you don't get many followers or profile views.

2. Long Form
In long form, it was much easier to provide actual value to the reader. However people have short attention spans, so my first long-form posts failed, because of their academic nature: valuable, but boring.

I'm a big fan of movies and storytelling. I tell at least 5 stories a day every single day since I remember myself. About my past, about my fantasies, or my dreams or present.

I realized that this may turn into a superpower, in the offline world, people love my stories. What if I start telling stories, instead of writing articles.
My main goal was to write a cool story that I myself wanna read over again.

3. Stories
Stories are different from articles.
I have an intuition for it since I practiced it for so long.
If I have to give short advice:
a) start with a killer headline that the reader simply can't pass by
b) give a good promise in the first 100 words, so that the lazy modern reader will not quit and scroll to the next short tweet.
c) have ups, downs, and culmination, like a movie
d) structure it well with sections, lists, h2/h3
e) mix the tale and facts

4. Value
Stories on their own are fun, but without value, stories won't create respect.
Luckily, I've been an entrepreneur since 2004.
Built a bunch of startups, tools, products, directories, SaaS, learned stuff from scratch, such as SEO, Design, Programming, and Typescript :D.
For 20 years. So I have a huge list of stories, facts, failures, lessons, case studies, and successes in my past.
In each story, I do a 50/50 mix.
Half of the words in the story are to entertain.
Another half is to provide value.

5. Honesty
People respect me for being honest.
It's often putting me at risk. Since not everything I say is pleasant. I criticize certain things, which might hit me back. But I try to be as open as I can. When I write my stories, I pretend it's being told to my best friend at a fireside chat.

6. Reply every comment
I reply to almost every comment. So I've replied 1000+ times in the last 30 days. It's not just "thx", but a tiny value to the commenter. Some ask questions, and I try to answer in a way that people get double value from my post+reply. I genuinely love helping people. I could just do it all day long for free. In fact, this is what I mostly do. So it's naturally going for me.
If you're not like that, try to act as you are.

7. Diary, not an Article
Most of you have watched Rick Rubin's videos.
He said: write text as you're writing a diary that nobody ever gonna read except you.
This is perhaps the best advice ever given to the authors.
Most authors write as the text will be read by others and this often turns the text into an average internet text, that's boring and 99.99% of the internet text is ignored by the world.
But when you write it in your diary, you get free of outside judgment. You get free of your own judgment. You just get into the creative process. Try this. It works.

8. If you don't wanna re-read it, nobody gonna read it
Once you've written the article, you must re-read it from start to end and enjoy it.
If you start scanning instead of reading and can't keep the focus to read every single word in it, this means your text is not good. Sorry. I've trashed 90% of all posts I wrote because I didn't enjoy them.
If you enjoy it partly, but not completely, rewrite the parts you don't like. Until you can re-read the whole text in one stream of focus.

9. Sleep on Topics
Before writing the whole post, you need to come up with the topic.
It's not easy to come up with one on demand.
I add every topic that comes up into my notes.
Every night I read all of them and remove those I find boring. Even those I found totally exciting, I might find them super boring the day or the week after.
This is a good test.
We somehow give a higher rating to the idea we just came up with. Because it's our idea and our effort.
Once you sleep on it and detach from that moment when you "invented" the topic and read it again in a few days, you often realize that the topic is sh*t. And you can't understand how you liked it in the first place.
So: never post anything at once.
Write it down. Sleep on it. Clean the list in a few days. If an item is still there after a week, then it has survived natural selection as in a "meme theory" and you can spend an hour writing a whole story/post for it.

10. Post it everywhere.
If the text is good. It goes totally viral every-fuc*ing-where. It's the same as with products. If few users love a product, everyone in their group loves it too.
Same with text. If it's viral content, it will go viral on any platform that has a similar audience.
You need no followers, nothing really.
I went on Reddit with 0 karma and my next 5 posts topped Reddit as top posts of the month, year, and even top of all time.
Same with FB and Linkedin.
All platforms these days are able to surface content outside of your follower circle.
If the content is good, someone will repost it, then someone else and it just goes viral to 100k-1M views.
I didn't know this until December 2023.
I was sure it was all about the number of followers.
But now I learned.

11. When I write
I write after work. Not before.
90% of my text is written between 2AM - 4AM.
I wish I could do it in a day too, but I can't.
I don't know why. Maybe a spirit enters my body after midnight, idk :D.
Find that peak time when you get this creative channel stream open, and use it.

12. Keywords & Trends
Most platforms use vector similarity to recommend the content in the feed.
For those who don't know what is it: basically, the algoryhm is trying to see what have I liked/commented on before and find similar new content to recommend in my feed.
So make sure to include the keywords, which resonate with your audience. Also, check trending keywords and include 3-6 of them. Don't do the hashtag thing. Just embed it naturally into the content. If you look at this post, you'll spot those, if you do, tell me.

I hope this inspires and helps you with your next writing, looking forward to reading it.

The End.

I Went From 6% to 22% conversion in 12 months.

[#1 Attempt]
In May we tried to completely redesign our home page. The idea was to go away from a typical approach(sections, graphics) to a story on why we invented the Unicorn Platform, who is it for, what our values and etc.
We saw several other products do this very successfully. We wanted to stand out.
It took a month to come up with a perfect copy.
We configured @posthog to be able to measure the impact(heatmaps, conversion, sessions, funnels, scrolls) and launched a totally new home page for @unicornplatform.

[Failed]
Despite our hopes, the conversion rate didn't go up but actually dropped about 60%.
We made some changes, by adding back some of the elements and it improved a bit, but it was clear: what works for others, may not necessarily work for you.

My take on this: we weren't "famous" and "reputable" enough back then, not me, not the tool.
Acting like Steve Jobs only works if you're Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. If you're small, don't act like the big guys. People see things differently based on who is speaking.

[#2 Attempt]
We restored the old landing page, and the conversion went back to where it was. So at least it was okay.
The next step was to figure out what strategy should we take.
I went for:
-"Put 99% of the effort into the Hero section and CTA".
It sounded basic and boring, but it brought results quickly and every next edit would improve the conversion. Long story short: we went all the way from 6% to 22%.

[Detailed Breakdown] ⤵️

1. PH product of the Day.
This badge is very important if the audience is bootstrapped, busy founders. They all know and respect @ProductHunt . So this is a Must. Try super hard to earn it, once earned, place it in the most visible place. @devhunt_ badge works too, for dev tools.

2. What & How Can You Do Here?
I changed "Unicorn Platform is a Landing page builder.." to "Create a Website..Fast".
It made it clear that the value here is "Fast" and it's not just for landing pages, but for websites.
Also the action "create" did a really good job of converting users.

3. "Fast" is the key to Unicorn.
I wanted to make sure people understood it quickly. I wanted to capture the attention of those who believe "fast" is important.

4. Who is this tool for?
People must quickly realize if this tool is for "Them".
I listed the type of projects it's for. Now if you're a SaaS founder and you see the hero, the "saas" keywords grab your attention really quick. It makes you believe this is a tool for tailored for you, rather than for any kind of website...
Later I added the "directories" keyword, and it added even more conversion. The learning: be very specific about who is this tool for. The more specific the better.

5. Unicorn has a free tier. But instead of saying "We got a free tier" I went for "Get a free lifetime plan".
It's practically the same thing, but it also boosted the conversion. I'm sure you can guess why.

6. The single BEST impact on conversion came from the social validation. I added the block showcasing a few faces of the makers and the total number of "100,000 founders".
In today's world, every single day 5 new website builders are being released and shut down.
I thought I had to figure out how to stand out from the crowd. How to let the user know that we've been in the game for a long time and we plan to be in the game because we've got tons of users.

7. Call To Action.
I've changed the generic text such as "sign up", "get started" etc to a highly specific: "Create Website".
It worked pretty well.

8. We made a cool video that shows how the product works. Instead of screen recording. I'm a big fan of low-fi animated videos. I've tried it first for @seobotai and it went totally viral compared to the real product demo recording. So I've tried the same here and it went viral on Twitter first and helped on the home page too.

9. Custom Landing Pages.
We've added custom landing pages for specific use cases to link to those instead of the main/generic ones.
Here is one example de

[Next Steps]
I'm not planning to stop on this.
I have a few more ideas I wanna implement.

A) Embed the website builder right on the home page below the hero, so that users could try the builder here and now. No need to log in.

B) Add "Google auth". Now it's only email/pswd.

C) Create 100 custom-niched landing pages and channel the traffic there, instead of the main LP in cases where we know the audience and we can channel it.

Side Note:
None of the action around the following has improved the conversion. In fact, some did the opposite. For example animations. 90% of founders end up spending 90% of their time on these. But from my own subjective experience, it makes no positive impact. It's all about copy and placement.
- colors
- beautiful design
- custom advanced elements
- animations

.The ENd.

Must Read for Early Stage Founders!

Do Not Do This if you have zero traffic
- A/B testing the website, Design, Crafting the copy, Pricing, Advanced analytics or Conversion

I've built all my products following the same 9 steps, which are easy to grasp, but difficult to follow.

[Introduction]
→ 0 * X = 0
If you have zero traffic, it means you're wasting your time on the wrong focus.

[Fix Traffic First]
Spend 99% of your time on fixing the traffic first.
The way traffic works is that if you do the right job, it keeps floating. If this is the case, who cares about those early visitors who saw an average version of your site.

[My Job is to Fail Fast]
Once the traffic is coming, you start working on all those I mentioned above. And it's easy.
I mean nobody ever failed at setting up advanced analytics or designing a good website or figuring out pricing.
This is just a job to be done.
But do not procrastinate on these easy tasks.

Most likely the original take on your idea isn't the winning one and it will fail.
It's best to figure out that it's gonna fail fast.

[9 Steps I Always Walk]

1) Launch simple site using basic nocode landing page builder with a template (spend on it max 1 hour)

2) Go find traffic. Either with SEO, directories, Social media, reddit, blogging, replies on relevant posts, DMing people...

3) You most likely won't find the traffic

4) Edit your idea and value proposition a bit or a lot.

5) Go back to step #1 and repeat until you get traffic (might take 1 or 20 iterations).

6) Once there is traffic, go heavy on figuring out only one thing: how to convert it into signups until you see greater than 10% conversion rate.

7) When there is good conversion, work on retention. So that users come back after signign up. Retention must be at least 25%.

8) Next step is to optimize paid user conversion from a free plan.

9) Then optimize word of mouth. Monitor mentions in social media and blogs, and do stuff to grow it. Usually you can do it by overdelivering on the product and support.

This is how I built all my products.
>seobotai.com
>listingbott.com
>unicornplatform.com
>indexrusher.com
and a lot more.
It has been replicated many times, which might suggest that it's not luck but predictable process.

Simplicity. Simplicity. Simplicity. Simplicity.

I've made 4 tech choices that aren't common today with all these hyped techs, but after all, it was the key reason I got these insane results over the last weeks.

1. Google Sheets.
Nothing beats it as a CMS/database. With all respect to Airtable and all fancy CMS solutions, I had 10k records in allgpts Google Sheets which I managed to quickly edit. If it was a CRUD CMS, I'd need a month to enter those records.
From now on, I'm betting big on Google Sheets, using it as my main db for all projects.

2. Keyword research for free.
I used the free Google Search Console. Not Ahrefs, not Semrush. It's very easy to use, needs to be learning, is intuitive, free, and fast, I can 100% trust the data.
I found the banger keywords "all gpts" and "oss software" in there, which have exploded in traffic to my directories. Free traffic.

3. Simple NoCode builder.
I used @unicornplatform for both my viral directories and allgpts. co and osssoftware.org.
At first, I wanted to build it using code, cuz I wanted to have ratings, auth etc. I've started but quickly realized it will take time and maybe users don't care about these features.
It ended up being my smartest decision because the custom directory would not be as beautiful and simple as the one I made inside unicorn. I actually think most people on internet were sharing my Allgpts video, because it just looked good.
So what I learned here: less features, more design.
The other cool thing about using unicorn for the directory is that it's so fast. You open it instantly. I had no "server" really. Everything is loaded to the client and then sorted/filtered right there. So for the user, it feels instant. All other "fancy" nextjs directories are slow. I see the loading indicator way too often. For a directory user, it's a red flag.
I'm the owner of unicorn and I might be biased towards it, but results speak better than words.

4. ".com" isn't the king.
In fact, .co is as good as .com. The owner of .com tried selling it for allgpts to me many times. But I refused and bought .co for $9.
This is what I learned: if .com isn't in use, then launching .co has the exact same effect as launching with .com. So just check if .com is actually used for real projects, if it's just hanging in the hands of domain brokers, then you say GFY and go for .co and win. Proven.

That's it.
I didn't write any advice or reflection on the fact that allgpts went totally viral with 0.5M visits because I wasn't sure, maybe I'm just lucky and this is a survivor bias.

But I replicated this success with osssoftware.org just 2 weeks later. Used 100% the same algorithm.
Now I'm pretty sure it works, and it was not pure luck.

I'm launching 90 more directories.
Gonna learn a lot more on this topic and keep sharing all my learnings.

I'll share more details in my newsletter
>>>100xfounder.beehiiv.com

YC founder reached out with very good questions.
Every day I answer hundreds of questions in my DMs from other founders.

From now on, I'll be publishing the answers here too, so that more founders can use them.

Why does freemium not work in B2B SaaS?
→ it works once you have a product users wanna pay for. But if you start with freemium, you get a false feeling that users need it just by seeing all the free users. It's not easy to ignore their feedback, so you will start changing your product based on their feedback and go further away from the goal

What are your thoughts on SaaS models 'dying'?
→ I'm pretty sure it will die for 90% of the cases. Most SAAS tools are incapable of innovating. They reached the max. Any new tool is just the same, but new marketing.  Like forks. We don't care, just buy any. This means most SAAS will soon start competing on price. Going too low on the monthly price is wrong since the LTV will drop too low. So most will go for LTD that/s = LTV

Can you suggest any good pricing resources?
→ The founder of Profitwell (@Patticus) is the best at it. He helped me once with pricing for @unicornplatform. Try to ask him, maybe he will reply. or read his tweets

What are the most successful channels for you?
→ x/reddit/hn/devto/seo/directories/cross-promo

When to hire an SDR / BDR (if at all) in early stage?
→ don't do that. ever, unless you can raise 50M+. because a top-down sales strategy only works if you have at least 50M to spend over 3 years.

Suggestions on how to build backlinks at scale?
→ use listingbott.com . it's exactly the backlink builder at scale. We have just a one-time fee now, but you can enroll for a subscription too. So you will get X backlinks every month.
→ other than that: make really good blog articles, so journalists link to them
→ make little free tools on subdir, so that others link to them from their blogs

Any thoughts on PR as a GTM channel?
→ again, it comes down to your $$$.  today, even tech tool PR is competing for attention among everything else(media, videos, movies, people, news..). So it's really expensive. And the effect fades away. The only paid channel I respect these days: sponsoring directories or influencers. But make sure to find real folks, not fake ones.

P.S. You never know what the future holds.
I might get banned one day for a silly reason. Join my newsletter list just in case. I don't send emails often, 1-4 a month.
→ 100xfounder.beehiiv.com

I wasted $1M on Marketing. Until my pivot.

In the VC world, profits didn't matter. Only revenues did. But 9 months ago, reality struck:
- low rates are gone.
Time to do organic growth.

The next 9 months I had to learn 3 new skills; these were the wildest months of my life.

I was just entering the bootstrapped indie maker world, which was totally new to me. Don't laugh, but I didn't know there were bootstrapped startups at all.

After looking around into best practices, I set these 3 targets to reach by the end of 2023:
→ Grow big on social media and blogs
→ Master SEO
→ Build and launch free directories for traffic

[1] Grow big on social media and blogs
I began by sharing stuff everywhere. I did this for weeks, but got nothing; no likes, comments, views, or followers.

I found a tip: "Stick to one platform until followers grow". I chose X because I saw Pieter Levels and Marc Louvion were there hitting millions of views.

After six months, I got it. One platform is like one product. Start with 10 followers. Post and watch reactions. Look for patterns in attention-grabbing content. Iterate based on feedback.

I wrote and replied 10,000 times. That's a lot. It took much time. But it was worth it.
My brain had rewired and my content creator intuition turned into a pretty solid machine.

This month, I hit my goal on X - almost 10k followers and 6 million views in 3 months.

Next Stage: defocus from X and go wild on all platforms.
Started from scratch there with no karma or followers.
In a few weeks,
→ Best post of the year on SaaS Reddit and topped many more subreddits
→ Twice topped hacker news
→ Went viral on LinkedIn/FB/DevTo/Hackernews

None of it was working in April, but now it did.

Wrap up on social media,
For 9 months, I posted and replied 10,000 times.
All my energy went into one platform before spreading to others. On day 30, I only had 135 followers with no interaction. But something told me to keep going.
And so I did.

[2] Master the SEO.
Last April, I was clueless about SEO.
Reading a lot online, I learned about it.
Free traffic seemed like too good to be true.

However after more research and writing many articles,
We held on to hope: "SEO just needs time".

May brought small wins but not enough for all our hard work. Yet, I lost hope, to be honest, but my partner convinced me to give it some time, saying - SEO works; it just takes patience.

That's when seobot was born – an AI tool to speed things up. Cuz it was taking too much time.

By the end of summer, we saw good progress. 'SEO does take time' proved true! In September, SEO became my main traffic source for some of the projects!

Looking back,
I wish I had started this journey in 2009 when I first got into the startup world.

[3] Directories for traffic.
Sometimes, I get the visions, like daydreaming.
One day, I had one, where I own 100 directories which are all famous.
I told my team we should make directories to increase our traffic in the future. They didn't like the idea because they thought it was too old.

I dropped the idea until six months later when DevHunt came into my mind. It's a directory for developer tools. I couldn't let this idea go so I built and launched it with friends. The results were great! It turned into second most famous launchpad in the world for devtools.

Four months later,
A rumor about custom gpts gave me another idea - "allgpts", a directory for them. I decided to try it out. I didn't tell anyone in my team. This was totally secret project which I was sure will fail. But no! It worked really well!
It became the most popular gpt directories worldwide with half a million visitors and 7 million clicks on gpts. It brought the biggest growth to my premium tools, just from the links in the footer.

This hit made me realize that ignoring directories was wrong. So, using keyword research and 20 domain names, I started launching new directories every week.

Next: osssoftware_org turned out to be another hit!
It got famous overnight on Hacker News with around 30k users visiting the site just within one day!

This proved – Directories are indeed worth trying! They can drive lots of traffic if you know how to pick cool domain names paired with relevant content collection tacktics.

So there I was spending hours searching Google Ads Planners looking for matching keywords and free domain names on Godaddy.
It took time but looking back now – definitely worth every minute!

That’s the end.

The main point of this essay was to promote organic growth. It's very much underlooked by founders, just as it was totally ignored by me for more than 10 years.

It's not easy comparing to loading ads with cash.
But it's so fullfilling, fun and once it works, it just keeps growing on itself, exponentially.

>>>100xfounder.beehiiv.com<<<

The Worst Day In My Startup Life.

I was having a New Year's Eve party, had a few beers, and went to sleep late.
The next morning I had 100+ unanswered calls and SMS messages on my phone.

I read the message. I couldn't believe what was there, felt like someone punched me in my chest.

[THE BEGINNING]
It was 2011. The world was going crazy about mobile apps. Everyone was convinced the web was ending and native apps were the future.

I was working on a bunch of boring b2b startups until my friend introduced me to a guy, who was about to start a mobile app.

[B2C SUCCESS]
The whole project went really well.
We won the best app of the year award, got into the second-best accelerator in the world, our seed funding, and dream team.
Very good growth on installs. All organic.
But it didn't turn out the way we hoped.

[B2C FAILURE]
We couldn't figure out a way to monetize all this success. Partly we hoped to make an exit, unfortunately, our main rival was acquired instead of us.
The SEED money was running out. But we weren't a good fit for Series A. We were about to close down. Had negative balance and debts.

[PIVOT]
I was very pessimistic about the whole thing, but my co-founder has figured out a chance to survive.
He pitched our app to a corporate client as a Whitelabel solution. They said: cool, we were about to build the same thing from scratch.
But they said: you got 2 months. Launch it on Xmass or no deal.
We shook hands and went on with 60 days of non-stop work. Days and nights.
We slept at the office.

[B2B Success]
Just the day before xmass, we managed to launch it, with tons of bugs which we hot fixed on prod.
The client was happy. They got lots of hype around this launch. They were the first in the world to launch an app as a business.

[WORST DAY]
I celebrated new year Eve and in the next morning, I wake up to 100s of missed calls and SMS.
I read the first message.
It says: we were hacked. Everything is down.

[DISASTER]
Someone has encrypted the data on our server. So nothing was working and we couldn't do anything.
Back then people ran their own servers, just like we did.
The API, the database, github, the files...Everything sat on the same server and filesystem. No backups. We simply didn't have time for this. We moved fast, breaking things. Because just 2 months ago we were on the edge of bankruptcy.
From that moment I saw the message, I sat on my chair for 57 hours in a row with just a few trips to the toilet.
I had almost no food, just water. I was trying to fix this.
The client was "firing" us over the phone. If we don't fix it in an hour, we're dead.
It took more than an hour.
The details of these 57 hours are not to be publicized, but on the third day we find a solution, that works and everything goes back up.

[After effect]
Over these 3 days, I literally aged and lost both my hair and my health.
I couldn't sleep well for many months after this.
Every notification on my phone would bring me anxiety.

This was the worst day (or 3 days) of my life.
But it wasn't the last.
Almost every year of my startup life would bring another story like this.
It's not all romantic and joy.
Sometimes it's very hard. Especially when things go well since you have a lot to lose.

[Reflection]
Being a founder is perhaps one of the most difficult jobs on earth because failure often means almost the end of the world at the moment.

We Failed Such A Great idea.

7 years ago, we started a startup to challenge Carta, we raised $1M, got our first 100 users, and tons of optimism. 6 years later we went bankrupt.

Full story 👇

In 2017 I was playing cageball in Oslo when I met my old friend, who said he just started a new startup, it was a competitor of Carta, but for the EU. He asked me to join as CTO and co-founder.

We got accepted into a cool incubator, raised over $1M, and were set to win the EU and later go after Carta itself in the USA.

Our plan was the following:
- we win Norway first
- we get Scandinavia then
- then EU
- then the World

[Mistake #1]
We started with Norway.
And this was our main mistake.
The second big mistake was that we placed strong bets on corporate partnerships, which I will describe later.

[Hyper-localized service was a mistake]
We thought we would quickly make a version of our product for Norway, and go for the other countries then. We spent a few months, a year, a few years, and only then we were done.

And here I learned a good lesson: it takes almost the same effort to win in a small market or a big one. Takes same amount of coding and marketing in most cases.
We spent several years just to make it functional within Norway.
But right after this, we made our second mistake.

[Deadly Partners]
After launching our MVP, we gained our first 100 b2b users and got good interest from big corporates. Somehow all law/accounting firms wanted to innovate and were looking for startups to work with.
We were extremely happy.

We thought this was so cool and we said yes to the 3 biggest players. I won't name them, but some were publically traded companies with over 50k employees.
They said: we will sell your tool to all of our clients, you just need to fix these few things.
The way we heard it: we have 100k clients, and you may get at least 10% of them, and we share the revenue.
The "few" wasn't "a few".

[Corporate hell]
Being a startup, very quickly we realized that the number of requirements to be compliant with such a corporate partner was so huge, that we would spend years implementing them, and we actually did.
But when the year passed and we were done, the corporation changed their plans, and all they did was include a link to our website in their email at the bottom, which drove just...30 clicks. But we spent the whole year, naively expected to be pushed to all of their 100k clients, get 10k clients overnight, and celebrate.
It never happened. Nobody to blame really, it was just us, being inexperienced in expectation management when working with corporates.

[More Corporates]
At the same time, we had a few other corporate partnerships going on, and the same thing happened there.
We finally learned: that the people who promise things from the corporate side are the employees, who often aren't even there by the time we complete the work on our side. They just play the "cool" side and give promises, which were in fact never approved by the real decision-makers. But we have never had any idea who was the real decision maker, since every person in the corporate has such a buzzy title that it feels like this person is the second employee after the CEO. I mean the VP of...titles.

[Last partner]
4 years later, we had no users, no money left, and our product turned into a corporate type of product, that was too complicated for SMBs.
We ended up joining forces with a new corporate partner, who bought half of the company.
Things just fell apart after this and a year later the company was out of money again, the partner didn't do anything, because, in the deal, they had the right to the source code for internal use if the company fell apart. And this is what has happened.
Our startup went bankrupt at the end.

Lessons learned:
1) Don't do anything with corporates. Maybe it works for some, but when this story was unfolding, I met dozens of other founders, whose startups were dying following exactly the same corporate deals as ours. For corporate, our startups were just toys, they played "innovation" and didn't really care much about the outcomes.

I wanna emphasize,
that I don't blame the corporates, I blame ourselves, the founders, who thought: Oh, this is the easy way, they got 50000 clients that we can easily get too. Let's take the shortcut. We should have gone the proper way, product-led growth, organic growth, user feedback, iterate, improve, and grow.

However, this lesson has taught me so much. The cost was high, but a few years later, when working on my other startup, I had a similar opportunity, one of the largest companies on earth offered me an exclusive deal and over $1M a year contract, but we just had to do some custom stuff for them...I'd say yes immediately if it was 2017. But in 2022 I declined it, and fast-forward to today, I haven't had the slightest regret.

2) Don't build for a small market, if you can build for a large market.
What I mean is: that if winning the market is difficult and the software you have to build is very complicated, then don't go for small markets, go for the largest markets you can find.
You should go for small niche markets in case the software is easy to build.

I hope this story may be useful for other founders.
[THE END.]

P.S. Should we relaunch it as an Open Source Alternative to Carta?

I Bought a Startup For almost $1M
but it didn't go as planned.

Two years ago I bought a product from another bootstrapped indie maker.

I had two options
1) build it from scratch
2) buy it and continue building the existing product

I was about to start building my own but stumbled upon a product that had really good feedback on Twitter. I'd often see people mentioning it.
I've tried it and love it too.

[Acquisition]
So I reached out to the founder, it turned out he was actually planning to sell it right at this moment too, so we made a deal really quick for $800k (5x ARR). It was right at the top of the valuation hype.

[Reality]
I was coming from a VC-backed startup world where you've got a team, one person per position, or even a few.
I never really met yet anyone who built stuff in solo.
So I didn't know what to expect.
The seller was pretty honest about everything, but I am an optimistic person, so I wished for the best.
However, things didn't go as planned.

[Downtime]
Either I was an unlucky buyer or it was just the nature of software to break when it gets to the new owner (remember what happens when you buy a used car? It breaks right away).
The platform was going down way too often. The churn started to grow into 2-digit numbers.
The upside of building solo is that you're fast, but the downside is that you take shortcuts.
The platform used the stack I wasn't familiar with. So it basically took me and my devops guy almost a year to figure it all out at finally fix the downtime issues.
But we lost lots of users until that.
I'm a really scrappy person.
Maybe if I hired an expensive DevOps guru, he'd fix it all in a day. But I tend to dig deep into every problem and fix it internally, so that at the end of it, we know how to fix such things next time, for the next projects.

[Churn]
The overall trajectory of the growth before the acquisition was positive, going up, but 2 months after I bought it, the numbers started going down.
The key reason was that the products built by solo founders are very tightly connected to their persona. So many users are loyal to the persona, not the product.
The other reason was that the original founder was grinding every day promoting the product everywhere, but when I bought it, I didn't do that. I did pretty much nothing and hoped for organic growth. Yes, I was naive. The growth slowed down. It was still happening organically, but it was slowing down every month. Until we did something new.

[SEO]
I heard SEO terms a lot in my life. But I had no idea what is it and how to do it.
My intuition said: it's what you need for growth.
We went for agencies and even got a quote for Neil Patel, but after all, I didn't wanna just buy the black box. I wanted to learn and master SEO so that I can use this skill in my next projects.
It was April, and we started learning SEO and experimenting. At first, it felt like an ocean, but in 2 weeks of playing around, we got some little results.
After 2 more weeks in May, we had even more.
Here I realized that this may be huge, and I need to build an engine that does this for me. That's where I came up with another idea: build my own SEO tool.

[SEO magic]
We started doing lots of AI-generated articles and used lots of different tools, raw chatgpt, own AI playground.
Eventually, in June we started one of the biggest projects of my life: a tool for SEO automation. The goal was to build a 100% autonomous agent that does SEO on autopilot. We knew the world would be soon filled up with AI SEO generators, so our goal was to make the one that makes human-level content that's actually valuable to the reader.

[Growth]
Finally, we started growing again. Or at least we stopped going negative.
Since Aprile, we have grown MoM every single month until this day and I'm pretty sure there won't be ever a month with negative growth for us again.
SEO was bringing more and more traffic, so the growth was accelerating.

[Social Media]
In April I had 72 followers here on X.
I searched X for my product term and saw almost no recent mentions. I remember how many mentions I saw a year ago, and now there were very few.
To be honest I felt pretty sad for a while. It's the same as when your kid brings home F-grade from school. You have this chest pain. So I had the same. I felt like people don't talk about it, so they don't love it anymore.
My goal was to bring it back to the track. So that people talk about it, recommend it, and share their love for it.
In a few months, after I engaged with people around my product topics, provided value and we did lots of improvements to the product, people started mentioning it again.
Eventually, we had more mentions than ever before by the end of the year.

[Product]
When I bought the product, I thought we could keep it as it was for a long while, it's good, no need to make serious changes, just fix the bugs.
But I was very wrong.
The world is changing. The tech that's not changing is falling behind. People wanted new features, but we were very slow to deliver them.

[AI Hype]
In the middle of the crisis, we were sure that AI would solve it all. That we can just add AI to our product and the world is gonna go crazy about it.
So we did, and it took us 6 months.
But the results weren't what we expected.
I asked users, and I just sent them an email asking: what's the problem?
Many said: you have the wrong focus. We don't care as much about AI as you think...
Something clicked in my brain here. I realized that we were wrong all these months.

[Hackaton]
Three months after our AI fiasco, I asked the developer to travel to my home and we spent 2 weeks in a hackathon. We work every day, sleep, eat and work again.
The goal was to figure out what users want (I asked churned users and existing users, and had at least 200 chats). So it was clear to me what people wanted.
To key problem we had was our slow innovation speed. We were basically moving too slowly, so most users said they didn't even realize we shipped anything over the last 12 months.
So the key task for the hackathon was to figure out a solution to this problem: How Can We Start Moving 10x Faster?
We ended up solving this problem and turning our sale into a Ferrari by the end of the hackathon. We didn't add more resources, we just did certain tech tricks, which changed everything and we could start adding new features way faster than before.

[Now]
From April last year to today, we went from 14k MRR to 18k.
We grew every single month for the last 9 months.

[Future]
Our growth is accelerating, and I expect to at least double our ARR by the end of 2024.
The product is loved by the users, both on social media and when I talk to users. It warms my heart and wakes me up every morning.
Nothing is stopping us from turning it into the best product in the world. We're one step closer to it every day. Or even every hour.

[Conslusion]
It was a very successful acquisition after all.
I'm very happy I've done it.
I wish I didn't waste the first 12 months after acquisition just expecting it to grow by itself.
On my next acquisition, I know exactly what to do.

[The End.]

Worst Advice I Ever Got *

0] Build scalable tech
1] Raise VC money
2] Join startup incubator
3] Hire people
4] Hand code Landing Page
5] Pay designers
6] Write unit tests
7] Code from scratch
8] Outsource
9] Quit main job
10] Partner up
11] Invest in an expensive .com domain
12] Make it free for users first
13] Don't use nocode, it won't scale
14] Find a co-founder
15] Build an app for both IOS and Android at once
16] Add dark theme switch
17] Make it perfect before launch
18] Be in a bunker while building
19] Don't do marketing before launch
20] Keep it all secret, so nobody can copy it

* for MVP Stage

My biggest fuc*up as a founder👇
- Ignoring SEO for 14 years.
I only started focusing on it in March 2023.

From only blog, I got 32k organic clicks, signups, and paying users.
Best ROI ever.

Had I realized this sooner, my products' revenue/traffic could have been 2-5x bigger

I'm Done With Free Tools.

All my life, I'd first launch my products for free. Recently, I changed that for b2b SaaS products.
Now every tool comes with a price.

The outcome was pretty shocking.
The upside of going for Paid versus Free was completely different than what I thought it was.

[Story: Everyone loved it, None paid]
In 2018, We launched a tool for biz administration.
It was targeted towards SMBs. we pitched it to our networks, people seemed to like it, and some asked for access. We shared, people signed up and used it.
Since it's a biz admin tool, users need it just sometimes. So we'd say: let's count signups as our KPI.
The Cofounder said: let's add pricing. I said: let's give it away for free to the first 100 users and we charge later.

Long story short: once we asked them to pay in a year, none did. Literally none. Zero.
But all this year, we were convinced we have a good product and users need it.
We were wrong.
Free users are the worst way to validate the product.
They often don't even represent your audience. But yet, they kept asking for features, we built all they asked and in the end, they didn't wanna pay.

So basically we pivoted the product into something great for the group that doesn't wanna pay for it!

[It's a Trap]
Free users are a trap. They create a false sense of PMF. You think "Yeah, I've made it, they use".

[They ask the wrong stuff]
Free users ask for more features than paid users. And the product just shifts towards a state, where it's good for free, and not good for pro.

[John 2.0]
So as an experiment, I ditched the free version for my new product launched.
The results were shocking to me personally.
I had fewer users, but paying users.
They behaved in a much more professional way, so the support was actually fun, rather than a job.
The feedback started being super constructive, often they would just write up the whole spec for the change, basically doing the whole job for me.
They would almost always quickly bring friends who also want to use this product.
They would often do an action such as a tweet, blog post, or similar about my tool.

I was sitting there and thinking...How and Why is this? Totally counterintuitive. I'd expect the users, who got my tool for free, to go out and scream about it. Bring me more users, recommend them to their friends, and give polite feedback. But NO.
The worst ever support chats would always be the free users. And 99% of them would never do any "ambassador" like action toward my product.

[Validation on a Real Case]
On Friday, I launched indexrusher.com with no free tier. Lots of users signed up for a paid plan and I had one of the most fun chats over the whole week with these users here on X. I just gave them tons of SEO advice, and they gave me feedback on my tools, with some we ended up becoming friends I think.

[Wrap Up]
- free users might be a fake sign of success
- paid users make it clear: users actually like it
- paid users create organic growth
- paid users give 100x more constructive feedback
- paid users often have friends, who'd pay too

The End.

P.S. This applies to B2B SaaS tools only.
It's totally fine to make free lead magnets, directories, and other side stuff that drive traffic to the main project.

P.S.S Also I'll keep the free tier for @unicornplatform.
I may even add a free tier to my products after PMF.
So what I said applies to the pre-PMF phase.
Once PMF is achieved, the free tier is just yet another marketing tactics.

Growth: What Worked and Failed for Me in 2023.

[Failed]

1. Partners.
I've tried everything: incubators, accelerators, other makers, startups, corporates, influencers.
Takes forever to set up meetings, negotiate, and execute. Negative ROI.

2. Newsletter Ads.
Despite the promised CTR and traffic, the reality is pretty depressing. Tried many. Won't name them, but enough to make the conclusion. The ROI is negative for a product with an LTV below $300.

3. Podcasts.
I tried both, going to podcasts and hosting podcasts.
Last year we ran "Mars talks" and had all the famous makers and founders there. Big names. Marketing effect? little. The time it takes? A lot. 1 person full-time.
I also went on 20 podcasts. Very little effect too. But I enjoyed the chats of course, with great people as a human being.

4. Outreach.
This is by far the worst method that was ever invented.
- it's embarrassing since you send an email nobody asked for which is marked as spam by many.
- feels like an illegal activity, since the emails are often acquired in a sneaky way.
- near zero conversion. Most ignore. Very few reply, usually not the people you'd want to get replies from.

5. Googe/FB/Twitter ads.
Low ROI. Shows a high "view" count and likes. But the reality is that some random butcher from Nebraska is in the list. Whatever I try on targetting. I guess the new anti-tracking tech has destroyed targeted ads or idk really. Tried a lot, using pro people, who know their stuff, but still negative ROI.

6. Hiring a marketing person.
I believe there are great marketing people out there. But those cost a lot, more than bootstrappers can afford.
Can't really afford this as a bootstrapper, so I go for cheaper options, which obviously fail because almost no marketers can work with near-zero budgets.

7. Hiring marketing team.
I made this mistake. It was very costly and a big step back. Lost at least 6 months.
The people were great, but not a fit for bootstrapped startup.
Same issue: couldn't work in scrappy env.

8. Paying influencers.
Good influencers are expensive (starting at $2k).
Those I could afford were around $100-$800.
Unfortunately, the audience was mostly too amateur. Not the one that can pay for a tool. Got a good number of sign-ups, and zero paying users.

[Worked]

[a] Social Media.
This has been by far the most successful channel.
Loads of views, clicks, signups, paying users.
I can't stress this enough. If you're a maker and don't spend at least 10 hours creating content on social media every week, I don't know how you can move on.
Of there are genius exceptions, but you get it.
I will make a dedicated post on how to grow on social media as a technically bootstapped founder next week.

[b] SEO.
This must become a habit.
Write at least one article every day. It takes 10-30 minutes. Just like the Gym. Do it daily, get used to it.
SEO traffic is at least 30% of all my traffic on all products and the best thing about it: keeps growing itself at some point. Even the old articles grow in traffic. So eventually you can stop blogging and still gonna get traffic growing.
An alternative to writing blogs is to generate them using AI tools such as SeoBotAI (I'm the author).

[c] Affiliate partners.
This is not the same as the #1 from the "failed" list.
The affiliate partners don't need to be managed by you at all. I use the firstpromoter tool for this. On Unicorn Platform we double the revenue from Affiliate Partners every month since we launched it. The only investment we made was to integrate the code into our code and add a link on the header nav. Do it from day 1.

[d] Listing on Directories.
This is my favorite way. Takes almost no effort, just time and you do it just once.
I get from 10 to 50% of the traffic from directories for my products. Which is insane. If time is an issue, use tools like listingBott which can list it for you.

[e] Sponsored Directories
This is the only paid marketing method I use.
I sponsored a few directories. It's usually around $100 a month. My tool is featured on top of the home page every day for the entire month. Pretty good ROI on this. I had sign-ups and paying customers. Since my LTV is above 100, I think we get at least one paying user a month, so we're positive ROI on this.

[f] Side projects.
The most entertaining way to market my main products.
This year I made a bet on directories as side projects.
Launched many using Unicorn Platform and 3 directories went viral, generating over 1 million views. Which transformed into at least 20,000 visits to my main products.
Next year I plan to launch 80 more directories and a new type of side product: micro tools with one action only.

[g] Word of Mouth.
I take personal care of every user.
You can see my Twitter as a support channel for most of my products.
I get over 100 DMs every day and answer each on the same day.
When I get a user for Seobot, I ask them to add my email to the admin list of their Google search console stats so that I can see how I can help them. I try to give advice that will help, and sometimes it's helpful. I charge nothing for it. It's a "pay it forward" thing. I expect nothing in return. But good people love doing good stuff to those who done good stuff to them.
So we have an insanely good word-of-mouth growth. It's so good that sometimes I think that we can stop doing all the marketing and we will still grow.

[Gonna Try in 2024]

(I) Collabs with Makers.
I wanna co-found several product with fellow makers.
50/50. It would be great marketing effort for both parties. My users get to know his/her products, and visa versa.

(II) Collabs with Influencers.
I wanna run builder/marketer collab.
I'll build, the influencer will market it to their own audience. The product will be built specifically for the audience.

(III) Nano apps.
Very small apps on subpages of bigger apps.
For example seobot could have a subapp: keyword researcher. Which would have own Landing Page and own SEO. Good organic potential and lead magnet.

(IV) Directories within Products
I wanna make programmatic SEO directories within each product. 1k-100k pages for a wiki-like high quality verified content.

(V) Sell Life Time Deals
I wanna have an option for life time deals for all my products.
In fact, I even wanna sell LTD for all my products at once too. One fee and you user gets access to all my 20 products and all future products too. Forever.

--

[The end]
I'll be sending more detailed breakdowns of these methods with better examples in my newsletter in the near future 100xfounder.beehiiv.com.

- End Of SaaS
+Birth of SaaS OS

__By the end of 2025, I'll launch 1000 products.
__These products are going to run on a new SaaS OS.
__It'll transform the software world as we know it.
__You won't take it seriously until it happens.

[The History]
Back in the day, each vendor had a full set of apps.
Apple built all their apps, Microsoft did, and Nokia phones did. All did.

[The Third-Party]
At some point, the apps went into the hands of third-party developers, who built apps for different platforms. It made sense since most apps haven't yet been invented. It took many decades to invent all the apps and iterate to come up with best practices.

[End Of Innovation]
Around 5 years ago, the innovation reached the limit of the old GUI paradigm. The UX and Software reached the final stage within the scope of GUI.

[Start of "Attention"]
For the last 5 years tech companies have been competing in purely attention battle. Sometimes using technology itself to generate attention: e.g. opensource, new frameworks, etc. and mostly using mission, vision, money and all other known methods.

[What's Next]
With the arrival of AI(and later AGI) that's capable of doing 90% of the human tasks, the GUI is not a suitable interface for human-machine interaction. We don't know yet what is suitable, it will take us 7 years to figure that out.
We will see a lot of innovation around AI just like we saw it around saas in previous decaded. In a meanwhile, the SaaS world will have it's own shakeup.

[Reality]
Despite the belief that products have unique IP, the reality is that all popular products are popular because their founders have won the "attention" war. Once the war is won, the users might start looking for the elements in the software that are remarkable and state those as the winning reasons. But that's simply a human urge to justify the reality.

[Intermidiary Step]
The inevitable next step is self-evident. Those who win the attention will supply their audience with more software. It's happening now, on a large scale, but most don't notice it yet.
It will follow the same playbook.
First, they launch integrations to connect 1000 apps to their tool and provide those to the users.
Then they will replace each app that's doing well with a native feature, simply because embedded apps suck, due to tech limitations of existing frameworks (most run in iframes, are slow, and can't talk to other apps).
* 3 hints: triangle, all-in-one workspace, SEO tool.

[Bolder Step]
Eventually, all tools with the highest attention will turn into "platforms" and later into super-platforms.
They will supply all relevant software to their audience.
It will all work out just fine but it's running on old tech, which will turn it all eventually into Microsoft-like corporate software mess. That will kick in yet another cycle once again, but this time much shorter one,
see it next.

[Single Purpose Tools]
We will see a renaissance of single-purpose tools again(biggest trend of 2024), just because these will be more pleasant to use, after those bigger platforms.

[Final Destination]
The attention is not a kind anymore, it's a god, so the platforms will end up winning anyways because they will have to fight for existence and they will team up with all possible attention winners(stars, opinion leaders, influencers, artists etc).
And now there will be a huge gap.
It will look like they won the war, but all this time there was an underdog, that was cooking something.

[The New Solution]
The New Internet for SaaS.
A system that can run SAAS apps the same as internet browsers run websites or iPhone apps. But not just that. Much more.

[SaaS OS]
> An OS that can run any SaaS app instantly. No waiting, no downloading.
> Think Spotify - hit play and music starts in an instant.
> "buy once, use forever" option. As it can run on your machine locally as well as on the cloud. If cloud, user pays fixed fee for cloud and still can go for pay-once for all saas
> single subscriptions will be obsolete
> super subscription is the new solution. One fee to use all 1000 SaaS tools.
> saas tool makers get revenue share

[Why 1000 products?]
The vision is too far ahead of time and sounds crazy or even absurd (dumb).
To make it work, I'm building the first 1000 SaaS tools and solving the attention/distribtion myself + partners.

[End]
I'll be inviting makers into the alliance in 2024. Once we launch 100 products and run the first stage of proof of concept.

The lowest-hanging SEO fruit I do in 5 min which always works.

1) Go to search.google.com
2) Open "Performance" page
3) Sort the "Queries" tab by "Impressions"
4) In the top 20, find top 5 queries with "CTR" < 50%
5) Insert them to your home page hero, h1/h2 & meta tags

I wake up at 10AM and work from bed on my phone until 2PM.

I got no todo list,
No sleep routine.
No daily goals,
No system.
I drink sugared water.
I eat fat food, meat, carbs, junk food.
No gym.
Drink beer few times a week.

But somehow I managed to build a number of profitable businesses.

The old saying says: if you wanna make a baby, you must make love with an opposite sex.

Same with startups. If you wanna make a good startup, do the startup.

All modern cool trends such cold showers are simply the giant procrastination schema.
Don’t fall for it.
Just keep building stuff and selling the stuff you build to the users. That’s it.

'Fast' beats the Sh*t out of Perfect.

Capitalism throws negative force at you.
Founders who aren't fast simply move backward.

I'll have 50 profitable products on the market in 2024. I'm on track.
My Way of Building SaaS tools & directories FAST 👇

1. Kill My Ego.
I do what my project needs me to do, Not what I wanna do. It's not a game. I'm not trying out a new framework or sdk because it's tempting. I'm fully a slave of my product and the product is my master.

2. I invent and give up on ideas fast.
I may be telling my friends that this is the best idea I ever had today, and tomorrow I'm dropping the same idea because I slept on it and it doesn't sound good anymore.
It's not politics where I have to do what I promised.
The moment I feel the idea isn't amazing, I drop it.
I might rethink it later and start it over again.
But I'm decisive on both starting/pausing/ending.

3. The 1/99 ratio
The 1% of effort brings 99% of my results.
For example, it took me 20 minutes to write the tweet about CountVisits, add a stripe payment link, and get lots of pre-sales. The text was so-so, and the demo was just okay. Not perfect. Very fast. Validated.
Today I did the next step: countvisits.com
It took me 5 minutes to make this landing page, I just picked a random template inside @unicornplatform and asked AI to fill it in based on my tweet.
Then I spent 2 minutes generating the logo inside chatGPT and 5 minutes adjusting the content.
It's not perfect. But it took me 30 min. I'm moving on, I have way more important tasks.

4. Fast>Perfect
I use simple & limited tools only. Because it's easy to use them. In chatgpt, I get a logo by chat writing 10 word prompt. I could go and find a better AI logo maker tool, but I don't wanna waste time searching, signing up, paying, and filling up all the fields. The same goes for Unicorn Platform where I nearly instantly make the landing page.

If there is something I want on the page that's not supported by Unicorn, what do I do? I say "who cares". I go with what's supported.

The ironic part here is that every single day I help founders who use Unicorn to implement their strange custom needs. But inside my head, I'm thinking "Man, why are you wasting your time on this? Nobody cares about this little cute animation or button design".

5. Autopilots.
If there is an AI Agent or Automated tool that does the job, I will never go for an advanced tool, even if it's 10x better.
A good example is Semrush/ahrefs.
Both are advanced and cool.
But to use them, I either need a dedicated marketing person or spend my own time clicking the buttons and figuring out things.
Instead, I use @seobotai. It sucks compared to a pro-human + pro version of Semrush. But I spend literally no time. So I chose to spend 0 hours and get an okay result, then spend 20 hours and get a good result. At least at the start.

6. Analytics.
So many founders are obsessed with analytics.
I don't give a sh*t in most cases.
Most of my products have no analytics at all.
I have a waitlist form or payment button. This is the only KPI that's actually important.
Could I count the visits and maybe optimize the conversion? maybe, but in reality, I'd be solving a problem that doesn't exist.

Why? Because almost every project gonna get zero traffic. Why would I spend time trying to measure, A/B test, and optimize a page, that has zero traffic?

My focus at the early stage of the product is purely the distribution. I need to get the traffic. Once I see sign-ups and payments, it means I got the traffic. So now I might put some time into conversion and analytics.

The harsh truth is that most likely everything I ever launch won't get users/sales. So I don't invest time into things that are only relevant once you have sales/users.

7. Idea.
Ideas are the simplest part of the puzzle.
Henry Ford: “Everything can always be done better than it is being done.”
There is no need to do market research, competitor analysis, etc.
Pick pretty much anything that you can sell, and build a better version of it.
Make sure there is Founder-Product-Fit.
I do it this way
> Am I an active user of this?
> Do I have ideas on how to make it perfect for me?
> Can I find the audience for this product?
> Can I win their attention?
> Can I build it in 1 month max?
> Is it a global tool?
> Is it b2b?

Another way of coming up with ideas is to look at Google Keywords Planner and search for random stuff there to find high-traffic keywords. Then search for those on Google and see if there is any tool on top of Google. I often use it to come up with Directory ideas.

8. Product Features
I put 90% of my focus on onboarding and 10% on the features after onboarding.
People buy the tool based on their onboarding experience. The first 5 min.
I don't pay much attention at the early stage to the features that won't be discovered by the user in the first 5 min.
Inside the product, I focus on 1 feature only. I pick that one feature that's the most important and I make it perfect, near amazing.
It works so well in marketing later.
I go out and say: see this feature, how amazing it is here compared to a "competitor". It's 10x better.
Users Never evaluate the product based on the quantity of the features. They evaluate it based on your best features. So I put 90% of my focus on one best feature.
It saves me a crazy amount of time.
Later I add more, seeing what people ask for.

9. Marketing.
I only do the marketing that is not time-consuming.
I don't go to conferences and I don't do calls.
It's a waste of time in my world.
There is almost no value in closing a customer over the call for a B2B product that's below $500 LTV. It cannot be scaled.
I do this
> Earn the attention of my audience in social media by content creation. I start doing it the day I come up with the idea. It takes time. I read a lot of analytics, reports, and wisdom about the topic. I start forming my own opinions. I do experiments to validate some of my theories. If it works, I share it with the audience. Eventually, my audience respects my opinion and wants to hear more. The moment I launched the product for the same audience, I earned enough respect that they bothered to try or buy it.
> I have done SEO from day one. I spend half an hour to make sure I have good keywords on the home page. After that, I turn the SEObot on and forget it. My sites run on Unicorn, so I know it's all good in terms of all typical SEO fu*kups. I saw many founders with websites that were terrible for SEO (some weren't even SSR).
> Listing on other websites and directories turned out to be the best way to get first users for most of my products back when I had no social media followers. Used listingbott.com ofc.

10. Pricing.
I always do very simple pricing. Just one price at the start. Usually LTD instead of subscription.
The whole pricing saga takes me about 5 minutes.
It can always be changed later. No need to be a genius here.

11. Decisions and Action.
The most important part of my routine is this.
I do stuff instantly.
I have no to-do list, no planning.
If someone sends me a message, I answer right away.
If I come up with an idea for a better text headline, I go and edit it right away.
If I feel like I picked the wrong "main" feature, I go and redo it right now. Not tomorrow, but right now.
I switch between the tasks all the time.
While writing this tweet, I answered 20 support requests and 9 DMs here on X.
Most say "Focus..focus..focus". But I say: learn to switch context instantly between any tasks and get up to a productive state immediately.
The real world won't let me focus on things for hours and days if I'm a founder.
I need to answer in the support chat instantly, this will turn those complaining users into fans.
I need to reply to every single DM and comment. I reply to 200-500 a day.
I turn all those tasks into background tasks that I do on autopilot.

[Future of Startups]
The competition in the startup world is growing insane.
It'll be 100x in the next years because AI and NoCode tools just changed the game.
I don't believe the not-fast founders have a chance.
I believe the "slow founder" will go extinct.
This applies to both multi product makers like me, but also to those who are building one product only.
There will be many other makers entering the game, who move fast in the same niche and they will win.

I Bet on Single-Purpose Tools in 2024!
or How Bootstrapped Founders Eat the VC World.

The old world was ruled by VC-funded Silicon Valley startups with one thing in common: unicorn size TAM (total addressable market).

Let's say ToolX has 1 million users and 25 features.
Maybe 1% of their users use only 1 feature.
This means building a single-purpose tool that has only one feature makes sense for those 10k users.
In fact, most likely reading social media, quora, and Reddit it's possible to hear the complaints about that specific feature and improve it in this single-purpose tool.

Pricing-wise, most likely the ToolX charges double or triple digits every month since it has 25 features. But for a user that ends up using just one feature, this makes little sense and bad ROI. In 2024, most users are gonna reconsider their spending on SaaS.

In fact, paying monthly for this feature makes no sense too. The updates aren't really important. Most of us use tools and don't even notice updates or even find them disturbing.
Here is a fun exercise: Bring me back to 2018 to the old version of all SaaS tools I use and I'd be totally fine. Nothing has been added over the last 6 years that's so valuable for me. I believe it's the same case for most users.

So offering the single-purpose product on a lifetime deal that does that one thing really well and fits my needs perfectly sounds like the best deal ever.

In 2023 I discovered the world of directories and validated it with 3 viral directories. This year I already put it on autopilot to launch 100 directories in total and score 1-10 million visitors monthly, to channel them to my premium products. Also, I'll launch the directory-ad-network at the end of Q1, as promised earlier in 2023.

The premium products are the single purpose hyper niched tools.
I plan to build over 100 of these.

Since my life's mission is to help bootstrapped makers eat the heavily VC-funded startups and the corporate world, I will describe every single step, from ideation to scoping, building, and marketing, so that more makers can do this.

Starting on it next week with my first launch scheduled.