My 2 year journey to building a successful product ($2,700 MRR)
February 14, 2023: Running a successful SaaS since 1.5 years back, but as the marketing/sales founder. It’s not the project I actually want to do. I want to be the one building products. Product is everything.
July 14, 2023: 0 coding skills. Signed up for App Academy free bootcamp to learn to code.
December 13, 2023: Finished App Academy. Started building out my first product—a lead qualification form.
February 12, 2024: Deployed the finished app.
March 3, 2024: My brother joins me as co-founder in trying to market the app.
June 19, 2024: Built another product on the side, Tinder Roast. Still trying to get users for the main app.
July 7, 2024: First commit for 3rd product, Buildpad.
August 1, 2024: After 171 days of trying to get the main app to work, we finally abandon it.
August 12, 2024: Abandoned 2nd side project too. These are times of a lot of doubt.
August 19, 2024: Launched the MVP of Buildpad. Get a few early users. Maybe we have something here?
September 2, 2024: After 2 weeks of grinding marketing, we hit 100 free users on the MVP. The times are a-changing.
September 30, 2024: Built out the full version of Buildpad and launched on Product Hunt. First paying customer. Relief.
October 25, 2024: One month later, 40 paying customers.
Today: Buildpad has now reached close to 150 paying customers and $2,700 MRR. We just released Buildpad 2.0 and I think this is the update that will take us to $10k MRR.
I know there’s a lot of people that find themselves on the same journey but in the part where there’s little success and a lot of uncertainty and doubt.
There’s only one way to get through it. Work harder. Writing out my journey like this makes it look easy but for most of it I had no idea if things were actually going to work out.
The only thing I could do was trust the work I was putting in. And that’s what I’ll continue doing to reach $10k MRR, $100k MRR, and go beyond.
You can do it too, if you want to.
Impressive persistence. It’s easy to read a timeline like this and overlook the uncertainty and second-guessing that happens in between. I work in technical marketing, SEO, and product advocacy at a product-based startup, so I know the grind of trying to get traction.
You mentioned grinding on marketing early on—what actually moved the needle? Was it pure consistency, or were there specific channels or strategies that made the biggest impact?
I’d say consistency with high volume targets. We got our early users from posting on X, especially in the build in public community, and that came from doing a lot of posts and replies per day.
Thank you!
Inspirational to read it. I've been coding much longer, yet... I've never started and always wanted to somehow/somewhere.
Thanks for sharing. I've been on a similar path and also on my third product. Every product has seemed to be closer to sticking and I think that's the case with the one I'm currently on.
It takes time to grow this way and I'm super excited for your next post at $10k MRR!
That's awesome. Wishing you the best!
Great journey, seems like you're just getting started. Curious, did you develop this type of drive recently or do you have past experience in hardcore work/study (e.g. u use to be in investment banking or studied pre-med at one point in your life, military, etc)?
I was always driven but when I was younger I channeled it into video games and sports.
During the past year it has intensified. I think part of it comes from reading about people with a lot of drive, such as Elon Musk, Kobe Bryant, and Bill Gates. When I read that they are putting in 80+ hour work weeks I ask myself, why can't I do that?
We should be seeing more of this on HN.
The hard work and dedication are commendable for sure. Are you full time on this, or is it passive income at this point?
I'm sure many people will have positive things to say. So, to keep the conversation interesting let me make some counterpoints and questions, please don't take it the wrong way, I think it's great whenever somebody upstarts and independent project and gets paid for it.
- What's the growth curve look like, and the cost to acquire new customers?
- I'd worry about getting stuck working on things that hit local maximums. Will it hit $10k? That's still less than a reasonable dev job where you probably don't have to work as hard. The current amount is akin to minimum wage I think.
- Can you make it passive/part-time? In case it doesn't scale the way you envision.
- Are you actually building and providing a novel tech solution, or is it something that chatgpt or perplexity will do good enough for free in a few months? Not to be a downer, but as someone in your potential target audience, I see what's going on with your site and would personally just set up my own prompt chain to get 95% of the value on my own with other AI tools.
Yes, doing it full-time. Cost to acquire new customers has been $0, we're growing organically and through content marketing.
I believe we could hit $10k just repeating what we're doing now. But we're currently looking at where to best spend our earnings in order to scale faster.
I get the AI wrapper objection, but Chatgpt or other LLMs can't do what Buildpad does. For example, when verifying demand for your solution (this is one of the phases users go through) Buildpad will generate and host a "research page" for you that will help with taking in feedback from your target audience and make the whole validation process a lot easier.
I appreciate your perspective and I'd be lying if I said that what we're doing isn't a risk. But I personally get so much enjoyment out of building my own product and having users that appreciate it, that all the hard work makes it worth it. And the idea that we can make it into something huge is very motivating too. For me, it's a risk well worth taking.
That's great, I forgot to mention but I'd also look very closely at user retention. Because maybe there's a risk people try it and realize they can do enough with conventional AI tools, which would indicate you should add new value-add features, etc.
In general, I think these niches can work if the startup is consistent about adding new valuable features ahead of what broad AI can do, so the users feel like they're getting value going to their "all in one" place for this. For example, maybe your research page helps people who don't want to use a separate site to make surveys.
It's still not my cup of tea but perhaps I'll see it sometime down the line and change my mind :)
Let him cook...
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