Hello Everyone! I’m Domenico from Italy. I’d define my personality as a wave that is always in motion, never stopping.
In my full-time job, I’m a Business Analyst for Mexican Fintech. I started this new exciting job in Jan 2022. I have a bachelor’s degree in Economics and Management. As you can understand from these few lines, I love startups, I love the No-code movement, and everything around the tech world.
In this short article, I will tell you how I co-built and co-sold 3 micro-startups in 6 months starting at $0, with no code, and having a full-time job.
The Beginning 🔗
It all started almost 1.2 years ago on Twitter. A new challenge was launched: The Build & Sell Challenge (https://twitter.com/BuildSell30).
Few lines about this challenge:
- You needed to build and sell something in 30 days
- You needed to validate your idea in 1–2 weeks
- The challenge was open to everyone
- A sequence of activities suggested by the organization
It was an interesting challenge (first edition). So we decided to join it, and challenge ourselves.
Oh, in this adventure there was also my friend Tanveer -> https://twitter.com/idonotwritecode — Follow him, he’s amazing!
First Product 🔗
For participating in this challenge we needed to build and sell in a very fast way. The first part is very important: the building phase! You don’t need to waste a lot of time on it — check the last part of this article for all the lessons I learned.
For building the product in a quick way, you needed to use no code. It was not requested, but if you want to build the first version of a product in 1 week, you MUST use it.
We decided to build the first product based on creating an automatic Pitch Deck starting from info like the Startup name, market, team, problem, and solution. We built and shipped the website in 1 week (we were at the beginning of Jan).
This is the website -> https://pitch2point0.com/
We reached more than 100 users in a few weeks, having 3 paid users. To be honest, it was not a lot in terms of revenue, but this was just our first project together, so it was fine for us.
We never did ads. We spent $0 on marketing. All our traffic, also for the second startup, was organic.
We built and sold this first micro-startup in 2 months. We closed our deal at the end of Feb.
Second Product 🔗
After the sale of our first product, we decided to go on with the second one. It wasn’t planned, but we had gotten along well together. So we decided to focus on something else.
The second product we built has received good success: onetap.ai (Now https://lumelixr.ai/)
It was an AI product (GPT-3) focused on translating text requests into Excel Formulas.
For this product, we reached more than 500 users, with a total income of around $5k in 2 months (from Apr to May).
From Mid March to June
We closed the deal at the end of June.
Third Product 🔗
The third product was always related to the AI field. In that case, it was a cover letter builder, and the website is still active.
How does it work? Pretty simple: you can generate cover letters in seconds according to your job application and your past experiences. So you can upload your last resume, add more details about the job position you’re applying for, and that’s it. Your Cover Letter will generate your perfect cover letter in seconds. You can always edit the final version, and download a PDF.
We launched this tool on Jul 22, and I sold it on Oct 22. We had more than 300 users, and (more or less) $800 in revenue.
Marketing Channels and selling platform 🔗
Since we have spent $0 on marketing, what did we use for our promotion? Here you can find a list of channels we used. However, they are subjective channels, so they depend on your product and the goal you want to achieve.
- Reddit -> Reddit communities are super useful, mostly in the validation stage
- Indie Hackers
- Twitter DMs -> search for people using hashtags (according to your target)
- Kernal Ideas -> the same as Reddit (validation stage)
- LinkedIn -> more professional
- Facebook Groups
- Online communities focused on your target
What did we use for the selling phase? We used the Microacquire platform. They are amazing, and you can reach your goal very quickly.
ROI 🔗
Okay, it’s all beautiful, but how much do we earn from these adventures? For privacy rules, I can’t say the amount of money, but I can tell you the % of ROI we had.
- Pitch 2.0 -> ROI 4000%
- Onetap -> ROI 4600%
- Yourcoverletter.com -> ROI 700%
We invested a little amount of money since we used no code tech. The most significant expense we had was Bubble Plan at $39/m. That’s it.
How to manage your time 🔗
Since we both have full-time jobs, the most important part was managing this time. So what is the advice for reaching these goals by having a full-time job?
Be constant with your liabilities. Work every day, also for a small amount of hours. For example, I dedicated at least 1h/per day to my side projects. This is so important. Of course, I also used weekends for managing these projects.
Is it stressful? It depends on your point of view. I love this, so it wasn’t stressful for me, also because it brought so much satisfaction.
Use a time-management strategy. For example, I love SCRUM Planning. Use it!
OpenAI 🔗
I want to dedicate a short paragraph to OpenAI. First of all, if you don’t know it, read here: https://openai.com/about/
We used GPT-3 for the last product we sold (Your Cover Letter, and Onetap). I believe that OpenAI + No Code tech is the best combination you could create for building amazing products, in a very short time.
It’s not so easy at the beginning, but you can find a lot of youtube videos for learning it very quickly.
Now a lot of products are built on this tech. Use it.
What I’m doing now 🔗
After this amazing journey, now I’m focusing my attention on 2 main things:
- Investing
- Building a micro-startup studio here: https://twitter.com/theomegastudio
