I Make $15K/Month With 2 AI Apps | Starter Story

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1:02This is the way. Our only chance is to work together. I'm the life this game. Always wear your seatbelt. Star Wars, the Mandalorian and Grogu now streaming on Disney Plus. Wait, PG 13. I personally used to think that I could never ship a profitable product because I was not amazing at coding. I reached this point when I'm earning 15k out of my products. It feels unreal. How did this guy build two SaaS products to $15,000 MRR as an average coder? Well, it's because of his approach on how to find winning ideas. When you niche down as much as possible, I only need 0.1% of the market and I'm good. Fernando started his journey as an agency owner, working with clients for over a decade. But then, his entrepreneurial dreams came to a halt when he had to go back to his 9-5 job. While working my 9-5, I was always there dreaming about what to do. Deep down, I knew I wanted to find a way to go back to the sense of autonomy that I had

2:05at one point. After unexpectedly getting fired, he decided he had enough and went all in on his dream. Now this takes very real. I always rely on my 9-5, but not anymore. I needed to show up and build something. A year after he took the leap, Fernando became a solopreneur, making a good living while working only 4 hours a day. So I gave him a call to ask him how he did it and how you guys watching could do something similar. And he shares everything, including his process for finding profitable ideas, his strategy for building and validating those ideas quickly, and the distribution channel that gets him most of his paying customers. When it comes to the distribution for both Resom and Maker.Line and Icarusels, this is the main channel. Alright, let's dive in. I'm Pat Walls, and this is StarterStory. Welcome man, thanks for coming on StarterStory. Tell us about who you are and what business you built. So well, I am Fernando, a pro designer originally from Argentina, now living in Sweden and

3:09working in two SaaS projects full-time. Resom and Maker.Line and Icarusels. When it comes to Resom and Maker.Line, I'd like to define it as the easiest way to build your Resom and then there's acarusels.com, which I launched last year and needs the first Aicarusels generator. And it allows users to create stunning social media carousels, even if you don't know anything about design. Both products run on a free model, so you can start right away for free, but subscriptions unlock all the AI and Pro features. Together they're bringing in about 15kimera, which allow me to finally step away from the 925 and just hope stays that way. Okay, since you've built not one, but two successful projects, can you tell us a little bit more about your process for how to find winning ideas? I always find it easier to scratch my own age when I see something that I know that it can be time-consuming. I thought it could be a great idea. Why not creating something that simplifies these problems, instead of having multiple features like Canva, Enbato. Most users are no pro users.

4:10It's one of the simplest ways to achieve something. That's the advantage of being a solo entrepreneur. Canva cannot afford to go for a very specific solution, because they need to target a wider audience. So I think that's where solo entrepreneurs can try to niche down as much as possible, find the portion of a huge market that they can serve better than these big companies. With Aicarusels, it's only me, I don't have Acophander, I don't have employees. I only need 0.1% of the market, and I'm good. I think there's very fertile ground for indie hackers or entrepreneurs to create solutions that are later focused and solve one specific issue. All right, so your approach is to take these big markets and niche it down and build one simple solution for users. But how do you look at validating these ideas, and how do you know that it's something worth building? I go after markets that are already validated, but I try to be just a little bit different, take a new approach. With the resume market that online, all these resume builders were really bloated.

5:13You needed to sign up for, before you even see how the resume is going to look like. I took a completely different approach. You just press one button. You're right there. You can see how good it's looking already, and I think people are really resonated with that. That's my philosophy. I think that's going to be my philosophy going forward. Let's take a validated market, niche down, and find a way to save people time. I always say that I don't sell design. I sell time. That's the value that I provide. I help you to get you to good enough point, and that's more than enough, sometimes. Validating your idea is one of the most important steps when it comes to starting something new, and Fernando is proof of that. Profitable side projects are built on the right idea, the right market, and the right launch strategies. But that process to go from zero to one can be long, and it might make you feel lost if you aren't following a solid blueprint. That's why I created the Academy. It's a five week program where you'll find an idea, build it, launch it, validate it, all while only working two hours a day. It's the same framework I use to build a million dollar business, and it's what I've seen

6:16thousands of other successful founders use. It's what actually works, because it's all about taking action and actually building stuff and putting it out into the world, which is what I really want to see you take a shot at. So if you're curious about building a side project like Fernando, and you want to surround yourself with other builders, then head to the first link in the description to see if the Academy might be a good fit for you. Now let's get back to Fernando's story in the amazing business he built. Okay, now let's talk about actually building the product. I know you did a 10 day challenge to go from zero to one with AI carousels. Yeah. Can you tell us a little bit more about that approach? While working at my nine to five hours, always they dream about what to do. After a year and a half working there, it's just a few weeks after a very positive performance review, they tell me that I'm fire. That was just one day before my planned vacations. And obviously I was quite burnt out from the nine to five that left such a sour taste in my mouth, so I was not very optimistic and I didn't really want to find another job.

7:17I think maybe this was the push that I needed. Low energy, unfocused, foggy, you might be dehydrated. Whether it's hot yoga over 100 degree weather or too much sun, gator light with a specialized blend of five electrolytes was scientifically designed to help move fluids into the body faster for rapid rehydration. Shop now at retailers nationwide. Gator light hydrates faster than water. Is it in you? Symptoms noted are signs of mild to moderate dehydration, consult to healthcare professional if symptoms persist.

8:21This is the way our only chance is to work together. I like this game. Always wear your seatbelt. Star Wars, the Mandalorian and Grogo now streaming on Disney Floss. Wait PG 13. Now the stakes were real. I always rely on my nine to five, but not anymore. I need to show up and build something. So I thought, okay, let's go for a building public challenge. The first day I tried to get the main features running, also as a designer, and given that this is a design product, it had to look somewhat nice, but it was really, really simple. The most basic tech services you could create. It's a good thing also to launch these bare-boned products because then when you start getting feedback, the feedback tells you where to go. The biggest value that I get from this challenge is that if you without fail, I could have move on into the next thing without any issues. But if you work for around six months, one year on a product, it's easy to get attached.

9:24It can be harsh to hear the product sucks, right? If I launch in the future, I would like to try to replicate this sense of urgency. Wow, that's an awesome story. Thank you for sharing that. So after you built the MVP, I see that you then launched on product time. Can you tell me more about that launch? Yeah, despite my concerns, the launch went really well for AIKerosols and five users sang up and people can say that they like your product and you might have intuition that there's the demand for it, but the ultimate validation is when you get paid for it, right? And the product was super baggy. For me, that was like the ultimate proof. If they pay for this baggy product, there's really an opportunity here. I need to double down. So after you get those first five customers, how did you continue to get more of them? What kind of distribution methods did you use? When it comes to distribution for both resume maker.online and AIKerosols, the product hand helped a lot to spread the word about, especially with resume maker.online winning first product of the week. It was pretty so quickly and I got so many backlinks.

10:25But then SEO is the main channel. And I'm definitely better at building that on marketing. So I started building a lot of free tools for both products. I think it's about 30. It just has to be something complementary to your main product like a natural extension. It's a good way to bring in traffic, especially if you're not a SEO expert. The building public also helps to spread the word on Twitter or on LinkedIn. I think people like, especially when you try to make it personal, can be a bit cringe sometimes. But that's LinkedIn. Also, you launch an affiliate program for both products, which is working okay. It's in progress. Yeah. So after you started to get more paying customers, was there a specific pricing strategy you used to monetize the product to its potential? Pricing it was a bit tricky at the beginning. I mean, I knew it wasn't beta. So I launched it at a 999. Now I, after adding so many features and the product has much here so much, it's a 1495. And I want to be seen as an affordable tool, not a cheap one, right?

11:26And when it comes to resume, make it that online. I started with a one time purchase model, which made total sense for the type of product. But after I launched it as a SaaS earlier this year, even though the turn is high, the revenue is much more predictable. It's really nice because, yeah, with one time purchases, you go back to see your, that's a bit scary each time. Yeah. Got it. Okay. I want to double click into the topic of turn. Do you have a strategy you used to reduce turn for AI carousels? Yeah, that my strategy was to start with carousels, but expand and offer other tools. So people might come for the carousels and they stay for a whole package. It's way easy to communicate the proposition value when you can focus on only one, the core message, which in this case is carousels. It's easier for me to stand out among all the competitors by presenting myself as the best AI carousel generator. But when people come, they find out that there's a lot of other tools that they can use to maximize their online presence. That's really helping to make the product better so people don't cancel about to being

12:27expired users back. I want to go into the topic of customer support. I know it can be tricky as a solepreneur. So how do you go about it? Yeah. And when it comes to customer support, I think it's key. I mean, I think that's another like product feature. It's part of the experience. And I try to just reply as fast as possible because it's not only about helping users for me, especially when I launch, getting this initial feedback was a bit like a cheat code. Not only helped to shape the direction of the pro, but also turned all these frustrated customers into loyal fans because we write about the bug or feature requests. And maybe in like an hour, the bug is fixed and the feature is up. And I always try to embrace being small. Even I have in both versions of Maker and the AI carousels I have in a bug page that I'm saying, it's only me here. You know, you want to talk in direct with a founder. And on the emails, he's like, it's I, it's never we. It's Fernando, the sole founder. And I really try to embrace that instead of pretending to be like a big company. And I feel like that's really working.

13:28People don't want to deal with a faceless big company. I think as sole entrepreneurs, we should leverage on that. Okay. Now let's get technical. Which tools and software do you use to make $15,000 a month as a solepreneur? Yeah, when it comes to tools, I keep things very lean. I just use notion to organize both products. I use audita. It's a no code tool that is perfect for such founders. For me, no code is ideal for speeding up all the basic things like feelings, CRM, subscriptions, all the repetitive stuff that you don't need to reinvent. It let me say just focus on improving the actual product. Yeah, that's basically it. Wow, that is lean. And how much does it actually cost to run your businesses? The costs are around like 1,000 per month. So the product margins are above 99% and not all having employees or founders is only me. Although this year I did bring a freelancer to help me some more time consuming content tasks. So yeah, I just bring him in whenever I need to do some type of stuff like that.

14:31Jeez, 90% margin is impressive. Wow. Let's talk about competition. I'm sure since you're building invalidated markets that you've faced low energy, unfocused foggy, you might be dehydrated, whether it's hot yoga over 100 degree weather or too much sun. Gatorlight with a specialized blend of five electrolytes was scientifically designed to help move fluids into the body faster for rapid rehydration. Shop now at retailers nationwide. Gatorlight hydrates faster than water. Is it in you? These noted are signs of mild to moderate dehydration, consult a healthcare professional and symptoms persist. Instagram teen accounts come with automatic protections that limit who can contact teens, the content they can see and the time they spend on the app. Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at Instagram.com slash teen accounts. Star Wars The Mandalorian and Grogu is now streaming on Disney

15:33Plus. The must see galactic adventure comes home on Disney Plus. This is the way our only chance is to work together on the life of this game. Always wear your seatbelt. Star Wars The Mandalorian and Grogu now streaming on Disney Plus. Wait PG 13. It's a lot of it. How do you deal with competitors? I'm glad the competition exists. I mean, it's a good sign. You don't want to be in the only one. Also, it can be easy, I think, to get cut up and try to one up each other, all the competitors with a new cool feature when often usage care about something entirely different. So that's why I keep my focus on the user feedback. Alright, now let's get a little bit more personal. What is your actual day to day look like right now? After so many hectic years of managing my office job with my personal projects, I moved to different countries, I switched jobs, launched products.

16:35Early this year I decided to take things a bit slower just to enjoy the summer. So I decided to work only four hours a day. And it was quite difficult first. I keep thinking about the opportunity to cost right, watching the movie thinking about I could be working, I could be shipping features. But it turned out to be just the best decision for the business. Things start going even better by working less time. So I decided to stick with these four hours of deep work each morning. Having this constant strain kind of forces you to be intentional about your tutorialist. You focus on what's important. One thing I do is though is I make sure to work even on weekends. I feel that really keeps the momentum going. It feels great just to skip the daily stand-ups of past nine to five. I work out without any alarm. My color is empty only how do you call. What I'm getting by from friends, I'm always available. I'm in a better mood, I'm happier overall. I'm more patient with my girlfriend. This gives me also the mental clarity to focus on what's important on the business.

17:37I think that's why the business is doing better because I am feeling better. I mean that's more important to optimize for life. No, no, no for revenue. Okay, Fernando. The last question that we always ask all the founders that we interview. If you could give a piece of advice to all solar pernivers just starting out right now, what would you say? Yeah, sure. I personally used to think that I could never ship a profitable product because I was not amazing at coding. I have all these self-imiting beliefs and I was wrong. Most of the times, especially in B2C products, users don't need like a super complex solution. They're just one simple one. So if you can provide a way to make something faster, simpler, that is value and most likely people are going to pay for it. There's absolutely nothing but of focusing on building a tiny little tool that takes people time. You could pay and free up time for you to do whatever you care in life. I mean, I'll be honest, I personally couldn't care less about social media curses. Like, I like helping people with all these essential challenges but what I care is curing

18:39something that allows me to free up my time, have your life spend time with my family, with my girlfriend, spend a bit less time on the front of the screen. Being able to do that, having that freedom, that's so cool. And that's for me, it's something that's not in the chart but this is what I'm doing. This allows me to improve my lifestyle and that's what I'm here for you. Alright, man, thank you for coming on. I love the business that you built. Thank you for sharing everything with our audience. Have a good one. Hey guys, thanks for watching and if you made it this far, I want to share something with you. As you've seen with a ton of these interviews we've done on YouTube, anybody can change their life with an idea, the ability to code in a couple of hours of work per day. In these videos we talk about tons of cool strategies and tactics but the thing that's really going to get you your dream outcome is taking action. And if you feel like you're struggling at all with that no matter what you do, then I highly recommend checking out the Academy. It's the community and accountability that I wish that I had when I first started and

19:43it's got a ton of resources to help you find an idea, help you ship that product and help you get those first users. And I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace. Hello. Look what TJ Max dragged out. The Devil Wears product too is now streaming on Disney Plus and Hulu. We are digital, we are downloadable, we are streamable. The fashion event of the year is certified fresh. Pull yourself together we have work to do. Critics say it's smart and witty and the perfect sequel. That's all. Get runway ready for the Devil Wears product too on Disney Plus and Hulu, RIDD PG 13.