AMA: I built 6 startups in 6 months, sold one, tripled my revenue goal

Hey fellow makers, it's Phuc. 👋

7 months ago, I quit my job to start indie hacking full-time and posted about how I prepared to quit and was gonna do 6 startups in 12 months (many of you have liked it).

A few days after the post, I added a goal of making $12K in 12 months (together with building 6 startups). It was inspired by learnings from Jon Yongfook's video and Andrey Azimoz's hardcore year (thank guys).

Today, I completed the goals, I built 6 startups in 6 months, sold one of them last month, & nearly tripled my revenue goal.

I'll summarize the questions & answers that I think are the most common and useful in this post. Feel free to ask me any questions in the comments below if you can't find your questions already, I'll answer and consider adding them to the post later. 🙌

What I built?

1. Queue - Twitter Scheduling Tool for Notion (acquired)
2. Nora - Project Management Template for Notion ($8K in sales)
3. nbundle - App Platform for Notion (retired)
4. Daily - Simple scratchpad for pretty much anything ($0)
5. Clean Mac Desktop - Clean Mac Desktop files & folders (42 sales, hiring a freelancer to develop further)
6. Animatable - Collection of animated web components (I were a bit burned out by this stage and couldn't really finish this, I cheated by turning it into a newsletter 😅)

Why 6 startups?

I started building 6 startups in 12 months to build myself a habit of launching early and shipping frequently, not to expect one of the startups to become successful.

(Read more how I explained it 7 months ago)

In retrospect, the original answer remains, but I'll tell it a bit differently:

Instead of shooting for success right from the beginning, I spent the first year building myself the habits which will likely lead me to success later on and making sure they stick.

Depending on each person's goal and situation, these habits may vary. For me, it was to ship more, earlier, and more frequently.

What was great?

Together with getting used to launching early and shipping frequently, I grew a lot during the process:

• From having 1 product with 4 customers, now I have 6 products with 250+ customers.

• I grew my audience on Twitter from 3,000 to 11,000 followers along the way.

• I have my tech stack set up now so that I can just duplicate and I'm good to go. I know how much it will cost, how to change it efficiently depending on the kind of application that I'm building, etc.

• I won't build in stealth mode for months until making a product live anymore. Nowadays, I'll feel annoyed if I've been working on a product for 2 weeks and it is not live yet. I'll figure out ways to make a product live in ≤ 2 weeks, or I won't work on it.

• I don't feel emotionally attached to my product anymore. Previously, if my product isn't good, I'd feel like I suck at building and because building products is a big part of my identity, I suck as a person. Nowadays, I'll let customers tell me what is not good, and I'll improve it. The trick is to make it just good enough that customers are willing to give feedback, if it is so bad, people won't talk to you.

How do I come up with ideas?

I don't keep any list of ideas. Instead, every Sunday I open Daily (my note-taking app) and spend a few hours writing down problems that are not related to my products but I spent a lot of time on.

For each idea, I expand it into a few points:

• What is the the first version that I can build in 3-5 days?
• Who are the customers of the first version? How much would each customer pay?
• What are different directions to grow this product? Who are the customers? Would I enjoy working on it then?

Repeat it a few times, an idea will resonate stronger & stronger with me until I can't help working on it.

It sounds unstructured but this exercise helps with focus on a few key points:

• I can get a product out quickly and validate from there.
• I know exactly who are my customers (as in I can say their names, not just a persona) before building.
• If it gets traction, I know exactly how I want to grow and sustain this product so that I will enjoy working on it in the long term.

How do I find customers?

Twitter, friends, and ProductHunt.

Having a Twitter audience is crucial in my process. I found most of my customers by just tweeting daily.

Another big source is Product Hunt launches, I wrote a post about how to launch on ProductHunt that many folks loved and successfully applied it.

Some of my customers are my indie friends, I'm in a few indie group chats, I just shared my products with them, and because some of them shared the problem, they became my customers 😊.

How do I build the first versions of my products?

After deciding on an idea, I'll either build it right away or talk to customers, depending on each idea.

If it's possible to build the first version within 3-5 days, I'll just build it, then share on Twitter, and go from there.

If it may take 2 weeks to build the first version, I'll name a few people I know who I think will be customers, I'll reach out to them, ask about the problem that I'm solving and what they are doing about it, I'll see if I can make it significantly cheaper or better. If it is 50% better, I won't do it. If it is at least 2x better, I'll build it and the person that I talked to will be the first user & customer, then I'll go from there.

Would I recommend 6 startups in 12 months to others?

Yes. I can't recommend enough, especially for those who are getting started.

Each product may not be the proudest thing that I can build because I had to scatter my energy between products, but I've grown & learned the most about bootstrapping software business in the last few months. These hands-on experience & skills are invaluable and will stay with me forever, I'm more ready than ever to focus on 1-3 products now.

Important: before taking the leap, be sure to prepare at least 2 years of runway.

What is my next steps?

As I've completed number of products goal, and total revenue goal, my next goal will be recurring revenue, specifically $20,000 MRR.

One thing I learned from the experience was that my revenue goal was too low for me to have to think seriously about who my customers are and why they are paying. This time I set the goal 4x higher than what would be enough for me ($5,000 MRR), so I'll have to be more serious about it.

I'll keep launching new products if I see strong path towards the goal in the new products. However, I'll reduce the frequency significantly to double down on 1-3 products that get traction.

That's it for now.

Feel free to ask your questions below if you can't find them already. I'll answer and consider adding them to the post later.

PS: if you're on Twitter, connect me at phuctm97, I share my journey every day on Twitter. 😉