Deep Dive: Usama Ejaz of SocialBu ($4k/mo)

Usama Ejaz was so positive that his business idea would be a success that he was willing to quit his day job and put his education on the line to pursue it. Not only that, he convinced his friends and co-founders to do the same thing.

We, the founders, are also all students. We've delayed some of our education to work on SocialBu. We risked our education, let go of our jobs, and fought anything that came in our way... Failure would be an unrecoverable and a critical blow.

To make matters worse, he had no funding, no users, and no experience making an app.

We started at zero, we even had to learn a lot of things to be able to start, and are still working to reach our destination. Things looked very blurry and confusing at the beginning.

But somehow, he overcame all these challenges. His social media management tool, SocialBu, now has 5,000 users and brings in $4,000 in MRR.

The first leg of the journey? Going from zero to one.

One of the hardest problems to solve in business is finding your first users. It costs money, time, etc., and if you don't have product-market fit, even the users you do manage to find will slip through the cracks.

And precisely because of the product-market fit problem, he didn't want to waste an opportunity to launch on the biggest product-listing site Product Hunt upfront.

So here's what he did instead.

The initial version was launched on BetaList... I kept collecting the feedback and got a few users along the way... We zeroed in on online communities, like Indie Hackers, startup and business related subreddits, and some Facebook groups... We also used Quora, where we answered questions relating to our area.

And then there were cold emails, reaching out to influencers, experimenting with early SEO. And pretty much none of that scales. Usama and his co-founders had to claw their way, without ever accepting a single bit of funding, to get traction.

And, now, Usama and his tea mare on the lookout for their first office.

We are profitable at the moment (even if it is very low profit) but the future looks bright and better. I believe we are going to make good progress in the coming year.

But then, a lot of that happened before COVID-19...

We were almost going smooth and then COVID happened and it disturbed our productivity. It took a lot of time to adjust.

Find out more about how SocialBu bounced back here.