From idea to first paying customer in 10 weeks — building AçaíGigs in public
Hey IH 👋
I'm Leonardo, solo founder building AçaíGigs — a unified gig discovery platform for freelance developers.
The problem I'm solving: developers waste 10+ hours/week manually checking Upwork, LinkedIn, and other platforms for projects. By the time they apply, several proposals are already in. The ones winning are the ones who apply in the first hour.
AçaíGigs aggregates opportunities from all platforms into one dashboard and sends real-time alerts when a matching gig drops — based on your imported dev profile.
Where I am today:
• 1 paying customer (cold — found the landing page without me asking)
• 19 founding member spots left at $10/month
• MVP build starts after reaching 3 paying customers
• Solo founder, bootstrapped, no VC
Planning to share weekly updates here. Would love feedback from anyone who's built dev tools or marketplaces.
Landing page: launch.acaigigs.com
What's the hardest part of your first 10 customers? Curious what worked for others.
Interesting idea. What I didn't get is where did you get gigs from. Also, you need to improve the color palette, my eyes are bleeding.
thank you for the feedback. I used to be a back-end dev and this color combination is not one of my strengh. But be sure it will be improved.
The gigs will come initially from 3 different platforms: Upwork, 99Freelas (from Brazil), and Workana (South America). But after the MVP release other integrations will be made
Checking multiple job boards manually is a massive time sink that usually results in applying to projects that are already saturated with hundreds of bids. Most developers find that tailoring their profile to highlight niche problem-solving rather than just listing languages leads to a much higher conversion rate even with less frequent applications. Have you considered adding a feature that analyzes the average bid amount for similar projects to help users price themselves better?
Thank you very much for your question. I have not considered yet. A feature like this you suggested can be analyzed and developed in the future if we understand our users benefits with that. For now, the purpose is to put the developer in front of everyone else in the application process.
Being the first to apply is definitely the most effective way to beat the "crowd effect" on platforms like Upwork because it ensures the client sees your proposal before they get overwhelmed.
Focusing purely on speed for the MVP is the right move since the value of a gig discovery tool lives or dies by how much of a head start it gives the freelancer over the competition.
I see this same need for speed in my high-tier PR and media placement work where we have to jump on breaking news cycles immediately to secure authority placements for brands on major outlets.
Are you planning to allow users to set up custom keyword alerts so they only get notified for high-intent projects that match their specific stack?
Users will be able to set up custom keywords in the future. We are not covering this feature in the MVP
Makes sense to keep the MVP lean. Once you do add keyword filtering, even a simple stack-based tag system (React, Node, etc.) could do a lot of the heavy lifting without overcomplicating the UX.
I agree with you. The keyword filtering feature will certainly become a must-have requirement for a version 1.0 or 2.0