From ten years of failed products to $10k/mo and five acquisitions

Joshua Tiernan failed for ten years, then sold a business. Then, he sold five more.

Most recently, No Code Founders and Tiny Empires were bringing in roughly $10k/mo before getting acquired.

Here's Joshua on how he does it. 👇

A serial failed founder

I'm a serial failed founder. I had ten years of making $0 online before getting my first break when I discovered Bubble.

My first Bubble app was a remote job board that specialized in showing you jobs that were hiring in your own timezone. It got acquired by We Work Remotely a few months later. Since then, I've sold five other no-code businesses. It seems my business model is building and selling micro-businesses.

For the past 6 years, I've been running nocodefounders.com and, more recently, the Tiny Empires Substack. These were both recently acquired too, but I've stayed on to continue running the community and content.

Before I sold them, they were averaging around $10k/mo, but it varied month to month — anywhere from $0 to $25k. We've got about 34,000 members.

The evolution of a no-code product

I initially started the No Code Founders as a free Slack group back in 2019, when the no-code movement started to take off.

As a non-coder, I had been fumbling my way around building products. But discovering Bubble allowed me to become a serious founder for the first time ever. I realized there were many other people in similar situations, and I set up the Slack group as a way to connect with them. It took a few months to reach the first 100 members, and it took a full year before I turned it into a business.

As the Slack group grew, I started a newsletter to share updates on what was being posted in the Slack. Each week, I would curate these and send them out so that everyone would jump back into conversations.

These natural conversations brought a lot of attention from the no-code tools themselves. So, I created some sample sponsorship packages and sent them to the platforms' CEOs to see if they were interested... and they were!

I launched a sponsorship program, then a paid membership once I had built up enough value for members.

A simple stack

The stack was initially just Slack. Then, I built a landing page on Carrd. That graduated into a simple blog site built on Webflow. And then, finally, it became the current site — a directory/marketplace built on Bubble.

So, these days, my stack is:

• Bubble

• Stripe

• Beehiiv

If I had to start over, I would focus more heavily on community and less on tech. There are a lot of off-the-shelf solutions for running community businesses now. Using something like Circle would have allowed me to spend more time delivering value by engaging with members and creating initiatives.

Community challenges

The challenge with a community business is that the desires of the community change at each stage of growth.

What a community of 100 members wants is very different from what a community of 10,000 members wants. For me, that meant the business model moved around a bit more than I expected. I've had to change strategies every few months.

Overall, though, sponsorships have historically accounted for the bulk of the revenue. We also offer a lifetime membership, which is a one-off fee. The things that change most are what's included in the sponsorships and memberships.

Growth via content and SEO

Initially, I grew by publishing interviews with other founders. I would look for interesting stories on Twitter, as it was called at the time, and invite them to a written interview. I would then share these on social media and via the newsletter, and they would attract a few more users. I did this repeatedly until the Bubble site was built.

The Bubble site allowed users to submit their own content, including details about their startups and what tools they used to build them. Again, I shared the best content via the newsletter, and this created a flywheel of more content being added.

Over time, I learned more about SEO and built the site in a way that would optimize each new piece of user-generated content that was added. This led to most of the sign-ups coming through Google.

Fast-forward to today, where the LLMs now recommend us as a founder community based on the search engine results.

Five pieces of advice

Here's my advice:

• Take startup best practices seriously, rather than being overly optimistic.

• Read startup books and start building simultaneously.

• Use existing business models, don't invent your own.

• Target businesses rather than consumers.

• Price higher than you think.

What's next?

From here, my goal is to build online products that give people more time to spend offline.

You can follow along on X and LinkedIn. And you can join both nocodefounders.com and tinyempires.substack.com for free.