How Ben from Tiny Projects sold $15k of Emoji Email Addresses

Hi guys,

I recently interview Ben Stokes from Tiny Projects for Founderness.

For the last 18 months, he has been on a fun Indie Hacker journey of building out 7 different projects.

Here are the most interesting parts of our conversation.

ON SELLING EMOJI EMAIL ADDRESSES

Emoji email addresses? Yeah, you got that right. Ben found out about them after purchasing the domain name netflix.soy. In the process, he discovered that there is such a thing as emoji email addresses.

That led to him creating Mailoji where he sells email addresses like 👋@🚀.kz.

I actually sent my first cold email to his mailoji email address.

Ben said that he has now sold over 15,000 of these, in turn, making him more than $15,000.

ON CHOOSING WHICH PROJECTS TO WORK ON

Similar to many of us, the best ideas come to Ben when he's already working on something. He has a simple framework of choosing which ideas to work on:

• They have to have some novelness;
• He should be passionate about finishing the project;
• Preferably, little to none ongoing maintenance

How does that compare to how you approach your ideas?

ON PRODUCT LAUNCHES

Ben has had his fair share of successful Product Hunt launches. For his last project, Paper Website, he reached the Nr. 4 spot of the day.

Ben emphasized creating trailer-like videos as a key point of success upon launch. They have to be easily digestible and shareable.

Additionally, for growth, Ben suggests building in public by simply documenting your journey step-by-step.

"Keep building things that pique your interest, talk about it, and great things will start happening."

If you want to read the full interview, click here.

Can you, the reader, suggest any other founders I could interview?