How I Co-Founded a 60k+/year startup - Part 2 - Building and launching

Hi Hackers! Sharing the second part of my history! I'm leaving it in text but if you prefer you can read it in my blog:
https://welcomeimjd.com/posts/60k-Part2

It has images there! If you missed part one:
https://welcomeimjd.com/posts/60k-Part1

Lets go:

It was Hustle time.

Having some experience from the past I knew that it’s easier when working with people that have a product idea but no visual idea of how it should look, to make first designs by myself and then change things as per request.

So I started with the rough components, which were a simple navbar on top, with the option to create resources and use them.

Usually, I started with the backend and tried to understand how the tables should look and relate to each other and then code them in Django, after which I did a quick Postman check and started coding the front end.

Note that at this time no tests were developed, and I still think that was the right move. Not that tests aren’t essential, but spending time on tests while not knowing if a product would see daylight is a waste of time. So I decided to postpone them.

I created a Trello board with everything we needed and wanted to be done, and each day I would wake up at 6:30, pick a task and start coding until work time, then I did my normal day of work and at the end of I would rest a bit, a pick it up again after dinner (which I had early). Sometimes when things were slow I even did a couple of things during lunchtime.

At this time, I had to decide to sleep less because I knew in the short term I could do a lot of work quickly, and then when the biggest part was done I could come back to a normal schedule, and that was the only way I could get things done in time.

As time went on we needed more structure in the planning, so we started having regular meetings (once every couple of weeks) where we would look over the tasks and decide the ones that were a priority for the following weeks. This was a critical process because when you have a vision, everything is important, but you need to know there must be priorities or nothing gets done.

After some months of this, we were at a point where we were able to receive users. By this I mean users could register and perform basic operations, but everything was duct-taped together and things would likely break. It was usable but by no means full-blown complete.

And that's when plans changed. Seeing the progress of the platform, the brothers decided we could launch now since we could still meet the marketing times, and we would CHARGE now.

This was very worrying to me. The platform felt very shaky and incomplete, and that was kinda ok for a free platform, but now we were going to charge people?

I explained these concerns to them but they assured me that since the platform was not critical we could afford outages of even one or two days and likely wouldn't lose clients. Additionally, they explained that even though people were buying now, they would use it very little until 6 months later, and we could fix and patch this until then.

I was nervous about this, but they were ready to deal with any blowback, so I agreed.

The next three days were spent frenetically coding - better put, “gluing” - not only a way for customers to pay but also to allow discount coupons and a way to allow users to test the platform for free. They were ready to do the monkey work so the process was very rudimental:

People would pay us and send proof of payment to our email, and their accounts would manually be updated to premium.

It was awful, but it worked for the time being.

So D-day had come. It was time to launch.

Everything was hosted in a cloud service and all three of us had hand-tested it to the best of our abilities. And so they shared the link to our Instagram/Facebook.

And just like that, we were live, launching with a “Promotional price” - which I think was around 90$ for 15 days.

After only 3 hours we had our first client. I couldn’t believe it. Someone had actually paid! We quickly set up a zoom call (we were in different places usually) and celebrated with A LOT of enthusiasm. Our product was validated.

The next day we had about three more users.

Then four more.

This was amazing! People were buying this problematic and sometimes buggy platform!

As soon as someone bought and sent the proof of payment we would try to activate their account as quickly as possible, which led to some interesting times, in which, by the end of the promotion I was staying awake until 3 AM receiving and activating accounts, and sending an email saying their account was active.

It was a weird kind of work for a developer but I didn’t really mind, since each email meant we had received at least another 90$.

At the end of the promotional period (emphasis on the end, which was when most users bought it, sometimes with a panic fear of missing the promotion) we had amassed a total of about 30.000$ in revenue.

We were in heaven!

But with a lot of clients comes a lot of responsibility and things soon started looking darker…

I'm very new to social media and so I'm going to plug it here.

Did you like this post and want to read the next part? Follow me on Twitter and Indie Hackers

Thanks for reading!

WelcomeImJD

Thanks,
JD