How I grinded my way to $1K ARR in 6 weeks after launching

I'm not under the delusion that $1K ARR is anything to brag about. But I wanted to share a real, raw story about my experience building and promoting sifd.io. Frankly, all the "I made $10K in my first week with chatgpt" posts are becoming a bit demoralizing (although I do appreciate founders sharing their experience).

Origin Story

sif'd ("sift") is a platform that makes it easy for brands to find content creators on YouTube and Twitter to partner with to promote products and services. The idea stems from a couple previous products of mine that taught me

1. content creators are easy to reach and they all desperately want to make a living doing YouTube, so if you give them free tools to earn money they'll quickly jump on board.
2. finding content creators to promote your product is more painful than it sounds.

I'm a big fan of YouTube, so I often look for YouTubers to promote my products. The trouble is, YouTube's search engine is designed to find videos, not channels. Fortunately YouTube has a free data API, so I use it to discover channels in my niche, but even then it require a lot of data filtration. At some point I realized I had a solution to a real problem that other people had, so I set off to create sif'd.

Finding & Firing my CoFounder

My biggest hurdle - I'm a data scientist, not a web developer. So, I reached out to a web dev I knew from UpWork and asked if he wanted to be my cofounder. He jumped at the opportunity. Unfortunately his progress was slow and his communication became even slower. I know I sound like the annoying "idea guy" here, but I was asking him to give me tasks to help out and he just wasn't responding for days at a time. So, right before we formed a formal partnership, I decided to part ways. Fortunately, he understood and took it well. We remain friends to this day.

My biggest lesson here is that, if you're going to work with a cofounder, be sure they're as committed to the project as you are. For me, this means they need to quit their job and work on the startup full time, or they need to make a financial contribution.

Learning Web Development

I began searching for a new cofounder but was striking out. No one seemed to believe in me, but I wasn't about to give up.. I decided to build the MVP myself. This meant learning Tailwind, React, Next.js, and Firebase. After a couple months of studying, I finally had the skills I needed to start building my MVP.

"Launching"

I built my MVP in about a month and then "launched" it which means I posted it on Reddit, Twitter, and LinkedIn. ...crickets. A bit demoralizing, but I've been there before and didn't lose hope. I kept looking for subreddits and communities to post to and eventually found someone willing to be my first customer. I cannot thank this person enough, as she encountered multiple errors signing up and using my platform, but she stuck with me and got me that first "Stripe payment" email. Her willingness to put up with my half baked platform just to solve her problem gave me hope that I was finding product market fit.

Then Til Now

Since landing my first customer, I've tried to balance marketing with development. The product is getting good. I've added a few features, but I've really focused on optimizing performance, data quality, usability, and reliability. I'm quite proud of what I have today. Here's a quick demo of my search engine 👇

On the other hand, I'm still trying to figure out marketing. (Yes, I realize the irony.) I've managed to land 6 customers so far. UpWork, LinkedIn, and Reddit have been my most successful channels. But frankly, every day is a grind as I write posts, search for leads, take meetings, etc. etc. Perhaps the toughest thing is that I have 6 customers. If it were 0, I would simply give up and work on something else. Instead, I spend every day grinding to get that next customer and make that next buck hoping that things will eventually compound.

My big plan is to set up an affiliate program that pays $100 for each customer referral. (Bear in mind, my product costs $300/yr.) Then I can use my community of influencers to do marketing for me :) After all, I built the product for this purpose.

@NebNamrog on Twitter, if anyone wants to follow me :)