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How to bootstrapp an Airtable API tool to $4K MRR

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Indie Hacker: Andy Cloke (@clokehead)
Founded: Influence Grid (Acquired), Data Fetcher
Sphere of influence: Persistence
MRR: $4K MRR

Broke, unemployed, and fresh out of college, Andy Cloke taught himself to code out of necessity.

Each morning he watched freeCodeCamp tutorials until he built his project, a Spanish learning site.

It got some free users but made no money.

So he went to work on his next idea, a SaaS called Influence Grid.

Influence Grid made it easy for advertisers to identify TikTok micro-influencers and the tool quickly found an audience.

Within a few months of launching, Andy scaled Influence Grid to $3K MRR before selling it to a US based company for $60K.

Today Andy is the founder and operator of Data Fetcher, a tool that lets you create and run API requests within Airtable.

Data Fetcher is sitting pretty at $4K MRR and Andy launched it in November of 2020. Here's my interview with him about his indie hacking journey.

As a kid, did you want to be an entrepreneur?

Andy: Yeah. I always wanted to be one. When I was a teenager I started buying and selling products on Ebay.

I also tried buying products off Alibaba and flipping them on Ebay, little schemes that nearly always failed.

The first time I made money online was from a side project selling bags of Lego.

I’d go to garage sales, buy Lego sets from families cleaning out their homes, and then divide the legos into little packs and categorize them.

So I spent my first summer at university packaging up Legos, to the point the post office would recognize me and say, "oh, here comes to the Lego guy!" I was just sending out so many parcels.

At the end of summer, I made around 1,500 pounds. It wasn't crazy money at all.

I probably only made 5 pounds hour I spent packing, but it was nice to just figure out something that made some money on the internet.

What did you focus on next?

Andy: Then I became a developer and focused for two years on little side projects, but never really launched anything.

I was just honing my skills and my aim was to try and get into contracting, because it was obviously lucrative.

I ended up getting a contract and then launched my first software project with someone I used to work with.

It was a football trivia app e.g. how many of the top 20 scorers can you list?

We'd get 1,500 users for the day, but only one or two would come back. Retention was just horrible. There was no way to monetize the project other than horrible banner ads.

But the project was solid in the sense it taught me about back-end programming, website hosting, and a little bit of marketing.

That was my first proper project.

How did you teach yourself to code after college?

Andy: I started with web development just because it seemed the most accessible. So CSS, and then JavaScript in particular.

Once I felt I was pretty comfortable with that, I went on to React just because it seemed like it was growing and Angular was dying out.

I was quite lucky, my next door neighbor at home had been a web developer for five years.

B2C can be tough. Did you pivot to the B2B space after the trivia app struggled to sustain itself?

Andy: For sure. The first thing I did was learn more about coding and software engineering, so I could create a more sophisticated product.

As I looked for a project, the term micro-influencer and nano influencer were starting to become popular keywords.

My idea was to create a directory of all these influencers since I figured they were becoming the future of influencer marketing.

I thought if I could build a way for brands to find micro-influencers, Influence Grid would be a beneficial tool for indie hackers and enterprises alike.

This was the end of 2019, and around this time TikTok influencers were starting to get recognized, but in 2019 most people hadn't heard of TikTok.

It was a sleeping giant about to blow up.

The nice thing was no one had created a product like Influence Grid yet, whereas Instagram had this really open API and there were loads of tools for Instagram. But there wasn't one for TikTok.

ImgurAbove is a photo of the Influence Grid UI

How did you manage to get the data off TikTok?

Andy: I had two phones set up scrolling TikTok all day and I was harvesting the data.

I launched Influence Grid at the end of 2019, and it grew for six months to about $3,000 MRR by the middle of 2020.

Around this time I went full-time on it and then sold it to this U.S. company for around $60K which was good.

That was the first time I made proper money from doing one of these projects and the experience made me feel this validation that I could actually do it.

Once you sold InfluencerGrid, were you eager to start a new project?

And: Definitely. I started Data Fetcher a couple months after that, but before I launched Data Fetcher I spent a couple of months looking for an idea, worrying I had just sold the only thing I'd ever made that was going to make money.

But overall, I think it was the right move to sell InfluenceGrid.

Data Fetcher is more sustainable and it's been going strong for the last year.

What is your framework for coming up with SaaS project ideas?

Andy: If you look at a platform that's taken off, whether it's TikTok or Airtable, you look at some of the tools surrounding the older platform, like add ons or extensions, and then build that for the new platform that's taking off.

So I built a directory of influencers for TikTok rather than Instagram.

I'm now building an API connector for Airtable rather than Google Sheets. That's the framework I've used to come up with both the ideas.

Building on top of someone else's platform is a good way to go I think.

Imgur Above is a photo of Data Fetcher

Why did you sell Influence Grid only a few months after building it?

Andy: It got to a point where I was really quite fed up with developing it. It had been an open startup, so it didn't really have any secrets.

In some ways that meant I could be super transparent in the sale process and didn't have to hide anything.

At any moment my data scraper could die. I needed to get cash off the table.

It took a few weeks of conversation with my buyer for me to receive a letter of intent, but basically I got all this money into my personal bank account, because they couldn't transfer the payment into my business one.

It was a great push notification. Then I moved the money across to my business bank and handed my buyers the keys.

We didn't use escrow, which is really unusual. I'd normally go to a third party, right, but the buyers were quite happy to trust me, so they sent me the money first, and then I just handed the stuff over.

Imgur Above is a photo of the Data Fetcher UI

What were some of your ideas that failed?

Andy: I was messing about with colorizing old movies, basically taking old black and white films and then colorizing them, and building a Netflix-like application where you could come and watch all these movies.

This idea was the biggest waste of my time, a total failure.

What is your advice for Indie Hackers reading this?

Andy: Don't be afraid to start. It's cliche, but people always email me saying "how do you find your first customers?" and my response is always stop thinking about it and just do it.

  1. 2

    This is really insightful, especially the part about launching an influencer tool for TikTok vs Instagram and an API integrator for Airtable instead of Google Sheets.

    1. 1

      thank you, glad you enjoyed the interview with @andycloke

  2. 2

    Totally worth reading.

  3. 1

    Great interview. Could you please write about how you grew, marketed and scaled influence grid and data fetcher to $3K/mo in detail. Would love to learn to you.

  4. 1

    I read every word of this post voraciously -- because I'm also running an indie Airtable tool startup 😅-- in a totally different sphere though. You've done amazingly well. I have two questions:

    1. How big do you plan to go with this? Sell for 6 figures, move on to the next thing?

    2. Where do you get most of your customers now? Just straight from the Airtable App Store? I see you've done a bit of content marketing as well, which is what I'm really struggling at, would love to hear about how you tackled that.

    1. 2

      I think $20-30k MRR is doable. Then potentially diversify a bit with another app or 2. No plans to sell.

      Yeah YouTube/SEO drives 20% of my customers, but most if just from the app marketplace so I'd focus on that funnel if I were you.

      1. 1

        Totally makes sense. Good luck!

  5. 1

    congrats on the success! how has airtable's recent valuation at $6B influenced your approach towards building more tools for airtable

    how long did it take you go from your first line of html to bulding a working app too?

    cheers

    1. 2

      Yeah, it's great to know they will be around for a lot longer. Reduces the platform risk.

      1-2 months of coding and 3 months of app marketplace review

  6. 1

    awesome post and story @andycloke are you planning to hold on DataFetcher longer then InfluenceGrid? both are really cool tools :)

    1. 1

      Yeah, no plans to sell. I love working on it! In a way I did not with Influence Grid

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