Non-tech founder, Learned Coding at the age of 30 to build a tool which now processes 5M events per day.

I am an entrepreneur from Non-tech background (10+2 in non-science stream ), after running a successful marketing agency for about 5 years we decided to build a SaaS product in the same industry.

After the initial ideation phase, the product looked complicated and hiring a developer to join us without fully understanding the tech infra or scope was becoming difficult.

I started to explore the tech space and did research on how we could achieve the goal at hand, the more I explored the more I started to like these things.

The crazy javascript front-end space with React, Vue Angular wars, the backend scene with Python, Node & Larvel or the databases like Mysql, postgresql, Mongo.

Learning about Different APIs, each with their own implementation of how they worked, getting into Rest vs Web-sockets threads etc.

It was so fascinating and a very different world from my earlier life which revolved around SEO, SEM, ROI, CPM, CPA, CPC Conversion rates, backlinks & traffic etc.

Soon enough, I was spending 6-8 hrs a night to learn more and more and after about 2 months hacked together the first prototype which kinda worked on command line.

Half of the code was lifted from GitHub and the other half from Stack-overflow, but somehow it worked :)

With that, Now I was in a much better position to hire a full-time programmer and get the product (MVP) built and hired a new CTO.

With him onboard, It took us about 2 months to build a presentable MVP, from there we went on to get to $25K MRR in next 6 months.

We just recently closed a funding round as well from few of the top investors, if that counts.

About the tool

While the MVP was being built I was working on potential marketing lead magnets which could attract lots of potential customers to our website.

Being in the industry for years I knew few of the pain points the industry had and decided to address them by building those tools.

This tool allowed users to check if a given domain is available for registration or not, 20,000 domains at a time.

Since the CTO was already occupied working on the product, I decided to build it myself and test my newly learned skills in real-world.

Here is the technologies I selected for this -

Front-end : Vuejs, Because it was relatively easier to learn than the other front-end frameworks. I could quickly pick a html template and convert it into a Vue project.

Backend : Node-Js : Because It sounded easier to learn one language for front-end and backend both.

Communication layer : Rest API

I built it in few weeks and shared around in our circles for testing, people from the marketing community loved it and soon I had hit scaling issues.
With few days of research & testing those issues were fixed.

Later I replaced rest API with web-sockets for real-time results & Vuejs with Nuxt for Server-side rendering & SEO.

So far It has been used by over 20,000 marketers to check 737 M domains (lots of them checks same domains multiple times).

You can see the uses graph here - https://twitter.com/subhashchy/status/1186291969766543360

We now limit uses for non-logged in users and ask them to signup for a free account or free trial, a 7 email series then encourage them to use rest of the product line with a good success rate.

My learning from this is :

Even if you are a non-tech founder It's a lot easier to build a product or business when you spend time to learn the inner workings of how things works at a micro level.

You will have so much more respect for your tech co-founder / CTO when you have a first hand experience of how frustrating fixing even a small bug is. Which ultimately leads to a far better working environment.

You will have much better success hiring a CTO or a tech co-founder when you show them the work you have done, it instantly boosts your credibility & capabilities as a founder in a market filled with wannabe billionaires with an idea.

Questions ?