November Startup

A startup a month 🚀

My introduction to the '12 startups in 12 months' challenge happened through the Indie Hackers podcast several years ago. Setting a personal goal to generate income from a side business while juggling a full-time job, I decided to embark on the journey of launching a startup every month as a stepping stone towards a profitable side venture.

The rules I've set for myself are straightforward:

Launch a product or service within a month.
Ensure users have the ability to make payments.
Establish a business that is self-sustaining.

The emphasis on a self-sustaining business is crucial, given the constraints of working full time and transitioning to a new startup each month. I recognize the challenges of managing multiple projects as a task for my future self 😅.

I started my first business project by making a document on Google and thinking of ideas. The rules for this project were:

Make a public website.
Have at least 80% automation.
Accepts payments from users.
Listed the website for sale on https://flippa.com/.

I got interested in https://flippa.com/ because it's a place where people buy and sell online businesses. I wanted to learn how to sell a business there, so I looked at different categories on the website. I liked the Amazon affiliate category, where people usually talk about products and share links. But I thought those businesses were a bit boring.

So, I added a fun twist to the ideas by thinking of games related to Wordle. These games have events every day where people can play and compete with each other. That's when I decided on making an Amazon Price Guesser game. In this game, users would guess the price of Amazon products, and at the end, they could see how close their guesses were. We would also show them affiliate links to the products they guessed.

This Amazon price guesser still needed to accept payments from the user. I came up with the idea that an Amazon affiliate could pay to have their affiliate code used on the website for an entire day. That way they would get commissioned for any users they brought to the website. This would also help market my website and get more players.

Building Guessaprice.com

I organized the project into sprints, breaking down tasks into weekly checkboxes to prevent feeling overwhelmed and overworking myself.

Initially, I acquired the domain amazonpriceguesser.com, but Amazon's Affiliate rules prohibit using 'amazon' in the domain name. I opted for Guessaprice.com, which I believe offers a more effective branding strategy.

In terms of the tech stack, I chose Django and Tailwind CSS. My familiarity with Django allowed for swift development of the backend. While I was less acquainted with Tailwind, I leveraged documentation to quickly grasp and implement its functionalities.

Positive Experiences

Digital Ocean Apps platform is hosting the website. It's auto rebuild on GitHub code changes is really useful.
I used https://www.rainforestapi.com/ to pull products from Amazon to support the daily game. Their API was simple to setup and use.

Negative Experiences

https://www.namecheap.com/ website is clunky
- Their email is provided by https://privateemail.com/ which I also found to be clunky
While Amazon Associates has an API you can call to access products "Product Advertising API sign up is available only to associates who have referred qualified sales and have been accepted into the program." Since I started a new affiliate account, I couldn't use their API.
It was challenging coming up with a usable UI/UX. I am primarily a backend engineer, and spent a lot of time researching front end UI/UX stacks to use (Figma, tailwind UI, versoly, webflow, etc). I really wanted a quick way to create a web page design and export it to HTML and Tailwind CSS. I couldn't find a workflow that I could adopt quickly, so just manually built the pages.
Stripe rejected me 😱 "Unfortunately, after conducting a further review of your account, we’ve determined that we still won’t be able to accept payments for guessaprice.com moving forward." This surprised me, given Stripe's positive reputation. Despite my attempts to explain that this was my first startup project, their response remained firm: "After a further review of your business, we’ve determined that we still won’t be able to accept payments for your business moving forward." Digging into this issue online, I discovered it's a common occurrence. Faced with this reality, I made the decision to remove the payment feature from my project entirely.

Conclusion

I learned a lot this month. I validated that you can create and launch a startup business in a month while working full time. However, there are three reasons why I am marking this startup a failure ❌:

User's can not pay for anything since my business was rejected by stripe and I did not have time to switch to a different payment provider.
My goal was to sell this website on https://flippa.com/, but you business has to exist for at least a month before listing it for sale. I still plan to do this in the future.
I failed to market the website and get any users.

From this startup I have these take aways:

Digital ocean apps platform will work well for hosting these startup projects.
Find a different domain provider than https://www.namecheap.com/.
You can't rely on https://stripe.com/ for payment processing, especially if you aren't following a traditional payment methodology.
Great UI/UX is hard.

Follow for more

Feel free to follow me to see more posts about my startup adventures. You can play https://guessaprice.com/ and let me know what you think of it! If you're interested in buying the website, feel free to send me a DM.