Paying the bills with a $13k/mo business while testing product ideas

Thanks James 😊

Are you building a project yourself mate?

Hey Sunday, what a great name you have 🙌

I'm super happy this was motivating! What are you working on at the moment Sunday?

Hey Marcos, appreciate your words!

Share your 𝕏 handle and I'll follow you 👍

Hey Amy, absolutely. Perseverance is one of the most important traits of successful people. We just keep showing up. We keep doing the word.

Keep at it, we got this 🙌😉

P.S.: Share with us when you launch your thing 😉

You're very welcome 🙌😊

Hey Guy, appreciate your words brother!

Absolutely, experimentation is a big part of it.

I'd be very happy to exchange notes, I'll send you a DM 🙌😊

P.S.: I can't find your handle on here. Feel free to DM me on X.

Hey Joy!

Honestly, it was a pain I felt as a developer. It's super cumbersome to set up database, deployment, frameworks, etc over and over again. It was such a huge pain. It's specially painful when you're a senior dev that pushes out many projects in a short amount of time. Then this bottleneck really starts to be felt—and it's painful.

So I decided to solve my own pain 😊

I'm really proud of the product and eager for this branding phase to end so I can start pushing out improvements and web dev-related content 💪

I have a lot of ideas I think the industry will love 😁

As for the DM, send it, let's chat!

Hey Murad, I appreciate your words, thanks a ton!

I'm having dejavú Irsa 😂

But to answer your question: I agree on the "zero-to-live" screencast.

There's a lot of exciting work ahead and I'm eager to get going 💪

The channel that yielded the most sales was one-on-one connections through Zoom while I demo'd the product. Actually 100% of those turned into a sale, now that I think about it 🤔

But that's, obviously, not scalable. Hence the branding and subsequent marketing effort.

Absolutely, please share your GTM list 💪

I've been fortunate enough to see problems I felt myself very clearly.

While building applications for clients, setting things up was such a hassle. E2e testing was a hassle. UI libraries where a hassle. Deployment was a hassle. Losing all that time demotivated me, so, just like I did with my tutoring practice, I thought about how I could motivate myself while also making money: and LaunchFastPro was born.

But, before I decided to build LaunchFastPro and turn into a business, I submitted that, and other ideas, to two frameworks:

The CENTS framework:

• Control - can I have control over this business or do I have 3rd party dependencies that could kill my business?

• Entry - Is this hard to do or can anyone do it?

• Need - Is there a need in the market or is it just me? I showed LFP to a few friends and they LOVED it. I also launched it on ProductHunt and it made sales, so this is a definite YES.

• Time - Is this a time-dependent service-like business or can I earn while not working?

• Scale - Is this scalable or fairly limited?

The 5W2H framework:

• What will be done?

• Why will it be done?

• Where will it be done?

• When will it be done?

• Who will do it?

• How will it be done?

• How much will it cost?

Then I ordered my ideas by how good the answers where to these questions. LaunchFastPro came out clearly on top. And here we are :)

Thanks Dev!

Hey Sankar, appreciate your words my man 🙌

Yeah, it's a stuggle, but I'm pushing through it.

My plans for the future of LaunchFastPro is to build templates on top of it, that I can charge for, and make LaunchFastPro—because I believe it's so valuable, everyone should have access to it.

Apart from that, but related, is building a great UI library. Shadcn/ui is great, but it has a lot of problems and holes. I think I can do considerably better with my current knowledge. I've started VerveUI and learned a lot from it too. I'm super eager to have the time to start working on VerveUI again.

Another great idea is building pre-made mocks with MSW. This is super useful for people wanting high-quality DX without having to hit live APIs.

And so many other great ideas, I'm super excited to work on.

Hey Raghavn 👋

The way I think about it is like this: your first landing page, with whatever traffic and conversion rates, is your baseline. Then you experiment on other landing pages and drive traffic to them. If they perform better in both metrics, that's your new landing page. Then iterate upwards. This allows for fast iteration while also balancing stable SEO, giving your website multiple points of entry. Makes sense?

Thanks Gilles!

I'm super happy for you! 😁 Getting that TaskWand running and making profit is a real accomplishment!

Stop developing and gaining visibility was a lesson learned the hard way, my friend... I'm just glad I learned it eventually.

Thanks Parag, I appreciate you! 🙌

That's a great question Ankita!

I've realized the same. The market is not only crowded, but the offers are low quality.

My first step is to brand the product, my main company (Casal Innovations, Lda) and my personal brand properly. Then we'll do design for all 3 brands and start executing a content marketing strategy.

I guess what really distinguishes me and my product from others is that I'm taking this project seriously because I truly believe in the huge difference it can make for developers. The 10 min to production, the excellent developer experience, the dramatic decrease in development time, and the economically efficient scaling to millions of users are, to my knowledge, unbeatable. And I'd love for every developer to have this.

That's why this path I'm on will eventually lead to making LaunchFastPro open-source. But I need to build paid templates before then.

Thanks Pioneer91 😊

What stack are you using at the moment?

Thanks mate! 🙌

What stack do you currently use?

Thanks my man, appreciate it! 🙌

I'm very much looking forward to writing the docs and building paid templates so I can turn LaunchFastPro open-sourced 💪

I think people will absolutely love it! I use it to build applications for clients and it makes me ~10x more productive.

Hey Scott, thanks for your input!

Absolutely. I'm really excited about this branding process. The ROI looks solid!

And I'm definitely a big fan of automation and predictability 💪

I don't know what micro-products are—How would you define them?

As for pricing, I just look at what other tools my audience is using to do the same job, take that as a first princing approach, and iterate from there.

Hey ixartz! You should give Remix a try. It will blow your mind!

You've implemented passkeys, I'm jealous! ♥️

Yeah, to be honest I don't think I could even gotten to this phase without breaking challenges into tiny pieces and gradually ramping up the challenge 😅

But here we are 😆

Appreciate you!

Hey McDo, your profile says you've founded McDonalds, congrats 😄 hehe

Yeah, those choices took quite a bit of time and research. Remix is simply fantastic. So much easier than Next, it's insane. Ever since I've started developing with SQLite I've never looked back. There's no match for having your DB be "just a file" embedded in your application. No connection string headaches, no external service, no extra cost, no "I can't develop because my internet is down", and all the same scalability and performance benefits.

Yeah, security is a big thing. It's unfortunate that some entrepreneur think that security will only slow you down and sell sub-par products. If you're building a toy, sure. But if you're building for real users, security shouldn't be an afterthought.

As for marketing requiring a different muscle, you're spot on 🎯

I'm glad you liked my share, thanks for your comment mate!

Hey Irsa, thanks for the tips, they are really useful!

At the moment I'm in the middle of a branding process for LaunchFastPro, the main company (Casal Innovations Lda), and my personal brand (that's really just a content marketing plan).

I intend to create:

• A 10-min to prod video (actually already live on the homepage)

• A teardown of a project I've recently completed from scratch in 4h/day in 3 months (that a team of 3 engineers couldn't finish in 6 months)

I hadn't thought of having 3-laser focused landing pages per job-to-be-done, but that's an excellent idea, thank you for that!

I do intend to go heavy on supporting AI though. The stack already works extremely well with Claude Code, thanks to great code examples, built-in documentation in the repo, and powerful MCP integrations, like letting AIs control the browser to run/debug e2e tests. The way I see it, if it's easier for a developer, it's also easier for an AI. And vice-versa. So good quality software does matter.

As for a north-star, I don't think one is enough. This is what's important for most devs:

• Time to first successful deployment (under 10 min at the moment)

• Excellent developer experience (low number of unexpected hickups, keeping devs in flow)

• Application development speedup (a little over 12x at the moment—a senior dev can do in 4h/day in 3 months what 3 devs can't full-time in 6 months)

• Scaling to millions of users economically and with predictable expense

• No security issues from the stack and lowest possible number and severity of security issues from custom development (a good infrastructure/code foundation and great docs go a long way to help in this).

I took a look at your website, looks great! It is a little bit slow though. Switching the animations to CSS-based ones would give you GPU acceleration (as opposed to CPU) on the animations, making the website feel a lot smoother.

Thanks for your input Irsa, I appreciate you!

I feel you Marilyn—the struggle is real indeed 😅

I keep pushing myself because I have something to prove to myself: that I can become a successful solopreneur.

I feel like this is one of the last things I want (not as much 'need' fortunately) to prove to myself. I expect this to change as soon as LaunchFastPro becomes a self-sustainable business.

As for marketing, joining marketing groups helped a little bit. People give you feedback and that's great. But I only really felt a great difference when I hired excellent professionals to help me out. Puting some money aside and investing in good branding/communication/marketing goes a long way to create and sustain a business.

I appreciate your words!

Thanks for the kind words, I appreciate it Sonu!

To be honest, being called out for doing something stupid is one of my biggest fears, but I reckon I'll get over it. Practice builds competence. Competence builds confidence.

This reminds me of the Dunning-Kruger Effect 😄

It's funny you're saying that, I literally just did that for Lucia (in the comments below) two days ago 😆 I do take the time to write my friend's birthdays on my calendar so I don't forget to congratulate them/offer them a gift on their birthdays 😊 It's a great habit!

Hey Pratham, thank you 🙌

It wasn't always easy, as you can imagine. In the beginning, when I was only teaching and wasn't disciplined enough to create a budget or stick to it, I had some hard months during the summer when students are on vacations and I barely had any money 😅

Then I learned to save.

Then I learned to budget.

Then I got better at teaching and increased my prices.

These small improvements compound over time and make a huge difference later on.

yea the balance and discipline is impressive

I agree.

Claude Code, for example, does a wonderful job at automating many of my boring coding tasks, like boilerplating. It still makes many mistakes, but it will only get better.

The benefit of a product LaunchFastPro isn't just having all the boilerplate code. It's the CLI, the decisions behind the tech stack, and the correctly written code and extensive built-in docs that help AIs (e.g., Claude Code) work faster while making less mistakes.

The wrong boilerplate can be expensive to scale, or allow blantant security breaches like in the recent Tea Dating Advice data breach, which the FBI is now investigating. Things like this can bring a company down.

but if you think about it, thats going to happen in every field

I don't totally get what you're saying, but I agree that an accumulation of knowledge and experience is definitely a huge advantage. In many aspects, it makes success feel obvious.

Hey Lucia, thanks for your input 🙌

An AI tool for non-devs that does marketing on autopilot or eases the process? That's something worth exploring!

I wonder if personal connection/vibe becomes more important with the widespread use of AI. Or if, instead, the best AI wins 🤔

Hey Wasell!

Yeah, it was tough for me for many years too. The workload is quite heavy. Even though I love teaching, I've recently started to dedicate less hours per day to it, as it's the less profitable activity I do. Second to that is building apps for clients. I spend 3h/day teaching, 4h/day building for clients and the remaining time working on LaunchFastPro. Hopefully, as LaunchFastPro starts making more sales, I'll stop teaching CS to college students. I'm not sure I'll stop client work tough, as it's an excellent way to test my product on a real enterprise application.

As a side note, I've built many application with it, but I've recently rebuilt from scratch and finished, in 3 months, a project that took 3 engineers a year to reach 80% completion. My client is super happy and this is all thanks to LaunchFastPro.

Anyway, validation is product-market fit. There's two variables here.

If you make the product constant:

1. You vary the audience.

2. For each audience, figure out what job your product is helping them achieve.

   The unintuitive trick is not assuming we know why people buy a certain product—did you know most people buy Snickers not because they want a sweet but because they are hungry? 🤯 People would never buy a Milka bar because they are hungry.

3. Check if they are already paying for something that helps them achieve that same job.

4. Make your product better (e.g., faster, more affordable, more beautiful) than the alternative tool.

If you make the audience constant, you do the analogous steps: vary the product, check what each product might help the audience achieve, check if they're paying for something that helps them achieve the same thing, and make your product more attractive.

The other thing I recommend taking into account is whether or not you actually enjoy building that thing and growing a business with it. A lot of the times founders don't enjoy the process and lose motivation. This is why I rarely see the "audience first, product later" strategy succeed. They're in it just for the money—which is ok, money's great—but it's not a sufficiently strong 'why'.

Anyway, I recommend you read 'Jobs To Be Done'. Anthony Ulwick is more theoretical/enterprise oriented and Bob Moesta is more lean/practical/startup oriented.

I hope it helps, cheers mate!

Thanks Mreat!

If you build something, I will not deny it! 😄

Thank you Musslima!

What are you working on?

Hey Ihar, thanks!

Yeah, it was uncomfortable but important to validate the product. Now it's time to scale with proper branding and marketing.

I've tried to do it myself, but I sucked at it and didn't enjoy the process.

Now I've bit the bullet and hired Phable Labs to do it for me. Let me tell you, they are super great. I'm so happy I found them 💪

I've contacted other companies and the quotes were between 50k–150k€. Ridiculous numbers. The people are Phable are very good and the prices are reasonable.

I took a look at your website. I see you help SaaS. Unfortunately that's not my case. I practice one-time sales. I'm essentially selling text (source code), so it's not unlike selling a book.

Anyway, reminded me of this Max MRR article I found recently, I thought was pretty interesting!

Hey Zhenhuamo!

That's actually an interesting story 😄

When I was in college I was struggling to understand the subject matter and I also wanted the freedom that came with having my own money. I noted down all my wishes and constraints on a notepad and tried to figure out how to solve more than one problem at a time.

I realized the best way for me to learn was to teach because 1. the criteria for knowing if we know something is whether or not we can explain it and 2. my fear of looking like an idiot in front of my friends/clients would force me to study hard.

I created, printed, and distributed fliers for my tutoring service on my college campus.

And that's how my first business was born! 😁

I was super nervous the first few times I was teaching. Thoughts of "wtf am I doing?", "they will not like me as a teacher", "I'm not sure I know enough to teach" kepts popping in my head. But I pushed forward and few lessons—and many hours of study later—I felt like my explanations were hitting the spot. My clients were getting it. And they were getting it fast! Comments like "AAahhh why hasn't anyone explained it to me like this before?!" where common. That made me feel pretty confident and comfortable :)

Hey GudSho!

Yeah, video is probably the hardest for me, as I feel quite exposed, but I'm making good progress on this front. Been putting a few videos on Digital Systems—one of the CS subjects I teach—out on my YouTube channel and using this as an opportunity to improve my communication.

A friend of mine bought a Vinh Giang course and I'm using it to improve my communication. Hopefully this will help me become a better speaker.

Replying to your question, video is definitely in my plans. It's one of the best ways to communicate your vibe and connect to people. Baby steps, I'm getting there :)

I took a look at GudSho. Seems like it's an online video editor + video hosting service + video player + video conference software? Seems interesting, I hope business is going well!

My 2 cents: it took me a while to understand what GudSho was about from the homepage. Clearly saying "online video editor + video hosting service + video player + video conference software" in the header might increase conversions.

Cheers mate!

Hey Marco! 😄

I have a lot of products ideas in the pipeline. Eager to test them out 💪

Thanks for the kind words! Will do my friend 🤗

I'm a solopreneur for now. I expect next year to be different and I'll start building a team. I'm already compiling interview questions in preparation for that phase, but it's in the future.

I have no doubt it's going to be quite the challenge!

"Tweeting Phobia" is a great way to describe it 😂

I think I have to start doing that too. It enforces publishing but also improving the product so you have something to share.

I learned this 'micro-actions' philosophy from Jordan B. Peterson. He's great at explaining it. I think I could write an article about it for sure. Thanks for the push!

I'd love to know how that works. Tried searching your profile and Google, but can't find your product anywhere.