Rejection, cold emails, and getting paid to learn how to code: An interview with Daniela

Indie Hacker: Daniela (@Daniela_s)
Founder of: odsgns and CtrlAlt.CC
MRR: $4.2K
Zone of Genius: UX design

Daniela was kind enough to let me interview her recently — over the course of the interview, she went into cold emailing, one-size-fits-all tactics, how she got paid to learn how to code, and some unpopular opinions. Hope you find it useful!

On her business

Hello IH 👋 as a quick intro, this is my story in a nutshell: I am a designer by background, I ended up working in sales and recruitment for a while, hated it, quit, and taught myself how to code so I could build a platform that should’ve solved recruitment. I became a freelance designer and developer in the meantime, went down the investment route for that recruitment platform that I made and decided it was not for me, so now I am bootstrapping my own products - making stuff quick, testing them and deciding if they are worth growing or killing (my story in more detail).

I believe that, in general, the chances of making something successful are pretty slim, so theoretically, the more things you get out and in front of people, the more likely you are to find what actually works and what doesn’t. Because of that, I have a couple things going - some making money, some not yet, some that never will and some that might help in other ways.

Some of them are products (CtrlAlt.CC, bubbleburst.xyz, bumpinto.xyz), some productised services (preMVP.xyz, UXfix.xyz, quicknew.site) and then some design consultancy work that I do with my brother (odsgns.com).

The reason that I am working on these particular things is that the consultancy business and productised services are where I am currently getting my revenue from, by making websites and landing pages and consulting startups on UX design. Then the products are my ways of addressing some problems that I come across whilst working with these startups, the main ones that I am trying to address now being, getting validation and making your brand visible online. I am working on getting these to produce revenue soon too.

On finding the time

I used to work on my side projects at the weekends and in the evenings, but having worked 10-12 hours days, 6-7 days/ week for years, when I started to get a steady enough MRR,I started to increase my prices, until I found a sweet spot, which allowed me to keep a consistent MRR but get some time back.

I am now taking weekends off because it helps me burn out less often. I still work long days and I do find it all a bit hard to balance at times, which is why I am trying to switch from consultancy to just productised services and products, and have everything, MRR included, be more scalable.

But out of the 5 days that I am working I like to have at least 1-2 full days per week in which I work just on my products.

So far they’ve been helpful to me, the clients that I work with and some of the B2B businesses that I got onboard my CtrlAlt.CC platform. Still a lot of work to do on my distribution channels!

For example, bubbleburst.xyz is super handy when you want to find people tweeting about startup topics, that you can engage in conversations with - I have been personally using this trying to grow my twitter following. I went from under 30 followers to almost 70 now, in less than 2 months (and I feel like that number would be a lot better if I could spend more than 15 mins per week using the tool)

CtrlAlt.CC has been helpful to my clients that always used to come to me for recommendations on what products to use for specific tasks (and on the other side for the people whose products are listed on the platform as they are gaining small amounts of new users)

On growing the business

The productised services and consultancy work are now at a point that I get a lot of new clients as referrals from my older clients, but it all started kicking off by getting the initial clients through Upwork, as a freelancer. So I haven’t done anything active on this side for a while.

This allows me to focus on getting users for my products.

My main product, CtrlAlt.CC is a marketplace, so a bit more complex than regular ones, as on one side I have B2B (the people who use the platform to list their product and have paid options for making their product attract more potential users) and on the other side B2C (people who are looking to find tools for specific tasks) and there’s also some overlap. I find it pretty easy to get B2B users for this platform, I think mostly because I’ve been doing B2B since before I started coding.

For this particular platform I usually use a cold outreach approach - via cold emails, social media or sometimes chat bots asking the people in charge of a specific product if they would be interested in being listed on my platform. Pretty straight forward. But to make it as valuable as possible for these businesses I need B2C users on the platform too, which has been a bit more difficult.

Across all the channels I have a 31% conversion rate from cold outreach to them becoming a user, which I think is decent. Here's an example email:

I haven’t really done B2C until now and I am still yet to properly crack it. I have some B2C users on this platform, some from IH, some from the yc school portal (however, the post that made those people sign up was taken down after about 30 mins of being up there) and I have recently started trying to build in public on twitter - I don’t have much of an audience there and only have 60 something followers so far. “The secret” to going from 0 followers to my current number, is that I feel like I personally know each one of these followers - because to get any of them I had to interact with them directly and provide them with some sort of value.

The more I’ve been experimenting on the B2C side, the more things I started to come across and decided to make some MVPs for some potential solutions, along the way (bumpinto.xyz and bubbleburst.xyz so far, but more to come)

On getting paid to learn how to code

After I left my stable job in recruitment, without any savings, I had to get a part-time job that would just pay the bills and buy me some time to learn how to code. So I ended up working in retail for about a year and a half whilst learning how to code and gradually going from doing drawings for people online on a freelance basis, to making digital graphics, to doing some front end work, to making full websites and being able to finally be my own boss. It was quite difficult to know that I was wasting all this time in a shop, selling my hours for minimum wage, when I knew the potential of what I was learning. But it was all with an end goal in mind. So I’ve done it.

How I went from just learning to code to actually doing it for other people and getting paid for it and now making my own products, was by basically applying to freelance gigs that I only had a bare idea how to do, but I knew would be useful in the future and then just figuring it out by doing a lot of googling and seeing how other people would solve the problems that I was coming across. I would definitely not be where I am today without stackoverflow and their forum.

I didn’t really have the option to fail at the freelance gigs that I was taking on, if I wanted to ever be able to get any other freelance gigs — using Upwork, I needed to do my best to keep almost 5-star rating at all times. I would end up spending way longer doing those tasks than the clients knew. Let’s say I would charge for an hour of work, but it would take me 5 extra hours to research the issue and learn how to do it. It was a lot!

On rejection

Having done actual hardcore sales at one point in my life helped me build my business in a unique way. After you’ve had literal doors closed in your face whilst asking people to buy into something, a simple rejection from a potential customer doesn’t really hit as hard as it would hit someone that’s not used to any type of rejection.

On one-size-fits-all tactics

Something that I keep seeing around is general advice being taken as a “one size fits all”. I don’t really believe in growth tactics - having tried them, and having come across the same type of stuff when I was doing sales.. “You have to do x, y, z and you’ll be successful”… No you maybe don’t and you maybe won't. Maybe a specific generic piece of advice happened to work for a particular person because they had the right environment for it to work. But the same advice might not work for someone else. You have to try things yourself, adapt them to your own case and then decide what works best for you.

On unpopular opinions

First off, money is important because it allows you to do what you wanna do. But I think the building in public movement is starting to transform into an MRR show-off . Don’t get me wrong - all the props to the people making killer MRRs - you worked hard, you deserve it! But I feel like it’s starting to become a bit of a toxic stat between people (similar to “likes” or social media followers). I think it can be very unhealthy and I’ve been seeing this a lot especially around Black Friday sales. My whole twitter feed was flooded with people’s MRRs and even the ones who have achieved a great return on those days were feeling shitty in comparison to others who achieved more, even if their business models and target clients weren’t comparable. It’s also particularly bad for people who are just staring off - it’s not relatable because it doesn’t focus on the process these people took to get these numbers.

The second unpopular opinion is about marketing. I think the whole “build an audience before you build a product” ideology is running a bit wild now. It’s transforming good community platforms into hidden marketing platforms (seen a bit of this on IH as well) because anything that’s being posted starts to have a sub layer of “buy my product.. I need that MRR”. Is there a solution to this though? I’m not sure yet but I am actually looking at this issue from a few POVs, so I will get back to you all when I have the answer!

On where to learn more

I lurk around on IH - so you might see me commenting on stuff. Then my only active social media is twitter, so you will find me there trying to build in public and posting quick updates: Twitter and my blog: how2human.blog - only started this recently, but that’s where I write longer stories.

See you all around somewhere and feel free to give me a shout if you wanna discuss any unpopular opinions of your own!