Who am I?
I solo founded an analytics company from the scratch. I had 2 years of my living expense before starting the company and that was all the money I needed to build a profitable software company. I had 3 years of working experience as a software developer and that was it. I don't have any experience working in a marketing or sales team before. Currently, I have a team of 5 people working with me.
Getting Started (2mo)
Took me two months to decide on what project to work on. I've decided to work on building a data tool for Airbnb hosts because I was an Airbnb host and I love data. I started building the business, completely alone, in 2020 April.
Building MVP and first sale (2mo)
Took me about a month to build a homepage and an MVP. A month after, I got my first sale. I wrote a few SEO blogs and did a Podcast interviewing Airbnb hosts, so probably someone found our app from one of those two, and decided to give it a go.
Keep working and no result (4mo)
After the first sales, I've done many different things. Like, writing guest posts, writing SEO blogs, podcast, interacting with Airbnb hosts in different online communities, handling occasional inbound leads - All while continuing to build the product. Nothing happened. Just a few additional sales (<$100/sale).
Learning to work with others (4mo)
I rented out an extra room to my friend, who is a recent university graduate, and working for a company without getting paid. She was happy because of the experience she's getting. I've started recruiting the interns, some positions are paid, and some positions aren't paid. Hired 4 interns (2 marketing, 2 devs) and worked on training them. During this time, there wasn't much progress in my business, because I was busy training them. All worked remotely, from US, Singapore, and India. The company revenue was still nearly 0.
Speeding up with the team / B2B sales (4mo)
I promoted existing interns and paid them the market salary. Even though I wasn't making much revenue, they became good at what they are doing. Also, hired two more marketing staffs, one from Paraguay and another from India.
With the team, I tried doing B2B sales, and managed to book around 50 meetings during the course of 2 months, we didn't make any proper revenue from it.
Got lucky with SEO (3mo)
Even though we did not do much SEO, we kept getting visitors from a few SEO articles. One of the market staffs suggested doing the SEO more aggressively. We did keyword research and it was successful. We found a few keywords that has 10-200 searches per month, but is easy to rank in the 1st position. Our daily signed up users increased massively. Those visitors are not the B2B audience, but they are mainly B2C audience. We started generating a small amount of revenue but not enough to cover all the business expenses.
Conversion optimization (Ing..)
Now we have good amount of new users every day, but the conversion rate wasn't good. All our team decided to just tackle one problem, which is increasing the conversion rate. We did research on the audience, sometimes by asking them and sometimes by guessing. The marketing team comes up with the ideas, the tech team implemented the new ideas. After doing multiple iterations, more and more users started purchasing. Combined this with some of the B2B clients (adding good amount of recurring revenue), we did breakeven. I'm just hoping to run this business for many more years because it's fun doing this.
Next steps?
Planning to build an office in India. Our team has been working remotely, but now I want them to have a place to work together. So, I'm renting a 3-bedroom house and an office space in a city in India for them to stay there. Also, going to try again with B2B sales.
Hi Jae,
Thanks for sharing this!
May I ask you how/where you found your interns?
I'm currently looking into recruiting business developer & marketing interns and I'm looking for tips.
Thanks!