Tech Co-founder Betrayed me so I Learned Coding Myself and built a $1.5m Business

Hi all, my name is Farid

In two years, I went from not coding to learning code, creating my own full stack application and turning it into business, all because my previous partner betrayed me.

The Betrayal

I have founded a startup before and I was the business guy while my co-funder was the IT guy. But that didn’t end well. The business itself was growing step by step and had potential, but my co-founder got a good job opportunity in a first-world country and decided to leave me….

I tried to replace him, but it was almost an impossible task considering the shortage of money. Eventually, I ended up closing the business and stopping any relationship with that person.

We lost 5 employees, 100 contracts and 2 years of work…

I am not saying that he was a horrible person; I believe he was a decent person, but he just wasn’t committed enough to the business.

After that, I opened multiple businesses, most of them passive income businesses that wouldn’t rely on coding.

But two years ago, I stumbled upon a problem. Sharing visual feedback with your teammates.

I realized that many companies still use screenshots (I mean, it is 2024 after all..), or even worse, just end up having dozens of video calls while sharing their screen.

My idea was simple, what if I could leave sticky notes directly on the live website and tag other people. And the whole team would see their sticky notes across the website they are building.

I didn’t have anyone close to me who was a developer, and relying on someone new was too risky since I didn’t want to be in a similar situation like before.

So I sat my ass in the chair and started to learn JavaScript.

It took me a month to learn the basics, and in month 2 I was already trying to create a backend via Node JS and Express by watching YouTube tutorials.

Month number 3 I spent understanding how chrome extensions work since I had to build one for my idea.

In total it took me 5 months to go from learning to creating V1 of what I proudly called Beep - the visual task manager or a visual feedback tool. It has grown to a full sized task manager with focus on web projects and is extremely good at what it does.

This is me presenting Beep at Techcrunch Disrupt (on the left)

It has already been 1.5 years since the release of V1, so the product is much better now. Since then we have raised $100k at $1.5m valuation.

The only thing that is stopping me from growing this even faster is the fact that I live in a third-world country where finding investment is almost impossible.., we have only 2 VCs in the whole country, and they only do $50k checks at max… The $100k that I got was from me travelling to many other countries, living in hostels, and trying to find money. But this is a story for another article.

Btw, I am documenting the whole journey in youtube and twitter, so feel free to join🥹

Currently Beep is used by over 407 agencies and companies worldwide to review and annotate on their websites while building it.