18
21 Comments

Starting over!

Today I start again. Sort of.

A year ago I pledged to launch 12 startups in 12 months. I managed to launch 7 products in 7 months, before deciding to focus on one of them. A couple of the others were acquired, and a couple of the others went nowhere.

Sadly, I couldn't make it work and I spent the last 4 months trying to squeeze out a drop of revenue from the one project I chose to focus on. Today I'm shutting it down.

The good news is, over the last year I've learned a ton about what I'm capable of, what customers are looking for, the type of company I want to run and more. So I'm putting my learnings into this new project, Mojosaas.

I'll be launching 2 or 3 SaaS products under this brand, with a more niche focus and an open startup approach. Think of Mojosaas as an indie, open SaaS studio :)

  1. 2

    Have been following you on and off since opensourcefood.com and Peashoot days. Good to know that you're back as "Web producer" again. Learned a lot from you.

  2. 2

    I followed your journey since you launched beatrixapp in the past, you are my first indiehackers role model, long before I know about indiehackers. Now, I follow your journey on instagram. I'm balinesse, thanks for visiting bali as one of your nomad places.

    Thanks for inspiring me

    1. 1

      I'm super flattered! And I love Bali :)

      coming back to Bali next month actually - it's a great place to get some work done but also have fun.

      1. 1

        Hahaha yeah, you deserve it!. Good luck with your new projects

  3. 2

    My first startup was first called Mojo! before we ran into legal issues with the name and had to change it to CoffeePass :) Hope things go well for you!

    1. 2

      It's not because of Mojo coffee in NZ is it? First thing that came to mind when I saw your name had changed :)

      1. 1

        Nope it was because of a coffee chain in New Zealand called Mojo who threatened to sue.

        1. 3

          Yes NZ means New Zealand 😊

          1. 1

            Oh woops. haha. you were right on.

    2. 2

      I noticed that! I was actually going to reach out to you to ask why you renamed.

      Was it from someone in a similar industry or completely different?

      Either way, my plan B would be to just settle on "Mojosaas" as the branding :)

      1. 1

        It was because a bigger coffee chain in New Zealand was named Mojo Coffee and they tried to sue us. They were similar enough to us that we couldn't use the name. You should be fine though. as long as there isn't a company in the saas or software space that isn't called Mojo already. It has to be different per class.

  4. 2

    Hey - wow that's tough. TalkShow seemed like a great idea, and I think you executed it really well. Great design, and I think you did a good job iterating and listening to user opinions.

    One thing I though you did that was awesome was bringing "Stories" (to those reading - think Snap and Insta) to the business world - which sounds incredible for remote teams. To me that's a killer feature. I could totally see that helping remote teams get to know each other better, at least with daily summaries or whatever.

    I'll be keeping an eye out for your future work.

    1. 2

      Thanks! Yes it's one of those things that would be great if everyone is using it, I just couldn't get users to use it regularly. The barrier to taking a video of oneself is quite high.

  5. 1

    LOL, I've been following your Twitter for months now and just realized I can follow you on Indie Hackers! Can't wait to see MojoSaaS. Good luck with that!

    Would be nice to know more about the fate of your previous startups and how you managed to survive.

    1. 1

      I’ll put up a post tomorrow with some details about previous startups and how I’m surviving... but long story short, 2 were acquired, the rest are now shut down. As for how I’m “surviving”, it’s all savings. I’m almost 40, so I have (well...had!) a decent financial cushion to work with. Obviously though after a year of burn with low revenue, I’m sweating slightly... so I’m starting to kick into a higher gear which is why you’re seeing all this action lately.

  6. 1

    You must be such a busy person building so many products, posting updates / blog posts and being active in twitter and IH.. you have no idea how much I envy your marketing skills. Also an active instagram account! Crazy in my eyes

    All the best to your new voyage

    1. 2

      Re: busy-ness... look out for an update tomorrow (I’ll post here and on twitter) because it’s about to get a whole lot crazier!

      My IG has been quite active for a good few years now. My audience there is 99% interested in food and my keto diet, so I rarely talk about startup stuff on my IG.

      I’ve actually only just “clicked” that I should be doing more with the audience I have on IG, so I’m about to start up a keto-in-Asia blog. This is on top of the new startup stuff I’m doing. Better to burn out than fade away!

  7. 1

    Wow quite a journey! You randomly appeared on my Twitter feed today, and I liked how you managed to stay classy without starting a war 😀

    1. 1

      I got no time for angry people like that 😅

  8. 1

    I'd love to hear about all the projects you made, is it logged/blogged anywhere?

  9. 1

    This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

Trending on Indie Hackers
How I grew a side project to 100k Unique Visitors in 7 days with 0 audience 49 comments Competing with Product Hunt: a month later 33 comments Why do you hate marketing? 29 comments My Top 20 Free Tools That I Use Everyday as an Indie Hacker 16 comments $15k revenues in <4 months as a solopreneur 14 comments Use Your Product 13 comments