🙍🏽 🎨 🎦 How I created the next site builder 🏇🏽 🤾🏿 🚣🏼

Hello everyone, my name is Sasha. I am creating my site builder. I got the first paying users. All of them are mainly from the USA and Europe.

I want to share the story of my journey, which includes coding, crowdfunding and promotion.

Disclaimer : I regularly read Habr for more than 10 years. I remember many significant events of this community. Offhand: transition to a flat, separation, reunion, epic posts of Mosigra and Madrobots, striking the depth of thought comments of misterMeklon'a.

Unfortunately, all this time I was afraid to write here, because I always thought that only top experts were sitting in the Habr community and they would laugh at me with my insignificant knowledge.

Over the past few years, I have gained unique experience not only in programming, but also in promoting my projects. Namely, the need for advancement stops many undertakings of talented programmers. Therefore, perhaps my experience will be useful to that part of the audience who wants to be able not only to program pet projects, but also to make sure that the world uses them.

My background

But why exactly this hackneyed, wildly competitive niche? Let's get everything in order.

I started entrepreneurial activity in the third grade. I bought glitter varnish in stationery and sold it to girls. This happened by itself. Derived a hypothesis → poured money (from bottle fees) → checked demand → poured more money.

Then there was a university, I needed money. Having worked as an Internet seller, I quickly got tired of the endless shit and opened my online store. Having successfully selected a niche, I was able to instantly reach a profit of about 7,000 rubles a month, which allowed me to feed in my student years.

The online store required improvements. I had to learn to code. In 2014, I wrote the first line of code. I was quickly dragged into the magical world of programming. The rabbit hole turned out to be surprisingly deep and imposing. I closed the store and got a layout designer in the studio. A year later, quit and went to work as a freelancer on Upwork.

The former coder’s enthusiasm was already gone, and I was bored with working. There was a constant feeling that something was wrong. I was hoping that happiness would come when a certain rate was reached. Here I’ll raise the rate a little more, and this overwhelming feeling inside me will leave. For a year I grew up to $ 60 per hour, but the itch still remained. I still felt that I was doing the wrong thing.

I understood that I had to cut my project.

But how the hell is this done ?!

First projects

I worked as a freelancer for Dima. This guy is one of the best designers in St. Petersburg. He also has a very rare talent - to subtly sense trends and predict them.

We quickly worked together and began to talk a lot on non-working topics.

It turned out that we were united by a passion for the web and an all-consuming desire to do our projects.

Dima suggested the idea of creating a cool HTML template and selling it. He had a clear marketing plan, and it bribed me. We got down to business.

Over the course of two years, we have created several successful commercial projects together. And thanks to Dima's unique talent and my rare skill in creating web animations, we soon (not without suffering) reached a stable profit and began to live only on our projects. How cool it was!

Cryptocurrencies

Oh shield! Fever of the summer of 2017. Bitcoin for $ 3,000. Do you already feel trouble?

Our projects brought a steady profit, but there was no growth. HTML templates and WordPress themes turned out to be very difficult to scale. We barely had enough for a modest life, there was no money to hire new people.

We dreamed of creating our own SaaS. They even tried to start sawing it. But fear and an empty wallet forced to return to old projects. We have stagnated and depressed for a long time. Frankly speaking, there were not enough eggs for a new breakthrough.

In the summer of 2017, we met with cryptocurrency. Once again I got the idea of quick enrichment. Once again, I believed that all my troubles and misfortunes were decided by a six-digit figure on the account. How wrong I was!

Someone Jura suggested that we become co-founders in one promising cryptocurrency project. Together, the three of us decided to make an aggregator of cryptocurrency exchanges. We completely froze our web projects and took up this aggregator.

It all started amazingly. Our third partner, thanks to his charisma and speaker talent, attracted angelic investments.

We started to grow.

But due to lack of experience, we drowned in the surging money. Spent them at all for those people and not for those purposes. No, we didn’t add cocaine and didn’t drive Lamborghini, but purchases like tickets to pseudo-elite conferences were gradually sharpening our budget. And soon we went bankrupt and closed.

It was a failure.

I decided not to return to Dima’s projects and start my topic.

I rise from the ashes

I'm running out of money. It used to panic me, but this time I decided to think differently and act with the mistakes of the past. First, I sat down and decided what I would do. Here, the niche of web design and development won without a doubt.

But what exactly is to be done? I have seen many site builders. And I got my own vision.

I believed that the site designer should be strictly focused on a specific target audience. In no case be a universal tool suitable for the salon of nails, and for a mobile application, and for dentistry.

A site with a mobile application needs its own features: the “Download to AppStore” buttons, phone mockups, the terms of service page generator and other small specific pribludy. And the site of the nails also needs other pieces (I have no idea what).

If you make a station wagon, then, firstly, you will overload the UI, and secondly, you will do well for 1000 people, instead of making awesome 10 people. And if you are a little man without money and connections (like me), choose the second way.

I really love startups, so I decided to make a website builder for startups. Since I learned a lot in previous projects, I didn’t worry about promotion (the irony is that I didn’t use 1% of my experience in promotion, as I was engaged in product in full time. Customers appear only due to sarafan and SEO).

Checked the market: there are a lot of startups in the world. If at least 1% of all startups will have a website with me, my monthly income will be $ 18 million.

I am confident in the product, I am confident in the promotion, I am confident in the market.

But for the money I’m not sure. After all, they end, and the profit will not be known when. But as I said, I decided to take into account previous experience and score * for money.

My position is this: if you make a claimed validity, then the money will appear on its own. And so it happened.

* May not work if you have children or other financial obligations. Not a recommendation.

How I attracted 500 thousand rubles for a 0% stake

Crowdfunding!

Extremely underrated way. And now it's not about Kickstarter and not even about AppSumo. So how do you raise the dough? Where to click?

First, let's go lightning over Kickstarter and AppSumo.

Kickstarter gives you the opportunity to create your own page and collect money. Difficulties : to withdraw money, you need a legal entity in the USA, you need to diligently promote the page, a lot of work on the design of the page, you need to come up with a variety of awards, SaaS is an unpopular topic on Kickstarter. It’s necessary to add seed money to the page - it seems that they have already collected 20% (I'm sure everyone does it).

AppSumo eats up 50–70% of the profit with its commission. Yes. Ofigel too. In addition, the audience of AppSumo is huge, so the campaign will bring too much money. From previous experience, I found out that too much money is just as bad as too little. I am alone in the team, I don’t need much. Just give me a modest ten salaries to eat, and I will do everything.

What? An investment of only ten salaries? Quite an unambitious request, don’t you? Yes, compared to high-profile headlines in the spirit of “Project X raised $ 20 million in a new round!”, My round looks more than modest.

But people appreciated this modesty.

Private round

I was advised to have a private crowdfunding round. How it's done?

1. Create a page where you describe the product, and add a link to the roadmap in Trello. Roadmap is needed to show where the project is moving, how it will develop. Designate your work plan for the next 6-12 months.

2. Present to the public the finished MVP of your service. MVP is the first version of a product working prototype. My MVP was already good enough and even sold pretty well, but it wasn’t possible to edit content online - only export HTML and edit everything locally. I just promised to make a full-fledged online content editor with hosting. It should be noted that, most likely, high-quality MVP was the main reason for my success.

- , MVP. , ! MVP 5000 200 . , — . — , MVP .

3. Prepare the offer. Usually this is a unique lifetime subscription, or Lifetime Deal (hereinafter - LTD). Ordinary users in the future will be required to pay every month. And those who buy LTD now, will pay access only once and will use the service endlessly for free. I set a price tag of $ 180 for 1 LTD. There were 50 licenses in total. And yes, one more point not to go to AppSumo - the local audience got used to a much smaller check.

4. Just promote your page with the offer :) Yes, this is the most difficult and unobvious. Let's take a closer look.

To get started, I presented the offer to the public at Product Hunt. Since my MVP was successful at PH (Product of a Day, 1500 upvotes), many people saw the offer. I immediately sold 20 subscriptions. But this was not enough, I did not know what to do next.

However, help came by itself.

Someone Nitesh Manav came to me with a proposal to launch my offer in his small LTD-oriented Facebook group. It turns out that there are many such groups on Facebook. This is a huge mass of people who are just waiting to pour money somewhere.

Nitesh took a small percentage (and by the way, he bought one copy himself). This positive guy helped me competently draw up an offer and answered people's questions about my product in the group for six months! I had extremely positive impressions of working with him. Write to him if you want the same.

Four factors influenced the success of launching an offer in the group:

My reputation (I have a good profile on Product Hunt).
Cool MVP.
Honest and impressive roadmap.
Support admin group. Not the fact that in another group there will be an adequate admin.
My responsiveness. I answered lightning fast. There were about a hundred comments! It was like launching on Product Hunt, to be honest. A lot of feedback.
Tasty offer. $ 180 for an endless subscription to a fierce site builder will pay off very quickly.
Well then. Round closed. Loot in your pocket. We drove to saw the product!

One year of solitude

Oh, I don’t know how to program! All my life I have only been typesetting and noodle coding in jQuery + PHP. How to be

Option 1 : hire programmers.

Let's take the accounts in hand: we have $ 7,000 (after taxes and commissions) + sales of the first version. Round up to $ 10 thousand.

The salary of the middle-coder in St. Petersburg is 120 thousand rubles. Need a back and front. Plus I have to eat. Total burn rate = 300 thousand rubles per month = $ 5000 per month. I will be able to provide project development in just two months. This was the initial plan - to raise money for the salaries of two coders, and this should have been enough in theory.

But I did not take into account many important additional factors: I am a layman in hiring people. How many months will it take to select a normal team? I am also a layman in management. How much money will I burn before I learn how to put tasks?

The most important thing (and especially thanks to Kostya for setting the brains) is that if a third-party person does the project and quits, then I will not be able to maintain the code base or urgently restore performance. But I am responsible for the uptime sites of my clients. I have to be sure of every aspect of the product.

Option 2 : learn to program and do everything yourself.

The advantages are obvious: I will be confident in the project, I can support it. I can better put tasks to the development team in the future, I can confidently hire coders. And most importantly - the probability of death of the project tends to zero. He will die only if I die. Cons: dohchenit work, the likelihood of making a flimsy unsupported architecture.

And I surrounded myself with textbooks, enlisted the support of true friends (Kostya, Arthur, Slava - you are the heroes of the project!) And leisurely, I really did the project for the year. Thanks to my experienced advisers, architecture turned out to be more or less tolerable. Everything works like a clock, you can create sites, edit them.

The main thing - now I am floating in the code of my project like a fish in water. Also, as a bonus, I became a tolerable full-stack developer, which will allow me to effectively lead a team.

Gradually, while I sawed the product, my site moved to the first page at the request of "landing page builder for startup". Let's go organic sales. A sarafan also works well.

I admit, coding one project alone for a whole year was very difficult. My only friend is the IDE. Communication only with the code for hours on end, every day.

I went on vacation twice, but still burned out. I began to forget how to communicate with people (one of the reasons why I organized IndieHackers-SPb-meetings). Vipassana also contributed. After it, for the sixth month in a row, my level of derealization has been growing.

In general, I have changed a lot. Hopefully hiring cool kids and staying in touch with them will help me get myself back then.

User reviews

Future

I do not know how and do not like to plan. My plans are crumbling in nine out of ten cases. To hell with them!

I also do not like racing and KPI.

I just calmly and confidently do my job, and that’s it. This is my style. This year I’ll grow not by 200%, but by 50% - well, okay. That's OK too.

To me, one MBA on serious cabbage sticks wiped out that if there is no growth chart in the form of a hockey stick, then you can close the project (okay.jpg).

The startup industry is still young. And over time, more and more new styles of creating and managing projects will appear. It is possible that my calm style will become commonplace.

Now I want to increase the turnover sufficient for hiring employees. I hope the launch on Product Hunt helps me with this. If not, I will shift the focus from product to promotion.

Then I will go to Y Combinator and go to San Francisco to look at homeless people and learn the craft of a startup. It will be fun and rewarding.

Many competitors appear, the old ones are overgrown with features and buy up all traffic. But I am confident in the future of the Unicorn Platform, because I know for sure that my passion for startups and the web will not die. So, while I'm alive, startups will get the best landos, and I will get regular customers.

Thank you for the attention.

How I created the next site builder