i just launched my 25th startup (SaaS)

- Within two minutes, they made 400 bucks. The bug is extremely weird and they have no clue how to fix it. It turns out it's the developer's fault. - Speaker A tells the audience that he has been working every day without taking any holiday for a thousand days and he is way more productive. He thinks working hard works only if he doesn't neglect the three important parts which are diet, sleep, and work out. - The product made $0 because there is a 14 days of free trial. The top of the funnel is pretty bad. But there are 19 people who have an active subscription. They are guaranteed to secure the launch deal. - Speaker A tells the audience that the ranking of the new website jumped from 0 to 23 within 24 hours. He thinks it's an unfair advantage because he has built 20 plus websites in the past. - Speaker A tells that his new startup will rank in first place. He suggests having a free project to research keywords on Google and building a tiny reputation. Then he writes a blog article about programmatic SEO. - Speaker A tells how to create websites that rank on Google using SEO. Speaker A: How to create a website that gets more impressions.

Speaker A: Months ago. What the is I'm getting a bug that is extremely weird. And within the last two minutes we made $400. What? Yeah, man. I don't know what the is going on here.

Speaker B: We made a 400 bucks.

Speaker A: Yeah. Two customers. They both like a very similar time frame. So this, you know, there's a mix of like, punch you in the face and like, go fuck yourself, deal with your bug. And at the same time there's a little universe sending me another message like, let me give you 400 bucks.

Speaker B: Oh, wow.

Speaker A: But still, I don't know. I have a bug and I have no clue how to fix it.

Speaker B: Wow, that's a nice dish fork.

Speaker A: What? This happens all the time. I always blame whatever, like I told you, like it's a random error, I don't know what's going on and etc. And then I realize it's.

Speaker B: It's your fault.

Speaker A: It's my fault.

Speaker B: What did you miss?

Speaker A: So it's always the developer's fault. Remember I was making a thumbnail for YouTube video a couple days ago and I put some codes where I kind of reveal API keys, which is secret keys. You're not supposed to reveal the API key. And for that I faked. I created fake API key inside of the project.

Speaker B: Why?

Speaker A: So I can fake it? No, so I can fake it. So I can make a screenshot of fake API keys. But the problem is I forget that I saved the file. So now my computer was reading these fake API keys that don't exist. So of course he was telling me like, hey, I cannot connect. Oh, fuck. That was fast, right? I'm literally about to launch data fast. It's been three months. I'm working on that startup. What I'm doing here is I'm testing the happy flow. I'm logging with a new browser, erase the cookies, try a new email address and pretend I'm a new user. Try everything from visiting the landing page to using the product to being able to pay. Make sure the happy path is working. Once I'm done with that, I'm going to press play, actually launch that startup. I'm not going to lie, I'm a bit stressed about it. Let's go. Okay, so this is not yet posted on the Internet, but this is a launch tweet. And when I click here, I officially launch this three month old project. Shit. The tweet is live. Oh my shit. And it never gets easier. It'd be three years launching 24 websites. And I always have this stress whenever I launch. I didn't add. Oh my boy. And I don't remember if maybe I It's a website analytic tool and maybe I don't even track my own data. Oh no. Okay, I'm tracking. Oh boy. Okay, I will turn on the camera again if something happens. For now, it's gonna be just me overthinking again. But at least it's public, it's live, it's launched. I launched it. It's been just one hour since I launched and there's 14 days of free trial so people cannot pay at the moment. I got maybe 20, 25 signups and two people already secured the launch deal and input their credit cards. So those are the subscriptions and they are two active subscription. This is maybe the road to the first $1 in monthly recurring revenue with this product. Let's go. I see lots of advice for productivity out there, and most of it, I think is really toxic. About work hard work hard, work hard. I've tried that in the past, trying to work as much as I can, setting up alarms so I can work earlier, sometimes neglecting workouts. And the only time I burn out, like the two times I burn out in my life were times where I neglected sleep and I was not in shape. I was not working out every day. When I restarted the the Journey three years ago, I remember making three rules for myself to make sure that I never burn out again. And it's been like a thousand days almost and I've been working every day without taking any holiday. And I always feel great, whether it's for work or whether it's my life with a wife. There's no sense of burnout and I work way less than I used to and I'm way more productive. I think working hard works only if you don't neglect the three important part which are diet, sleep and work out. And mine is very simple. I go to bed at the same time every single day, no matter what. I make sure I have eight to nine hours of sleep and then clean food most of the time and not eating too late, not eating too much to make sure I don't destroy my sleep and work out every single day no matter what because that's the way I tame the little box up there. That's how I'm more focused, that's how I'm more productive. That's how I sleep better. And the next days are even easier. And I think I work from 10th or 11am until maximum 6pm, which is a pretty decent day, but nothing crazy. And I'm able to do that every day without sacrificing what matters the most. Which means having a beautiful life time with a wife, being healthy, being happy, not being stressed. And really, it's all thanks to those three things. Workout, diet and sleep. I launched Data Pass, my 25th software, yesterday and I just got to see the number after a good night of sleep. And I was really not expecting any of this, to be honest. I was really pessimistic about the launch. And every time I launch a new product, the couple days before the actual launch date, I always feel like this is not going to work. And sometimes it's the case and sometimes, like today, it's very surprising. I'm going to show you the numbers, but just the takeaway. And it's always the same, but you never know until you actually launch. So launch that thing now. Let me show you some of the numbers. Okay, so yesterday I made these tweets. It's poorly written. Again, the product is a beta of a beta of a beta. It's a big product. I relaunched an early version and man, there's a. I would never expect to get this much likes. And especially the number of comments which show that if we look at the comments, it's very positive. Yeah, the overall comments are really positive. So these really shows there's something going on. The numbers are actually great. So this now I can use data fast to track the data that are happening on my site. This is data fast. You can see the spike coming from the launch. 5.8 thousand visitors with one tweet. This is crazy. So now we can look a little bit deeper at what happens. Exactly. So this is the data for just today. I'm going to check the last 24 hours. So that's a big spike of traffic and that's crazy. X Twitter brought over 4,000 visitors. It's insane. Here there are 468 people who went to the signing page. That's less than 10% coming from the homepage. So here it's telling me that this is a bad, this is pretty bad. Less than 10% interest from click to from visitors to sign up. I think this could be really improved. There's some really potential here to improve. It's very interesting that almost the same amount of people are visiting the affiliate page as the one signing for the product. So half of the people are here for the actual product, which is the reason they click, but half of them are also coming for the affiliate program. This is interesting data. And then again from signing to dashboard there is about 30% of people who did not sign up and then half of them did not even create try to create a website. Wow, the funnel here is pretty bad. I'm pretty happy with the launch. I was excited about it because you'll see why later when we come to revenue data. But it's very interesting to see that the top of the funnel is actually pretty bad. Let's have a look now at. So this is tribe. So of course the product made $0 because there is a 14 days of free trial. But what I do is I let people input their credit card details. I charge them zero until the end of the free trial, the 14 days of free trial. But by inputting the credit card details, they're guaranteed to secure the launch deal because I cheap with the cheaper price and as I input more features, the price will go up in the future. And so that nudges people to input their credit card at the moment so they will be grandfathered. They will keep that launch deal forever. And if we look at this, those are all the people who created an account and input their credit card details to secure the launch deal. And there are I think 19 people, 19 potential customers who have an active subscription which is going to start in 14 days. Most of them are on the 10K plan. So that's a $9 a month plan. And there are some of them on the 100,000 pages a month, which is $19 at the moment. I'm recording this video. So this data is great. The top of the funnel, lots of visitors, very few sign up. But among the people who sign up, which is like somewhere around 150, almost 20 of them decided to give their credit card details to secure the launch deal. This is really good. And on top of that I checked, I built this little whatever feedback board for the product where only people who logged in and have a subscription can submit stuff. And I'm already collecting feedback from people. So click tracking, track events. I think yeah, there is something here where literally tracking like events on the website, like custom goals, like who signs up and eventually making a funnel out of that. I think this is the number one feature I'm going to work on after I'm done fixing all the little bugs I've seen. And. But this is great. This is the day number one launching this product. This is much better than I expected. I'm collecting feedback. It's going to take a while to get this product to a decent monthly recurring revenue. But I'm positive now, I'm positive that it might make more than $100 a month. And that's beautiful. All right, so for today, it's mostly there's no plans. Like, I have a lot of like tiny little tasks here and there. I'm going to check emails, see if I get bugs reports from beta testers. Since there have been a lot of people testing the app when I was sleeping, I expect it to have broken at some point. So today it's what is going to be a day. Just like eating bugs for breakfast. This is crazy too. This is absolutely crazy. So I launched Yesterday and within 24 hours, the ranking of that new website. It's a brand new website. No one owned it before it jumped from 0 to 23. That is just crazy. And that is at this point it's an unfair advantage because I would never be able to do that. But because I built 20 plus websites in the past, all of them have a little bit of like domain reputation. And so whenever I launch a new startup, I add this new domain to the previous domains I owned. And it tells Google that the new domain I'm launching is trustworthy. And so Google will start pushing it up right away. And within a couple hours now if I type data fast, the name of my new startup, Google will rank in first place. This is really crazy. So what I do usually is this. For instance, this is one of my websites. And then at the bottom in the footer I had right here, the new website and these are all of my other websites so that Google's trust these websites and then he's going to trust the new website that I just created. I think when you're getting started, it makes sense to have a free project where you research some keywords on Google so you know where to rank. Like, I don't know, like a hobby project, something you're passionate about. That step by step, month after month is going to start building a tiny reputation. And then later when you launch a new startup, you can always add your site to that previous site and you never start again from zero. And actually I created this artist. This blog article is 100% free. It's how do you get customers with programmatic SEO. It's basically how do you create websites that rank on Google using SEO? This is for instance, a website I built and I don't touch this website. And over time it gets more impression, more clicks. So Google increased the domain rating and then I can use that website to rank my new websites. If you want the article, it's literally in my blog. It's Mark marklew.behive.com this is where I share everything I've learned in the journey and definitely recommend these kind of like fun hobby projects to get started at the beginning. All right, about to wrap for today. So the 24 hours recap for the launch is 6,000 visitors, around 200 signups, and 21 people who input their credit card details, which I believe is great. I need to fix the top of the funnel. I spend most of the day fixing bugs and also replying to customer support because, well, the app is new, it's only been tested by me and three friends. So there are some stuff that are not intuitive. So people ask questions about how to do this is it, how that should work, etc. I think tomorrow will be another bug fixing day, but now it's 6:30pm I really have to log off because I need to wind down. Otherwise my brain never stops and I really want to have good sleep. That's how I'm going to be able to be productive tomorrow. So I'm going to turn off this computer, go back, see my wife, have a little walk, maybe outside in the dark, alone and ready to crush it tomorrow. That's all there is to it. So what do you do? You say you make websites? Yeah. Okay. And you freelance and you work from Buddy? Yes. Okay. And you said you started from zero? Yeah. And now how much you're making a month? I make like 4k this month. $4,000 a month, that's pretty good for Buddy. It's happening for real. So yeah, for now there is $0 in revenue. But if we scroll to the monthly recurring revenue, there it is. 234 monthly recurring revenue. This is just two days after the launch and there's a 14 days of free trial. So people cannot pay for the product, but they can input their credit cards. So they start their subscription right after the free trial. And stripe, calculate that as monthly recurring revenue already. So within 12 days, I think these monthly recurring revenue will be converted into actual revenue. And there we go. Just like this, the first step of making $1 in monthly recurring revenue is completed. Still a long way to go until I reach a million dollar in valuation, but that's a little step already. So now this is what I am doing in order to hopefully grow this product. First I set up a feedback board. So this is the little something I built where only people who are authenticated to my product can submit features. And then they are ranked here from the most wanted feature at the top to the least wanted feature. What I'm going to do is I'm Just going to go over each feature step by step. The first one, the most wanted feature first, build it, ship it, let people know that I have shipped that feature and hope that by making a better product, people will maybe spread the world, love the product and stay for longer. Another thing I did, and I wish I did that earlier, it hurts a lot, but it works so well, is to ask people blunt feedback. So I made this tweet, a little recap of what happened after the launch. And here I asked if you visited the site but did not sign up. Why be blunt, please. And this brought so many replies. 114 replies. And each of them is a masterpiece. All of them really, really hurts. But each of them is a little pebble to build a successful software. So what I'm going to do now is I'm just going to get read these over and over until I understand exactly why people did not sign up, why people did not purchase. And that's it. That's the whole marketing strategy. I hope I'll find the right problem, the right objections until I click with the audience and hopefully build a product and hopefully reach that 1 million in valuation. Now it's time to grind, time waste for no man Life is buddy two steps slow jam dancing with the devil Trying not to lose my balance. But God bless the kid with many talents. He was chosen. That's why you see him living in the moment. Now I would say the most important. So how was the launch, man? You know, the numbers is good. Very happy. I think we have around 25 happy users.

Speaker B: 25?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Already?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Well, that's nice.

Speaker A: I didn't check today, so maybe a little bit more than that.

Speaker B: So you told me you're going to grow it to 1 million sets. Long journey to go. But how are we going to actually do it? How are we going to grow it?

Speaker A: I mean, okay, so now we around 2 or 300 in monthly recurring revenue. 1 million SaaS is like I think 25,000 monthly recurring revenue.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: So that's. I kind of have to like add two or zero to that.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Okay. I asked people on Twitter why they don't they sign, why they visit the site, but why they didn't sign up. And I learned something very interesting. Yeah. So when I asked this question, people said, I don't understand why I would switch to this new product.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: I realized we ship fast. And then my mind forgot it. And then now I'm launching and I didn't pay attention to that. I have to find the right angle, the right marketing angle.

Speaker B: What kind of angle?

Speaker A: See, when I launched Shipfast, there were already tons of boilerplate out there. The thing is, Shipfast stood out. Like, there was like this boom effect, and people are like, oh, yeah, that's nice. And people spread the word. And yet Shfast is just another boilerplate. I think what worked is because I had a really, totally new marketing approach. Like, a totally new marketing angle. It was not just. It was not just a code base to do xyz. It was a tool for you to stop overthinking.

Speaker B: True.

Speaker A: And the fact that I branded it with a very emotional thing, I think that's the reason it took off. The reason they visited the site, but they don't sign up is because my tool is just another tool. It has nothing special. It's just analytics. It's boring. And plus that I am a tiny little company. It's just me. Why would you. Why would you migrate all your data to my software?

Speaker B: True.

Speaker A: This is where marketing angle come from. This is where I have to give people a clear reason why they would sign up something that makes my site very special so that instead of comparing my tool with other tools, my tool would just be a different market. There's no way to compare it with others because it's not like the others.

Speaker B: So how are we going to differentiate?

Speaker A: You know, I cannot say that.

Speaker B: Okay, okay, continue.

Speaker A: But that's a good point. But I think it's something to remember for every product that I launch. Something that anyone who is launching a product should think about. Why is it different? Why is it special? Why someone would share this to their friends? Is it worth sharing? And I think if you can answer that in a single sentence, you're onto something.

Speaker B: So is it, like, about more marketing? Find the angle, like, oh, there's different. Or you have to really also build the features.

Speaker A: That is very different, man. I'm a strong believer that if you package it in a way that's different, even though the product is not fully ready, you're doing a good service for people because you show that maybe there's a solution out there for them. And so you can afford to make a product that's not perfect at the beginning. It's okay because it's finally someone who, like, oh, this guy, he has a solution for me. If I just make another analytics tool, then what is it like? I'm another founder. I'm making people lose their time. Now if I brand it, which I'm gonna do, I'm gonna rebrand it towards a new thing, a new kind of marketing a new kind of analytics, then it's worth people time.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And then if I keep investing my time and I deliver on the promise I'll make, hopefully that's the road to this one million dollar software.

Speaker B: Even though you don't know the angle fully, you can just test in the market early. So actually you will get the angle from people, not by yourself.

Speaker A: That is it, man.

Speaker B: Oh yeah. This is exactly perfect for market fit.

Speaker A: So, yeah, good question. The person behind the camera is an AI.

Speaker B: Hello, I'm an AI assistant.

Speaker A: AI girlfriend. That's the new kind of tool. So that's the end of this video. I want you watching to think, why is your product different? And make your entire landing page copy around that until the next one. I hope you keep shipping.