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In 2020, I was laid off from my bartender job during the Covid lockdown.
Suddenly I had a lot of time on my hands, and so I decided to code up a SaaS.
My product was Zlappo, a Twitter growth tool offering a suite of tools for power users, including advanced analytics, viral tweet repository, thread previews, auto-retweets, auto-plugs, etc.
I didn't have an email list or a Twitter following when I launched, so I had to get creative with how I got the initial word out and signed up my first 10 users.
It was a grind starting from absolute scratch.
What worked for me ($0-$1k/mo a.k.a. initial traction)
A. TWITTER GUERRILLA MARKETING
Since my product was a Twitter-specific tool, it was only natural that I started marketing on Twitter.
I employed 3 successful tactics that worked to get my first 10 paying customers:
- Sending DMs - I searched creator/marketing Lists and just directly sent DMs to users, telling them about how my product can help them to up their Twitter game. In order to make them feel special, I created a personalized link with a personalized promo code for them to get a discount upon signing up. This boosted my response rate. I did this for hours every day until I got rate-limited for spamming, then rinse and repeat for the next day.
- Using Twitter search - One of the defining features of my product was the ability to schedule threads, which back in 2020 was a feature gap in most leading competitors. So I bookmarked a Twitter search link for the keywords "schedule threads," and every morning I responded to these tweets and plugged my product. This got visits to my site immediately, as I was helping them out directly with a problem that they had.
- Tweet source label - Every tweet posted by my app borne my app name (it said "Zlappo.com") on the bottom-right of every tweet. If you're a Twitter user, you're probably familiar with the "Twitter for iPhone" source label that tweets used to have -- until Elon ruined it (more on this guy later...).
And just like that, I've seeded my app with its initial users who are using my app, paying me monthly, and offering their feedback freely and enthusiastically.
Notice how I never did any content creation, wrote threads, did profile optimization, etc.
B. REALLY FINE-TUNING THE PRODUCT
Once I got my first few initial users, I think the most important thing that really accelerated my path to $1k MRR, as a solo founder, was to focus 80-90% of my time/effort on getting the product right, transforming a wonky MVP to a passable/good-enough product that can compete in the marketplace.
Here are some specific things I did:
- I filled in feature gaps so that my product is state-of-the-art for my product category, using customer feedback as my guide -- I worked on the most-requested features first.
- I fixed every bug reported, even if I considered it edge-case (nothing is "edge-case" if a customer encountered it).
- I sped up the site as much as I could, rewriting/refactoring tons of my code to utilize more efficient database queries for instance, adding more RAM/processing power to my server, caching generously, enabling gzip, minification, etc. etc.
- I continually updated the UI/UX if I had a customer emailing me about something that was unintuitive or confusing.
In my opinion, having the product on point was my #1 way of user retention and also to encourage users to proudly share my app with their friends.
What worked for me ($1k-$30k/mo a.k.a. scaling)
C. AFFILIATE PROGRAM
Once I had a small base of die-hard users, I created a generous affiliate program:
- I paid a fat 50% recurring monthly commission to incentivize my users to share and promote my product.
- I also provided double-sided incentive, in that every referred user gets 60-day free trial right off the bat (instead of the usual 30 days).
Soon enough there were users who tweeted constantly, wrote blog reviews, created YouTube reviews, and even ran paid ads to drive traffic to my site.
I assisted them by providing graphics, screenshots, copy, and also creating a simple affiliate dashboard where they can view their affiliate stats and redeem their commissions at any time using a one-click interface.
D. APPSUMO LIFETIME DEALS
I also ran an AppSumo Marketplace deal which eventually accounted for 50%-80% of my monthly revenue, depending on the month.
I could obviously sell lifetime deals on my own (which I did), but selling on AppSumo had several advantages:
- It legitimized my nascent app.
- It helped me garner 5-star reviews/testimonials.
- It got affiliates to link back to my site and thus drive traffic.
- It also increased the visibility for my brand by running paid ads on my behalf.
- It jumpstarted word of mouth like crazy, as I later discovered "Zlappo" was mentioned so often within these lifetime deal groups on Facebook.
- Don't forget... the revenue! I would have never hit $30k/mo without the boost that AppSumo gave my deal during times like AppSumo week and Black Friday sales.
Absolutely worth it, 10/10.
E. EMAIL MARKETING
As my user base grew into the thousands, email marketing turned out to be massively valuable.
I now had thousands of email addresses to leverage on, to whom I could blast offers or update emails.
I wrote a custom script to send emails to my user base who have trialed but not upgraded, or churned, and I periodically send out offers, discounts, product updates, etc. to get them to re-engage with my product.
And I regained many customers this way.
My downfall ($30k/mo to $0)
My business had been humming along fine for ~3 years... until late-March this year, when Elon Musk announced that Twitter API access would no longer be free but will cost $42,000/mo.
Well shit, my entire business was built on top of Twitter, and there was no way I could pay $42k/mo.
That's a brand-new Tesla every single month!
So with a heavy heart, and after many sleepless nights, I decided that I had to shut down Zlappo, or at least deprecate like 80% of my features, which angered a lot of users and led to massive churn (the churn is still going on as we speak).
My 3-year entrepreneurship journey had ended in failure, and to say I was sad was a massive understatement.
But god damn what a ride it was.
Lessons learned
The most important lesson I learned was to never hitch my star on another company's wagon.
Never have all your eggs in one basket, never have a single point of failure.
If I had diversified early (and integrated Facebook, Instagram, Google My Business, LinkedIn, TikTok, etc. into my product), I might have been able to attract a broad-enough customer base who wouldn't care too much if Twitter was deprecated.
Platform risk is very real, and, although it was a risk I undertook, it was quite unexpected that Elon Musk would buy Twitter, let alone cut off API access.
But it happened, and it can't unhappen, so I saw only 3 ways forward for me:
- Build my next business
- Give up and get a job for life
- Just pack it in, call it a good life, and take a long walk off a short pier
I'm very far from 3, I'd rather die than to settle for 2, so realistically 1 is my only option.
If you want to follow my journey as a 3rd-time founder, I'm currently building Zylvie.
If you're a creator of any sort who sells stuff online, I invite you to please come along for the ride. 😎
Otherwise, I'm open for questions if anyone wants to know anything in particular!
Thanks, I definitely made the best out of Covid.
Believe it or not, I bootstrapped my app in 2020 using my unemployment payments and stimulus checks.
My state and the federal government were giving me $4k/mo for months, and that helped me tide through unemployment while coding up my app.
By the time they cut it off (circa Aug 2020), my app was already profitable, and I was ready to stand on my own 2 feet.
Right now, I'm bootstrapping Zylvie, but this time using the residual income stream from my app.
I had to cut a lot of features due to the API changes, but enough customers stayed with me such that I didn't need a job while I build up my new business.
Yup, honestly in my opinion most pivots are just reactionary and suboptimal at best.
You're still trying to salvage your old work and make something out of it, a.k.a. sunk cost fallacy.
Plus pivoting to LinkedIn would have required just as much effort/work than starting from scratch, so I might as well start from scratch with a business model I know that's more defensible.
I think defensibility against competitors is quite well-covered in entrepreneurship circles, but defensibility against suppliers is not talked about enough.
Because that's not a "real" solution to the problem.
The problem was that my business model was flawed from the very start (platform-dependent on another business who can cut me off at anytime).
If I pivoted to LinkedIn, who's to say they won't cut off API access 1 year down the road?
Then it's me scrambling all over again to figure out what's next.
I do.
I didn't need to touch my savings yet.
Hey, thanks man.
I was very depressed when my API access was cut off, it felt like I worked hard for nothing the past 3 years, and it felt like turning the clock back to 2020 all over again.
But I'm good now.
Thank you for your kind words of support!
smartest bartender I've probably met.
Lol, I'm not sure about that, my co-workers back then went on to do great things too.
One started a wildly-profitable drone business, another got into real estate.
Anyway top 3 pieces of advice:
- Figure out your repeatable marketing strategy early on, preferably before even building your app. In most cases, it will be content/social, built-in virality, affiliate program, or paid ads. It has to be something you can do over and over again to predictable results, and it has to have: founder-marketing fit, market-marketing fit, and product-marketing fit. Meaning the marketing strategy you use has to fit your personality, your market niche's personality, and your product type.
- Don't build any feature unless dozens of paying customers are breathing down your neck for it. It's easy for any random user to see "ackhtually, it would be cool if you had <complex XYZ> feature." It takes them 3 seconds to say it, it will take you 3 months to build it. So be very sure to build your product roadmap only based on the pressing, repeated feedback of a lot of users who are already paying you money.
- Diversify your revenue streams by tailoring your revenue streams to different market segments. Yes, SaaS is 1 product, but that doesn't mean your customers are a monolithic entity, and that you have to charge your customers only 1 way. For instance, for Zlappo, I introduced lifetime plans for customers who want to do away with monthly fees. I was always careful to price them at above lifetime value, and that gave me a ton of cash upfront for product development (and vacations and a new car lol). For Zylvie, I'm planning to earn money 3 ways: (i) I take a commission for each successful sale, (ii) I'm rolling out monthly plans for revenue predictability, and (iii) I'm also offering lifetime plans for customers who despise monthly plans. These are 3 different market segments that should be treated and monetized differently. Plus, diversifying my revenue streams provides me with safety, in case 1 or even 2 of them falter (e.g. Stripe/Paddle banning me, AppSumo delisting me, etc.). If you only rely on monthly plans processed by 1 MoR, you're very vulnerable to platform risk. Plus you're most likely leaving money on the table. Lifetime plans eventually accounted for anywhere between 50-80% of my monthly revenue. That's no small amount!
but really i was just building stuff i thought was 'cool'.
This is often a mistake.
I find that these 2 things are extremely important before you work on any idea:
- There must be first-hand evidence that someone is in pain and needs something that doesn't exist yet. This often means a tweet, a post on Reddit, a forum thread, etc. where people are asking for a solution to a niche/specific problem, and none of the replies actually fulfill that need. This was what happened for my first app, Zlappo (people were complaining that existing tweet schedulers could only schedule singular tweets, but not threads). This is also what drove me to create my 2nd app, Zylvie. Creators were looking for a way to partner up and do co-selling (profit-sharing) without having to manually pay out their partners using PayPal.
- As you work on your idea, you need to consult directly with the people who were complaining about that pain. Ask them what they envision they need in the product, if you were to build one. How would it work? What features are critical? What features can be pushed back to v2 or v3? And what price would be reasonable for you to charge if it really solves their problem? You cannot build in a vacuum. You need to talk to your target customer as you build it out.
If you do these 2 things, you have a significantly-higher chance of success in gaining traction.
There's so much noise out there nowadays competing for everyone's attention.
If you do 1 and 2, I can guarantee that the response will be a lot more excited and enthusiastic when you finally launch.
I appreciate your kind words of support!
Oh, my usual, which is:
- Python/Django
- Django Celery for cron tasks
- Postgres (love it)
- Linux VPS (Digital Ocean is bae)
- nginx Gunicorn
- JQuery Bootstrap on the front-end 😎
- Twitter API of course
Firstly, when you were sending those DMs, did you use personal branding or company branding?
Personal.
Personal account, personal name, personal branding.
Going company for prospecting is a big mistake.
Company social should only be used to communicate with people who are already customers.
Main competitors would be Gumroad and Payhip at the moment, since these are also platforms that offer a landing page/storefront to small solo creators.
I'm already differentiating, as we speak, so hopefully that will help me gain traction when I finally do a full launch.
I bet you can do it again without issues.
Thanks!
As anything in life, assessing your risks in a business is a fundamental pillar, especially when you're exclusively relying on a single service.
Absolutely, I agree.
I did assess the risk back in 2020 when I was just building Zlappo.
I thought it was a stable-enough platform to build a business on (and it was, for a few years).
Never did I think that "Elon Musk buying Twitter for $44b and then hiking API fees to $42k/mo" would even be a possible worst-case scenario, but lesson learned!
Finally someone notices...
Yes sir, I'm a sweaty-toothed madman with a stare that pounds Ethan Hawke's brain.
That's a good question!
In a way, yes.
But here's a crucial difference:
I can swap out 1 provider for another on short notice.
The API providers for Zylvie are not monopolies; they're interchangeable with one another.
Say Stripe bans me now.
It would suck, but I can integrate PayPal Commerce and get it up and running within days.
I couldn't do that with Zlappo, because it was marketed as a Twitter tool, and only Twitter provides Twitter API access.
I've decided to fortify my current business moving forward.
That includes using multiple (interchangeable) API providers and also multiple payment processors.
Yes, but I would hate selling it when I had zero leverage.
So I decided to just keep it.
Of course I informed my users why.
The monthly-paying users were understanding.
The ones who paid for a lifetime plan, however...
Ah, here comes the paywall...
Lol, just kidding.
Let us know when you release it.
If you know how to code, that would help a lot.
If you don't, you might want to learn or look into No-Code.
I've heard of non-coders successfully starting SaaS businesses, so look into it.
Please for the love of what is holy pester Twitter for a better API deal.
Would it be possible?
Maybe.
However, it does not solve the underlying issue, which is two-fold:
- We as developers have mostly lost trust in Twitter/X as a stable and reliable platform to build our businesses.
- It doesn't resolve the fact that Twitter/X still reserves the right to arbitrarily change the rules, prices, etc., and we would be at their total mercy all over again. I refuse to tie the fate of my company (and my life) to the capricious and unpredictable whims of an eccentric billionaire. It's a flawed business model from the very start. And it's time to finally move on.
Anyway, I've followed you.
Seeing people from Twitter on here feels like some cross-over episode or something. 😂
Thanks for being a user of Zlappo! ♥️
His hands reach out and choke me.
And all the time he's mumbling!
I'm closer to DTLA.
Do you go to tech meet-ups in LA?
I've been to We Are LA Tech meetup, if you've heard of it.
It takes tremendous guts to rebuild.
I just don't see any other alternative.
I'm terrified of having to go back to get a job.
Reading r/antiwork for 10 minutes each day is enough to send buckets of ice down my spine.
I'm sorry, no, it's not.
More like $0/mo growth moving forward, because it has hit a brick wall product development-wise?
How did you get the idea to code a twitter tool? What made you believe in this idea? Do you have prior experience in social media targeting?
Hanging out on Twitter.
I saw people asking for a tool to schedule threads (there were very few then).
Then I searched "how to schedule threads" on Twitter itself, and, holy shit, there were new people asking for it on a daily basis.
I knew then there was a burning demand for it, and I went to build it.
Bro, what's with your username? 😂
It's not nothing.
There are still thousands of dollars in residual income each month.
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I was already a freelance programmer in college.
I took a 6-year hiatus to try my hand at acting.
I tended bar and waited tables in between auditions.
All that shut down during Covid, so I went back to coding.
My monthly costs were around:
The rest was profit (minus my living expenses and taxes).