# I built a startup in 31 hours (SaaS) Channel: Marc Lou Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CDBbEVBtBU Duration: 10 min Language: English Words: 1988 Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/1CDBbEVBtBU --- [0:00] on February 5th I went live on YouTube and I built a software from the first line of code to the first customer within 31 hours of streaming in this video I am going to share everything from how did I get the ID and validate it how I use four unconventional methods in order to build it really fast and that is probably going to make some developers cry and finally we are going to go over the launch part and how did I get visitors and get $2,000 of profit within the first week let's Jump Right In how to find startup IDs there are three ways to find them and my favorite [0:33] by far is to scratch your own itches looking around you what you do on a daily basis and see if you find any boring annoying tasks that you don't like that you could have a product to automate it or delegate it thanks to that I've been able to generate money from every single launch that I made my best product so far ship has made $300,000 in 6 month thanks to this exact same way to find IDs for the startup that I built in 31 hours I was actually checking my stripe account seeing how much money I made in 2023 and I realized that I spent $1.6 th000 on stripe fees [1:07] in order to generate PDF invoices I decided to turn off the option and my email were flooded with customers asking for invoices there we go I had a new product ID born just like that when you scratch your own itches it's much easier to validate a startup IDs because you actually a user of your own startup I also checked on Twitter and I saw that there is a recurring uh pattern of people complaining about stripe invoices so I had a sense of I might not be the only one in need of this tool there are tons of tips and advices to validate startup IDs um my method is a bit [1:42] unconventional but it is to ship it so fast that if it's a flop it doesn't really matter so someone at the end of January 2024 I have a pain in my life and I have this startup ID to let uh customers generate invoices themselves so the sty businesses owners like myself don't have to do it I would normally start typing my first line of code and but instead I went live on YouTube and I built the entire startup during 31 hours of streaming from the first line of code to the first customer these are the methods that I use to build the startup really fasing is everything as a [2:15] customer that's where you would go on a website if you don't fully understand what the product does and as a business owner that's how you pay the rent and also how you stay motivated over the long term so this is one of the first thing I brainstorm when building a product I found out last year that free plans don't really work for solo preneurs because most free users actually never convert to pay customers also that subscriptions are actually much harder to sell than onetime payments so I usually ditch subscriptions I start with onetime payments it's much easier to implement as a developer better for users because [2:47] they don't have recurring cost and if the product goes viral and I end up having a bunch of users and there is a need for subscription I could still grandfather the first users and start charging subscription for the next user for one payment I found out that less than $30 is usually a good price point when you're selling a vitamin a product that is a nice to have but not a must have and less than $100 is usually a good price point for a painkiller so for my startup Zenvo I priced it at $69 onetime payments um I have barely zero recurring cost the bandwidth is [3:22] extremely cheap the emails to send secure tokens are also really cheap it's like usually $1 for a th000 emails so this is very unlikely that I would get a customer that would actually cost me money and finally I added a price encor to the product at $49 one time payment this gives you access to the the product for uh limited access with only one stripe account this is important because people have it's a new kind of product people have no clue what they're looking at and this helps them decide roughly what is this product worth if I add only one plan it would probably get them confused as a product [3:59] obsess developer this part is the one I struggled the most for years it is to ship only one feature that one feature you cannot remove for his invoice it's the ability for customers to send a link to their customer so they can generate invoices anything that is not about that will be removed there is no way to preview the invoice no way to edit the details on the invoice no reset password thing there is just one big feedback button at the top of the user dashboard so that customers can let me know if they want a new feature here is the red pill most of startups fail so most of [4:35] the features that we build won't be used by by users that's why I have this framework of building only one feature and shipping the first version of the product with only that feature there is another crucial part that is often overlooked by product obsess developers like me it is the Ling page 90% of people will never see your product so I spent 11 hours or 30% of the entire time building the the Ling page and there are a few components that are very crucial for Lending page that converts first is the problem agitation component it's a section on your landing page usually under the hero section that shows that [5:11] you understand the customer pain it is very helpful because it shows respect it show that you care about your customer you know why they're here and if you speak their own language your visitors are much more likely to convert into paying customers the headline at the top of the hero section the H1 tag is very important it is the promise you make to your customers it should answer the question of why would I spend more of my precious time on this websites I never ship a startup without some kind of social proof at first when you don't have much visitors it's hard to get them but you can still send a few DMS on [5:43] Twitter LinkedIn wherever this is your hanging outs and ask some people who are potential customers if they're willing to try your product for free there are tons of noise out there and when you have some kind of social proof on website you build trust and you increase your conversion rate because I always launch product without a free Tri people would have to pay before actually signing up I usually display a little demo video of the funer so me explaining the product so people know what they're buying and finally your product name is very important because that's what people will remember and later on share with potential users if they find it [6:17] relevant if you are a software engineer you are going to cringe at the next part I do not use typescript I do not use G branches I do not test my code and I keep the same text stack for the past two years I still use mongod and I love it this is usually a loss of time because it creates constraints and whenever you want to move fast and break things it just make everything much slower because most startups fail I do not spend too much time thinking about the marketing side of things and instead I focus on the launch if I launch well I'll get enough data and visitors to [6:48] know if it's worth it or not to invest more time into marketing and growing the product later after 28 hours of streaming the product Zenvo was done and I am going to cover the four places I launched the startup in order to get the first visitors and the first customers all right first I will always schedule a launch on product hunt there are many people browsing the site every day bringing some traffic to your product and giving you an initial boost and later on if things go well you could be targeted by other newsleter and media who would just fed off product hunts and you could see spikes later on in the [7:18] future I also launched on Twitter I usually use Twitter as a bumper to P to pump my product hunt launch on Twitter people like new stuff so if you have some kind of product that is a bit trendy or if you use a good headline you can easily get some traffic even though you're getting started another platform I love and I always launch on is hicker news this is more random than Twitter in product hunt but if you craft a good headline your product can go crazy viral this is what I happened for my first product and I got something like 10,000 visitors within the first 24 hours and I [7:49] had zero audience and nothing back then and finally the subreddit side project it's still very active has a decent number of people can bring a couple hundred of visitors here your product so overall a good place to launch a startup I launched on all those four platforms within a time frame of like 2 to 3 hours and 24 hours later and about 4,000 visitors on the site then voice made $800 and by the end of the week of launching he made $2,000 in profit and also received messages from customers who were happy to finally have a solution for stripe invoicing which is promising for the future I still do not [8:26] know if I will focus on Z invoice or if I will let it run by itself I will wait to have at least 10,000 visitors on the site in order to see the dollars earned per visitor metric which is the only metric I track um to give you a reference my best website uh ship Fest gets almost $1 per visitor Revenue so for 100 visitor I could expect $100 worth in revenue and my worst product got 0.06 per visitors it's quite oversimplified but I found it to be very relevant to see if there is some kind of Market fit if I get somewhere above $0.5 per visitor I think it's a product [9:08] that's worth focusing on otherwise it's good to just let it run by itself fix some bugs be there for customer support if needed and just move on to the next one until you find the product that hits big in the last two years I started to ship my startups in days sometimes week instead of month and my Revenue went from $1 and $2,000 a month to now about4 to $50,000 a month I think speed is the entrepreneurs best friend and these video summarize everything I do in order to ship fast if you like the video you can like the video and if you love the video you can subscribe to the channel [9:39] if you're looking for another video I made one about how I got my first customer for a software I did not create you can check that out all right cheers --- About this transcript Read from YouTube's own caption track and laid out by ViewRank AI (https://viewrankai.com). 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