Day 287 growing my SaaS startup to $1M

0:00What is one thing that made your software grow? The globe. I cannot reveal everything. I brought two projects side by side. Fix your own problems is one of the best ways to build a startup. You just open your computer. You do the thing. It's only depends on you. Good job. 40 minutes. You're done.

0:18Time to lock in. We made it. What? 3,000 [Music]

0:32No, that's summer. It's winter in South Africa. It's been raining every single day. We came to Ki to visit our friends. But it actually become a perfect start of office. No sun, no surf, no distraction. Maybe it was my master plan to make Mark work harder. I made a tweet a couple days ago that I think worked well. I said that even if YouTube Premium was free, I would not

0:58subscribe. Why? Because watching ads is how you learn. And if you see an ad on YouTube, you can assume it's the top 99% of ads because it's like an auction system. So you see the best of the best. There's literally a blueprint for you that's free to use where you understand how to sell the product. That's one of the best marketing hack you can have and it's free and you have it all the time when you watch YouTube videos. So every content you see online could be the

1:23lesson. Yeah. And I would say watch more ads. Actually that's how you came up with the codefest ad. No. Very true. Yeah. The developer guy. Yay. So that beautiful woman talking to the male audience. You want to learn a code to build your own online business. Go to codefast.now. Enroll for the course. It was a really good idea. Learn from the masterpiece and then reproduce in your own way. I think

1:47that's so key. [Applause] [Music] Springman push the ground. Whoa. [Music] Good. 40 minutes. We done. Time to lock in. It's raining every single day. We're forced to ship because of the rain. Hello little chicken wing. Wow, you can be my lunch today. Very lean meat. [Music] [Applause] [Music] Back from the gym.

2:39Mark, why are we here? Cuz I'm working on the on the little new something. Oh, no. I cannot show the moment. Oh, let us know. I will see you soon. Come in. I promise. Okay. But first, every great startup come up with a good daily routine. [Music] I just started reading this book. It's 99 of the most common patterns, the errors we make when we think like cognitive bias and stuff. It's very

3:11interesting.

3:20Deep work. [Music] Mark, your posture is super good. I'm becoming the the shrimp in the developer meme. You know that this perfect spiral like this. It is true. I have a terrible working posture. So, I'm making an app to fix this. It's called Posture AI. It's using my uh little uh computer webcam and and local AI model to detect in real time my posture. It gives me quick feedback on uh roughly

4:01what's what's my uh situation right now. So, one common mistake I do all the time is like I just drop my head like this. It's going to tell me to uh that I'm slouching. if I go off center or if I go too close to the screen or something, it's also going to alert me. And then because I spend 99% of my time on my code editor, it's also going to show me

4:17alerts if I get off my correct posture. So, let's try. Um, I have this little window and it's uh basically telling me that I have to go back to my correct form and then it's gone. I am using AI for absolutely everything. Like 99.9% of the code is written by an AI. Whenever I'm stuck, I ask AI to explain me how things work. I tried to decode and combine with the things that I've learned from coding. And then after a couple days, I was able to get this little prototype right here up and running. It's not perfect. It's not completely done, but it's fixing my actual problem. It's showing me when I

4:48have like a wrong poster, and it's exactly what I'm trying to fix. And so now, literally, anyone can build an entire business using AI in 24 hours. All you have to do is to do marketing. I'll make an entire video dedicated to this app. How I got the idea, how I built it fast, and especially how I got customers with it. I'm going to try some new stuff like I'm going to try to not leverage my audience and start from scratch because I think that's also how I'm going to learn. And a quick thing I wanted to mention too is that you should

5:14build apps that solve your own problems. The reason I'm building this posture AI app is because I have built all those startups in the past and so I spent already like 6 years slouching on my computer and I started to have like this uh need for an app that would tell me to go backward. It started with my own frustration and if I'm lucky, there'll be another 100 developers or 100 people working online who have the exact same problem. And if I am very lucky, there will be a 10,000 of people who will have exactly the same problem. I don't know yet, but I know for sure that it's

5:41fixing my own problem. So, I cannot go wrong. And this is the same story for all the projects that I built. The recent one I launched is codefast. It's a cord to learn how to code. It's here because uh people kept asking on social media, how did I learn how to code to build those startups fast? And this is just the results of people asking questions. Before that I launched data pass because I had built all those project and I was wondering like which one should I focus on. I need some analytics that show me the data for all of my startups as well as how much money

6:07it's making to help me choose where to focus. So I build that fast. The point here is to uh not try to find some like fancy stuff, fancy ideas or whatever. Fix your own problems is one of the best ways to build a startups that will fix some other people's problem. Off you go.

6:21Wow, that's cool. posture.ai. That's the domain name I'm trying to get. It's going to cost us a little bit of money, I think. How much? $5 to $25,000, I think. Better be working. Yeah. Better be doing hard on marketing after that. Yeah. [Music] Look what we just found. She's ending her best life. You're so cute. I cannot believe. Wow.

6:54So long. Wow.

7:05So cute. There's a wild safari here. I think that will be the weirdest meeting ever we've ever done. I forgot for the first time in like a month, I have a meeting at 9:00 a.m. and we're in the middle of like a ma big massive park and there's no data except in this area. I'm going to do a meet up a meeting with a lawyer to sign some papers like legal stuff and hopefully like the connection

7:30is good enough so we can talk to them. Bon. Wow. There's no one literally. Wow. The most southern viewpoint in South Africa. [Music] We made it. What? 30,000? Yes. M RR 3000. Crazy. Congratulations. Yes. Yay. It took so long. A year ago, I was already building this even though growth is so slow. Why do

8:22you keep doing it for one year then? Cuz I got so many positive feedback and also it's growing very steadily. 15 to 20% month over month. I think it just takes a lot of time because it's a very people need to really trust me for this because I use their data and this I think takes time. There's no you cannot

8:39fake trust. What is one thing that made your software grow the globe? I cannot reveal everything. It's still too early like 3K is not is absolutely nothing crazy. But I think I've I cracked two things that are working. One, you know, I'm working on it at the moment. And another one is the globe feature where now if almost every day I see people showing screenshot of their data fast dashboard because of the globe because it's aesthetic I hope and that I think is what brings people new people in. And here we go. Datafas finally reached $3,000 in monthly recurring revenue which brings the valuation at 15% of this $1 million goal. And I

9:17wanted to mention that because I brought two projects side by side. On the left there is Dataf Fast and on the right there is Codefast. my uh course to learn how to code data fast generated a little over $18,000 while code fast made a little over $640,000. So for the same amount of time one brought 30 times more revenue. This is important because it shows that the time invested does not equal or is not linear to the actual revenue that will going to come out and one of the reason is because datafas is a SAS with a subscription which is much harder to sell than selling an info product or an

9:50app with onetime payments. I think there are different tiers in entrepreneurship. Probably info product are the easiest way to make money on the internet and the probably the end goal would be to make money with like a big social network like Facebook and have advertisers. And I think it's important when you're getting started to start at level one or level two because you want to get cash flow as quick as possible that would let you quit your job that would let you feel comfortable about doing what you're doing. That will makes you like feel pumped and excited to work on that will make the people around you

10:16think you're not actually crazy. So maybe like a little app with a onetime payment. But as long as you build something, you can't go wrong. Cheers. Let's go. [Music]

10:39So beautiful. So, a couple days ago, I saw a tweet from a guy that say like, "I failed at making $1,000 in one week. I'm going to try again next month." And I think this is just a shortcut to burnout. Because you cannot really control the time you can earn x amount of money. Yeah. You have no control over the market. You don't know if people are going to buy. So, you basically set yourself for failure. Teach financial goal. each stuff you cannot control and just focus on stuff you can control. Set yourself for like X apps in Y month or like 10 push-ups per day or stuff that

11:17you have 100% control over so you can only only win at the end of the day. And remember to always ship. [Music] Just ship it.