How I Do Marketing as a Solo Developer (VLOG)

0:00so this is how I made $5,000 us with a free tool I built in 3 [Music] days I am launching a course called cancel du to volcano what happened is absolutely crazy this is the marketing cure sell it before you make it and I did not discount any of my [Music] product $55,000 what it it's free free app yeah it's 100% free it leaves completely separate to my other apps it's Standalone app I see sometimes people on Twitter sharing like oh if you want to make a logo try this by Mark because it's free people who reshare it so it brings constant traffic and then there's

0:41a little ad on the right side because if you need a logo maybe you need to a code base to ship your startup faster and so that brings I track exactly how much traffic it brings to ship fast and then when they pay I know exactly how many people bot ship fast because they discovered logo FAS oh so even though you don't have audience and you hate marketing so you just build a free tool that you like to make and then share it with people then make money this is especially for developers like me who are a little bit too addicted at making stuff this is the marketing cure cuz you

1:15never actually do marketing you build a tool you ship it because it's free people share about it and you have to make a great tool as well and then you get free traffic that's the best way to start getting traffic also grow an audience I usually plug my name under it so so people discover the me through the tool so you grow traffic you grow an audience and you get customers from it and it's like I think it needs to I need to make an entire video about that hello bear for millionaire St T yeah well why are you here we're here because I need to get

1:51this cut this way too long for now and tomorrow we are going to Korea and we're going to go to one of your best friend's wedding with te style are I don't know up you look good like a French rooster you've been calling it the local barbershop for a long time no I think it is yeah since they I mean actually when we mooved from Korea because we were like we had zero you earn 1K a month I think in Korea even less yeah and then we moved to Bali and it was 2018 life was way cheaper mhm and remember we we had like maybe 1K per month and we live

2:31like kings we had a swimming pool we had a like a nice bedroom in a Shir Villa it's crazy how you can reduce burn rates like increase your life by just moving to a different country I think maybe the numbers have changed a bit but I think with $1,000 a month you can leave great in B this is $3 like the haircut but after earning L of money why do still come to local Garber shop I don't know man I just like it feels natural here I don't feel like I people are genuine not pretending just so kind after tomorrow when I'm gone he's going to have more customers he's

3:06going to behave exactly the same he's not trained for me he's just he's just doing a thing mhm I like that authentic experience a lot let's see how your haircut would become like a local people man I choose number number eight French crop number eight yes makeover wow look at you so it is uh 7 7:50 p.m. which is 1 hour before my bedtime and I'm entering the most important part of my day I spent an entire hour to wind down and have bit of sleep because when I started the journey 6 years ago I remember I used to sacrifice hours of sleep so I could get

3:48work done more and I would often get tired and emotional during the daytime and 3 years ago I read a book that changed my life called why we sleep by Matthew Matthew Walker and that reframed how I thought about sleep I stopped thinking that more hours of sleep means less hour during the daytime but I see it as an investment for a better day and since I prioritize my sleep like never before you almost become like a religion I have the best happiest days of my life whether it's my body physically or whether it's in my head mentally even when nothing is happening I was grinding

4:23I had zero followers I made Zer I just felt good all the time I I try to get almost 100% every day and most of it is because of this wind down routine I read for 15 to 30 minutes then I do a few breathing exercise it's a method called 468 I think where you inhale with your nose for four times then hold for six times and then exhale with the mouse for eight times when I met Brian Johnson one of my hero in Singapore a few months ago he told me that he also struggle he recommended me to do this kind of exercise and this is working so well now

5:01I I really sleep so easily and to finish I just sit in the sofa and a few things I also do that really improve um especially if you have a deviated septum here and you snore at night I wear those patch on my nose which opens uh the nazle nostrils and help me breathe better with the nose otherwise I just cannot breathe and this change my life like crazy I used to get about an hour of deep sleep now thanks to this I also sleep on the side and I get two hours of deep sleep every night this is really a game changer so if you snore really

5:33consider buying one of those oh and and one thing that is also very important it's about those red light here that makes really chill relaxing mood uh there's no blue light there is no screen for the entire hour and then the light will keep dimming dimming diming until it reaches my bedtime at something

5:51around 8:45 p.m. [Music] okay so this is how I made $5,000 with a free tool I built in 3 days and how you can come up with your own free tool and Market your startup for $0 so this is the free tool in question it's a very simple tool where you can create logos uh based on icons you pick here and um and make whatever logo you like and it's promoting on the right side a little startup of mine called ship fast I track how many people click on this link it sends them to this website right here and if they end up making a purchase I

6:54know it in my database so this business here is already converging well and it's just a matter of sending more traffic that's how I came up with this idea of building a little logo maker because the reason is if someone needs a logo then they might need to build a website after and this is exactly what my startup does it help them build websites faster now there are many many other ways to come up with free tools ideas one of the popular SEO tool out there SEO hre which is an SEO uh software you can do a bunch of stuff from keyword planning domain Authority Etc they have four five free

7:28tools just like this one where you can have a little uh glimpse of what you can get if you purchase this software this one is a very specific where you can find keywords uh search like how many people search for those keywords for a specific keyword it give you a few information and of course if you want to get more of that you can get started and purchase their paid plan so they took one feature of their main software and made it available for free and a little bit limited on the internet and they did that for many other tools and that's how they bring lots of customers another way

7:58I do this with one of my habit tracker called habits Garden here people can uh use this app to track the Habit how do I get more customer for habit tracker well I build this thing called visualize habit it's an app that is again free that helps people realize and visualize what they're going to achieve in an entire year if they build tiny habits so for instance they can start their habit greed by saying they want to stretch 5 minutes every uh three times a week and they want to work on their side Hol for uh 16 minutes every day and because sleep is important we

8:32also want to say that we want to get eight hours of sleep per night now when they go next then they can see their little grade uh what they going to be uh what they're going to complete in an entire year this gives people a sense of like what are you going to achieve they can share that with their friends if they want they can download that photo and then when they click next they can surprisingly sign up for my habit tracker and when they'll click here they'll end up on the Habit tracker it goes directly through to my website and it Imports all the habits that they

9:00created previously you can literally come up with any idea for a free tool to promote your app you want to make sure it takes a few boxes the first one is you want to make sure this free tool is well free it's very important because this is how you go viral this is where we're going to talk about it later this is where you can post your free tool in every uh Community every platform social medias out there and this is how people can spread the world you also want to make sure it has only one feature you don't want to make it complicated you want to make that feature available as

9:29soon as people land on the landing page you don't want people to click on buttons you don't want people to you want you don't want to redirect them on pages you don't want to collect emails you don't want any of that you want them to go straight to the point you also want to find an explicit name something that is very easy to remember logo fast is well a tool to make a logo fast and it's very important because now with social media people will share that if it's useful and this is a easy way for people to remember your brand search it on Google and this is how you improve

9:59your ranking there and finally this is kind of what I said earlier but you really want to make sure people don't have to sign up because this is going to kill the convers rate build it in a few days and once you're ready there are tons of places you can launch your tool I will link to an article below where um it's a list of all the places you can launch for free so we have R product Hacker News um directory AI directories like there is an AI for that in future pedia for each of them there is a tutorial to help you uh increase the

10:26chances that it goes viral use those platforms to LA launch your free to basically you want to drive as much traffic as possible on the launch day so it makes like a little buzz or boom you want people to talk about it on social media Tik Tok Instagram Etc and hope that the tool will keep spreading here's a quick summary of what you get when you start building free tools first you appeal to wider Market just like logo fast there are people who might not be interested in ship fast but they might be interested in a logo second you start to rank for new SEO keyword it could be

10:54your brand name but it could also be some keyword that people search on the internet since it's a free tool then you have chances to go viral because this is you know like something is free it's valuable you can easily share it to a friend it also helps you grow an audience because it keeps you accountable every week you build a new free tool you share it on Twitter Youtube Instagram wherever this is your hanging out this will signal to people that you're someone who shows up because every week you have a tiny new tool to share it also make a good first impression if you think about href which

11:24is a software that is pretty expensive when they have this free tool it's it's easy to use is friendly I'm like this seems like a good company and we all know that first impression matters a lot and finally if you're a developer like me and you're addicted to spending too much time coding this is one of the best way to be self-driven because you actually never really spend time doing marketing you're basically building tools that will be used as a marketing tool oh man this is our last dinner in belly I'm so sad a true we're leaving tonight yeah I'll miss this yeah yeah I mean this is so healthy I feel so good

11:59after eating that true like recently you made domestic change on diet as well you quit sugar and both of us actually so how did putting all this sugar and eating healthy diet impacted you it feels good it feels really good because I remember I used to eat lots of pastas and I would be tired after and I would just sit on the couch and do nothing with this I've almost feel like I can do a workout after that and I'm not hungry it has a I don't know it just feels like it's the like a kind of a power food somehow what is your secret of healthy

12:34food I have a lovely wife cook so well actually I think avoiding carbs in general is a good practice or you get get it from like stuff like sweet potatoes you mean avoiding the processed carb but eat lots of like a complex carb yeah with a fiber like vegetable fruits nice entrepreneur not only work is important good sleep good food to fuel your brain is very important okay some some I know I've seen some tweets like because I tweet often about sleep exercise and and diet and I read in the comments some people who mentioned that I only say that because I made it but I think what they don't see and I

13:18wish you know I I I wish we recorded YouTube videos earlier is we have been doing this especially like sleep and and and exercise from Day Zero M and this is how I was able to grind for like 2 years with nothing happening that's true even though you don't have much money you can still prti sleep food and work out cuz we still work out through free YouTube video yeah we don't have a gym membership yeah we still eat like we don't go out so actually cooking at home is much cheaper much cheaper yeah even for that I think the fact that you're here it helps a lot oh that's true yeah

13:58I wouldn't be able to cook that and work and then also cancel cancel du to volcano everything is canceled to the volcano what happened is absolutely crazy there's a volcano eruption this morning and 90% of the flights are cancelled except today every every flight was cancell but luckily our flight didn't get cancelled because it's at 1:00 a.m. the day after so why every time we fly out there's something like accident always happen we're literally the only flight leaving tonight for Korea easy there is absolutely no one this is immigration I have never seen the airport so empty I can't believe we were boring good morning good morning did you

14:48well so [Music] well we made it through hurry up wondering how my shoes will like it [Music]

15:11[Music]

15:35[Music] wow we're

15:43in workout completed by 5° I think the cold killer no excuse always work okay so I just landed in Korea and it's going to be a crazy week we're like couple days before the Black Friday and I have been working on a new product for the past N9 month it's it is the biggest project I've ever released I have so much work to be done if the product is available for Black Friday you will know it at the end of this video and at same times I also want to mention about last year's Black Friday where I run kind of an unusual type of deal where I would did

16:22not discount the product and I was able to generate 10K Revenue in like 36 hours I want to I want to show you a little bit how I managed to do that so you can replicate but first I need to find a coffee shop and since we're in Korea it shouldn't be

16:45hard it up uh big bummer I realize I forgot my uh wire cable so I cannot record videos on my laptop with this camera so I'll do the Black Friday update at home okay I just got back home and I want to share about what I've learned last year from making $111,000 for the Black Friday deal the first one is that you want to stand out this is my way of standing out I make those weird videos where I go live with uh someone famous like uh Jimmy felon uh this is my way of doing things it's not everybody's ways and of course the fact that I have an audience

17:24makes everything a little easier but this tweet is a promotional tweet it would never get 500 likes if I hadn't make videos that gives people a reason to stay a little bit on that page during Black Friday there will be tons of other business owners that will try to make their product stand out so try to find something creative something that feels like you to stand out and give people a reason to have a look at your discount so this is the Black Friday page I built for my product and I did not discount any of my product when it comes to making discounts there are two schools

17:57of thoughts the first one her people who say like you should make Black Friday discount this is how you make lots of money Etc and there's another school that says do not discount your product because it train your customers to expect discounts so even though you'll have a spike during Black Friday you will Flatline after that and you will be waiting until the next discount I don't know which one is right I believe it's somewhere in the middle I believe Black Friday is a good excuse for people to finally buy a product they've been waiting for but I also believe that you don't want to make your product look

18:27cheap and for that reason instead of discounting your product you can create a bundle so what I did back then ship fast one of my uh one of my main product was $149 instead I bundled it with other products I added this Indie page product and this buy dispute product and I made the three of them for the same price as shifas and so the discount is only on the bundle and not a single product and so instead of lowering the value of one product I increase the value inside of the same price if you don't have another product to sell maybe you have a little

19:00course or little PDF you can create something of extra value that you can release for The Black Friday and bundle it together with your main products okay I have a few days left before the Black Friday so now it's time to rock and roll you look so fashion yeah yeah me oh I'm

19:28oh how much better say we are going to my best friend's wedding and yeah we're going to show you how the typical Korean couple get married here which is very different from our wedding yeah I think Korean people are more efficient we do one hour wedding one hour buffet and then bye-bye and we're going to give them blessing to have a nice honeymoon in New Zealand because they're a big fan of camping are they going there yeah they're going New Zealand oh nice it's interesting this the first time we wear proper clothes in like 6 months H actually like a power by my dad he gave

20:04all the clothes for Mark like a shirt pants and a watch I do not watch I do not own any of those clothes it's all all all of her dad's clothes [Music]

20:36[Music] [Applause]

20:42it is ready it's been 9 month I am preparing for this single day I am launching a course called coat fast pick backstory here when I started sharing whatever I do on the internet people started to asking me questions and the number one question question people ask is how did you learn how to code I Tau myself how to code back in 2016 and it was really hard I had to spend hours debugging stuff without finding the answer and then sometimes I I would get stuck for weeks honestly it was really not fun but in 2022 since chpt announced the release of their AI models I have

21:18been using AI all the time in my code editor and I realized that it's getting much and much easier whenever I don't know anything I just ask chpt and these days I barely don't even code anymore I just write English and review the code that the AI made and at the same time I am not doing anything complicated I'm not like a advanced software engineer for a big company I do simple things like building landing page user dashboards and all these kind of things which is like 10% of what you need to know if you're like a proper software engineer so it is way easier than it

21:47used to be because of AI and if you want to build a tiny business you don't need to know everything so I decided to make this course I'm trying to tell the little story of how I learn how to code and how chpt the the arriving of AI changed everything and also the fact that it's pretty new even if it's 2022 it's only been like since 2024 that AI is literally like super efficient inside of your code editor and most of the courses out there are still teaching people how to get a job and uh I think there is a new opportunity for people who just want to learn how to make your

22:18ideas into reality and eventually code a light little business so this is the website that you're seeing right here um huge inspiration from gumroad and another site called links as well um you can see uh I have been overthinking the those little uh buttons here and there this is the actual course so there three parts in the course one is about the mindset not just coding but the mindset of you know how to train yourself to use AI for everything um how to ship ideas like the mini smaller version of your app so you don't spend month building a product um a few tips also about

22:50marketing and how to make money with your products then there's another part about the fundamentals so a don't like an hour about an hour long version of um HTML CSS and JavaScript how the internet works just the basics so that people following the course know exactly how to how the internet works and how to ask an AI to do things for them and then there's a big big part uh right now it Sayes 7 hours but I think it's going to be a little more than that where uh we're building an entire software from scratch from the landing page designing a little bit of marketing as well and

23:20then everything that involved in assess so private user dashboard uh subscription payment with stripe Lon squeezy sending emails authentic users Etc as well as using AI heavily in order to code really fast I really put my soul out there uh there's a little confession that I've made probably on the internet I hated school I hated how things were taught to me and I really try to teach this course in a way that is simple easy fun with a real outcome a goal that you might want to build your freedom you might want to turn your idea into reality I'm really trying to make this course as engaging as fun as possible so

23:56it never feels like you're learning but it feels like you're having fun so maybe I can show you a little demo of what's inside of the course so there are three parts the part you just saw earlier mindsets the fundamentals and your each lessons are breaken down into sections or categories whatever and then each lesson is like a 30 seconds to sometimes one or two minutes long I I really try to break them down into the smallest part possible and because I am a developer after all I need to procrastinate a little bit so I played around and there's like a dark theme a way for people to focus and just be

24:28fully locked in into inside of a lesson um well this is me procrastinating here that brings me up to today and why I'm releasing this course now it is about 80% completed I think I need a couple other weeks to finish it fully so I think it was an opportunity for me to launch this course at a cheaper price to reflect the fact that uh there's still some lessons that I need to work on and it's also an opportunity for anyone learning how to code to grab the discounts now that it's cheaper and so you will find under this video a link to the course to see if it's a fit for you

24:57and that's how you can grab the Black Friday deal I hope you like it and that you keep shipping 6 years ago I fired the developer in my head in order to become an entrepreneur but I couldn't have done it tone it's because of my friend Andre all right so we are in s South Korea and we met for the first time 6 years ago in a similar area and I was back then I was like 100% thinking about whatever product I'm going to build this is what my matters and you came and you told me something I will always remember sell it before you make it yeah what is

25:33the first thing you you what is the actional thing you tell me do that you remember yeah so the actionable thing that I told you at that time was that you should uh pick a niche first of all like an it a niche that is very interesting to you that you feel excited to work with and then go you know scrape some emails from people of that Niche so like maybe you know 10 a day or whatever you feel comfortable sending emails per day and um and then just try to get them to raise their hand and say that they're interested in some type of value

26:04proposition that you're offering and then once they raise their hand you try to get them on a call and then you make you make an offer you make a pitch and then from that it's mathematically impossible not to get your first client and start to make money and start to build confidence and then have a service or a product that you're proud of so it's 2018 so people the world does know does not know what Zoom is and I'm following his device I'm sending emails to businesses that I've never seen whatsoever and then I told them to to jump on a zoom call and a few of like

26:35most of them like what what is zoom you know like I have no idea what like they don't even reply but a few of them say yes and eventually that's how I end up making my first $1 on the internet and this is crazy it's all everything everything is like everything started with with Andre it's crazy and you can do it too nothing stopping you earlier we were talking about the product first mindset that I had that you helped me like break and go from the entrepreneurship mindset what would you say is the things that developers lack when it comes to entrepreneurship yeah so the product first mindset it it it

27:07makes a lot of sense but another way to think about it is um a customer first mindset so the way I think about a customer uh first mindset is you go directly to the customer first right instead of trying to build something and then and try to sell it one to many which is very very difficult you go directly to whatever target market you've identified you talk to one person in that Target Market you identify what their problems are and then you build something specifically for them and now you're in a position to gather those insights get that market data and then build a SAS later or continue down the

27:38the service based mindset too that works as well if your goal is to make money as soon as possible which I know a lot of people's goal is just to get some to generate some cash flow then there's no faster way than going directly to somebody and asking them what their problems are solving proposing proposing to solve that problem and then getting money to fix it right that's the fastest way and and then from there you have options you can build a SAS or you can continue down that server space path it's like a hypothesis it exists in your head yeah but like it yeah you're

28:06putting a lot of time energy into something that you don't even know somebody will buy so the fastest way to know if if somebody will buy is to go directly to the market ask them yourself and all you lose is a little bit of time yeah making those Cod emails exactly right so that that to me is probably the safest most effective route than trying to build something uh that that you hope people will buy later because those insights are incredibly valuable that you gain from working with someone one-on-one that's how you got fired me up 6 years ago to choose between subscription or onetime payment oh you do onetime payment if

28:43like you want to build something and not really like think about it too much yeah right but I think one time payments are good for validating something if if no one buys your One Time payments no one will buy your subscription if no one buys your subscription maybe they'll buy your Ser your service for onetime payments so from a development standpoint I think it's really up to your own priority right like the nice thing about subscription is that you you have this money coming from the same people over and over they become loyal to you and it forces you to continue to build on that one app and develop it so

29:12if it's like your one baby and you want to you know take off with it and you want it to be like your one Legacy product then a subscription might make sense because again it just keeps you accountable to continue to force yourself to develop it and improve it Etc but if you just want to ship a bunch of stuff I think a one time payment is probably idea it's a good point I didn't say it this way it's like like almost forcing you to be productive by having subscription that's true it's like a financial accountability you have to the user right it's like they're paying you

29:38every month so they expect to see uh more products more updates more a lot of different maybe a community component maybe all these different things but uh that depends on your own priority as of

29:55development this is my uh current family knows apartment and this place is magical to me because this is when ship pass idea came from this idea eventually turned on into a million doll business so uh trouble [Music] more now I need to turn off these camera before I get deported from Korea for installing equipment on the balcony this is the setup this would be no issue in belly your friends but here you never know