How I grew my SaaS to $4,000 MRR with cold emails (developer VLOG)

0:01one cold email $4,000 and there was no customer support whatsoever we need one cold that's it and that's the first making money other the balls meet Mark Lou a millionaire who owns exactly zero pairs of shoes and way more startups than You' think is reasonable he sits here in this disgustingly beautiful Tropical Paradise to show you how to turn ideas into trans strangers into clients and your boring job into a distant [Music] memory we finally made it yeah we freaking made it with maybe 6 hours delay but we made it yeah we got the Visa we have a fly ticket we're freaking ready to go to Australia to meet that

0:58person meet some [Music] we finally arrived Australia it was supposed to be our healing trip but the first day is totally brutal yeah it was crazy hopefully we can get a car rent told now ah

1:38Australia what's up that pretty [Music] good now it's 400 p.m. we tried to eat dinner before five Mark is actually having a little struggle to disconnect we can talk about it during this dinner yeah e you yeah yeah okay let's do this that looks good so actually this morning we had a little talk no yeah I'm kind of made a mistake today by opening the computer mhm cuz once I start working I kind of stop thinking I have to write about thinking about the tweets I'm going to write build features I have to fix bugs so many things and once I see something then it kind of

2:26never stops and it's like infinite treadmill you need to find the SA way to work well but also have a good rest to disconnect from work to have better ideas to do up or and out yeah I think you need to work whatever if you want to make something good mhm but honestly I think you can start with a couple hours like an hour a day I think it's a miraculous amount of time and when you have a constraint and your brain knows it has a limited amount of things those constraints create creativity MH because you know you only have one hour because after you have kids or you have a job

2:59now my weakness is that I have so much time because that's my work that I'm getting drawn into it and I'm not creative I'm less happy I burn out it's interesting because when you are Indie hacker people recommend to start side hustle along with your main work to like um risk management of you know yeah and also for that mindset your constraint actually make you like success faster because you don't have a pressure to succeed fast so if you just start don't quit your main job keep it and also use that rest of time wisely to work like a 100% yeah you go full time and your brain starts to have

3:43expectation imagine you spend you work 66 hours a day for like a month without taking time off at the end of the month unless you've been doing this for years your brain will expect results it's It's Perfectly Normal yeah so e it's so easy to burn yeah discourage burnout there's my brain that is like how much views are we going to get how much like is this we going to make how much money are we and man this is so stupid because I have not started the journey for that it's addictive I get drwn into that and I don't want to I need to write a plan of

4:12all the metrics I want to track making one video per week is something I really care making thoughtful tweets to help people get started building apps I want to keep making apps like I used to I think I'll take a day off a week now mhm I think that's important cuz human beings are not made to sit down and look at the computer for 24/7 I think relationships in this larning journey is very important at the beginning it's pure Faith like you you see sh for month nothing happens and you even start doubting about yourself are you good enough am I good enough mhm when you

4:43have someone that you can trust that tells you I trust you you're going to make it this is like a it's a superpower sometimes it's hard to see your value by yourself and you can be the worst enemy telling negative selft talk so that's why outside objective you is important and that emotional support really means a lot yeah should we turn off the camera and enjoy the yeah this is freaking good yeah everybody's [Music] good it never gets easier I 30° outside it wasn't easy that was a mistake but it was very important for the mental health we talked about all to be

5:36[Music] continued 8:00 a.m. camera is rolling yeah what's your plan bro what's the plan bro um hike in the morning mhm then uh try to find some good food then we are going to see kangaroos because we're in godamn Australia and then we're going to meet that person that special person that special person Chang your life yep 7 years [Music]

6:22ago W big oh hey it's beautiful wow imagine going all the way down to Australia to eat [Music] ital so cute yeah so beautiful we just have a lunch like it was so amazing with the homemade olives and it's always about no it was about having a time off to refresh our mind and then ready to go back to work just ship it to ship it what day have a life in a Solo preneur I don't I don't know if people actually have a clue of what we're talking about but we're going to meet the my first ever customer and I person changed my life and and your life too we

7:18went from like doing zero on the internet to making the first dollar with that customers we're going to meet back then I also meet my good you know him too my good friend Andre and he told me like sell it before you make it and I started to color collect emails of escap room businesses across the world that person said yes to the email so we jump on a call and I Tred to sell her like I was in my head I was completely thinking like an engineer so the call is super awkward I recorded the call and I'm like uh you uh I I I I I I built this this

7:46tool so um I um um I sent you um a demo of the of and she's so kind and she's like oh okay yeah that's that's sound interesting and she said yes and she spent around in toal I think around3 or $4,000 for the software one call emails one call $4,000 M crazy one of the reason most entrepreneurs never make money is because they build things people don't want and so if you don't ask customers before you're just going to end up spending 3 months building a product that nobody will want cuz we convince oursel oh this is a good idea this is going to work the truth the

8:22numbers shows that most of the time nobody wants the product what made you convince persuaded the customers to buy your product I make it sound like a no-brainer I told her this cost this amount of money and if you use it well you're going to get 3x the same amount of money I was I'm really sure of this was ever going to work in the worst case I can refound her if I messed up in my calculation so there's no big deal there's no string attach it's not about the product it's not about your product it's about the outcome for the business when you invest in the marketing tool

8:56it's like you expect a return on investment on the call I would use that to explain more how this would work see their objections see where they tell you like ah I'm not sure M so ask questions because you might realize that your product is not a good fit and instead another product could be a good fit and you will be surprised how much people are willing to let you know their struggles what else can I help you with you know is there anything you struggle with that I can make easier for you that is the right mindset I think to have and it's it feels much more genuine

9:29to sell something to someone that way that's true so [Music] cute I don't know who is the animal

9:42here oh the balls he has massive balls are you blind oh sorry are you okay they're all blind look at their eyes they all sleepy what is this kind of food like chalk oh oh [Music] so uh bummer the Escapo business was closed today today's Wednesday so we didn't get to see danela the owner of the Escapo business and I didn't get to show you my first customer but uh instead let me show you how I made $4,000 with one Cod email okay so we are early 2018 I have Zer I am doing some gigs for movies to make a couple hundred dollars a month so I can survive I need

10:30to make money so what if I help some kind of business I care about get more customers in using a product that I create what if I make puzzles for escape rooms that they can use those puzzles for them to get more customers so I go on yel I type escape room in whatever City I don't care because I'll never go there I'll use the internet to reach them out I pick any escape room then I open their website and here manually I go to the contact page and then I sell them an email this is a real email that would sent um 2018 I personalize every

11:02email so for that I use the name of the business owner to do that I go on the yel page and usually in the reviews um sometimes the the business owner would reply to a customer or a customer would mention a staff member that was really helpful I would use that email I explain why I'm reaching out I go straight to the point I'm trying to help escape room businesses increase their booking rate I personalize even more I say I know how much reviews you have on y but I noticed there is something you could do better I put myself as the bridge to get more

11:31customers and the C to action is you can pick any slot on my calendar I'm an engineer I feel super uncomfortable and it's somewhere in the middle of 2018 I flew to Japan cheapest flight cheapest guest house I have $0 I have to do a Visa Run and one of those leads decided to jump on a CO with me I wrote a few things back then where why having this marketing tool it would help them uh what they're missing out um I have a little plan on what I'm going to tell them but it's mostly me just awkward trying to to tell them something but surprisingly that person danela from the

12:06escape from business we were supposed to visit today uh decide to move forward and says yes I'm happy to get this going and here we go the ball was running I ended up making building the software for her it looks like this so it's on Facebook Messenger it's like a bot where it's automated messages so people customer their customers could go here uh start a little challenge they say oh I want to play the parking spots game and then the messenger bot would challenge them like here um there's was there was a murder in bangalo uh here are three potential suspects which one killed Rose there would be buttons for

12:40people to type there are like 10 20 games like this that are built and in the end the customer can get an escape room this is just 5% but you earn a 5% coupon for the escape room this would increase escape room business's conversion rate and just that one call with danela was enough to get one customer she spent I think around $4,000 on the business because she keeps paying for on and off four to 5 years just one cold email this is pretty crazy I would structure my days based on that so in the morning I would do marketing and sales so I would go back to yel Trip

13:10Advisor uh find five or 10 escape room businesses basically I would have different stages of pipeline the first one would be uh just the lead itself I haven't sent any email then would be stage number two I sent one email two email three emails and then at the fourth email I would just move on and close it I would automate the email sending so every time an email has been sent on stage two if it wasn't uh replied from the customer it would move on to stage three I would have four templates one per stage to make sure that I'm not missing out any leads and

13:39this was 6 years ago and now the business is closed Co basically killed the business here uh 2020 espr business is closed but as you can see it went up to I think four a little bit over 4,000 mother must recurring Revenue which is just excellent for me I was so happy because it was my first dollar on the internet uh the entire business was built on top of cold emails that said that's the only thing I did that worked he made around $770,000 plus I think around $1 to $15,000 on PayPal and this is just me doing cold email for like one year or something and what's even more

14:09crazy they have the customers who ended up loving the product so much they spent 13,000 us on this product and there was no customer support whatsoever we did one call that's it that's why I think Cod emails for any B2B businesses are really really underrated and should definitely dig somewhere here I also learned how marketing because I am a developer and it felt so awkward to sell something and some people say like sorry I cannot afford it right now and I realize this means that she does not see the value in the product but of course she can afford it if there is the value all those learnings from C emails and

14:43calls which are very hard to do are very Foundation of marketing that's why I really recommend start with a random business idea just pick something that exists already where you see money is already flowing find a way to make it yours add your signature me it was adding little games make turning the like marketing things into a gamification tool you might not build the exact business you have in mind right now but you're going to end up making something people actually want and that's the first step into making money on the

15:16[Music]

15:27internet how was the workout holy you scared the of me I just came back from kangaroo lens and I have so much work to done so now it's time to look [Music] in this is happening um YouTube sent me a little message the say it's time to celebrate I'm going to redeem this little thing right here it's so fun because I still watch a lot of YouTube videos and whenever I see a Creator showing these in the background I'm like a that would be amazing to have this in my room but it's impossible and it isn't it's it's real uh I'm going to show you the process how that goes okay so they

16:10gave me this little uh code here and I can redeem the award I have no idea what's next there we go this is the thing that's going to be in the room in the background oh I can input any name here okay that's going to be displayed right here approve and check out and there we go it's shipping to friends it's taking about to 3 weeks and I think we should be around friends in a month so uh yeah prepare the unboxing in the next videos I am trying to grow this software data fast to $1 million uh now what I mean $1 million it's the valuation so if

16:44we uh take a four multiple which is a generous multiple for software uh we take the monthly recording Revenue so 21,000 in monthly recing Revenue uh annualized on 12 month that's about a quar a million dollar times 4 that a million dollar valuation uh now I'm far from there this is the actual monthly recing Revenue 642 in Mr um which is not bad for a software that is about a month or two old but we're far from the 1 million in valuation so what I did recently is I asked on Twitter Hey if you visited the site but you didn't sign up why and surprisingly I get so much

17:21good valuable information uh there was this one from Kites that says I'm not sure if it's worth the hustle to migrate all my data to your software and so what I'm doing now is I really want to focus on building features that help people grow their startup with data actionable data that tells you exactly how to grow your startup data FAS knows what your site is all about and it also knows analytics my goal now is to build the right features to help customers grow their business so the new feature I built recently and I'm super excited about is the customer Journey it basically gets all the customers and

17:54check everything they've done before signing up uh for this person uh tomaya I can can see that this person found uh fast on X I can see what the person did so they visited the site two time and then they purchased and I can look at for different customers for instance um this one I can see what they did on on November 1st I can see what they did after they even uh sent me an email and then finally they ended up paying this is just the beginning it's a very early version but basically is going to track any goal that the user has in mind until

18:25the entire Journey from the moment the person visited the site to the moment they completed the goal and as a little hint I'm going to use that later to give some actionable insight another things I did which is also really useful is when I get events from stripe called the web hook events um stripe tells me for instance a customer check out but fail or or customer just cancel their subscription and so I built lots of little robots on my site that listens for those events and send emails to try to understand why the customer performed this action for instance I set up this email here that says um I noticed you

19:00just cancel your data fast subscription so right after they cancel your feedback could help me improve data fast if you tell me just why you cancel I'm just curious and now I'm getting pretty decent replies um I think what the person means here is that he doesn't see the value in the software yet so back to the initial problem but uh it's good to collect feedback and know exactly why people take the time to visit my landing page and not sign up look at this big musle what kind of YouTube channel is not Fant shoe it's a fitness channel oh man it feels so good to be back

19:32Australia was so good but the routine we have at home nothing better than that and you know what what logo fast the free logo M maker I built one year ago guess how much revenue you made 1,000 it's a free tool it's a free tool yeah oh 3,000 in total you made [Music] I need a to take me home I can't see is where my house gone think about you all the time and I just can't see to make you now [Music]