I made an app in 24 hours and $20,378 the next day

0:00I built this app in less than 24 hours and it ended up making $20,000 a couple days after the launch and it also made more revenue than 90% of all of my other side projects. It's currently at $18,000 in monthly recuring revenue and funny enough it started because of this tweet from Peter Level, a prolific indie maker in the tech uh space who said that too many people fake uh revenue screenshot in order to get attention. And I care about this because I do share my revenue publicly and trust is everything. So I came up with this uh little idea of building a little board of verified

0:34startup revenues. I just dumped my thoughts into cursor and asked AI to build it for me. I designed the website to be super simple. So just a button for people who want to verify their startup. So here they can add a readonly Stripe API key and they can add their Twitter handle name right here and then they will get a a dedicated page like this where they are verified. So I go and I check their Stripe account, fetch all the transactions, and I build this little chart right here. And I built a search feature for people who want to check on other startups to make sure

1:02that the person sharing numbers is legit. So they can use the search feature, and they end up on the startup page where they can see the revenue over time. In less than 24 hours, the product was done. So I made this tweet and I shared it live. And I also quoted the initial uh tweet from Peter. And the tweet went really well. It got uh close to uh 3 million views, which brought a lot of visitors to the site. Initially, there was no monetization or anything apart from me sharing uh my Twitter handle and the little codebase I use for myself to build this project fast as

1:31well as a little um embed of this map, this real map from Dataf Fast, which is a software of mine that I build with a little button here for people who if they're curious about this, they can visit my SAS. And I hope that I would get some users for datafast using this little uh embed widget on the trust mr website. Then I started to add sponsor slots on the left. This is the live website. That's why all the ad spots are filled. I try to recreate on local host what uh was there before. So there would be some empty cards here that would redirect to Stripe payment link for

2:03people to buy an ad spot. Um this is on the launch day. So uh the end of October 30th. Initially I priced the adspot at $299 per month. And within two to three hours, uh, half of the ad spots were sold out. Since the value for sponsors for advertisers relies on the fact that there's a limited number of ads, I decided to have no more than 20

2:25advertisers at all time on the sites. So, they're displayed here and they rotate a little bit like Times Square in order to show all of them within a couple of seconds. And since I sold half of the hotspots and also the site took off really quickly, I decided to increase the price. So, I went to 699 per month and it keeps selling. So, the final price was $1.5,000 US per month. So, this is what the Stripe dashboard looks like. And this is all in the span within two to three days after the initial tweet. Uh, what's funny is that this little side project ended up making as much money as my top

2:57three product where I spent a lot of time growing and it also ended up overtaking all of my most of my other uh website that I sometimes spend month or at least weeks building. So after the initial launch, a lot of people started to talk about it, sharing it on Twitter uh about um the fact that they verified their startups and and all that and I was not really sure where I should take the product next because again I had no idea what I was doing. So I started seeing people making comments and suggestions on what to build next and what I did is I just to I just took all

3:28those feedback and I just built the feature and I shared that publicly. So for this one for instance I added categories so people could search startups by types like SAS course marketplaces etc. Someone mentioned the fact that I should add a little badge that people can embed it on their site to say that their site is verified with trustmr actually um it look like this when people click embed they have a little piece of code and it will show their actual revenue in a little image that is dynamic that people can share that on their website. If you've been watching my videos, you know that uh I

3:58think dark mode is a little bit of overthinking. But to be honest, my eyes were also itching as I was working on this project. Someone mentioned I should add dark mode. So there there he was. So I just had a little uh fun building this dark mode feature for trustmr. And also I just uh initially I just wanted to have fun and I come up with this idea of having a game where uh people could bet on those real startups. So they could start a game, they will see two websites on the left and right. both are verified with my website and they have to guess

4:26which one made the most money. Uh this is my website on the right so I actually know the revenue for this one and then people would like basically earn points for investing in the right startup. Uh that made a good tweet. People had a lot of fun playing this. I think I had like somewhere around 100,000 clicks on this uh little website. So that was a fun thing. And as I kept adding more features, I started to see like really big players making millions per year adding their startup to the site. And to my big surprise, one of them was Sahil from Gumroad. So if you're in the tech

4:56space, you probably know Gumroad, which is a platform that helps creator uh monetize their creation online. Gumroad is a wellestablished startup in the tech space. And I just hope that by having uh people like Sahil sharing their numbers publicly, it will build trust and hopefully bring this little side project into something that becomes hopefully

5:15the number one place to uh trust Mr. Screenshots. Uh this was really fast. So now we're in a Tuesday 11th of November. So it's like about 10 days after the launch. Um there's a few things that I've learned in this project. The first one is like simplicity is number one. Um the website is dead simple. there's basically nothing on the landing page but a headline and a button for people to add their startup. And I think this is really important. When things are too complex, people tend to just drop off and not take the time to understand what you're trying to build. So I try to

5:45always strip off everything to make my website, my project a one feature startup. So one headline, one feature and that's enough. The second one is the OG image. So the OG image, it's just a little uh when you share a link on social media, a social media platform will add an image with it automatically

6:02based on what you've added to your site. And this is very important. I treat those as YouTube thumbnails. This kind of like the packaging if I may. Um this really gives more value to a link because this is not very clicky. But if you add an image, a beautiful simple image to it, it makes it way more engaging that drives way more people to click on your site. The another thing I learned is about context. Uh in this case the the fact that Peter uh sets the story he set the problem like oh too many people are sharing fake MR screenshots it gives a little story and

6:34then I was able to close this story with a product. So so it's a really a twoact story here and I think if Peter had not tweeted about this there would be a very high chance that this would have not done as well as it did. And finally it's about the rule number one of entrepreneurship which is like just showing up and building. Um, honestly, I had no idea. I thought this would be like they would get a thousand visitors and I would just move on. It's very hard to control what's going to happen. So, the best thing to do is to just keep showing up, not giving up, um,

7:05increasing your odds by playing a lot of time, adding small bets here and there until hopefully someday one of them takes off. And that's it for this video. I root for you and for your project. Cheers.