This Simple Widget Makes $50K/Month

0:00A couple nights ago, I was scrolling Twitter like I usually do, looking for ideas when I came across this. An anonymous startup making over $40,000 a month launched just about a year ago. I was interested, so I DM'd the guy. I said, "Hey, cool business. Want to share your story?" And to my surprise, he said

0:18yes. My name's Tom, and my brother and I built Avenue together, and we built a website widget for trades and mechanics. This is Tom, and he built a really simple app that today makes over $50,000 a month. But when I dug into that deal with him and asked him why it works, I was blown away. I did the one thing you're not meant to do, which was I asked Tom to come onto the channel and break it all down for us. And in this episode, we're going to dive into the dead simple app he built that today makes over $50,000 a month, the growth tactic that almost nobody is using that

0:51helped him get his first 10 customers, and why he built an app in a category that almost everyone is ignoring. I'm excited for this one. Let's dive in. I'm Courtland, and this is Starter Story. Tom, welcome to Starter Story. Super excited to have you on the channel. Could you tell us who you are, what you

1:08built, and what's your story? My name's Tom, and my brother and I built Avenue together with a team. We do $85,000 a month in revenue now in Australian dollars, and we built a website widget for trades [music] and electricians and mechanics. Today, I'm excited to share kind of a bit more about how we got to where we are and

1:26what we do. Tom, that's so awesome. I'm super excited to talk about the widget aspect of this, the trades aspect of this. I think this is going to be really interesting. But let's take a quick step back and just tell us about Avenue. What is it? Who are your customers? Pull up your website. Tell us a little bit about

1:41the business. Avenue is a website embed, so it goes directly onto the client's website. It just offers all their services in a visual way. That way, they can kind of be guided through to a purchase or even put through an inquiry. It does go onto Google reservations as well. So, we go onto their Google My Business profile,

1:57also. Cool. So, this kind of looks like one of those widgets that you see on websites to help you book a call with somebody or I've used something like this to book a call with like my barber. Is that the same thing or is it a little bit different than that? I think the back end is very fundamentally different cuz of the automations that we built for them, but yes, essentially it's solving like an age-old problem. I have money, I want to buy from a service business. Why do I have to call them? Why do I have to kind of send them an email or I could just

2:26tell them what I want. All right, Thomas, this seems really awesome. Just tell us a little bit about the revenue. How much is it making? Pull up your Stripe dashboard to show the audience that this thing is legit. So, this is what we do through Stripe. We're still [music] growing and reinvesting like back into the business. It's been pretty steady. Like I feel like from August last year of 597 and then August now 63,000 Australian. It's

2:48been a wild ride. What I love about Tom's story is how simple his product is. He noticed a tiny problem and built a really simple solution that solved it. He is proof once again that you do not need a complex or even an original idea in order to be successful. You just need to spot a real problem and solve it and that's exactly why we worked with the team at HubSpot to pull together a free database of over 90 business ideas worth solving. Every idea is backed by real data, things like revenue and cost to start. Plus, it has a full case study attached to it on how they built and

3:19grew the business. If you're looking for your next idea or looking for a problem to solve, head to the link in the description and grab this database 100% for free. All right, let's get back to the episode. Cool, Tom. Thanks for sharing all that. Just tell us a little bit about what you were doing before you built this $50,000

3:34per month widget. Well, I left school early, sorry freshman year for the Americans watching. That probably taught me the biggest lessons ever. Like I got my first job and it was like $4 an hour and my brain just couldn't comprehend how I was making $4 an hour, but all these people around me were kind of making way more money. So, I started to obsess about like business and what are different business models. So, I kind of just kept obsessing over like software as a business model and just seeing like you can still be making money while you're sleeping even though you've already done the work. Once you kind of

4:06realize the direction you want to go in and then you just won't stop iterating and trying stuff until you kind of find something that clicks. Cool. So, how does that lead to this particular idea, this widget that you built? I think realizing that this was a problem I kind of obsessed over where I was like, "Why is it so difficult to inquire with such upstart businesses yet

4:25they seem to make like heaps of money?" And just thinking surely there's a better way they could do this. Leading to the fact that it was like I didn't have any coding experience. I'd never kind of designed anything myself, but I knew what it would take to kind of put the team together to get these things and seeing that anything I'd previously done had some success, I was like, "Why couldn't we do this? Like why not me? If

4:49we started, just give it a go." Yeah. You don't have technical background. So, how did you build this? What was sort of the timeline like? How long did it take you from idea to a working project that is now, you know, scaled to, you know, over $50,000 US per [music] month? February last year, I had a friend that was a developer and he kind of helped like create like the MVP basically to see that it could be done. What we're kind of talking about like embedding it [music] naturally into a client's website. Once we kind of saw the layout begin to come to life, I kind of went all in at that stage. So,

5:22I hired like a lead designer that could actually make them look better. I hired like a head developer that could actually build out the back end and then we hired like a front end developer. Yet we had zero revenue. So, on paper, terrible idea. Don't recommend it at all. But [music] with that gave us the confidence to sell into these bigger companies that we kind of needed to get on board to pay us to kind of make it

5:43possible. Yeah, for sure. You didn't have any customers. You didn't have any revenue, but you were able to hire all these people. How did you like afford that? run a marketing agency for 10 years, which still had like 70 plus clients paying like website hosting. So, I used my like very precious income that I did have to live to basically fund the start of this and try [music] and transition

6:04out of the agency into this full time. So, I was very very fortunate that the past business was still like actively running without a whole lot of like attention required, but needed that income to kind of be able to hire staff to then get the product up and running. Awesome. Can you tell us a little bit more about how you grew this business from zero to over $50,000 a month in a relatively short time frame, like a year, year and a half. So, tell us a little bit about that growth. How did

6:30you get that initial traction? Door-to-door sales, essentially. Like, [music] going and showing people our product. Initially, we showed it on an iPhone and they'd go, "Oh, what is it? It's like an app." And I'm like, "No, it goes on your website." There was a lot of confusion about what the product actually was. Then we switched to iPads. One of our early staff was like, "Why don't we just show it on like an iPad so they can understand that it's like embedded onto a website? [music]

6:52They can see it's in their branding." So, we switched to iPads and then printed like brochures explaining what the product was. And that quickly kind of got us really early [music] traction where it's like when you show someone the problem they have and you can explain it quite [music] clearly, like, "You can't get sales outside of hours.

7:08This fixes that." They're very open to trying something new that they're being shown in person with a real [music] person, which has then led to us being able to get bigger clients because they go, "I've seen you guys everywhere. A lot of people must [music] trust you." Um, but we didn't have any connections to get into those bigger clients if we didn't do the hard

7:25work of getting the smaller ones first. Mhm. That's awesome. Just tell me a little bit of how you landed on kind of working or building an app or building this widget for this particular type of customer. So, we definitely fell into it. Like, when we first went door knocking, we didn't skip a business. So, we'd even go into like music [music] studios, electrician repair shops, like anything that was open, we would walk in and basically just try and show them our product. What we found from like taking action and doing that was the trade started to respond to us better and better. And [music] it kind

7:59of revealed itself that they're no kind of people. They're very direct in their feedback. They don't like giving money away if something doesn't pay for itself. And that's kind of exactly what we needed. We wanted really tangible results, so we weren't just building something that was kind of based on hype temporarily. We wanted to build like long-term clients. So, trades kind of found us. We we went looking, but they kind of kept being interested or kept showing kind of interest in the product, and we kind of adapted it to suit their needs as their kind of

8:26business type. Cool. You know, for someone watching who's maybe getting some inspiration and saying, "Oh, maybe I'll go door-to-door, find people in my local area." What would be kind of your advice or playbook for them? Definitely starting, it is incredibly intimidating. You're about to show them something you put like your love and effort into, and then they're either going to like it or they're going to just rip it to shreds. But if you really do love your product, that's the

8:49feedback you're actually looking for. And maybe it doesn't end up being a product for trades, and [music] they'll tell you why directly to your face. But sometimes we've even had certain types of businesses refer us to the right business being like, "Ah, this has no use to me whatsoever. However, you should speak to my friend because this [music] would work so well for his

9:07business." Yeah. Cool. Let's switch gears and go to the tech stack. What's the tools or tech stack that you used to build this business or that you used to still run your business on a regular basis? So, AWS is 150, which I absolutely love cuz that's like the essential biggest [music] part of our business is the hosting. Slack 120, Google Workspaces

9:29130. Zapier 500, so we do use a lot of like AI voice credits. And then Twilio being 4,000, which is a huge part of our SMS cost, which is another part of our product. The last shot to find like very specific leads, and then of course, Claude. Everyone's using Claude, we're no different. We need it to survive at

9:49this point. Cool. So, we've been talking about this widget, you know, used for these trades, and you've told us a little bit about the story. Now, I want to see it. Can you just give us a little quick demo of how this widget works? For sure. So, this one of our clients, first thing they get is a book online button with Google. So, it's actually partnership with Google directly. They click on that, they come through to the client's branded form, where they can kind of tap through the product. If customers exit out of it, they're actually sent back to the customer's website, where we also have embedded the

10:19product directly on the website as well. So, that way clients can kind of contact them through Google, or they can contact them directly through the website, leading it all to one place, essentially. I love that. The final question that we ask all founders to come on to the channel is, you know, if you were standing on your shoulders, you know, a year ago, 5 years ago, or for somebody watching who is just getting started in their, you know, business journey, what advice would you give to yourself or

10:44give to them? Definitely to sell before you build. I know it's said so many times, but customers don't care how much went into something sometimes. It's really sad. If you can get someone to commit before building the product, you've probably found something worth pursuing. So, if someone you tell them about what the problem you fix is, and they go, "Great, how much is it?" You tell them the price, and they get to the point where they're actually willing to hand that cash over, then you definitely could be

11:09on to a really good idea. That's great advice. Tom, thanks for coming on the channel. So fun to have you on, and congratulations. Thank you. Appreciate it. All right, I just wrapped up with Tom. That was a really fun interview. I loved learning about the widget that he built, and kind of how simple the business is. I have like two takeaways. The first one, which really stood out to me, was the like door-to-door sales piece that he talked about. So many of the founders that we bring on the channel, and I think I mentioned this in the interview, though I don't know if it stayed in

11:38there. So many of the founders that we bring onto the channel are using, you know, TikTok, UGC programs, posting, building in public, posting on Twitter to get their first customers. Obviously, all that works, as you've seen from our interviews. But there's something, I think, especially in a world that's moving so online, I'm sure a lot of his customers really respected him for coming in, knocking on their door, and asking for kind of the sale or the service. And not that I'm necessarily going to go do that, but it just it's a little bit compelling to think about all the people in this area that I live in,

12:14probably in the area that you live in, who are not familiar with AI, who aren't using Claude or Codex every single day, but you've built a solution, there might be 100 customers in your back door who need this service or need something built for them. You know, you're never going to find them unless you go kind of walk down the street and do it. So, that was like, I think, really, really good piece of advice. And my second takeaway is the widget aspect is so simple. A button that helps one business, you know, earn more from their clients, that's something you've probably seen 100 times and you've

12:49probably used yourself. He was able to do it for mechanics and electricians. I'm sure there's a bunch of other niches out there that could use a product like this. And so, my takeaway is like, even though it's something I've seen done 100 times, it's proof that you don't need like an original idea to go do it. My last takeaway is that he solved a really big problem for these businesses that now use his widget to help complete their transactions. And I think that's probably the real secret sauce of this whole thing is that he solved a real problem. Which reminds me, in the link below, we have our database to 90

13:22business ideas that are solving real problems right now, all backed by data that you can download 100% for free. All right, thanks for watching. I hope you enjoyed this episode. We will see you in the next one. Peace. [music]