I sold a SaaS before coding it...

0:00in 2018 I made a call from Japan to a business in the United States and I sold them a software that I did not create that's how I made my first internet dollar and that's how I built a software business that lasted for 5 years and made almost six figures in revenue and is still paying the bills today even though I abandoned it for years ago hey I'm Mark I am a son entrepreneur and I built small internet businesses that are now making $50,000 a month in Revenue at 90% profit with zero employee in this video I'm going to break down how I created my software without knowing how

0:27to code how I grew it and what's going on to in 2018 I moved to s South Korea I was there because an high school friend of mine was already there and managed to get $11,000 uh an investment from Angel Investors and he offered me to become the co-founder we created an AI startup and we hired two employees in the little office in the middle of s and we were trying to predict the the price of flight tickets uh we felt miserably we couldn't deliver anything valuable um but it was a very interesting experience because I learned something about me which is I want to to be 100% free I

1:01don't want employee I don't want investors I want to work on my own little project and so after we moved on I had zero income uh and no savings so I started to do some side gigs where I would go in movies uh as a actor in the background uh they would pay $200 uh a day for like 12 to 14 hours of acting I wouldn't do much uh I would just get some makeup and and get paid at the end of the day I would have one gig a week which would pay just enough for me to be able to leave and eat in s South Korea I

1:31started to brainstorm on Startup ID uh that I could work of on just by myself so I would go to this little uh co-working space in the basement near my house they would provide free coffee and free snacks which was really good at the time uh back then in 2018 uh messenger uh and WhatsApp Bots were very popular so basically it's uh automated replies from a business that can chat with a customer to help them uh I've been a gamer my entire life uh so I thought why not having some kind of game on messenger or Whatsapp that could entertain potential customers give them a discount coupon if they succeed at the

2:06game so that the business could grow and so I came up with this IDE of a messenger bot that would actually be an entire escape room so you would have a lot of puzzles and riddles uh that you could you can play and if you finish the game you get a discount coupon um back then it was just an IDE but now I have to show you the software uh so you have um a better understanding of what I had in mind so this is a customer of mine on the left side uh they would sign up on my website and then they will connect their Facebook page people will be able

2:34to play uh those games once the Facebook page is connected on messenger so the B here is automated it offers some rles and puzzles that people can click um if I want to play this game for instance the there you go you would have uh the the automated replies from the messenger Bots that will challenge you you earn some points and at the end if you get enough points you get a discount coupon for the skap room business uh I was a terrible programmer back then and I know we would would take sometimes to build something like this but luckily in my co-working space I made this guy on the

3:04right Andre which is a very um successful marketer and later became my friend and he told me then why don't you just build it before why don't you just sell it before you build it and uh I had nothing else much at the time uh it was very reliable so I was like oh why not let's give it a try so I started uh to send C emails to escape room businesses uh would say something like this I can help you get more traction or get more customers usually my code emails would be three lines um I would always add the name of the business owner at the top

3:35and try to explain a little bit how how this thing work um I sent those emails and I had to go to Japan for a Visa Run I had no money so I ended up in the cheapest and the tiniest uh room in OA Japan uh but I started to get some replies from those businesses and uh one of them wanted to get on the phone call with me and I uh did the call and this changed my entire life uh so I was in this room I was tired and uh the C was K for somewhere in the afternoon the Wi-Fi was bad so I had to go down in the

4:06living room it was really hot it was noisy there were people um I was I I was a terrible marketer and a terrible salesperson uh but I jump on the call and the call lasted for 42 minutes of cringiness and awkwardness and eventually at the end she said uh yes I'm in and uh she wanted to move on and get that uh messenger butt set up for her page and she asked for the payment page uh I sent her the link and she paid and eventually she turned uh just only recently 2023 after spending almost $5,000 on this messenger bot so that call entirely changed my life because it

4:42was my first dollar online and without knowing it after this first Fone call I made $5,000 I went back to Korea more motivated than ever I had paying customers and I had a product to build but I was a very bad programmer so I started to like find uh pieces of codes on YouTube and GitHub and try to assemble some product I would bring my computer everywhere um even when I would do some gigs and I would build in the bus eventually I ended up building a product that was working and I also made this little website with some U social proof and everything but I had no idea

5:13how to authenticate users like how to create a proper account so people would click here they would end up on a stright payment page they could pay and then they would have to fill a form that asked for their Facebook page and their email for contacting and I would manually have to set them up instead of logging them through Facebook and do it automatically um I started to get few more customers and because we had no reason to stay in South Korea we moved to Bal with my current girlfriend who later is now my wife um my days were would be really chill I would spend most

5:42of my time building I had a very um specific time schedule so I would surf in the morning and then I would come back and do marketing so I would do cold emails like I did in the past C worked and a little bit of Facebook ads I would also um try to take care of my health by doing some stretching and uh reading books and on the afternoon I would work on the product 90% of my customers would come from code emails and as a product guy I have no idea how to send good code emails so I follow this guy Alex who write about sending code emails that

6:12sell and I would take his templates personalize them for the industry I was in so ESC room businesses and I would add some variables like the business owner name and the business name uh then it was matter of getting uh leads and leads contact so I would go on trip advisor and type Escape rooms in CT and I would end up on their website and usually on their website of the business somewhere in here you would find the contact if you scroll you would get the email of the business a way to improve the conversion rate it's important to add the name of the person so the

6:42manager or the fer uh to make sure that it's personalized for that I would go back to Trip Advisor I would scroll through the review section and usually a member of the team or sometimes the funer would reply to comments of customers and add their name and sometimes even their business email I would just get that name here and I I would add all the information I collected to a sales pipeline it's basically a four stage pipeline um where I would per put the new contacts in here send them one C email if they don't rep I'll will send them another one 3 days later and on and on and on until I send

7:13four emails if some of the reply I would try to engage with them and get them on a zoom call uh back then in 20188 Zoom was not popular so it was quite hard but once they were on Zoom I knew that 60 to 70% chance they would subscribe for my services I would call col 10 new leads per day and I would send also 10 emails per day and in average I would get one to two reply and I would get one to two calls per week I would charge 199 per month for these messenger Bots but I was also experience some turn uh so I would

7:43I would get some customers and and some other customers would turn which would at the beginning uh make my Revenue around $1,000 to $1,500 per month so I started to experience with yearly membership I would say I would sell the bot for a discount for a yearly price at $2,000 and to my surprise some people actually paid I would get a sales notification from strip that says I received a $2,000 uh payment which was massive for me especially living in Bell where I would live with about less than $11,000 a month um the business the mini business started to grow a little bit I would have 10 to 15 customers at the

8:19time across uh the US the Europe and Australia and the business look uh like this uh C it was about $1,000 in 200 19 and I would keep growing growing uh I started to implement annual annual payments here and eventually it ended up reaching $6,000 in monthly uh revenue and then covid happened in February 2021 because of covid escape from businesses had to close their locations and I had two options either I was too greedy and I keept charging them uh the monthly recurring Revenue until they tell me hey stop or I just gave them service for free until someday they will be able to reopen which is what I did so they will

8:57I emailed the entire list of customers that I had and I uh told them like he I'm not going to collect any payments until things get better so obviously the revenue went to zero for 4 months as you can see here there's absolutely nothing um I was in Bal back then which uh I was pretty lucky because Co was not really bad and I could Surf and for some reason I felt disconnected from the business so I started a YouTube channel about surf just to keep me busy for a couple month trying to decide whether I'm going to keep working on this business later or not in August 2020 things started to

9:30reopen a bit so escape room businesses could open their doors and make some money u a lot of them had closed because of like they went bankrupt or they just you know business owners wanted to do something different uh so you can see here things started again not as crazy as they used to be uh but I didn't do any marketing and it was still paying customers from the previous year 2019 uh I would make 1.3 1.5k per month which is uh pretty good for here in Bal regarding the fact that I was not doing any marketing around this time with my wife we went back to France and we got

10:03married we eventually got stuck there and couldn't come back to Bal for about a year um things also went a little bit wrong in my life I got uh I think depressed and uh not in the right shoes so I decided to abandon the business completely uh of course customers would keep their uh service I had nothing to do to provide the service anyway cuz it was like an API I was just not doing any new marketing and andb boing new customers and eventually it's been four years since I haven't touched anything and you can see here the revenue is slowly shrinking and it will at some

10:37point to reach zero per month probably in 2024 and now recently one of my biggest customer turns bring the revenue down to $200 a month this year uh this was Alex uh they had two locations and this spend almost 13,000 us on uh my software which uh seems like crazy to me when I think I just got started with a couple of cold emails this is not a typical Silicon Valley unicorn fer this is just a random guy trying to make a living with its app in his bedroom this story led me to where I am today where I have all the freedom in the world where

11:10I can surf spend time with my family spend time with my wife and take care of my health anytime while also making $50,000 a month so whatever this is you have in mind just get started because you might be one C email away from closing a $5,000 client