John Rush

“And I think the future is founders plus AI agents, and that will be the new normal. They will be the new corporations run by very few people in some cases, like in my case, almost no people and the AI.”

“So I'm doing around 3.5 million error now with all these agents.”

“Yeah, this one is doing almost a 120 KMRR now and been doubling month over month after the launch.”

“So I usually start with smaller check, just that my first customers are the builders. Because I like to build product for builders first, because they give me good feedback, and they actually become part of my product team. And once I get to a place where they…”

“I think it's like five K or four K.”

“I think there are a 100,000 directors in the world and probably we have around 20 K of them now.”

“So this one is doing over 50 K a month and it's a one-time payment. So it's basically thousand people buying it every month.”

“Yeah, it's not fifty-fifty. So it's also split, but not fifty-fifty. It's like nine to 10.”

“No, I hold it forever. So I only buy, I don't sell and because I don't see any reason to sell.”

“Like I have directories. I have like 25 or 35 directories right now, like a lot of them. And most of them make no revenue. Some of them do pretty good, but most of them don't, but they drive traffic to all my other tools.”

“I actually want to End up having this full ecosystem where I have every single tool that a typical busy founder or like a bootstrap founder would ever need starting from tools for building products, tools for operating tools for growing and tools for monetizin…”

“That's why I made a pivot from VC back world into the booster world where I'm my own boss and I don't have to optimize for exit or for the next round. I just own the whole thing. I have good profits. I use profits to fund myself.”

“So now after 35 days. We reached five K MRR and 10 K in revenue and almost 1000 publishers have joined the platform to serve the ads.”

“Basically the way, I do is I start, I get to fifth decade, then I pose, then I come back and I get a hundred K then I pose and go to other tools. And I basically don't want to go farther than a hundred K because then it becomes a product that will require me t…”

“My name is John Rush and I'm running 26 startups at the same time after quitting the VC world and joining the Bootstrap movement.”

“All my businesses have combined around one million users in B to B and combined three million ARR, where seven products bring most of the revenue and the other products are bringing the audience And that channel to the paid products.”

“In 2022, I decided to enter the bootstrap scene. I found the one tool that I liked the most. Called unicorn platform. And I reached out to the founder and I said, like, do you want to sell this product to me, the whole startup? And also when you sell it, you w…”

“It's a website builder and directory builder for busy founders, and it has 600,000 users.”

“It has a hundred K MRR, and it has grown in less than 12 months, and it was one of the first SEO AI agent on the market.”

“I launch a wait list. And I see whether I am able to generate a hundred signups. I email them all and I offer them a 90% discount on a presale before I build anything. And then if I get five sales, I build the first MVP. I don't even build a product. I actuall…”

“And we share the ownership of fifty-fifty. It's just regular co-ownership. Where I take care of all the operation, legal parts, accounting, and the co-maker takes care of the coding and support.”

“Every user that drives one of my product, Ends up trying at least one more product and often I have people who try all of my products.”

“So I have over 20 tools where some tools are premium tools I make money on and some tools are just to bring traffic in and channel to Then my premium tools.”

“The way I use AI for building the products is that I built my own tool, my own AI code generator that lets me build all my SaaS products, no code tools, and AI agents, and it works extremely well.”

“For example, in SEO Bot, we have around 70% margins. So we make a hundred K a month, and then we pay 30 K for APIs.”

“And then in non AI tools where the costs are pretty low, I have 90% margins.”

“So I think I want to keep human support for all my products.”

“Before building in public, my failure rate was really high. Nine percent of the things I've done Failed. And when they start building in public, it flipped. So now only 10% of my products fail and 90% don't fail because I adjust them before I ship them just be…”

“So I think people will be outsourcing the decision-making for the content to the directories from Google, because now they ask Google, and that's becoming more and more relevant as we see that the top Search results of the Google are mostly dominated by all th…”

“Even if you know how to write code and you're great at that, It's a hundred percent better to go with no code, any tool”

“So it all takes, if it takes you more than one evening, then you're doing it wrong. Because if it takes more than one evening, You need to redo your method, otherwise you're kind of riding on a small car, on a slow car, and you'll never get really far with tha…”

“That's why I usually bet for five, six, 10 ideas, and I test them all at the same time, so that I, Remove the chance to be disappointed when one idea fails. That's pretty good approach, I would say. Like, don't do just one directory, because it will be disappo…”

“The next wave of growth comes from being early to list hot items on your directory, and Google will find nothing else on the internet to supply to the user who is searching for that, and Google will show Your item, your page for that.”

“So small ones go for two to five K and then 15 to 20 K the average ones. And then the bigger ones go to a hundred K. And I think that's where it stops. I never seen a directory being sold for over a hundred K.”

“I think the best way to actually buy directories is to go to similar web and Research the traffic, research the audience, research the countries, and then reach out to them. An offer to buy. I do that. And because if somebody put their directory for sale, very…”

“In, in, in my case, I would say the average directory I have is there. It's on five K.”

“If someone actually does this job of coming up with ideas validating the ideas with the users and then collecting a wait list, maybe collecting prepayments. And then you have the whole thing. Like there is an idea. There is there are like a hundred people who …”

“Like from my experience, it was like, you can pay 300 dollars and have a hundred K views on the post now on Twitter.”

“I was looking at that segment two years ago as well, and I was checking the prices and it was at least one K And they would guarantee maybe 30,000 views. And then I kept asking the same people price again every few months. And now it's way lower just because t…”

“So I pay influencers fixed amount every month. And there is similar to partnership, like the football stars do with Nike, et cetera, but on a micro, on nano scale, right? So, and I pay them fixed money every month and they know it will be coming in whatever ha…”

“So I think the directories will Eventually be really important for AI and the best directories will be chosen by AI to be used for the search results.”