The Exchanges

Q All right. Well, I really liked this strategy. I'm seeing a lot more people do it online with AI tools. You can do so much now as just one person. And I think it's especially starting to work and catch on more now, before we get into all that, I do want to understand a little bit more about your background. How do you get to this point?

A Yeah. I learned how to code during high school and got into freelancing. This is how I made my first dollar online. Then I continued freelancing through college. And after I got married for stability, I decided to try a full-time job as a developer. I did that for two years, but to be honest, I felt like I was wasting my potential in a corporate job. So in 2019, I quit and went all in building my own things online, doing whatever it takes to succeed and be free. Over time, this turned into a portfolio mindset. Instead of betting everything on one big idea, I built multiple smaller projects that could support each other, And generate income, even when I wasn't actively working on them.

AI assessment note: “I learned how to code during high school and got into freelancing.”

Q And when you get a deal, how do you evaluate? How do you know it's something that you should or should not invest in?

A So the founder, CEO, and their relevance to the business is always going to be the most important. Are they in this for the long run? Do they understand this market based on their previous role and problems they may have solved, companies they may have worked at? Are they a multi-time founder? Have they shown success in a previous co-founder CEO role? Then we're also looking at things like How big is this market, right? And is it a growing market? Is there an opportunity for this to be a really big company or even have multiple big companies in that market? Are there early signs of product market fit? A lot of times we invest when there's very limited traction, you know, the business is just getting off the ground. We want to see those early signs that they are building a product that customers want and will pay for and have the opportunity to scale. And then some of the other things we'll look at is who is co-investing in the round? I am not built Like an institutional fund with management fees to work nine to five on this and do the diligence that a traditional institutional fund would do. So piggybacking or leaning on these funds that are set up to lead rounds, set terms, and sign off or underwrite the deal is also quite important when we think about what's the right fit for us or not.

AI assessment note: “founder, CEO, and their relevance to the business is always going to be the most”

Q Okay, cool. The first thing I just want to nail this objection while the audience is watching this right now, they're going, Hey, I don't have any followers. Clearly was so easy for you because you had this massive audience. What would you say to someone like that? Who's probably watching this right now?

A Well, since launching Stella, I actually created a brand new Tik TOK. And since then it's been a couple months now it's grown to over 40,000 followers. I have another Tik TOK account with over 700,000 followers that I just like spam post on. And I have consistently going viral on every account that I ever make. Right. I could start a new account today and Probably guarantee 50,000 followers in the next three to four months. So it's not so much a question of like, do you already have a personal brand as much as it is? Do you have the skill of virality? And when you master the skill of virality, then you can create a personal brand very fast.

AI assessment note: “it's not so much a question of like, do you already have a personal brand”

Q build all these 100,000 dollar per month apps because of one thing. Women own distribution. So it's just a matter of time before the technical gets easy enough. And we live in this social media world. Anybody can build anything. So let's talk about that distribution piece. Take this app. How'd you get tens of thousands of users to see your app, download it, install it and pay for it?

A So if you have a personal brand and if you have a following, if you can go viral, you could sell anything. I mean, I could sell air and it'll sell right. First piece is how do you create a viral personal brand? And it's actually so easy. You find a niche. You look up the most viral content that's performing in that niche. You study core human psychology of what gets people to move and literally keep recreating viral content. If you have a video that hits like recreate it to infinity, I've been recreating the same viral content for years now, and it still continues to go viral and perform and convert. And once you have a video that really pops off, you want to like work backwards and ask yourself, What is a product that I could naturally insert into this video that would help the virality and also solve a problem that people are facing? Their first thought would be like, I need to close out a tick tock and go download this right now.

AI assessment note: “You find a niche. You look up the most viral content that's performing”

Q Okay, cool. Amazing. Obviously you have a huge social media following, which we are going to talk about that in a second, but before we do, let's talk about how you get to this point where you have now an app that is making over 300,000 dollars a month. What's your background? And then how'd you decide, Hey, I'm going to build an app.

A I mean, I've always been super entrepreneurial and I've always had like a sixth sense about virality and content. And so literally the first three videos I ever posted on TikTok went viral. And ever since it's just been like one viral video after the next. And I just immediately saw an opportunity for building a personal brand, even though I was in college, starting to be a teacher after that, I started monetizing my social media. And then I want to say about a year and a half ago, I launched a brand on TikTok shop, which also has been I've been super successful making like seven figures a month. I've kind of dipped my toe in every sort of business model that exists that you could have with a personal brand. And then I saw the opportunity in SAS and in the consumer app space. I saw the power of AI at the time as well, and how easy it was to vibe code an MVP of a product. I also saw that there was a huge gap in the market where there were all these apps that weren't necessarily designed to solve. Female issues because they were designed by men.

AI assessment note: “I saw the opportunity in SAS and in the consumer app space”

Q I'm doing 50,000 a month really quickly. This is just crazy numbers. So we're going to get all into that. How you came up with this idea, how you built it and how you grew it. I'm excited, but before we do, what's your background? Do you have a background coding up apps? How do you get to this place where you have a 50,000 dollar per month iPhone app?

A I actually went to school for accounting. I did a four years undergrad in the year for my masters. I got my CPA and I worked in public accounting in a big four firm for a little over a year, but I've been coding. I'm self-taught like the last four years or so had some other businesses in the past. Nothing really worked. I realized through all these failures that marketing is the most important thing. I started focusing on building an app as quickly as possible. That solved a painful problem in a simple way. And then following these models that a lot of these other apps are using, like influencer marketing is the one that I picked. It's proven to work and yeah.

AI assessment note: “I actually went to school for accounting... but I've been coding. I'm self-taught”

Q ones like yours. Simple makes it easier to focus on distribution and growth. And that's the next topic that I want to get into is how did you actually grow this thing? I'm sure there's a thousand alarm clock apps on the app store right now and growing every single day, but yours stood out. So how'd you do that? How'd you go from zero to 50,000 dollars per month?

A I started out by finding influencers on TikTok and Instagram, just reaching out, sending a ton of DMs early on. It's a tough, a tough start. You get very few responses. And I was trying to find people who were doing like day in the life or lifestyle content where I thought the app could fit in naturally. That was like a big thing for me was it fit in naturally. It was a really good sell to the influencer. They could continue making their existing videos, except they would get paid for it. A lot of times with influencer marketing, it comes off as It's too much of an ad. And so the influencer needs a lot more money and a lot of a reason. It needs to be very compelling offer for them to want to pick up a spot on their page. But if you find people that are already doing content where your app fits perfectly, like an alarm, they wake up in their day in the life videos and then pushups, which is inherently viral and intriguing as the viewer, then they're more willing to fit it into their videos.

AI assessment note: “I started out by finding influencers on TikTok and Instagram, just reaching out”

Q want to try that out too. So you can Live a day in the life like that. So I think that's great. A video like that. What, what is the deal structure for people watching this? They're probably wondering how much do I got to pay for something like that? How many downloads does this turn into? Could you give me some of the numbers behind a video like that?

A Uh, yeah, generally the deal structure is multiple videos a month, like two to four videos a month with a view guarantee. That's sort of the most important part is that you're paying for the views that you get. And so I view it as pretty low risk. Honestly, you can sort of tap what you're going to pay and take the risk and then see what the return is pretty quickly once the The video goes live takes about a day to sort of hit the peak on views. And then you see what your returns are generally paying around like a two to three dollars CPM, uh, based on the view guarantee. And then the money's really made on those big videos. It's sort of power law. A lot of the videos will sort of do. Okay. Every once in a while, you know, big, 1,000,002 1,000,005 million view video. And that's where you really make money.

AI assessment note: “generally the deal structure is multiple videos a month, like two to four videos”

Q how to come up with great ideas. It's like ship stuff and think kind of like you did. So for anyone watching this, what would be your advice for people? They're looking for an idea like this, something that can make 50,000 dollars a month, which is like an app you can build. What advice would you have for people watching this that want to do the same as you?

A Yeah. Uh, my framework at this point is just solve a painful problem in a simple way, and it should be inherently viral. If it's not inherently viral, the idea itself, Then add some sort of novel aspect to it to make it inherently viral. Um, with AI, there's so much that's possible. If it's painful, people will pay. And if it's simple, it's easy to show the value in content very quickly. If it's something that's going through your head, at least once a day, it's probably a really painful problem that you really want to solve. And you're actively looking, even if you don't know that you're looking for a solution for it, if it's solution shows up, you're going to jump on it. In college, my roommate and I would talk every single night about how we were going to go to sleep early and how we're going to wake up early the next day. It was just Constant. Every single day is something that we've talked about. Also, this is after the fact, but whenever I talk about the app with people or I show them, they're always, they either say, oh, I need this or I don't need this, but my friend needs this or my girlfriend needs this. Uh, someone in their life needs it. It's pretty much every single time. So it's just a very painful problem.

AI assessment note: “my framework at this point is just solve a painful problem in a simple way”

Q Okay, cool. I love the VSC framework. So could you show me a piece of content that has all three of these?

A Well, what I'll do is I'll start with a piece of content that doesn't actually. So when we look at this piece, we see that it's fitting the V part of the framework. Then S, it's scalable as well. As you can see, it's light shows created with nano banana with a text overlay on them, not complicated to create. Then the third part, when we come to the convertibility element, what we do is once we put out a content, we scan the comments. If they're not asking about the product, they don't mention the product, I would say that it's the biggest sign that it's not going to lead to high conversions. Of this video that got 120,000 views, I think we got nine or eight trials started. Now, this one worked really well for us. There's a highly engaging text overlay where a woman is stuck in a long distance relationship. She's saying, how do you not mess it up? How do you not lose it? And then when we go on to the next slide, this is where we plug a product in. It's a slideshow. And What we do then is we comment seed within this. Every one of these comments you're going to be seeing is going to be promoted from that account itself or from another account we have. Now, this is a way we notice we can get high conversion on the content when we don't get a lot of organic traffic through. We go in from all the other accounts we have and we drop in comments on the comments that are already coming i…

AI assessment note: “Now, this one worked really well for us. There's a highly engaging text overlay”

Q about that, especially because your app is Trending and taking off right now, which we're going to talk all about that. And maybe some of the reasons why this app grew so quickly, but before we do, I'm curious, this is the first app that you built. What's your background? How do you get to this point where you've made over 50,000 dollars with an app in about seven weeks?

A Yeah. So, um, it's not the first app I've built. I built my first one in October. There's a student marketplace app for the university of Oregon. And we just went around campus and kind of told people about it and got like 800 users. But I always wanted to take it like to another level where I could Actually make revenue. Cause we didn't make any money with that app. The whole experience from the first app taught me that I needed to find a niche that was really specific to like a group of people that would be interested in it. So once I realized that, you know, I decided to find something that was really popular and how I went about that was just scrolling social media until I found something that everyone was talking about and realized that there was no successful app for this.

AI assessment note: “it's not the first app I've built. I built my first one in October.”

Q was like a couple of signals, which is your friend told you about it, then you saw it in TikTok, and then you had genuine interest in it as well. Those are like three things that I think are really important. If anyone's watching this, What would be your advice to them on like how to identify like an idea like this? Tell me a little bit more about that.

A Yeah. It's hard to say because, you know, this is like one of those things that it just blew up overnight kind of, and then I just moved quick, but that's kind of what I would do again is I would scroll social media, find all these big content creators online and what are they all talking about? Is there something you've never heard of that they're all talking about? Cause if there is, there's a chance that it's something new and no one has done anything with it. Um, an example I have is like people were really into the Looks maxing for a while and like just be trying to look as best as they can. And so this guy made an app where you like take a picture of yourself and it tells you what you need to do to make yourself look better. And that was just a trend on Tik TOK. So I think that if you can find any trend online, you can turn it into an app.

AI assessment note: “I would scroll social media, find all these big content creators online”

Q I mean, I feel like that's one of the little secrets also of finding something trending is there's also like influencers that are maybe don't realize how powerful or realize how big their following is because the trend is still so early. And that's a great example of that. I'm guessing you couldn't attribute all the revenue, but 10,000 dollars from a single post is insane. What's the final step?

A Step five though, and I think the most important part about building an app is marketing. I think marketing and distribution matters way more than your idea, than your app, how great it is. If you don't have a vision for how you will market it and distribute it, then I just don't even think it's worth building. I got this advice from some other podcasts that I watched of other successful app founders, and that's their biggest piece of advice is just, if you don't know how you're going to market it and you Don't have a plan for influencer marketing, ads, whatever it is. That's the biggest thing. So unless you feel very confident in how you'll market it, I wouldn't even build it.

AI assessment note: “Step five though, and I think the most important part about building an app is marketing.”

Q won't disappoint. All right, let's get back to the episode. Okay, cool. I mean, this looks like a really cool app. I can see why it's popular and why it's growing. I want to understand a little bit about your background. How do you get to this point where you're building this cool consumer app that over 300 people are about to use this month at events? What's your background?

A So before founding once, I co-founded a venture backed B to B startup. It's completely different from once. It was more of a heavy sales driven, 50 person company. So building this venture backed startup Really showed me what a real business is and everything related to building a fast growth company. And while I was at the company, I found the whole bootstrap scene, which I didn't know existed before. I met all of these really cool indie hackers and bootstrap founders who are validating in a very small way, but it's rather a safer, smaller bet as opposed to betting your whole life on something that's bigger. And I don't think there's right or wrong here, but I really wanted to try this new path of building a bootstrap company and That's why this time I really wanted full control over the product that we built. Hence me and my co-founder, my girlfriend, we decided to go fully bootstrap this time.

AI assessment note: “before founding once, I co-founded a venture backed B to B startup.”

Q Kind of launch playbook, this LTD playbook, which I think is like one of the most effective ways to just get off the ground running. If you're launching an app, if you're launching a project, if you're launching anything, can you tell me a little bit more about that? How did, how are you able to build something and then make a 100,000 dollars in essentially 24 hours? What happened?

A Okay. So a lifetime deal basically is a deal where a user pay, uh, for lifetime access to the app. So the first thing I did was to figure out the long-term vision of the app. And decide when we would have been ready to start monetizing. And my approach here is, uh, always to monetize as early as you can. So I prefer to build the product and simultaneously, uh, building a revenue engine that sustains it. We looked at what was the minimum set of features that we needed to basically convince people to get a lifetime deal. Then I planned the whole launch sequence, so email landing page, videos, uh, the full machine. At the same time, I also did some lead generation to reach people that never heard about us. Uh, so there, there was a totally different approach of course. And, uh, basically after a few weeks of warming up the audience, uh, and showing of course the app, but so basically what, what I did is to record a YouTube video where I went through exactly all the features present in the app. And I basically said, okay, the app is gonna, it's worked like it worked like this right now. We're gonna develop these other features. If you want it, you can get now lifetime, but there is absolutely no refund. Uh, if you want to try it, you're going to wait for a couple of months, uh, till when we open the subscription plans. So we got around, if I remember well, between 506 hundred, uh, …

AI assessment note: “I planned the whole launch sequence, so email landing page, videos, uh, the full machine.”

Q Okay. We're going to get all into this YouTube search. Playbook, but I understand how you, did you even come across the idea for follow buddy? Like how do you even come up with this idea?

A Very funny story. So when I was growing my agency, I started making content about how to grow online and I was more focused on helping people grow. So getting followers, but a lot of people on Instagram are very concerned about who was unfollowing them. And so through doing that kind of content, so many people just saw me as their Instagram support person. And I tried my best to always answer these questions, but I started getting So many of them really quickly around three or four years ago, all around the specific subject of people getting banned or losing their Instagram account. And after investigating it a little further, I saw it was because they all were using an app to find who unfollowed them and why it got them banned is because it violated Instagram's terms of service. So then I was like, well, is there a way to do this? That is safe. My team and I went to the drawing board. We found a way that you could kind of do it. I made a video about that and it got like one point Something million views. And that strategy that I brought to the internet has since been repeated so many times that it's referred to as the compare lists method. I actually built a business for a guy by accident because we just sent the traffic like a million people to some random list sorting tool on the internet. So he owes me a coffee. And then we decided like, can we build this thing? So I was ch…

AI assessment note: “So then I was like, well, is there a way to do this? That is safe.”

Q I really want to talk about this YouTube search strategy. I think there's a huge alpha here. We had someone on the channel recently that talked about this. I want to go even deeper on it eventually, but first just explain to me at a high level, how do you get customers for your SaaS?

A All of our traffic is organic and it's all search based across the different social platforms. Why search traffic is so important is because it's high intense traffic. So I don't have to convince people of something. They've already convinced themselves. They're simply trying to source a solution, and I want to be the guy that can give it to them. And any business, even if you're not a SaaS business, you should be doing this because I guarantee you, even if there's not a ton of people searching certain things that would lead them to you, guaranteed there are some. And if there's no content for YouTube to put there, they put the next best thing. So meaning that something bad even could rank number one if there's not much competition.

AI assessment note: “All of our traffic is organic and it's all search based across the different”

Q that and congratulations on selling your business. I mean, that's amazing. You did this basically from your dorm room. That's insane. And that's part of the reason I wanted to bring you on. You're doing this already while you're in college, but I am curious what your background is. How do you even get into this? How do you get to this point where you build and sell this business?

A I was scrolling through TikTok one day and I saw a kid younger than me saying that he made an unbought game site and he was just telling everyone to go use it. And I was just like, how is this kid younger than me? Making something look super easy. I was just like, I can do that. It was relatively easy. It took me about a week or two, and it was really crappy at the start. And obviously I saw this kid marketing on TikTok. She was like, all right, I got to do the same. So I started marketing it daily on TikTok five days a week. Some days I only post one time and it never turned out too much. Fast forward like two years and I had made 240 dollars in a day passively from DuckMath. That day just happened to be the best day. That was purely just luck. And I was just like, DuckMath sitting here and it's been getting All this money. I've been doing nothing to it. So why not start actually marketing it? So I looked at what my competitors are doing, try to make the best videos possible and pull the crazy marketing stunt, which was just pure volume of videos.

AI assessment note: “I was scrolling through TikTok one day and I saw a kid younger than me”

Q a way to truly get this in front of millions of people. And then you sold it. So if you were starting over in 20, 26, which kind of sounds like you are, you're starting another company. How are you going to approach things so that you can grow even Faster this time and maybe not make some of the mistakes that you made before. What's your playbook for 2026?

A Pretty simple. Pick a niche that you know how to market in. If I knew how to market to college students, I'd maybe make an AI college studying tool. If I knew how to market to games in general, I might do a game server hosting platform. So pick a niche that you know to market in and then build a super quick MVP in like two to three days with the help of AI or however you're going to build it quickly. And then you might want to do these things kind of in the same time, but you're going to research 10 to 20 of your Competitors best videos that perform the best, that got the best conversions. Find what's all similar about them. What was the hook like? What was the call to action like? Understand why they went viral and basically write down how you can copy them or basically use their format to get the same outcome that they did. And you're just going to start posting daily on TikTok. Make sure to make mistakes, but always keep getting better. You know, your first video isn't going to be great, but you're a hundred sure as hell will be. See if people like it, iterate. And if it starts to get big, you see something changing. Maybe your life's changing. Maybe you want to go in on this, just go all in. Most likely it will become big.

AI assessment note: “Pick a niche that you know how to market in and then build a super quick MVP”

Q thousands of stars within a week. This is what's possible with building developer tools. I just think it's an amazing space. So I'm curious if you were to start over, you obviously have a business that you're going to run now and you were going to start a new developer tool. What would be your like playbook for finding an idea, building it, getting validation and turning into a business?

A Yeah. So start with like, be the user or ideally it's for yourself. So if it's for yourself, something that you see the value right away, you really understand how to do it. And because you got experience around what you do. For example, in CharDB, we find out that you want to visualize something very simple. Like I want an ERD and I want to look good that I can interact with that. That's something that just like very specific thing about that specific value that I can start from and get something super cool out of it. So step two, I think design for constraint, not for ideal. Every persona have their constraints. Uh, for example, developers, they're really prefer self-hosted tools that they can test and check on their local environment instead of, uh, going through any kind of, uh, signup wall. So I think like reducing that friction, as we talked before, that's why Charlie B had no signup, no sales calls. You don't need to provide any credentials. Step three, I would say start with a wedge and not from the full vision. Starting from something that like people will appreciate and see the value out of it right away, and then evolve that based on their feedback. That's the, like the right path, like how to go and continue to build, uh, in small iterations. Okay. So the next step is going to be let usage to lead you what to monetize. So in the beginning, we didn't monetize at all.…

AI assessment note: “start with like, be the user... Step two... Step three... let usage to lead”

Q people watching this have heard of Peter Levels. Or Mark Liu. They've obviously pioneered this. But also, there's a lot of people online that say, no, this is scatterbrain. Focus on one thing and one thing only. I'm curious what your experience has been in this. How do you get to the point where you have a bunch of different sources of income, and why does it work for you?

A Yeah, I didn't start out thinking that I want to build a dozen of projects. Early on, I was obsessed with finding the right idea that will change everything. Every time something didn't work fast enough, though, I felt like I failed. And over time, I realized two things. One is that most projects fail, not because they're bad or you're bad, but because their timing, distribution, or the market is not right. And secondly, placing all your bets on one idea is very risky, both emotionally and financially. This can quickly lead to burnout, which happened to me many times. So I shift how I think. Instead of trying to build one perfect business, I started building an income portfolio. Smaller projects, Which comes with less pressure. Some projects were about learning. Some were about making money. Some were about growing an audience. Some failed, but that was fine because the portfolio didn't depend on one single project. Over time, this project started compounding. Content got attention, and then attention made products easier to sell. Products created leverage, and that's how I ended up with multiple income streams instead of having one single fragile bet. It's very similar to investing. You don't put all the money into one stock. But instead you spread your investments over hundreds or even thousands of stocks through index funds or ETFs. So I stopped putting all my time into one …

AI assessment note: “Instead of trying to build one perfect business, I started building an income portfolio.”

Q All right. Well, this waitlist strategy is amazing. But before we get into all that, which we are going to do, I want to understand a little bit more about your background. How do you even come up with the idea to start Clio? How does it get started?

A Well, it all starts with LinkedIn. I started posting on LinkedIn around three years ago because what I realized and most people realize when they joined LinkedIn is that all decision makers are on that platform. And so you can build the business off the back of creating content. So I started posting on LinkedIn. I built two businesses off the back of it. And then in that journey, I met my co-founder Jake, who was also in a very similar situation like me. So my background is both in agency and the info product businesses. I took the marketing concepts from that business and understood the idea of FOMO, building waitlists, using emails and webinars, and we took it to SaaS. I love info, but we wanted to do something different and build a software tool. So me knowing what I knew, and then our co-founders knowing what they knew, we combined that and created this insane launch strategy in on the two months.

AI assessment note: “I met my co-founder Jake... took the marketing concepts... and we took it to SaaS.”

Q All right, Laura, let's talk about this launch strategy, which I think is amazing. And, uh, it's unlike anything I've ever seen before. So I really, really want to dig into that and talk all about that. Can you explain exactly how this works? High level, how you were able to launch and hit like 30 K MRR in basically a day. Can you explain that? How does it work?

A Yeah, so the way Clio was able to go from zero to thirty-k MRR in its first month was simple. We used the Clio Payback, and it's three parts. Content, waitlist, and webinars. We haven't even launched to the public yet. The first launch and second launches were beta launches straight to our waitlist. And the thing is, no one is doing it like this. Everybody's doing it the opposite way, where they launch something and they promote it. We did it the opposite way, which was the most important part for us, creating that scarcity, curiosity, and demand for a product people hadn't even seen yet. Our customers and my clients have been able to hit 50 K, 60 K, and 70 K following the exact same playback. It can work for anyone, no matter how big or small your following is.

AI assessment note: “We used the Clio Payback, and it's three parts. Content, waitlist, and webinars.”

Q thinking about how to build SaaS. I think it's actually genius. And I want you to dive in a little bit deeper though, on how you guys did this. What was the first thing you did? I know you said building a waitlist. How do you build a waitlist and how do you drive interest or attention to that waitlist? Could you share with me exactly how to do that?

A Yeah. So the approach that we took was obviously educating on LinkedIn fast because we're all LinkedIn native creators. So we had multiple posts that drove demand to this waitlist. So this is one of the posts, not from me and not from Jake from our other account called the LinkedIn creator. You can see that there is no call to action. There is no direct Plug. It's simply educating. This is something that Jake called Edu Selling, where you're basically telling people what they need to know, and you're answering their biggest problems. So for example, here is how to write. The best LinkedIn tips I found. We're telling them what they want to know, and then at the end, we show them where they can actually get more results using our tool. This leads them to sign up to our waitlist. A different post, for example, by Jake is, he's stating a problem here, And then he's literally just talking about the typical problems that every founder, entrepreneur, and creator has when they're creating content on the platform. Again, you can't see ACTA. It's simply creating this awareness and taking mindshare of Clio. So that's how we've done it over time.

AI assessment note: “So the approach that we took was obviously educating on LinkedIn fast”

Q get it, but it won't be free forever. All right, let's get back to the interview. Okay, so you guys, over the course of six months to a year, it doesn't happen overnight, but you built up trust, you built up this waitlist to thousands of people. What happens next? How do you actually get your product in front of those people? How do you turn those into paying customers?

A Again, another typical mistake that most founders do is that they built this waitlist and they never nurture it. Nurturing your list is one of the main things that you need to do as a founder or as someone that wants to build a product and ship it to the public. Four weeks before we launched the actual product, Live to our waitlist, we warmed up the lists showing people why they needed our tool without actually directly selling it to them, and so you can see our first email that we ever sent pre-launch was the problem with AI content and why we're different. What we did is we emphasized the problem that people were thinking about, so the problem with AI content, everybody can write with AI, so we knew that. We knew that the number one objection was how is this better than ChatGPT or Claude that is It's free for us. So we got there. We kind of like tested different headlines and said why most AI content fails before it even starts. Then we laid out exactly what the problem was, but it isn't an AI problem. It's a differentiation problem, which then makes people agree with us. That then led to them being engaged into the waitlist. You can see here, there's no CTA. There's no, oh, it's coming soon. Nothing. Simply educating people on the problem that they have so we can build trust. Rather than just sell them. So now, as you can see, we did over 10 emails before the drop. So then t…

AI assessment note: “Four weeks before we launched the actual product, Live to our waitlist, we warmed up”

Q Okay, so you're in this VC world, you work on and sell multiple companies. How do you decide to go the bootstrap route, and how do you come up with an idea that eventually makes 30,000 dollars a month?

A Well, there was nothing wrong with the VC backed route, but after selling that last company, I was really excited for a change. I started posting videos on YouTube, talking about my ideas for what kind of company I would want to start next. At the same time, I was getting more into YouTube itself and getting into this idea of faceless YouTube channels where you can create channels on the backend. So I started putting together a team. I quickly realized that script writing is this huge bottleneck. It's actually really hard to find good script writers, even though we sort of know what a good YouTube script looks like. I tried using ChatGPT and I saw that it was nowhere near good enough to, you know, write the kind of script that I wanted to see. But I made a bet that if I took all of my experience as an entrepreneur and as a software developer, that I could build a solution that actually worked.

AI assessment note: “I quickly realized that script writing is this huge bottleneck.”

Q get back to the video. I think that's really important that you mentioned there, that final catch, which you didn't really mention right until the end, which is you actually hadn't built the product yet. This is why I wanted to bring on the channel because I think this is so genius. Can you break this down a little bit more about why this works and why you did this?

A The curse of being a software developer is that it's so easy to fall in love with an idea. And I've done this so many times before. Too often we just get excited about that invention without making sure that it's actually like a painkiller. So as an entrepreneur, we always want to be selling a painkiller, not a vitamin. A vitamin is a nice to have a painkiller. Is something you have to have, and it's going to sell a lot better. The traditional advice with startups is to go and talk to your friends and say, what do you think about this idea? Give me feedback. Maybe the next level of advice would be to say, how much would you pay for this tool if it existed? I actually think that that feedback is not good enough. In fact, it's actually quite dangerous because it lets you think you have validation. So you go in a hole. For three months or however long it takes to build this thing. And then you pop up for air and you say, Hey guys, it's ready. And the problem with that approach, they say, you know, I would be willing to pay 20 dollars a month if I didn't have this other subscription, or I would be willing to pay once I get this check-in from my old company. And I've seen this happen so many times. So the only way to really get validation is to collect money from people. And the faster you can get to that, the more likely it is that your startup is going to succeed.

AI assessment note: “the only way to really get validation is to collect money from people.”

Q You had this business, you started with partners. It wasn't really what you wanted to build. Maybe it wasn't fully scalable. How does that turn into building an app that now makes over 400,000 dollars a month?

A The business wasn't doing great. And because we transitioned into this kind of agency format, I had all this like energy for developing something that wasn't being used. So I started with a more like a workout tracker kind of app. So I was like heavy, strong, that kind of thing. But as I was building it, I noticed that, okay, I'm not adding any value. It just felt like copy of what they were doing. And then it was one of my mates. He showed me Fitbot and Fitbot is one of the biggest workout apps. And when he showed me the app, I was like, oh, this is amazing because it kind of provided you with workouts on the spot and you didn't really have to do anything else. But then I started using it and doing some research. I noticed that the workouts were weird and even a bit dangerous sometimes. And like the more I used it, I was like, wow, okay, these workouts are actually bad. That's what triggered me. And then I was like, okay, this is it. We need to build Fitbot UI UX with an actual proper workout engine. That's kind of when we went all in on building it.

AI assessment note: “We need to build Fitbot UI UX with an actual proper workout engine.”

Q Well, to be honest, Sebastian, we don't usually bring on big influencers in the space. You have a million subscribers on YouTube, but there's a reason for that. You decided to build a software business without using your personal brand. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?

A Yeah. So, you know, after this last stint of posting content on the internet and going mega viral, you know, I had this, this feeling like I had to basically turn on a camera and talk and get attention in order to make money. And like most of my income was tied to that. I really, Wanted to break away from that. I really wanted to break that chain. And I set out to build like this real SaaS company and I didn't want to do it in a way where I was going to use my personal brand to make videos and talk about the SaaS. Um, I wanted to do it like the cave way where I just lock myself in my room and build it the hard way and grow it naturally. And that's exactly what I did.

AI assessment note: “I didn't want to do it in a way where I was going to use my personal brand”

Q Okay. I mean, we kind of talked about the pros and the cons of being an influencer and being big in the space and building a business around that. What are the cons or the downsides that you noticed of building a product based business without a big sort of audience basis?

A Well, I'll start with the cons. The cons are you're going from like an audience from applause to straight performance. Like you have to be straight competent. That's all that it is. You need to be working all the time a lot more. You're going to have stress. You're going to have problems. You're going to have payroll. It's way harder, but the pro Is that it's just way, way more fulfilling and you have freedom, like genuine freedom. And if you have a business that's attached to your face and a personal brand, you are kind of cuffed to the camera in a way. So I wanted to break that chain for myself. That's kind of like the, the tail end of like the journey or the path that I'm on now.

AI assessment note: “The cons are you're going from like an audience from applause to straight performance.”