I'm writing this to be helpful to anyone aspiring to start their own business. In 2019, YOE3, software engineer at FAANG. In 2022, I run a SaaS business, no VC-fund, no external investments, profit is more than my FAANG salary. Took 1.75 years. Started with < 50k savings. I work on this full-time. Real estate & data industry Pros - Personal freedom - Better lifestyle - Less tax - Income is scalable - I work to grow my asset (the 100% of equity I own) - More motivation Cons - Hard to make friends - No free food, coffee, gadgets (instead, I have to provide them to employees) - No business class flights - More meetings My journey During the first 6 months, I did not make any money. So I rented out extra rooms on Airbnb to survive. I did not eat out for 6 months. I did coding, sales, marketing, support, and all. I learned sales and marketing from Googling and Youtube. At the end of the first year, <$100/mo. Hired a few interns, and tried a few things, but nothing worked. After 15 months, I hired a good marketer to experiment with dozens of growth hacking, and eventually, we found one strategy to acquire customers at a very low price. Still, not much sales. After 20 months, over $15,000/mo revenue. Our team changed pricing and product iteratively and eventually found the magic combinations. After 24 months, the revenue grows every month, because big portion of the revenue is recurring. Trying out a bunch of unconventional growth tactics. #startup #google #meta #amazon #VC
Had to reupload this due to some errors. My FAANG TC was under 200k. My current EBITDA should not be publicly available but more than my previous TC.
How much more??
OP, take a look at the question above pls
How many employees ? What does your company do ?
4 full-time. 5-10 part-time / contractors
provide analytics dashboard for short term rental investors
This is where VCs come in: hiring, providing benefits for employees (medical, dental, 401k), marketing to fuel growth, network connections to develop partner ecosystem
Not every company is designed to grow to $b+
I don't think VC is good at building a profitable company. Most of companies they invest aren't profitable.
Same questions from the last thread. Did you have any cofounders? How did you get "interns" to work for you?
No co-founder. I used LinkedIn for the 4 interns I hired while the company wasn't making any revenue.
How did you sell the idea to them? Also are they from countries with cheap talent? (India, LATAM, etc)
Congratulations! That’s really impressive.
I like AirDNA better since it's still usable without paying, everything is behind a paywall at airbtics ...
Thanks for your feedback! and really glad to see someone at least heard about us.
If I may ask, how do you and AirDNA get this data? Scraping airbnb and vrbo?
Congratulations 🥳 this post is very encouraging! I had a very promising idea and I am thinking to build it but don’t have the right skills (I am ML research scientist) so I have to learn web dev to build my product. I don’t have any saving so I am considering to work hard to get into faang which will help me, first to gain experience on designing systems at scale and seconde have a good savings. But I am wondering if it is worth to spend time on leetcode or take time to test my idea. But startup takes time and from financial point I am wondering Hem hard to decide
Thanks! I started it with less than $50k, so you may not need to save that much to get started. If you are looking to bootstrapped, I suggest you to build your audience first by learning marketing, while working in a company. If I can go back to 2018, I don't think I'll spend time on Leetcode or interview preparations. But I'll learn how to build a company (which is marketing and sales) I met many success entrepreneurs even without college degree.
Thanks! Yes I am learning from YT and Google a lot about marketing, startups .... For building a community it is hard. My idea is an EdTech for kids so target clients are parents. I thought to create a YT channel but what kid of content I can create to attract parents? My skills are not related to kids but more ML. Any advice?
What was the very first thing you did? Create a vision deck? Make the app? How did you expect to find product market fit?
I built a product. I got some helps from freelancer too, since I'm not good at frontend. I found the product-market fit by talking to my potential clients. My potential clients are Airbnb hosts, so I made a Podcast where I interview Airbnb hosts. So I got to speak with 5 Airbnb hosts every week, which made it easy for me to find the product market fit.
Brilliant idea with the pod cast. Thanks for sharing. I am thinking I may stick around at microsoft for the WLB and decent pay and start a business with the extra time but I’m no developer.
what is your company?
if you want to check out, It is my username.
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How much of revenue is profit?
50-80% depending on how aggressive I try experimental growth ideas.
I see, what types of growth channels have you tried if you don’t mind sharing?