Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
What is the combined revenue of all of your projects?
It's around 3 million. That's incredible.
It runs on autopilot. So your bot is doing 1,000,000
ARR. It has been doubling month over
month. 110 KA month. Little tools are easy to build
in the age of vibe coding. You can build them in one
evening. Pretty cool hack.
I will show you. It's not a billion dollar idea,
(00:21):
but if you're a regular person and you want to build $1,000,000
business, we have so many low hanging fruits.
This is so good. It's just right in front of our
nose. So if people say I don't have an
audience, doesn't matter, that'snot an excuse.
What is your go to tech stack for building all of these tools?
If you're like me and find yourself bouncing around from
(00:41):
idea to idea and testing all kinds of different concepts,
this episode is for you. I found this guy on Twitter
named John. He has 24 different projects,
mostly websites, and they make him $3,000,000 a year of annual
recurring revenue. And you know what?
Almost all of the things that he's built or talks about can be
vibe coded with common AI, AI tools that I talk about on this
podcast all the time. So we get super nitty gritty.
(01:04):
He gets very specific on how to find good business ideas, how to
validate good business ideas, how to launch them and how to
grow them. What are his favorite AI tools
to use? How does he build agents?
How does he build agents for himself and then sell those
agents to other people? You don't need employees.
You don't need to be a software engineer.
You just need to listen to this episode.
Please enjoy. You have 24 different products
(01:25):
plus projects running right now,and you're trying to automate as
much of it as possible possible.Yeah, yeah.
When I saw AI happening in 2021,actually pretty early before
most of the people, I started automating some of the things
already with GPT 2 and GPT 3. And then in 2022 when they
launched 3.5, I think I kind of felt that, you know, the, the
(01:48):
traction they have on model improvements is so great that I
should bet everything on AI becoming really, really strong.
So and then I thought like, if that's the case, if that becomes
the future, then I should bootstrap and I should run
smaller companies and I should create suffering for myself by
(02:08):
not having people to delegate to.
So that I have to do everything by myself, from accounting to
paperwork to design, development, growth, marketing,
everything I had to do by myselfbecause in the past I would just
hire people for that. And now I did by myself and I
learned all those crafts and I sew the paints and I had these
(02:31):
ideas for 2080 rule. Like what can I do?
Like 20% of the work that gives 80% of the result.
And I automated that with AI, starting with operations, then
with growth, then with development and with, with
everything. So that was kind of my, my
story. And now I'm, I'm here with a lot
(02:51):
of agents and I used agents to grow my other agents.
So it's kind of the loop happening.
So these 24 things, are they some of them agents that work
for you and then it's also agentthat you're reselling to others
as well? Well, they all start as my
internal agent and I run them for a long while so that I'm
happy with them myself. And also it's easier to run a
(03:12):
project if you're the only customer because you can risk,
you can, you know, move fast andyou don't have all the users who
would complain. That's why I run for a year or
two or something, three years internally.
And then once I kind of like thewhole thing and it's stable and
I don't iterate that much, then I bring all my friends because I
have a lot of friends who are building startups, and then I
launch publicly for everybody touse.
(03:35):
So eventually everything I use internally will become public.
That's the end goal here. I love it.
You find a problem, you solve itfor yourself.
You solve it for your friends. If it's still surviving then
because surely some don't make it, then you launch it to the
general public. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
It sounds easy, but you know, it's the way I create suffering
(03:58):
for myself. It's really hard to replicate
because nobody really wants to suffer that much.
Like I have so many transactions, for example, like
a lot of product and transactions.
And I still do accounting myself.
I hate those days when I have todo that, but I have to do that
because then I understand whether the product I'm, I think
the H&M building is good enough and, and I can evaluate it.
(04:20):
And I, I think when they were somebody else comes into the
game trying to build the same thing, like they have too much
time. Like I don't have time at all.
So I'm, I'm kind of a typical user of the tool, while the
other people who would build that thing, they would
understand accounting really well and they would kind of, you
know, have a lot of time to click the buttons and to use the
(04:40):
interface. And I don't have that time.
So that's why all my agents are so simple on the surface and
still complicated under the hoodbecause my vision is that the
end goal for every agent is thatI turn it on and I leave it and
it just works as great employee that self managed agentic and it
(05:01):
asks me whenever it has questions and then goes back to
do the work. What's an example of one of your
agents that just works perfectlybut it's very complicated under
the hood? Yeah, it's like Sao bot for
example. I think that's one of the best
agents I have. So it runs on autopilot.
Like I even forget sometimes that it runs for some of my
(05:23):
products, but then I get emails from it where it says now this
week I've done this. So I built these articles, I
built this how to guides, I built these tools like mini
tool. It can even build little
products that will drive Sao traffic.
Then they can also collect all the news and then build some
(05:44):
newsletters and things like that.
So it does a lot of the work that Sao department would do.
It can also ask me whenever it'snot confident about things.
It would ask me like I have a list of these things and can you
help me to pick what's the best from this list?
Like I have 10 items, pick 5 andthen I pick five and then it
does the rest of the work. So it's able to involve me
(06:07):
whenever it's necessary, but then when it learns me and it
understands what I want it eventually over time, I'm not
involved at all. First you're involved every day
and then week and then month andnow once every quarter.
Well, it's like training an employee, right?
Yeah, exactly like a good employee.
Yeah. Are you willing to share revenue
(06:28):
numbers or anything like that? Yeah.
So your bot is doing 1,000,000 ARR.
I think I shared that before and.
Crazy. It has been growing.
It has been doubling month over month before summer and in
summer the growth stopped. I think it's kind of been 110 KA
month during the summer and now I think it will start growing
(06:50):
again in September. Good for you.
It was one of the first agent that kind of went into being a
real agent, because all the other agents, they say they're
agents. Yeah.
If you go in there, it's kind ofa tool that has a lot of AI in
it, and you have to sit inside of that tool and use it.
So it's just more convenient UX where with my agent from the
(07:12):
start, I went the other way around.
So it had no buttons at all. It was just turned on.
It was a check box. Put it on and it starts.
That was the only baton I had inthe first month.
And then I was just adding more because some people ask for
certain control and I don't wantto lose out on agencies and pro
users and they want more control.
(07:33):
But I'm kind of not really into it.
I think I in long term, I believe that people don't want
that much control. And the reason they want that
much control now is that they have too much time.
Like if you're an employee in a company and you have 8 hours a
day to do Sao only you have a lot of time and you don't want
to have a tool that just has onebatch and you turn it on and
(07:55):
what do you do then, right? It doesn't appear like you're
adding enough value. Exactly.
Exactly. But in fact, you're adding value
because you have an experience and you can help the tool once
in a while. And those little moderations
will be crucial because it's like the quality of the ideas
wins over the quantity in this case.
(08:15):
But but people are not ready forthat yet.
And I took a risk and I went into that early and a lot of
people didn't believe that such interface will work, but it work
really well and I think it's oneof the well known agents.
That's amazing. What?
What is the combined revenue of all of your projects?
It's around 3 million. That's incredible.
(08:35):
I mean, the 8020 rule is alive and well even, and you can't get
rid of the 8020 rule, right? It's everywhere.
Yeah, like 3 products do most ofthe revenue and then everything
else brings the rest. But I think it's, it's possible
to grow the rest too. But you know, I'm, I'm not doing
these things in a typical way where I want to just maximize
the revenue or I want to find the winner and put all my effort
(08:58):
into the winner, because that's what a lot of people do who run
a lot of tips. That's not my game.
My game is to build all these agents that play together.
And then since I have them all, I can connect them.
And that's also cool, right? Because now suddenly agent, one
agent like I have SEO bot and I have another agent that's called
(09:19):
Rapify and rapify builds little tools.
It's like a vibe coding tool andso your bot can call, repify and
ask it to build a tool and send it back.
So now I have one agent, you know, asking the other.
Like imagine in your office you have SEO marketer and then you
have developer and it come one comes to the other and asks for
(09:41):
the for help. And I have that across all my
agents and that's why I'm not hurrying up in growing them.
I'd rather when I have them all running like 100, maybe 1000
customers so that I have enough people to test, to ask questions
and to AB test things, but not more because when it's more it's
a hustle. It's a lot of support, a lot of
(10:03):
legacy to support. So that's my game now.
And you're able to cross sell across all of your projects,
right? Like, do you do a lot of that?
Yeah, Yeah, I think that's sometimes that's half of my
sales every month. Wow.
For new users, For the new users, half of them come from
one tool to the other. That's why when they land 1 user
(10:23):
in any of my tool, I have some tools that are making like 1K a
month, like very small tools. But at the same time, they are
so cheap and they have trial andpeople enter those tools and
they might even cancel that tool, but move over to the other
tools. And it's very rare when people
leave my universe. So if they enter, they, they
(10:45):
once you use one tool, the othertool, third tool, it's really
hard to leave because it's, it'snot locking you, but it's
convenient. And if you're busy, it's really
convenient. The one KA month MRR you get
from one of your small projects that could be contributing
another three KA month MRR in another project.
Exactly because of Cross. Or or across seven other
projects, right? Yeah, yeah, that.
(11:06):
That's why I have so many directories and a lot of people
think why do I build directories?
Is that that much money there? Like most of my directories are
making one KA month, some make 10K but most of make just one
Ki. Think like directories are so
good at driving traffic from people who would otherwise not
land on your website. You know, with your SEO
(11:28):
business, you know, one of the hard parts about SEO, either
doing it for yourself or sellingan SEO SAS product, is how long
it can often take to work. How do you manage churn in that
business when people have, you know, they want immediate
results and that's just not common in SEO?
Have you been able to overcome that, and if so, how?
Well, it's hard, of course, because a lot of people have
expectations and then they see somebody on the Internet with a
(11:52):
story that they stored yesterdayand now they have traffic and
they expect the same. But I think in my case, I'm
trying to build my products in away that they also educate
people on what to expect. And what is this?
Because most people who use my products are not professionals.
Like professionals usually go for more complicated products
because they want to spend theirtime by using them.
(12:13):
And my products are for busy founders the most my customers
are founders who are good at everything a little bit, right?
And, and I have this system of emails where I take some little
KPI's, little like for example for SEO articles, I send the
data every week on what has beendone.
(12:35):
And maybe there's some views because you don't get the clicks
right away, but you get views right away, right or not right
away. Within a week, usually you get
views and I send the views and then I send the clicks.
There's stuff to send to the user to show that things are
happening. And that usually works because
also it's about the price. If you go for the agency, you
pay like 5K or something like that.
And, and it's two months after and you don't see the traffic
(12:58):
and you, you feel like you've been scammed.
And in this case it costs like $20.00 a month.
And it's not like you, you're expecting any result for that
money. Oh.
Man that's so good. How long are your customers
taking to see SEO results with your product?
It's from weeks to month. Like I think Google has been
changing a lot in their algorithm.
(13:20):
So like 3 years ago you would never see any traffic on your
article until like 2 month, maybe something's three month.
And now I think the same goes for weeks.
So now in the weeks you can see views and some clicks like 2-3
weeks. What is your go to tech stack
for building all of these tools?I use a lot of the tools, so my
(13:42):
main tool that I use for prototyping is lovable or other
like bolt or cursor or pincer. But Lovable is my favorite I
think for byte coding. And I use Lovable for
prototyping and often I use it to experiment with different
ways of building the UI for thisproduct.
For example, once I move past the prototype, I use my own AI
(14:06):
coding tool called Morsex because that's where I go for
serious stuff where it probably becomes more complicated.
So it's like 2 tools. So first one for MVPS, the other
one is for full product. What about for automations and
other stuff you like make? I use make, I use Zapier and I
use Lindy AI, so I use the wholetree.
(14:28):
All right, we're like getting, I'm like so intrigued by what
you're doing. We had talked, John about you,
showing us how you find ideas, how you build ideas, and how you
grow ideas, right? Yeah.
Why don't we get into that? All right, I will just share my
screen for that. Yeah.
So for the ideas, I have this framework that I can make for
(14:50):
myself, and it was pretty popular in the Internet because
I think it's very simple. I think the best ideas are the
ideas that scratch your own itch.
So basically you're doing a job and then you have a problem at
the job and you want to solve that and you come up with ideas
for that, for solution for the problem.
That's what I usually do. 99% ofmy ideas are born that way and
(15:12):
then you have some other optionsfor finding ideas.
And usually my second option is to see that people are asking
for something and then see whether a lot of people ask for
it and then build that. So I will just show how I do
both and. For example this is.
So good. Like if I want to figure out
(15:33):
what what people are asking, I do a pretty cool hack.
I will show you. So I go to Google and I do this.
So website builder that. So you do this and you see the
code that doesn't use AI that accept payments that export the
HTML. Like that's interesting.
(15:53):
Like some people want that. And I actually know a guy who
built a website builder that cando that.
It became big so, and you can doit farther, like Website Builder
4. And now we see the audience.
It can be small business, photographers, artists.
That's interesting. And we're assuming this is
ranked by like search volume, right?
(16:14):
Oh. Yeah, exactly.
And and if you see it here, thatmeans a lot of people search for
it. But you know, we you have the
next step here where you can take this into the keyword
research and validate, for example, website builder for
artists. And now we can go into the
keyword research and we can see how much traffic is going there.
(16:36):
Yeah. So here we see it's around 10K
visitors a month, which is not alot, but if you look further,
you have this one, you have thisone.
So you have a lot of requests which are also and for the same
thing and they're also at each 10K10K10K.
So in total it's probably 100K now.
So it's pretty good traffic, yeah.
(16:58):
And also you can see where exactly people search for and
you can sort them based on the monthly searches.
And now you see how people frameit because that's also
important. And you can see that they that
they frame it in basic way. So the website builder for
artists. So now you can probably count
with the domain idea, which could be in this case, it's
probably too long like website builders for artists.
(17:21):
But in often cases, you could just find a keyword that turns
into the idea like I have this, I've been playing with the other
keyword now and it's tux haven't.
So I just tested it now before this call and it's a the 100K
searches. It's a lot of searches.
It's low competition. It means that people don't
(17:41):
really place ads for these keywords.
And that's a, that's a very highvalue keyword, right?
Yeah, wealthy exactly are searching that keyword.
Yeah, like people are willing tosave money.
It means that you can earn moneywhere others are trying to save
money, right? And then you can go and test
this, all the ideas here. So you first find them on Google
(18:05):
and then you see you make a list.
So I usually play with it for anhour.
I make a list in the Excel for like 50 or 60 ideas and then I
bring them back into the keywordresearch tool.
And then I see their traffic. And in the end, you have a
picture what you should work on,because if you don't do that,
then you're kind of in the dark and you have no idea.
(18:28):
You're guessing. Yeah, you're guessing.
And the problem with guessing isthat it's like in stock market
world, whenever you guess, usually you're doing something
wrong because that's how our mind works.
The intuition never helps in this case.
I would take this a step further, John, like So what if
you're only listening to this? What we're looking at is just
(18:48):
the auto complete on.google.com website builder 4:00 And from
the top to bottom it goes small business, free photographers,
portfolio artists, nonprofits. So you can go to the keyword
tool. In the artist example, there
were 92 keywords that had over 100,000 searches per month.
Cool. I would do that for like the top
ten small business artists, whatever.
(19:10):
And then I would go to perplexity and I would have a
prompt that says all I want to know, I want a grid.
I want to know how many website builders are there that
specialize in being 4 artists. Like not a Squarespace, not a
Wix. It needs to be a niche website
builder that is 4 artists. I need to know how many there
are. And then on the second column I
need to see like what's their estimated monthly traffic using
(19:33):
similar web or something else, right?
Run a deep research prompt on all ten of those.
Website builder 4, XY or Z. You get a table, you put it in
Google Sheets, and then you takethe search volume and how
competitive it is and put it in column C&D.
And then you can clearly see notonly where is the search volume,
but how much demand is there foreach.
(19:53):
And then you can easily sort andsay, Oh yeah, this one has the
most demand and the least supply.
I'm going to build here. Yeah.
And the thing here is that it's very often search IDs are not
really heavily targeted by anyone because it's a small
niche. And if you're AVC backed
company, it's, it's too little for you.
(20:15):
Like it's not a billion dollar idea, right?
But if you're a regular person and you want to build $1,000,000
business, that's of the market, right?
And that's why like we're now living in a world where where we
have so many low hanging fruits like that, because the VC backed
world, surprisingly is all goingafter the same ideas because
(20:38):
they have to measure the market and, and that's super important.
And all, all these other ideas are just unserved.
And there are a lot of them. And I see now a huge movement
where, you know, solopreneurs and indie makers and, and a lot
of the people are just, you know, targeting this.
This is so good. It's like it's just right in
(20:58):
front of our nose. It's just google.com, but it's
it's like a prompt. It's like a Google prompt,
right? And looking at it exactly.
Yeah. And so I do that, and my next
step is usually to validate again.
So basically when I built something, I'm trying to
convince myself that I shouldn'tbuild it.
You should behave that way because if you try to.
(21:21):
Like a negative bias just to be exactly, yeah.
If you're in love with your idea, then you will do the
opposite. Whenever you see the data, you
will interpret the data in the wrong way.
You will think that well, it's not that bad.
It's not that bad, yeah. But you should try to kill your
idea because there are so many ideas.
You rather kill, you know, 20 ofthem and 21st works out and then
(21:44):
you don't waste time building it, right?
Because building it takes a lot of time.
So then my next step is usually I go to my Uniggar platform and
you can go into any other vibe coding tool.
But I recommend to use like websites builders for websites
rather than vibe coding tools because the website builders are
(22:06):
made for landing pages and they have good SEO optimization and
things like that. So go for Framer, Unicorn web
flow, Don't go for lovable or BALT or others for this because
they are made for apps, right? For where you have the user
login and things like that, because people have mixed those
(22:28):
things. And I think this is really
important. Like you have landing pages and
you have your web app and for landing pages, use landing page
builder, right? So I usually go here and then I
kind of pick a wait list. So because I haven't built a
product yet, so I just pick a wait simple wait list, for
example, this one and then I go for create and then I say
(22:52):
website builder 4 or this Yeah and it will just build a little
landing page with a wait list. Now, yeah, it has to be super
simple. Like your goal here is to just
see whether anyone is willing toput their name or like here it
puts phone number. I don't need that.
(23:14):
So I just remove it. Yeah, name and e-mail is enough
for me. So that's it.
So now I have my landing page show it to potential customers
and C normally don't want to join wait lists because it's
silly, right? But still, if you show it to 20
(23:34):
people, at least one person would join because some people
are cursed and they want to get to know about this once you
launch. So it's it still works like
you're gonna lose a lot of the people who otherwise would sign
up if you had the product. But right now, our goal is to
understand whether people are willing to put any effort into
(23:55):
consuming your product. And this is good enough.
So I share this on social media,on Reddit, on replies.
So I search on social media for people rather than talking.
About this question. Yeah, yeah.
Or sometimes not even asking about the question, like
sometimes you can be a bit more spummy.
(24:16):
If you can't find the actual questions, you can find the
right people. So in this case these are
musicians and you can just search for anything around
musicians and software. Doesn't have to be the website
builder can be something else right?
You can search for that and thenyou can reply the year and it's
not exactly on point but it's not that far.
(24:38):
It works pretty well if you do like 20 or 30 replies like that
and then you do DM's to the samepeople and then you maybe find
their emails and send called emails.
So eventually if you do 100 actions towards a cold out
region and cold replies, you will see either 0 signups for
(24:58):
your wait list and if it's zero,it's a good sign.
It means that it's not that important of a problem for
people so they don't care that much.
That's good. Yeah, if you get 0, if you get
100, it's good because you're learning and you don't want to
waste time on a project that nobody wants.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. But if there's one or ten or
(25:19):
five, then you have an answer. Like if it's ten, then it means
people really want it. And sometimes you actually hit
the right spot and a lot of people say no because that
doesn't exist. And people all wanted it.
And then this, they sign up. I had that.
I was gonna ask. Did you have any examples of
that happening to you? Yeah, so I had a case with when
I build dev hunt. So Dev Hunt isn't similar to
(25:43):
Product Hand but for Dev tolls. And I just shared a tweet where
I said that I want to build thisnew launchpad only for
developers because Product Hunt doesn't serve developers as it
serves the marketers. And if 100 people sign up for
this, I will build it. And I had 100 people signing up
(26:06):
and people were actually sharingthe link to their friends
telling them, hey, come help. Me, they want for this.
They wanted to help you because they wanted to use it.
They wanted to reach the 100 marks.
They build it, right? So they wanted to help
themselves, actually, not me. Yeah.
And that's right. The best thing here, right?
So, and I do that every time. So basically all my products,
(26:28):
even before I build them for myself, I still kind of test
them on public using these methods because I know I'm not
building something that I will never be able to launch to the
public and works really well. So I do it through social media
and I'm kind of found a way to do it through social media even
before I had followers. Now I have a lot of followers,
(26:49):
but in the past I had almost none and I still found a way
because the interesting stuff about social media is that right
now they don't really respect the follower count count as I
did in the past. So if your content is
interesting, they will show it to a few people and if they find
it interesting, they will show it to more people and eventually
it can blow up even without followers.
(27:10):
So you should try that. You should always try that and
you should test. You should test it for messages
on your kind of launch tweet. But if that doesn't work, you
can also do ads. You can send paid traffic to
your tool, and paid traffic works too sometimes.
So in the past I was using Google and Meta for that.
(27:33):
But as with everything else, I end up building my own tool for
that. That kind of does it for me.
Has there ever been a time when all of your indicators were
shouting yes, yes, launch this, and then you did this research
stage or you actually launched it and it just did not hit?
And if so, why do you think thathappened?
No, that never happened really. I had the opposite.
(27:56):
I had the opposite where everything's sad that the ID is
bad, like there were no sign upsand all my friends were saying
that this is a bad idea. But when I launched, it worked
out. So I had the opposite.
But if I get the validation through this matters that you've
(28:16):
shown, I go for the last step. Actually there's one, one more
step that's just to make sure 100% is going to work.
I ask for pre bookings. So I give people 70% or 90%
discount if they buy now. And surprisingly, I had cases
(28:36):
where a lot of people sign up for a toll, a lot of people, but
nobody wanted to pay. Because you know why it happens?
It happens because sometimes youhit certain audience, for
example, students, they would besigning up for the thing and you
would think, wow, a lot of people, thousands of them.
But then you ask them for a dollar and they don't want to
(28:59):
pay because they're used to finding things for free, right?
And you never know because you have no idea.
You have some emails in your list and you have no idea who
are those people, right? That's why if you ask for a
payment and you don't get at least 10% of your wait list to
execute it, it means that it won't be easier after, right?
(29:19):
And I had cases. It's like that.
If I put up a landing page for a$20.00 a month tool that people
are signing up for and they showdemand for, and then you launch
it and less than 10% of people actually pay for the thing, it's
not a good sign. It's not a good sign.
It's a very bad sign because it it means that you're missing the
(29:41):
whole thing, like you're not selling to the right audience.
And that's a big problem becauseit's not something you can just
change because if you go and after another audience, it's a
new game. Yeah.
You have to like, maybe all thistraffic you saw on keyword
research was from the wrong audience, right?
(30:02):
Yeah. And you don't know that because
it's just numbers. And that's kind of the problem.
Like you get excited about something because there's an
interest, but it's wrong people and you can't like now you have
to kill the idea because most likely be the right people.
Don't search for it. What if you're just priced too
high? Like it is the right audience?
7% of people buy it and it wouldbe higher if you were priced at
(30:25):
$9 a month instead of 19. How do you know when that's the
case? Or do you?
Yeah, you offer them a discount.Let's say even with a discount
like it's normally at 49 and you're offering it for 19 or 9,
right? Like let's say that is the case.
They will tell you so you offered them a discount and they
tell well you know that price would work if that was one time.
(30:46):
But I won't pay every month because this tool doesn't look
like a tool I should pay every month.
For example, I had cases like that.
For example, I have listing bot where it lists you on
directories and 1st I want to launch it as monthly
subscription. But people said that why should
I pay every month. You just kind of do the work
once for me and that's it. You can talk to people and
(31:08):
usually if they walk through your process where they join
your wait list and you pitch them the discount and pre
booking, they would usually, notall of them, but some of them
will tell you back that it's tooexpensive or it's wrong pricing.
It should be once or the opposite.
So it should be once. It should be every month because
I had the opposite too. I had this tool called count
(31:29):
visits. It's for analytics and I went
for a lifetime though there and people said that I don't want to
pay $100 at once because maybe Idon't like the tool after all,
so I'd rather start with $9. But they told me so and I
changed things. Like if you do this, like
imagine if I put just my paymentlink like everybody else does.
(31:53):
Then if people don't want it, they just leave.
You have no idea why they don't want it.
But if you get them into your wait list and then after a while
you send them the payment, then you're sending it through the
e-mail. So you have the trap on the
e-mail with them and they will answer.
There's OK so much I want to ask.
All right, so you, you can validate with paid ads.
(32:15):
So if people say I don't have anaudience, doesn't matter, that's
not an excuse. A, the algorithm rewards good
content whether you have 0 followers or a million B you can
use paid ads to skip the line. What other tools do you use to
validate demand? And has there ever been a time
where the opposites happened andyou never launched something
because your tools just told youit wasn't there and you think
(32:36):
that you you avoided a failure by doing so?
I haven't had cases where I completely gave up on that idea,
because usually my first task for the idea is whether I want
it myself or not, and I never goon if I don't want it.
And if I want it, then I still want it even if others don't
(32:57):
want it, right? But now I have to figure out why
I want it and others don't and it takes time for me sometimes.
Like I could put the project on hold for for a year just because
I want to slip on it. And eventually I ask people and
ask people and ask people and myintuition tells me.
Also I do one thing that's not common.
(33:20):
Like people usually go for SAR traffic pretty late.
So because it's a long playing game and you shouldn't start
with it because they will play back on entry month, right?
And you should start with something else at first.
But in my case, since I have so many products and they're all
(33:40):
not pressing me on time, I have all the time in the world.
I usually start SEO work on the day one.
In that case, I can just post the product and wait for a few
months and then come back and see whether there is traffic
from SEO. And that's interesting.
So SEO traffic is a new source of validation because you know,
(34:02):
one thing that you have to also validate with the product is not
just if people want it, but alsoif you're able to drive traffic
there. Like you may build something
that everybody wants, but then it doesn't mean that you will
find you will win the attention of the people that so that they
know about the product and, and a lot of people don't understand
(34:23):
that that that's even more important because I rarely seen
people who didn't manage to build a product that people
wanted. It's funny, I I've made the same
mistake of spending months and years saying, yeah, I just, I
don't do SEO because it takes solong to pay off one year later,
yeah, I just don't really do SEObecause it takes so long to pay
off 1. Year later.
(34:43):
Dude, if you would have just done it any of those times, it
would be paying off by now. When it comes to converting a
percentage of your wait list, how much does time play a role?
Because if you collect a wait list on August 1st and then you
don't launch the thing until April first, you're going to
convert a lot lower percentage, right?
Because it's less relevant, lesstop of mind.
How quickly do you like to launch things after you start
(35:05):
getting emails from a wait list?It's not important at all.
So I felt that's important when I was running my first products
and I felt like the time was pressing and people are waiting
and all those things. But basically in the start
world, if you can do something once, you can repeat it, right?
Like, if you're able to drive 100 people into your wait list
(35:28):
this week, you can repeat that next year, too, unless you're
building something that's about Christmas and it only works on
Christmas, Right. But if there's no stuff like
that, you can repeat that again.And that's why, like, you
shouldn't really think about your first wait listers as real
users. Like, I hope it doesn't sound
lame, but you're kind of using those.
(35:51):
Yeah. They're validated.
Validate. Yeah, exactly.
And they don't put that much effort into helping you to
validate, too, Right. And once you validate it, you
can, you know, come back in a year and maybe all of these
hundred people are not interested anymore because they
were founders and now they went back for full time jobs, for
example. But it doesn't matter.
You just do the same thing again.
(36:12):
And then you have hot yeah weight lifters and then you go
on with them. That's why like I, I would
rather be worried about me doingthings on the right time.
But then like, for example, likeyou said about SAR, like if you
don't do it early, then after a year you think you should have
(36:33):
done a year ago. And so it's compounding and you
should do it as early as possible.
But for some things, you can do it at any time and then redo it
and it's all fine. Yeah.
So here's how it work. So basically I give it my URL so
it does the analysis and then itlearns the audience, the
keywords and here it found all the keywords that will drive
(36:56):
traffic and they have low competition and it made a plan
for the next articles. So now if I click proceed and I
pay it will just start working and every day it will pass on
article and I come back in two months.
Is this web-based or is it an app?
Yeah, yeah, it's web. It just looks like it's web.
(37:18):
Yeah. I think SEO was probably my
cheat code in the beginning. Like now a lot of people use it.
But in the past, only rich startups used it.
And that was the only poor founder who is doing SEO because
I had the tool that I built myself.
But I think it's like for peoplewho want to test a lot of ideas
(37:39):
like 3456, this is one of the best way to test it.
You just invest a little time into SEO for all those ideas and
you'll leave them hanging for a few months and you come back and
you see and you'll clearly see the difference.
Maybe you won't have each traffic, but you will see that
some URLs get 0 traffic. It means that there's no way you
(38:00):
can compete. Like with some keywords now,
they're like rich people paying a lot of money and you can never
win that. And with other keywords,
surprisingly, you win easily andyou get a lot of traffic and you
can grow on that. And it's sometimes easier to
just test whether by building the articles than actually doing
(38:21):
this, you know, long keyword research stuff.
And because the keyword research, as I told earlier, you
never know who is clicking that,which is also dangerous.
Like you might see some numbers,but maybe those are wrong
people. But if you drive traffic into
your blog, you can have little banners within your articles
with the wait list. So that's kind of another way to
(38:45):
test your wait list. You just put the banner and it
says, by the way, if you want totry this website builder for
artists, leave your e-mail and we will not notify you.
And that's another way because you will see someday data out of
it. Now with this is does it
integrate with like web flow andother web builders so you can
(39:06):
publish these articles without having to touch it?
Yeah, yeah. It just syncs with framing, Web
Flow, WordPress, everything so you basically never have to come
back if you don't want it. It will try to nag you and bring
you back to to help. But if you ignore it, it will
just like like an employee who will ask you questions and if
(39:27):
you don't answer it, they will just go and and do as they think
they should. Do it right.
Oh man. That is so cool.
OK, so we've talked about validating.
Well, we've talked about ideating.
Validating. What about growing?
Yeah. So the growth part in my world
comes from a social media. Social media is the best way to
(39:49):
grow for small products right now.
The best part about social mediais that it's not just the people
you bring directly from social media, but also.
The people who learn about you through social media and start
talking about you start including you into their blog
posts, their newsletters, their directories.
(40:10):
So basically if you become popular on social media, you get
so much attention from everywhere and all the other
people become your marketers forfree, like influencers start
talking about your tool and you don't have to pay them.
So I think like whenever you start working growth, you should
try social media and see whetheryou have talent for it.
(40:30):
If you have talent, maybe that'sthe only thing you should do
because the app side of social media is bigger than everything
else. I think you will get SEO traffic
by doing social media because your product will become
popular. People will put it on their
lists and directories and you'llget backlinks and that's why
you'll get the traffic back. So kind of universal.
(40:53):
And the other thing is SEO as I just talked.
So you should make sure that youhave enough backlinks.
You should grow your domain rating by having backlinks and
you should generate articles or write them yourself or use any
of the tools available for that.And a lot of people think that
that's complicated. They should outsource that to
(41:14):
agencies and stuff like that. I think if you have money, you
should because that will they will do a good job, but it
doesn't take that much time. I think spending one hour a day
in one month you can have decentoutput from your SEO efforts.
Yeah. And then #3 is partners,
affiliate partners. So you should sign up for
(41:36):
something like TALT or First Promoter where you're able to
create this portal so that your partners could sign up there,
get unique links and the code and they could promote your
product and earn money. And you should be really, really
generous on the Commission. Like a lot of people have this
like 10% or 15%. You should be crazy generous,
(41:58):
like go 50%. Like if you don't have costs on
your product, go for 50%. If you have underlying costs,
maybe go for 25 third. And then you'll see people
actually, you know, promoting your your product.
I have a lot of people promotingit and it's one of the best
investments I made. So that's the number 3.
The partners who promote your product for for the Commission
(42:22):
#4 is we should place your product in front of the people
wherever you want, wherever you can.
It has to be everywhere, on directories, launchpads, forums,
reddits and social media. You should find all possible
conversations on Quorum and other places where people talk
about it and place it there. So that's really important.
(42:45):
Two reasons. So number one reason, people may
just stumble upon your product there and become your customer.
But #2 which is even more important.
LLMS crawl those websites and they crawl those comments and
those articles and those listicles.
And then they may actually add that into their training data.
(43:07):
And then they will reply with your product when people ask.
And that's really big. Like I have some of my products
that suddenly just blew up because they were in the
training set for the latest LLMS.
And now I have like almost all traffic coming from ChatGPT and,
and all the others because I think they all use the same
training set. Like it was surprisingly, you
(43:27):
know, simultaneously when I got the traffic from ChatGPT and
Claude and Grog on the same week.
So I think they're buying the training that data from
somebody. Interesting.
From the same person, from the same company, Yeah.
So. And then #5 you can build little
tools that are free to drive traffic to those tools.
(43:49):
And then you channel the same people into your paid tool.
Like if you're running website builder for artists, maybe you
should build a little tool whichis like a cover generator for
your album. That's kind of probably good
keyword, right? Because they.
Just a leave magnet. Yeah, exactly.
(44:10):
And they would go there, they would generate their album, they
would enter their e-mail to receive the PNG in a good
quality. And in the e-mail in the bottom
you would say, by the way, here's also my other product.
Check it out if you want. And the chance that people will
click is really high because they were satisfied with your
first product. Because that's the difference.
(44:32):
Like when you're cold presenting, when people see your
banner for a first time, they don't trust you because they see
things all the time. But now they trust you because
they like your product. So kind of these 5 are my my
favorite ways to grow at the start.
And then you can add a lot more.But I think these five bring
(44:52):
like 80% of the growth. What do you think about
directories in the age of AI? Is it still a great opportunity
there? Yeah, yeah, I think so.
Because like directories that are made by people who have
influence will be really big. It's just like if you go to
Instagram and an influencer has a list of anything, car
(45:15):
influencer has a list of car shops or tires or things like
that, you're gonna trust that and you will be willing to
follow those links and buy that and share to your friends,
right? And I think the same going to
happen with AI. Like AI is now in a place where
it has so much information, it doesn't know how to pick the
(45:36):
right one. Like Google in the old world
tried to use the number of incoming links as a way to run
the websites, right? But it's so easy to game that.
And now AI systems don't know how to rank the websites.
They're just using the same system Google is using and
(45:56):
that's easy to game. And over time I think AI will
like we'll already see that theystart using Reddit now.
And when they use Reddit they also take the articles with
certain amount of app boots, right?
So they want to filter out trash.
And I think the directories are going to help humans to filter
(46:20):
out trash. And like in every category,
there will be so many items thathow do you choose the right one?
And directories can help with that.
And special directories made by people who have social media
influence. I think that's kind of mix here.
And so there's an opportunity topartner with people that have
(46:42):
influence, right? Because most people listening or
watching are not influencers, right?
That we can all slide into theirDMS and, and plant that idea in
them because they're certainly not thinking along these lines.
Like, hey, you like plant, like they say, invent the disease and
sell the cure, right? Hey, I see that you have this
list of all these things. Like, do you realize that
directories are going to become more relevant than ever in the
(47:03):
age of AI? Just so happens I can help you
with that. Let's talk about splitting up
this business somehow. Yeah, I mean, that's exactly my
model, but I do it the other wayaround.
Partnering app with people who own attention to build a product
around that attention is great. And you can do not only
(47:23):
directories, but you can also dolittle products, little tools.
Little tools are easy to build in the age of vibe coding.
You can build them in one evening.
So now how do we compete? We can all build that same
little cover generator for an artist.
But if that power generator is built by $0.50 or M&M or there
(47:48):
is some connection there, that'sdifferent thing.
It stands out from all the others, right?
And if we make a wild gas, that AI will make it easy to do
everything. If that's the gas or most of the
things, then they'll be difficult to compete because
everything is the same as good as the other things, right?
(48:09):
And now you can compete through reputation and the reputation
can be either built by yourself,which is also not a bad idea
because like we're not influencers, all right?
When you say influencer, you think about somebody huge with
millions of followers. But if you pick something really
small, like like something we'reonly, you know, 10,000 people
(48:30):
are interested in this in the whole world, probably there's
nobody talking about that. And if you just start talking
about that, that will be enough to go viral within that little
group, right? That's one way.
But the other way is, of course,to find the influencer.
I think both are possible. I wouldn't say that if you're
not influencer, you shouldn't even try.
I think you should just redefinewhat's influencer and it can be
(48:52):
something very small. That's so good, John.
Thank you. This was awesome.
Where can people find you and your products and whatever you
make? I'm on Twitter and LinkedIn and
sub stack. I love to be helpful with my
products. I love to be helpful with my
content that I share on X. It's John Rush XI love to be
(49:15):
helpful with advice. So I think I'm probably the only
person with so many followers who on support every single TM I
ever received and every single reply if there was a question,
of course, because there's a lotof spam.
And I think I will stop doing that by the end of this year
because it's overwhelming. But I will still do that for the
(49:36):
next three months. So if you will need help, I'm
open. My DMS are open.
OK, thank you. Thank you.
Hey guys, if you're still listening to this, it's probably
because you haven't had a chanceto take your Airpods out, You're
still mowing the lawn, you're still driving, what have you.
If you're still here with me, I would really, really love and
appreciate a five star review onSpotify, Apple, or wherever you
(49:57):
get your podcast. It would mean a lot.
If you want to go the extra mile, share this episode with a
friend that might have an interest in starting a business.
It would mean a ton. Hope you have the best day of
your life today.