Business Tips

I just sold my startup Talknotes for $200,000 on @acquiredotcom 💸🤯🤩💰🥳🎉 I launched it last August when I was looking for an idea I could grow with paid ads, and made a MVP in one week. I took it from $0 to $7500 MRR in just 11 months. 👉 Here is how I grew it from zero: 💡 Idea: I got the idea when I tried to write a tweet using Google Doc's transcription tool, but it was terrible. And I was pretty sure I wasn't the one too lazy to type. So I made my own solution, and Talknotes was created. The audience is pretty broad so it was a perfect fit for Meta ads However… ✅ Validation: My rule is to only reinvest what the project generates, so, no ads until I make enough cashflow ❌ Listing on startup directories + a few Twitter sales generated $700 after 10 days. Yes, it's not much, but more than enough to show there is interest in the product and tell me to keep working on it 🤩 teapawt.org/nico_jeannen/status/16… I started adding the features users requested, but the launch effect started to wear off and daily revenues quickly went to $0 after a few weeks 🫥 I got depressed and almost gave up on the app... 😔 But luckily, my friends @marclou and @DanKulkov pushed me to continue And I'm glad they did because In October, I launched on @ProductHunt and it blew up 🤯 It got Product of the Day and reached $1500 MRR thanks to the media coverage 🚀🚀 Until then, everything was done using vanilla JS/CSS/HTML + Node for back end. It's simple and easy, but I saw the limitations, so I remade the app using @nuxt_js to make it easier in the future 🏗️ (thanks to @blackevilgoblin and @piotr_jura for the content/courses! @Timb03 as well for the basics!) After that, I took a break and then launched ads on Facebook. The strategy is simple: Catch people's attention, and show them how the app can help them improve their life. No need to over-complicate 🙅‍♂️ Making good creatives is 80% of the job when doing ads on Facebook, most of the technical stuff is done by AI now. Thanks to the boost in traffic, I implemented a feedback loop: 1) Get new users 👥 2) Learn to know them with the onboarding form 💬 3) Make more ads based on the data you get from onboarding 📝 And it completely blew up. MRR doubled in ~2 months However... In May, I had a bad burnout 🥵😩 Multiple bugs slipped into the app, and I had to spend 2 days fixing everything in an emergency while revenues plummeted. This completely fucked me up mentally and had a hard time working on the app after that (teapawt.org/nico_jeannen/status/17…) 💀💀 So I decided to list it on @acquiredotcom and made a Twitter post (teapawt.org/nico_jeannen/status/17…) I listed it for $200,000, a pretty low price considering the revenues and fast growth. I could have gotten $300,000 if I accepted payment over time, but $200,000 today is better than $300,000 tomorrow for me. 🚨 The process went smoothly until we tried to use Escrow, which almost fucked up the whole deal. (details: teapawt.org/nico_jeannen/status/18…) I got extremely lucky because the buyer really wanted to buy the app, but this could have ended the deal. We had to wait over a week to get the money back from them, even tho they said they already refunded it. But luckily, after threatening them, they sent it back the next day 🙃 The buyer finally got the money back, I transferred every asset to him, and he sent me the wire. With the profit made from the app + the sale, and other projects, I'm 30% away from being a millionaire 🤯 With this amount, I can pretty much retire in Asia if I want to. But that's just the beginning, I’m going to launch new projects soon! 🚀 But before that, I need to take a real vacation and detox. My brain is completely fucked up by those last 2 months. I gained weight, and got brain rot from scrolling all day waiting for the acquisition to move forward 💀💀 Surprisingly, doing absolutely nothing is 10x more exhausting than working 15h per day 🥱 Now, all this might sound like an overnight success. It is not ‼️ This is the result of 7 years of failure and working like a madman. I launched over 40 projects in those 7 years, and most of them failed. But a few took off, and that’s all I needed All those weeks working 15h/day without weekends and vacation feels soul-sucking when you don’t see the end, but this is what took me there You only need to win once to snowball everything. Work hard, focus, fail a lot and keep shipping fast. 🚀🚀 Thanks to you for reading until here, and thanks to everyone who supported me 🤞