7 Steps I Kept Repeating Until I Hit $2M ARR

I started in 2004, made an exit, fundraised many times, 2 top accelerators, and failed a lot.

Pivoted to run profitable HoldCo with $2M ARR & 20 products.

7 steps I repeat in every product: Setup>Idea>Build>Grow>Monetize>Hire>Scale.

1. Setup

Get an easy main job that covers your bills. No need for heroism. I had a side-paid job for the first 5 years, and it helped me stay in the game. There is a 99% chance your first try will fail, as well as the second and third. Having a day job helps to get up and try again. Those YouTube stories of 18-year-old dudes getting rich overnight are total bullsh*t. It takes many years. Be prepared, both mentally and financially.

2.1. Idea. Training Camp.

It's very difficult to come up with good ideas at the beginning. My first idea was a game for coders where they code their bot and send it to fight. The second idea was a virtual reality room for team meetings. Both ideas failed miserably because I had no idea what I was doing. Which means you should not expect yourself to come up with good ideas. Your first 10 ideas will be crap.

That's okay. If you ever played sports, your first 10 tries are awkward; you play it as if you're a toddler making first steps. Why would you expect it to be different in business? So, your first 5-10 ideas are for you to practice and learn the startup craft.

2.2. Idea. Real World.

Eventually, your ideas will get better and better. Today, to come up with an idea I do this:

• Look carefully at my own routine. Is there anything I can do to get 10x more productive on a specific task? Not just 2x, but 10x, because remember: all vitamins fail; you must build a painkiller. A remarkably useful product. For example, I noticed that every time I launch a new product, it has zero domain rating, which means I'll get no SEO traffic even if I made many good blog articles.

  
  

  So, I build listingBott to solve this. Before listingbott, I'd spend days browsing the internet for directories and websites to list my new URL on. Literally days. Now, it takes me 1 minute. I launched it in Jan, and it scored over $20k in revenue since all the other busy founders loved this too. I have 30 more products I wanna build to take every routine task from hours/days to minutes. You can do the same.

  
  

  Watch your own work. See what takes time and can be improved if you've built a tool for it. Build it for yourself, iterate, and once you're happy - share it with others.

• See what people complain or ask about on social media. I literally checked my feed now and saw these requests: "I only check domain ratings and backlinks on Ahrefs, but I pay for the full product, are there any alternatives that are simpler and cheaper..". This post had comments from people supporting the idea. Save the post, build the tool, and once you build it, send it to the post author and all commentators.

• Clone existing tools for a new audience. For example, one of my products is Unicorn Platform (website builder). I target indie makers mostly. But I also have clients from other niches, for example, Churches. If you make a "Website builder for churches" it may be more appealing to them than my generic website builder. This can be applied to literally every product out there. Find a product, and make a clone for a very narrow niche. When I say "clone" it doesn't mean you need to redo the whole thing. Most likely the audience cares only about 10% of the generic product. Which is great because you can build this really quickly.

3. Build. I Build Everything With NoCode First.

I know how to code; I did it for 20 years. But I still go with NoCode first. It's just faster. Most coders think that coding is faster, but this is simply an overestimation. No coder on earth can correctly estimate the time it will take to build a product. You will guess "It'll take me 7 days."

But in reality, some things will go wrong, and the last 10% will take forever and here you are, 2 months later still fighting with bugs. Devs who built successful startups know this, but devs who have never done it are going to say I'm wrong. Okay. Try boilerplates if NoCode isn't helpful because your product is very custom.

Again, most devs think it's below their pride to use boilerplates, but the world has changed and the quality of boilerplates these days is insanely good; I made a list on nextjsstarter.com. If none of the options fit, you can hire a freelancer. But here is a thing: never go for hourly pay. You'll 100% end up paying a lot more than the estimate.

Because in all of human history, there wasn't a case yet where the estimate and reality matched. It always takes way more time to build software than it was estimated. Find them on Upwork, X, or mvpwizards.com

4. Grow. If You Have No Skills, Go for Paid Growth.

• sponsor newsletters from relevant influencers
• sponsor directories
• sponsor social media influencer posts

Social Media.

This method is great if you have a generic talent for social media attention. From what I've seen, people who didn't do well with their personal accounts, can't do well with business promotion on social media either. My advice: if you run your install/TikTok for years but it has only your friends and family and few likes, it means this isn't for you; don't waste your time doing it for business.

Blogging.

The long-form content is about storytelling. If you're good at it, go for it. How to know if you're good at it? Just see your personal life again. When you meet your friends, are you the one telling the stories, or you're the one listening to stories? Can you make people laugh easily? If yes, then this is yours; invest heavily into this for your business topics. Find relevant platforms, Reddit, blogs, long-form on social media, etc.

SEO.

This is a less creative job. For SEO content, you just need to create useful content. Useful content isn't the same as creative content. It has no job of entertaining and capturing attention. The key goal of SEO content is to be helpful to the person searching for an answer on Google.

Identify common questions your audience asks and create content that answers these questions. Or use tools like SEObot to get help with this job.

Cold Outreach.

This isn't my favorite method, but I know that it works. You can collect emails doing promotions and outreach. The conversion is low, so make sure you've got enough emails. You can run social media promos or ads to collect emails.

Lead Magnets and Side Projects.

This is the most fun way of working on growth. You build little tools, for example, we have uigenerator[.]org, which is a super simple tool; it's free, and it gets really good organic traffic every day. It drives lots of clicks to the Unicorn Platform. All directories I launched also serve as a side project to drive traffic to the Unicorn Platform.

I'm kinda lucky those directories ended up going viral and making their own revenues, but my initial goal was to drive traffic to Unicorn and it worked.

Directories.

I do this all the time. If I have a website builder, I build a directory of website builders where I pin mine to the top. The directories get organic traffic and a large chunk of it is channeled to my website builder. This can be done for literally any project. It won't always work out. You need to get organic traffic for your directory in the first place. But it turns out it's not that difficult.

5. Monetize.

For my first idea, I didn't charge users at the start. Since those ideas were really bad, charging users from the start would mean having zero users at all. Today, I always do this: I sell LifeTime deals first. It helps me validate the demand. Also, those who bought LTDs aren't so pushy compared to those who pay monthly.

So, the LTD users are very helpful and nice. I start selling monthly plans only when I see the product is stable and solid. For tools where I can get free users but can't get paid users, I go for affiliate links, sponsors, and ads.

If there is good traffic, you can make a very good income just by doing these 3 and keeping your product completely free for end users.

6. Hire.

Once I see a product taking off, I hire people in. I hire a support agent for about $300-$700. The support agent also helps out with testing and all other manual tasks. The next hire is a developer. I usually hire junior developers. They are cheap and I can mentor them to love my product and have the same dev culture as me. Experience devs have always been a disaster for me.

I won't dig into details, but I've failed this at least 20 times. Now, I only hire juniors and it's just great. Obviously, I hire talented juniors, those who have little coding skills, but high IQ, are optimistic, understand design, and can be self-driven. In East Europe, you can hire junior devs for $2000. My final setup is that the support agent is doing everything repetitively.

The coder is doing the coding, and I do all the marketing and product-guy jobs. I never managed to hire good marketers. I think good marketers run their own businesses. So, I'd not recommend hiring them; I'd recommend doing this yourself.

7. Scale.

Most companies brag about their headcount. I just talked to a friend. He was bragging about having 250 people on the team. Yesterday, he called me to ask for advice. They lost many clients, and their margins are negative. I said: Bro, you should have 25 people instead of 250. Don't scale humans; scale the productivity. In my projects, I have very few people.

I don't think there is a more productive organization on earth than the one I'm running now. We have over 100,000 users on b2b and millions of users on b2b2c. I always try to actually remove humans from the loop by automating their tasks using software and AI. I'd recommend the same. Keep the team as small as possible.

If you're below $20k MRR, have 3 persons max. When 50k MRR, go up to 5 persons. When 100k, then 8 people. Scale the output, not the headcount. The headcount scaling is a VC-funded startup fetish. As a bootstrapped founder, focus on margins, unit economy, and profits at all times.

For example, Unicorn Platform is growing at an exponential rate, with more than 10k new users every month, and the team is: Me + JuniorDev + 2 part-time Support agents.

The End

Follow me on X for daily posts

Also published here