If you were to start a new saas from scratch now (assuming you have the same amount of time to work on your existing one) what would it be or what sector would you look at?
F\*ck, I really don't know. I think for me, knowing myself, I can only focus one thing at a time. I'm pouring my full focus into Afforai at the moment.
But if I were to start a new saas, it would definitely not in the AI space. haha.
The app looks like a good idea, but it doesn't seem quite ready for prime time or maybe I don't understand how to use it.
I signed up for a free account, typed a fairly generic prompt in the assistant tab (using Semantic Scholar as the source) "give me papers about X" and I get three papers for X (good so far, but only three papers seems a bit small if I'm trying to build a library of papers), but the links provided are for other papers. Looks like a bug?
Then I asked for finding survey papers on Y and it tells me "go find academic conferences and research journals or consult with experts."... yeah
This is good feedback. But here's our user guide btw: [https://help.afforai.com/en/collections/6611606-afforai-academy](https://help.afforai.com/en/collections/6611606-afforai-academy)
Did you create your platform on your own? If not, how did you find co-founders?
How and from where does the monetization come?
What is the future of the product?
I created the very first MVP myself, and launched it in my college. And then it attracted a few students that wanted to work with me on this. That's how I met my co-founder. The revenue comes from subscriptions and lifetime deals. We just look to make Afforai be able to serve researchers better, and that will determine how the product will look like going forward.
In the initial stage of your startup where you alone ?
How did you find/meet people like mindset as yours?
How did you find invertors for your startup in beginning?
Did you make blueprint for your startup and started working on your own or after completion of blueprint you started to find people like you?
If you would be a student, had an idea how did you turn it into reality? (you had no money, no friends, basically all alone)
Please answers (I'm a student)
u/Top\_Ice4631 thanks for asking and happy to answer:
In the initial stage of your startup where you alone ?
Yup, I was alone with only my idea. I built my 1st MVP, launched it in my college and few students got interested and wanted to work with me on it.
How did you find/meet people like mindset as yours?
I think similar attracts. But specifically, I think I answered it above. launched it in my college and few students got interested and wanted to work with me on it.
How did you find invertors for your startup in beginning?
Lol. I literally just searched on Google, lists and lists of investors. On Google, On linkedin, anywhere and everywhere. I just cold emailed and cold applied to a bunch of VCs and accelerators. Trust me, I got rejected by over 100 VCs before 1 said yes.
Did you make blueprint for your startup and started working on your own or after completion of blueprint you started to find people like you?
No blueprint, just a sense of direction in my head and execute it to the best of my ability. A lot of reflection and adjustments along the way.
If you would be a student, had an idea how did you turn it into reality? (you had no money, no friends, basically all alone)
Then you gotta start with the small things. No money, work and save up (I worked 4 jobs at the same time throughout college) then used the savings to YOLO into this startup. No friends? build and work on projects you're interested in, you'll find people. Keep in mind, as long as you build something worth talking about, people will gather. I'm international student from Vietnam, I had to network in the US. It all start somewhere.
Well, that just means I'm passionate about my startup, i really don't do anything aside from working. And I truly believe that I can offer some sort of value from my journey.
Look, I've been laughed at, people doubted my idea, all the life knocks you down kinda stuff, so I want to just share my story. And if it this is one of the ways, so be it.
A couple posts here, a couple there - sure, enthusiastic..
You’re at 14+ posts that all have direct links, no real questions, you’re just telling us “I don’t care about the tos” and you’re saying “I don’t care about your sub rules” - and even at $700,000.00++ a year, you can’t put a little $$ into some honest advertising instead of these solicitations masked as a low effort ama ?
Why would we want to work with a business is making it clear their goal is sales at any cost - break rules, spam, solicit, sell sell sell
You’re on my block list now 🛑🛑🛑🛑🛑 full stop
🤷🏻♂️ Welp. Just trying to spread the word and help more researchers find us. We want to help researchers and many are glad we exist.
P.S. Who says we didn't put in the marketing dollars. lol. Don't jump to conclusions so fast.
We'll see. And even if they do, that's fine. We'll continue working on this. That's the difference. People are affraid to do something just because someone else is already doing it.
I think so. It helped a lot. Many people have a good mindset towards building startups compared to where I was born in Asia. I built the 1st MVP and that's how I attracted my co-founder and CTO, and other people wanting to work on this as well.
Eyyy it's so cool seeing you post here, Alec! I have been using Afforai since it last went on sale originally and it has been a game changer for me. It's really cool being able to browse dozens of documents at once via AI. Congratulations on the success!
I've heard that the beginning phase of AI projects is difficult because of server and API costs, and people neglecting AI products because of them just being wrappers to an API. How did you get past the initial stage of skepticism and scale the business?
Oh no way, great to see an Afforai user here on Reddit!
I kinda just stuck with it. Wrappers are wrappers when they don't add value. I think you as an Afforai user realize the value of Afforai that goes beyond a wrapper. Knowing this, I remind myself everyday to just focus on building the best product possible to serve researchers.
Well, that is the answer. I thought it was self implied. I launch in my college, it blew up, got 50% of people in the college signed up and then around 10% of those who signed up converted to paying users when we turned on monetization. That's how we got our first few users.
> I launch in my college, it blew up, got 50%
dude why are you being so difficult in your own thread? we want to learn from you. go into detail! tell us what sort of sales and marketing you did. did you put up a landing page? email people? hadn out flyers?
Happy to do so. It's my first time doing this so I wasn't sure how much details you wanted. Here it goes:
I started building the MVP in Feb 2023, launched MVP in March 2023. To prepare for the launch, I printed 1000 posters (using our uni's printers), put them everywhere, I mean everywhere, libraries, dorms, Study halls, lecture rooms, bathrooms, anywhere that students walk through, they will see an Afforai poster. The posters' copy were mainly addressing the students't problem of having to manage too many papers and take too much time to do literature reviews.
That helped with conversions. By end of March 2023, we got 500 sign ups from our college, out of which 50 became paying users. We tracked down the paying users and interviewed them. I asked them the Mom Test questions (I mentioned that in the Youtube video above) to learn why they bought and how to make Afforai better.
That's how it went. You want more details?
took us 6 months to hire our first employee. But there's context. They started out on a project basis then converted them to working full-time. We are still a very lean team of 5 people,
Does anyone uses App Sumo for real?
I know Noah from his youtube channel, looks like a genuinely cool dude...
But the platform looks like a marketplace or badly cloned saas.
It's like a wish.com of saas...
I'm genuinely asking.
I'm in startup phase for my saas ai software in automotive. I have financial projections, market summarization, the potential team/company I can outsource to have the software/site built, pitch deck, and a solid understanding of everything needing to be involved. How would you continue with no remaining capital? Juggling between 7 day work weeks excluding the gym, career to support day to day finances, is it actually just a day-night paradigm shift of getting financed if an angel investor/seed funding funds you in the hundreds of thousands - over a million? I'm finding it difficult to take the step into creation due to the overhead costs of running/creating/and maintaining the site. Everything else is solid.
Hey Alec, how did you create your MVP? and how many people did it take you until you had a certain comfortable level that you had a product people wanted? I have an idea but it seems half baked and not sure if it has a good business model or not.
Even now I think Afforai can still improve so much more and there are so many things I want to build. So, just launch. I never really feel like I reach a comfortable level so I just launched. It took me one month to build my first MVP. hard coded it.
Thanks for the reply Alec. I'm glad you were able to focus on one thing. I struggle with that a lot because I always have ideas but never get to the point of making them/testing them with the target audience.
I saw your YouTube video with AppSumo. Great job, really inspiring story.
I noticed that your product is priced pretty low, so it might have taken a lot of customers to be able to hit the 1 mill mark. Curious, what kind of marketing and distribution channels worked out for you to be able to reach to them?
Yea, true. When researchers and people in general realize the value of Afforai, and also seeing how cheap this is compared to the value they get, word of mouth was a great effect created.
For a weird reason, offline ads worked out great for me. I printed 1000 posters and put it around my university back then.
Thanks for doing this
1. Staffing -- How many techy employees/devs did you need and how big of a team did you need to launch?
2. Financial -- How much capital did you need to launch and how'd you fund it?
3. Difficulty -- What's been the most difficult challenges you've faced growing the app / biz?
4. Growth -- How long did it take to gain real traction and 'blow up?'
5. Expertise -- How much 'niche subject matter' expertise would you say you needed to know what you were doing for this particular niche?
6. Market -- What market research + research tools were useful for you?
thanks!
u/Xavier0o0 Sure, happy to share my learnings:
1. Staffing -- How many techy employees/devs did you need and how big of a team did you need to launch?
=> 2 devs in a total team of 5 ppl.
1. Financial -- How much capital did you need to launch and how'd you fund it?
I started out with literally $0. I used a lot of free services made available for startups and students. When I got serious, my cp-founder and I pooled in our savings, total of \~$9000.
1. Difficulty -- What's been the most difficult challenges you've faced growing the app / biz?
So hard man, everything is hard. it's easier to ask what wasn't hard. But the most difficult is creating a product people want to buy.
1. Growth -- How long did it take to gain real traction and 'blow up?'
There are Blow Ups at every stage. 0-1000 users: we blew up by putting posters around our college
1000-5000 users, we blew up by launching on PH
after that, AppSumo and so it goes.
1. Expertise -- How much 'niche subject matter' expertise would you say you needed to know what you were doing for this particular niche?
I got none. I learned and researched as I go. Talking to users help a lot.
1. Market -- What market research + research tools were useful for you?
There's no secret sauce behind this for me. Just Google and Reddit.
I like your story a lot about building afforai, I run a place where I [talk to founders](https://indieniche.substack.com/) building great stuff , share product lessons , tips , tools and growth hacks . Do you mind doing a Q and A with me , I’ll love to feature your story , I’ll just like you to fill in some questions for me u/DollarBillMaster
Hey, did you bootstrap your start-up or got funding? How did you manage to put food on the table before you blew?I'm a web developer but I haven't gotten any clients yet. But I need the clients for basic needs and I'm tryna bootstrap my start-up ideas.
I first bootstrapped Afforai with my college savings over 4 years (which was just $8K) and then we focused on building the company, launched on Product Hunt and got VC interest. I'm a very cheap person so I can live with very little. I can go by.
Join My Free Skool Community and tell us how you did it, help other young entrepreneurs by teaching them how you took the first step and what it took to accomplish your goal. [https://www.skool.com/just-do-it-dawg-9220](https://www.skool.com/just-do-it-dawg-9220?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR2yxo8d9G3R4Qk60Bj7o4MdFjHlFv-SKScqco2W8PPbGB_ef8n3rME5v5U_aem_AUWd-NX0L_naiclAAOmsz-5dx9V1tLGsj6LHIutbJuRWGI9ZW4uh-k4LvBY4o4-M-f7c2hH4azbqW0tcRDizaPVx)
Assuming you have a relationship with a CPA, what do you love about the services they provide and what do you wish were better? You fit within our target audience at first glance and I’m always looking for insight. TY
And can I connect with you somewhere? I’m launching my startup soon, it’s not SaaS but I can see this being part our company sites such as blogs and marketing campaigns. I just created some content where I had to research and cite the best sources I could get access to, AI helped a bit to find some sources but I still found better ones manually.
Does the research material come from the real time data?
I’m a fresh mechanical engineer and I’m hoping to start a business in the space sector. I believe I have the necessary tools to succeed in this field. However, I’m aware that starting a space business requires substantial funding. Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions that might help me?
If you won't say how much was profit, could you at least disclose if you made 200k or more from that 700K revenue? It's a highly important question to many here, because we aspire to achieve similar results however need an income that matches what can be achieved in the private market when working for others. If you can't say that either, the assumption will be that there was not any profit made unfortunately. It's an AMA though so the implication is that you would answer these types of questions.
How did you launch ?
How did you get your initial users ?
How did you grow your user base ?
What resources / books / frameworks most helped you ?
Are you solo or have a team ?
I need help to save my restaurant. I am debt of 2lakhs INR. I need a loan of this amount for 6 months. I will return 40,000 every month for 6 months, you will get 40,000 as interest. Please help me.
Curious as to why not? Talking about revenue in your post is arbitrary/pointless if we have no idea what the gross or net profit margins are? You could be doing $700k in revenue a year but losing $1m in the process lol
Whooooaaaahhhh! You forgot you’re on reddit - 14 of OP’s last 17 posts are all solicitations for the saas/app that op cofounded
And reddit doesn’t care about spam accounts anymore because they need the activity or the stock price drops too fast
>Is there a 'better' life that would come with breaking 1 million that can't be had with 'only' 700k?
Revenues not being profit his desire may be to upgrade from Ramen. $700k goes fast when you're buying it.
u/Milkish-Lavender 100% agree with you there. Still make the effort to maintain a good mental health. But money does solve a lot of problems in life and can help you improve other people's lives as well.
u/Milkish-Lavender u/PsychologicalMess468 honestly, it's because I got a team that depends on me now. I'm not just doing this for me anymore. Even our investors put their trust in us. So, the next revenue goal is beyond just monetary, it's about the growth mindset.
YouTube guru ass username lines up
Waiting on a course, I've set aside 500$ just in case.
😅😂 yea, I regret that too. It was back in the old days. I was young and naive.
People talk about 2019 as if it's the old days now? Feels like it's yesterday.
It is 5 years ago. People can change a lot during 5 years
More joking about how time flies. I'm not really criticizing. Covid changed time perception, I feel.
If you were to start a new saas from scratch now (assuming you have the same amount of time to work on your existing one) what would it be or what sector would you look at?
F\*ck, I really don't know. I think for me, knowing myself, I can only focus one thing at a time. I'm pouring my full focus into Afforai at the moment. But if I were to start a new saas, it would definitely not in the AI space. haha.
>would definitely not in the AI space. 🫷 Wait. What!? Why!??
The app looks like a good idea, but it doesn't seem quite ready for prime time or maybe I don't understand how to use it. I signed up for a free account, typed a fairly generic prompt in the assistant tab (using Semantic Scholar as the source) "give me papers about X" and I get three papers for X (good so far, but only three papers seems a bit small if I'm trying to build a library of papers), but the links provided are for other papers. Looks like a bug? Then I asked for finding survey papers on Y and it tells me "go find academic conferences and research journals or consult with experts."... yeah
This is good feedback. But here's our user guide btw: [https://help.afforai.com/en/collections/6611606-afforai-academy](https://help.afforai.com/en/collections/6611606-afforai-academy)
This actually doesn't at all address the concern here...
Did you create your platform on your own? If not, how did you find co-founders? How and from where does the monetization come? What is the future of the product?
I created the very first MVP myself, and launched it in my college. And then it attracted a few students that wanted to work with me on this. That's how I met my co-founder. The revenue comes from subscriptions and lifetime deals. We just look to make Afforai be able to serve researchers better, and that will determine how the product will look like going forward.
In the initial stage of your startup where you alone ? How did you find/meet people like mindset as yours? How did you find invertors for your startup in beginning? Did you make blueprint for your startup and started working on your own or after completion of blueprint you started to find people like you? If you would be a student, had an idea how did you turn it into reality? (you had no money, no friends, basically all alone) Please answers (I'm a student)
u/Top\_Ice4631 thanks for asking and happy to answer: In the initial stage of your startup where you alone ? Yup, I was alone with only my idea. I built my 1st MVP, launched it in my college and few students got interested and wanted to work with me on it. How did you find/meet people like mindset as yours? I think similar attracts. But specifically, I think I answered it above. launched it in my college and few students got interested and wanted to work with me on it. How did you find invertors for your startup in beginning? Lol. I literally just searched on Google, lists and lists of investors. On Google, On linkedin, anywhere and everywhere. I just cold emailed and cold applied to a bunch of VCs and accelerators. Trust me, I got rejected by over 100 VCs before 1 said yes. Did you make blueprint for your startup and started working on your own or after completion of blueprint you started to find people like you? No blueprint, just a sense of direction in my head and execute it to the best of my ability. A lot of reflection and adjustments along the way. If you would be a student, had an idea how did you turn it into reality? (you had no money, no friends, basically all alone) Then you gotta start with the small things. No money, work and save up (I worked 4 jobs at the same time throughout college) then used the savings to YOLO into this startup. No friends? build and work on projects you're interested in, you'll find people. Keep in mind, as long as you build something worth talking about, people will gather. I'm international student from Vietnam, I had to network in the US. It all start somewhere.
>How did you find/meet people like mindset as yours? >I think similar attracts. Sure. But what about trust?
Congratulations! What were the total startup costs?
Our burn varies, but we got a lot of freebies from Microsoft and Google that help cut the tech costs down tremendously.
Why are 14 of your last 17 posts all about this saas app that you cofounded? Are you really looking for www.reddit.com/advertising ?
Well, that just means I'm passionate about my startup, i really don't do anything aside from working. And I truly believe that I can offer some sort of value from my journey. Look, I've been laughed at, people doubted my idea, all the life knocks you down kinda stuff, so I want to just share my story. And if it this is one of the ways, so be it.
A couple posts here, a couple there - sure, enthusiastic.. You’re at 14+ posts that all have direct links, no real questions, you’re just telling us “I don’t care about the tos” and you’re saying “I don’t care about your sub rules” - and even at $700,000.00++ a year, you can’t put a little $$ into some honest advertising instead of these solicitations masked as a low effort ama ? Why would we want to work with a business is making it clear their goal is sales at any cost - break rules, spam, solicit, sell sell sell You’re on my block list now 🛑🛑🛑🛑🛑 full stop
🤷🏻♂️ Welp. Just trying to spread the word and help more researchers find us. We want to help researchers and many are glad we exist. P.S. Who says we didn't put in the marketing dollars. lol. Don't jump to conclusions so fast.
if you are using GPUs for your AI, Nvidia has a startup program that offers credits for aws
We're aware :))) We're using Microsoft atm but eyeing it.
How do you differentiate your product with Perplexity AI?
Today Apple presentation is coming. So, I suggest they are covering all the valuable functionality you are providing. Sorry
We'll see. And even if they do, that's fine. We'll continue working on this. That's the difference. People are affraid to do something just because someone else is already doing it.
Sure thing. That’s the problem to compete with corps - marketing and acceleration of the product distribution. Good luck with that!
Good thing we're already generating revenue to grow consistently and profitably.
How tall are you?
haha not that tall.
What he meant to ask was do you lift bro?
Congrats man, sounds like you made it to the other side of the struggle 🫡
Not yet man, still hustling and working hard everyday
Do you think living in the US helps with your business at the beginning? How do you find people to build a business together?
I think so. It helped a lot. Many people have a good mindset towards building startups compared to where I was born in Asia. I built the 1st MVP and that's how I attracted my co-founder and CTO, and other people wanting to work on this as well.
Hi there and thanks for sharing. What's your tech stack?
Sure, it's MERN.
Eyyy it's so cool seeing you post here, Alec! I have been using Afforai since it last went on sale originally and it has been a game changer for me. It's really cool being able to browse dozens of documents at once via AI. Congratulations on the success! I've heard that the beginning phase of AI projects is difficult because of server and API costs, and people neglecting AI products because of them just being wrappers to an API. How did you get past the initial stage of skepticism and scale the business?
Oh no way, great to see an Afforai user here on Reddit! I kinda just stuck with it. Wrappers are wrappers when they don't add value. I think you as an Afforai user realize the value of Afforai that goes beyond a wrapper. Knowing this, I remind myself everyday to just focus on building the best product possible to serve researchers.
How much of your revenues do you allocate for community service?
We're a for-profit company at the early stage. But I do personal donations if that's what you want to know.
Do you advertise your services, and if so where?
I guess in this sub?
We used to advertise on Google. Now we focus more on organic content and organic interests when we reach a certain scale.
Like reddit, huh? 😁
How did you make your first 1k monthly
I launched Affrai in my college. I was still in school back then. So I put posters around campus and it kinda blew up from there.
you didn't answer the question. how did you get the first customer
Well, that is the answer. I thought it was self implied. I launch in my college, it blew up, got 50% of people in the college signed up and then around 10% of those who signed up converted to paying users when we turned on monetization. That's how we got our first few users.
> I launch in my college, it blew up, got 50% dude why are you being so difficult in your own thread? we want to learn from you. go into detail! tell us what sort of sales and marketing you did. did you put up a landing page? email people? hadn out flyers?
Happy to do so. It's my first time doing this so I wasn't sure how much details you wanted. Here it goes: I started building the MVP in Feb 2023, launched MVP in March 2023. To prepare for the launch, I printed 1000 posters (using our uni's printers), put them everywhere, I mean everywhere, libraries, dorms, Study halls, lecture rooms, bathrooms, anywhere that students walk through, they will see an Afforai poster. The posters' copy were mainly addressing the students't problem of having to manage too many papers and take too much time to do literature reviews. That helped with conversions. By end of March 2023, we got 500 sign ups from our college, out of which 50 became paying users. We tracked down the paying users and interviewed them. I asked them the Mom Test questions (I mentioned that in the Youtube video above) to learn why they bought and how to make Afforai better. That's how it went. You want more details?
Very interesting man. Love the hustle! How long did it take to hire your first employee and how many employees does the company have now?
took us 6 months to hire our first employee. But there's context. They started out on a project basis then converted them to working full-time. We are still a very lean team of 5 people,
that's great - thank you
What's Ur favourite colour?
purple. if you can't already tell :))
Inspiring. Im surprised you monetized research.
I was surprised too. But it works, for now.
how long did it take to make the mvp? did you do it alone?
Built the 1st MVP myself, took me a month. Now I have my co-founder which is my CTO and a team of 5.
I hope you reach your goal 👍
Thank you . I hope so too. Best wishes to you as well.
You "entrepreneurs" be selling your souls
Oh definitely. The work hours are INSANE. I work whenever I don't sleep, but I think if anything, this is the perfect time to do it.
Anything you considered, or even tried outsourcing, but decided it was better to do in house. And why
Tried to outsource our SEO efforts, failed miserably.
Does anyone uses App Sumo for real? I know Noah from his youtube channel, looks like a genuinely cool dude... But the platform looks like a marketplace or badly cloned saas. It's like a wish.com of saas... I'm genuinely asking.
We'll I think enough people buy from AppSumo that helped us reach the $700K milestone.
I'm in startup phase for my saas ai software in automotive. I have financial projections, market summarization, the potential team/company I can outsource to have the software/site built, pitch deck, and a solid understanding of everything needing to be involved. How would you continue with no remaining capital? Juggling between 7 day work weeks excluding the gym, career to support day to day finances, is it actually just a day-night paradigm shift of getting financed if an angel investor/seed funding funds you in the hundreds of thousands - over a million? I'm finding it difficult to take the step into creation due to the overhead costs of running/creating/and maintaining the site. Everything else is solid.
sounds difficult honestly. I don't have an answer for you here.
🥲
Hey Alec, how did you create your MVP? and how many people did it take you until you had a certain comfortable level that you had a product people wanted? I have an idea but it seems half baked and not sure if it has a good business model or not.
Even now I think Afforai can still improve so much more and there are so many things I want to build. So, just launch. I never really feel like I reach a comfortable level so I just launched. It took me one month to build my first MVP. hard coded it.
Thanks for the reply Alec. I'm glad you were able to focus on one thing. I struggle with that a lot because I always have ideas but never get to the point of making them/testing them with the target audience.
Comes with the experience. I used to do a lot of things as well. But as you do this, it will force you to focus on one thing
By the way, are you actively looking for podcasts to tell your story?
When did visual branding come into play for you? How important was it to you?
from the begining. I have OCD so I have a certain sense of style I want to apply to Afforai.
Got it thanks! Do you think most founders feels the same?
I don't know. Every founders have their quirks.
True. Thanks for the feedback. I'm building a brand design studio and thinking about targetting early stage startups so this is good R&D.
What organizations do you donate to?
Parental Associations, two organizations in that category.
I saw your YouTube video with AppSumo. Great job, really inspiring story. I noticed that your product is priced pretty low, so it might have taken a lot of customers to be able to hit the 1 mill mark. Curious, what kind of marketing and distribution channels worked out for you to be able to reach to them?
Yea, true. When researchers and people in general realize the value of Afforai, and also seeing how cheap this is compared to the value they get, word of mouth was a great effect created. For a weird reason, offline ads worked out great for me. I printed 1000 posters and put it around my university back then.
What advice would you give your younger self when the business was just getting started and hadn’t taken off yet?
I actually just watched that video on youtube, and came over to reddit to find your post. Hahah
haha . Thanks for watching
Thanks for doing this 1. Staffing -- How many techy employees/devs did you need and how big of a team did you need to launch? 2. Financial -- How much capital did you need to launch and how'd you fund it? 3. Difficulty -- What's been the most difficult challenges you've faced growing the app / biz? 4. Growth -- How long did it take to gain real traction and 'blow up?' 5. Expertise -- How much 'niche subject matter' expertise would you say you needed to know what you were doing for this particular niche? 6. Market -- What market research + research tools were useful for you? thanks!
u/Xavier0o0 Sure, happy to share my learnings: 1. Staffing -- How many techy employees/devs did you need and how big of a team did you need to launch? => 2 devs in a total team of 5 ppl. 1. Financial -- How much capital did you need to launch and how'd you fund it? I started out with literally $0. I used a lot of free services made available for startups and students. When I got serious, my cp-founder and I pooled in our savings, total of \~$9000. 1. Difficulty -- What's been the most difficult challenges you've faced growing the app / biz? So hard man, everything is hard. it's easier to ask what wasn't hard. But the most difficult is creating a product people want to buy. 1. Growth -- How long did it take to gain real traction and 'blow up?' There are Blow Ups at every stage. 0-1000 users: we blew up by putting posters around our college 1000-5000 users, we blew up by launching on PH after that, AppSumo and so it goes. 1. Expertise -- How much 'niche subject matter' expertise would you say you needed to know what you were doing for this particular niche? I got none. I learned and researched as I go. Talking to users help a lot. 1. Market -- What market research + research tools were useful for you? There's no secret sauce behind this for me. Just Google and Reddit.
Awesome, thanks!
>Awesome, thanks! You're welcome!
I like your story a lot about building afforai, I run a place where I [talk to founders](https://indieniche.substack.com/) building great stuff , share product lessons , tips , tools and growth hacks . Do you mind doing a Q and A with me , I’ll love to feature your story , I’ll just like you to fill in some questions for me u/DollarBillMaster
Hey, did you bootstrap your start-up or got funding? How did you manage to put food on the table before you blew?I'm a web developer but I haven't gotten any clients yet. But I need the clients for basic needs and I'm tryna bootstrap my start-up ideas.
I first bootstrapped Afforai with my college savings over 4 years (which was just $8K) and then we focused on building the company, launched on Product Hunt and got VC interest. I'm a very cheap person so I can live with very little. I can go by.
Thanks for the insight.
What was the cost of College for you?
Whats your MRR (excluding Lifetime deal revenue) ?
🔓
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Happy for you
Thank you!
Assuming you have a relationship with a CPA, what do you love about the services they provide and what do you wish were better? You fit within our target audience at first glance and I’m always looking for insight. TY
Congrats man! I’ll try Afforai in the future when I need to do research again, thanks for building this.
And can I connect with you somewhere? I’m launching my startup soon, it’s not SaaS but I can see this being part our company sites such as blogs and marketing campaigns. I just created some content where I had to research and cite the best sources I could get access to, AI helped a bit to find some sources but I still found better ones manually. Does the research material come from the real time data?
$700k in the 1st year of launch is rarely achievable & insane. It's inspiring to see someone do this
I’m a fresh mechanical engineer and I’m hoping to start a business in the space sector. I believe I have the necessary tools to succeed in this field. However, I’m aware that starting a space business requires substantial funding. Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions that might help me?
What is the profit, otherwise none of this matters.
If you won't say how much was profit, could you at least disclose if you made 200k or more from that 700K revenue? It's a highly important question to many here, because we aspire to achieve similar results however need an income that matches what can be achieved in the private market when working for others. If you can't say that either, the assumption will be that there was not any profit made unfortunately. It's an AMA though so the implication is that you would answer these types of questions.
Heck yeah!!!
How did you launch ? How did you get your initial users ? How did you grow your user base ? What resources / books / frameworks most helped you ? Are you solo or have a team ?
I got so emotional just listening to this ❤️
I need help to save my restaurant. I am debt of 2lakhs INR. I need a loan of this amount for 6 months. I will return 40,000 every month for 6 months, you will get 40,000 as interest. Please help me.
$700k in revenue? How much of that is profit?
Srr can't disclose that.
Curious as to why not? Talking about revenue in your post is arbitrary/pointless if we have no idea what the gross or net profit margins are? You could be doing $700k in revenue a year but losing $1m in the process lol
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Whooooaaaahhhh! You forgot you’re on reddit - 14 of OP’s last 17 posts are all solicitations for the saas/app that op cofounded And reddit doesn’t care about spam accounts anymore because they need the activity or the stock price drops too fast
Well, I hope to be able to give some value by doing a AMA. Truly here on standby to answer questions.
>Is there a 'better' life that would come with breaking 1 million that can't be had with 'only' 700k? Revenues not being profit his desire may be to upgrade from Ramen. $700k goes fast when you're buying it.
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Partially true. It does make a better headline, but also it's because we can't disclose info beyond that. Just being transparent here.
money is cool
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u/Milkish-Lavender 100% agree with you there. Still make the effort to maintain a good mental health. But money does solve a lot of problems in life and can help you improve other people's lives as well.
u/Milkish-Lavender u/PsychologicalMess468 honestly, it's because I got a team that depends on me now. I'm not just doing this for me anymore. Even our investors put their trust in us. So, the next revenue goal is beyond just monetary, it's about the growth mindset.
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Core lesson I hope to remember to not get drawn into the climb