0 to $20M ARR in 5 years bootstrapped - how to achieve the i...

I just sold https://t.co/culXGjg8HN for $65,000 🤩🚀 Launched it 3 months ago, with 0 budget and less than 600 followers. I learned to code only 9 months ago. Big thanks @agazdecki & @acquiredotcom to have made it possible! If you're curious, here is the whole story: December 2022, 20:40. I had a sudden idea. What if I made an app to generate logos using AI? I was making AI logos already for my other projects, so I knew how to do it. However, I needed to validate 2 hypotheses: 🤔 Can I make logos in an automated way? 🤔 Would people pay for it? I decided to make an MVP in 48 hours, as deadlines are the way to go when launching anything: https://t.co/XLbPOgAD7Q 48 hours, 1 earthquake and 2 power outages later, I had my crappy MVP ready 🥳 By crappy I mean a static HTML page linked to a Typeform to collect payment. The back end was literally me generating the logos and sending them by email. No framework, no fancy stuff, just text and pictures. I made a few posts on Twitter and generated a couple of sales from it: https://t.co/oJWmZapfJ4 Sales = Validation. The next step was to make an automated version, so I made another challenge of making an automated version in 48h and launching it on @ProductHunt 🚀🚀 And oh boy, things went crazy! I launched on December 11 and generated +$1000 of sales, ended up Product of the Day, and got tons of followers on Twitter, so I knew I was into something 🤩 However, it was far from perfect. Lots of logos needed additional editing or ended up weird because the customer inputs/prompts weren't good. So, I started from scratch again and made a brand new version in January. The new version offered way more options, and better results overall ✨ Then, I added the app to every startup directory I could put my hand on. And that's how most of my traffic came. I also kept posting on Twitter, every time someone asked "what are you working on?" I replied with the name of the app, and the same when someone asked for AI-generated logos 🤓 And... That's pretty much it. I tried to run some ads on Twitter & Reddit but it didn't work that much, as it's not targeted enough. Now, I don't have much interest in logo/design, and I don't have the technical skills to improve the app further, so, I decided to sell it in February. @acquiredotcom made the process pretty easy, I received a few offers, and ended up choosing the best offer. Then I did the transfer and here we are 🥳 In total, the app made +$23,000 in sales and $15,000 in profit. So, that's around $80,000 in total (profit + sale), which is equivalent to at least 5 years of safety net where I live 😱 If you want a more detailed post, I wrote everything I was doing in real-time back then: https://t.co/iEpUio2pDs Now,... See more