Startups.email - Issue #2
In today's issue, let's chat about how I prioritize my most profitable ideas and decide what to tackle next. Plus, we'll explore Feather, a cool blog platform that's bringing in $4,065 MRR and more.
This week, I'm excited to share some tips on how to choose your next profitable idea and how I personally organize my approach.
Over the past few months, I've had some success selling a couple of SaaS startups using a proven method that works for me every time. The first step is to gather a bucket of ideas - I never start with just one idea, it's always important to have plenty of alternatives. My bucket usually has around 40 to 50 ideas and it's a simple Google Doc. I include screenshots, notes, and research to keep everything organized. I've found that having multiple ideas is key to success as a founder. I used to make the mistake of only focusing on one idea, which ended up in failure for me multiple times. But when I switched to the "bucket of ideas" approach, things started to turn around! I know that backwards attribution can be tough, but I want to share that I truly believe the bucket of ideas approach played a huge role in my success.
I didn't stumble upon this idea by chance. It actually reminds me of Peter Levels' impressive 12 startups in 12 months method. And guess what? Marc Andreessen has even explained why this strategy is effective!
The periods of Beethoven’s career that had the most hits also had the most misses. Attempting to improve your batting average of hits versus misses is a waste of time as you progress through a creative career. Instead you should just focus on more at-bats—more output.
Let's save the discussion on which ideas to prioritize and add to our list for the next newsletter. For now, let's take a break and discover some inspiring success stories of awesome founders. We can learn a lot from them to help build our own successful business!
Feather.so ($4,065 MRR)
Bhanu has built a blog platform where you can make a blog from your Notion in minutes. There are other successful projects like NotionForms (~ $20k MRR) where you can build a form from your Notion. You see a pattern? Take a platform with a big userbase (1M+ users) and build a tool around it. I personally built an app for Trello and was able to go from 0 to $200 MRR in a month. Another key point, Bhanu wrote that it took him 3 weeks to go from $3k to 4k MRR. If you struggle to make your first $1k MRR, it doesn't mean it will always be the case. In my research I figured out that it usually takes 5 to 9 months on average to get to the first $1k MRR. But Bhanu was able to get from $3k to $4k in 3 weeks. Good products have non-linear growth. This is called "the flywheel concept" introduced by Jim Collins.
"The flywheel effect happens when small wins for your business build on each other over time and eventually gain so much momentum that growth almost seems to happen by itself"
AudioPen AI (~ $14,469 TTM)
AudioPen lets you convert your spoken notes into clear text. The revenue has been generated mostly through lifetime sales within the last six weeks (estimation). Right now, many OpenAI wrappers are popping up and people are making a lot of money. Some well-known indie makers are even complaining about it, since a wrapper has no unique value, no unique IP, or the products are not better. It's up to you; you can decide to build something unique with a high risk of failure or to build another wrapper that makes you a living. I would rather go for another OpenAI wrapper and try to innovate later once you can survive from the MRR. The less innovative a product is, the less risk you have of failing.
CraftMyPDF ($16,784 MRR)
You can generate PDF files programmatically. It's a no-code PDF generation platform that offers tons of integrations. Jacky is a brilliant founder; he shares a lot of information on Twitter about his startup. He has built a great evergreen product. I think this is important to see in contrast with the e.g. product above. It's not a wrapper; it's a very complex product with many features that might not grow very fast, but will be around for years. Why? Because everyone uses PDF, and many businesses use PDF when it comes to documents. PDF is the thing. You can create different startups around PDF generation, PDF security, PDF forms, and PDF signatures. Just look around and let yourself be inspired by Jacky and his business.
Hey, just wanted to let you know that we've updated our website and added some amazing startups with revenue numbers 👉 startups.email