Do not index
Do not index
Building a SaaS is hard.
I mean think about it:
- Understand what the customers actually need
- Building that into a tangible/working product
- Selling and growing it beyond a hobby into a business
And after you do this for 6 months, you realize that the customers didn’t want this and you went down the wrong road.
Sounds scary. And it is scary.
But what if I tell you there is a method that allows you to find your winning idea in a few weeks and gets you PAYING customers on the FIRST DAY OF LAUNCH?
You’ll probably laugh about it, think I’m kidding - then ask me: “But no seriously, how do I find the winning idea and build a business on top?“
Except I’m not kidding…Not even close.
In fact this is how we built Tweet Hunter and Taplio and later sold them for $8M.
My recent perfectly encapsulates our building strategy for Tweet Hunter and Taplio (How the tweet is perfectly written for engagement is another thing and a topic for another day)
But let me explain it in detail, step by step: 👇
The downward spiral of a ‘great idea‘
Ideas are over glorified in the startup world.
People raise funds on Shark Tank with an Idea.
It’s always ‘the idea that changes the world‘.
The reason is simple - talking about something is easier than actually doing it.
You can keep talking about it for weeks and thinking about the perfect idea for months.
Or…
Try and build it in 4 weeks.
The solution is simple:
Build and launch 1 product every week
And before you let your mind go in the wrong direction, you DON’T have to be a top 1% coder to build and launch every week.
This is exactly how we built Tweet Hunter.
So back in 2021, after I wanted to go all in on business, I decided to do something many people will call borderline crazy:
Build and launch 1x per week
The result?
The first 10 products — absolute duds. (But great feedback)
11th product — took off, built, and sold for $8M.
When I tell people this story, there are many questions that they ask me:
- Does every product have to be different from each other?
- How do you ensure ‘quality’ in the products
- Did you code for 20 hours/day while doing this?
Let me answer the third question first - no, I didn’t.
And now, here are the tips and frameworks to build and launch 1x per week
Solve for the same people
The products don’t have to be radically different.
The way to do that is by writing out your ideal client and their problem on a sheet of paper.
For example, this is what we were solving while building Tweet Hunter:
Who are we building for? Creators. What are we helping them solve? Most creators don’t make money. We help them make sales. How are we doing it? Social media tools.
When you do this, you always have a clear direction regarding what you’re trying to do.
Make all your products centered around the same core concept, the method might vary every week.
As an example, here are some of the tools we created in those 11 weeks (will give you an idea of how to iterate on new products):
- Tweet Butler: A tweet generation SaaS, built a Bubble with a custom backend. It was using GPT3 to generate tweets. The content was not good enough, very high churn.
- Tweet Butler Digest: trying to build something recurring from day 0, so this was a rich Twitter analytics service powered by GPT3 delivered over email, every day. Reached about $300 MRR but still, high churn.
- Tweet Hunter: born from the tweets database built from the previous tool, where inspiration comes from old viral tweets (as generation from GPT3 was not good enough), it took off.
But this still doesn’t answer 1 critical question - how to maintain the seemingly impossible 1x per week launch.
Ditch the conventional techniques
Remember - you are not looking to create a unicorn in a week.
You are building to test validation.
Never forget that.
And if that means forgetting a few traditional techniques, so be it.
No UI
We build every single product on a landing page builder with a backend.
- We build many products with a single landing page builder connected to a shared backend. →
- People read, and sign up on a landing page →
- We connect this to our backend automation, and deliver the service by email, making the product work without any UI.
Is this scrappy? yes.
Did this work? yep.
Copy the code
A lot of our products share the same main code base. Honestly, now that I think - selling 1 of these would be a nightmare as they are so deeply integrated but thankfully it didn’t come to that.
That’s how you ship 1x per week. By being extremely against the ‘norms‘.
Validation = money
Most people are very nice and don’t want to say your product sucks on your face.
So if you hear things like - “The product is nice but it isn’t for me yet“, time to change some things.
The only validation you’re looking for is real, paying customers.
The number for me was $1000 MRR - this might be different for you.
I think this is the first time I’m talking about the rapid launch strategy in such detail.
The conclusion is simple - Build for validation, don’t waste time on ideas, and build for scale.
I hope this helped!
If you liked this, take a screenshot of your favorite part and post it on Twitter (Tag me @tibo_maker and I’ll repost!)
My goal is simple - help as many builders as I can with real and authentic growth tips.
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