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I personally used to think that I could never ship a profitable product because I was not amazing at coding. Reaching this point where I'm earning 15k out of my products, it feels unreal. How did this guy build two SaaS products to $15,000 MRR as an average coder? Well, it's because of his approach on how to find winning ideas. You niche down as much as possible. I only need 0.1% of the market and I'm good. Fernando started his journey as an agency owner, working with clients for over a decade. But then his entrepreneurial dreams came to a halt when he had to go back to his 9-5 job. While working my 9-5, I was always dreaming about what to do. Deep down I knew I wanted to find a way to go back to this sense of autonomy that I had at one point. After unexpectedly getting fired, he decided he had enough and went all in on his dream. Now the stakes were real. I always relied on my 9-5, but not anymore. I needed to show up and build something. A year after he took the leap, Fernando became a solopreneur, making a good living while working only 4 hours a day. So I gave him a call to ask him how he did it and how you guys watching could do something similar. And he shares everything, including his process for finding profitable ideas, his strategy for building and validating those ideas quickly, and the distribution channel that gets him most of his paying customers. When it comes to distribution for both resume maker, download line and anchor results, it's the main channel. Alright, let's dive in. I'm Pat Walls and this is Starter Story. Welcome man, thanks for coming on Starter Story. Tell us about who you are and what business you built. So, well, I am Fernando, a product designer originally from Argentina, now living in Sweden and working in 2-SAS projects full-time. Resume Maker.org Online and Aikar Results. When it comes to Resume Maker.org Online, I like to define it as the easiest way to build your resume. And then there's aikarresults.com, which I launched last year and it's the first Aikar Results generator. And it allows users to create stun in social media and car results, even if you don't know anything about design. Both products run on a freemium model, so you can start right away for free, but subscriptions unlock all the AI and pro features. Together, they bring in about 15kai MRR, which allow me to finally step away from the 9-5 and let's hope it stays that way. Okay, since you've built not one, but two successful projects, can you tell us a little bit more about your process for how to find winning ideas? I was finding it easier to scratch my own itch. When I see something that I know that it can be time consuming, I thought it could be a great idea. Why not creating something that simplifies this, something that solves this problem specifically, instead of having multiple features like Kanba on battle. Most users are not pro users, they just want the simplest way to achieve something. That's the advantage of being a solo entrepreneur. Kanba cannot afford to go for a very specific solution, because they need to target a wider audience. So I think that's where solo entrepreneurs can try to niche down as much as possible, find the portion of a huge market that they can serve better than these big companies. With AI care results, it's only me, I don't have a co-founder, I don't have employees. I only need 0.1% of the market and I'm good. I think there's very fertile ground for indie hackers or entrepreneurs to create solutions that are laser focused and solve one specific issue. Alright, so your approach is to take these big markets and niche it down and build one simple solution for users. But how do you look at validating these ideas and how do you know that it's something worth building? I go after markets that are already validated, but I try to be just a little bit different, take a new approach. With Resume Maker.Online, all these resume builders were really bloated. You needed to sign up for before even seeing how the resumes can look like. I took a completely different approach, you just press one button, you're right there, you can see how good it's looking already. And I think people really resonated with that. That's my philosophy, I think that's going to be my philosophy going forward. Let's take a validated market, niche down and find a way to save people time. I always say that I don't sell design, I sell time. That's the value that I provide. I help you to get you to a good enough point and that's more than enough sometimes. Validating your idea is one of the most important steps when it comes to starting something new and Fernando is proof of that. Profitable side projects are built on the right idea, the right market and the right launch strategies. But that process to go from zero to one can be long and it might make you feel lost if you aren't following a solid blueprint. That's why I created the Academy. It's a five week program where you'll find an idea, build it, launch it, validate it all while only working two hours a day. It's the same framework I use to build a million dollar business and it's what I've seen thousands of other successful founders use. It's what actually works because it's all about taking action and actually building stuff and putting it out into the world. Which is what I really want to see you take a shot at. So if you're curious about building a side project like Fernando and you want to surround yourself with other builders, then head to the first link in the description to see if the Academy might be a good fit for you. Now let's get back to Fernando's story in the amazing business he built. Okay, now let's talk about actually building the product. I know you did a 10 day challenge to go from zero to one with AI carousels. Can you tell us a little bit more about that approach? Well, working at my nine to five hours, always they dream about what to do. After a year and a half working there, just a few weeks after a very positive performance review, they tell me that I'm fired. That was just one day before my planned vacations. And obviously I was quite borne out from the nine to five that left such a sour taste in my mouth. So I was not very optimistic and I didn't really want to find another job. I think maybe this was the push that I needed. Now the stakes were real. I always rely on my nine to five, but not anymore. I needed to show up and build something. So I thought, okay, let's go for a building public challenge. The first days, I just tried to get the main features running also as a designer. And given that this is a design product, it had to look somewhat nice, but it was really, really simple. It's the most basic tech carousel that you could create. It's a good thing also to launch these bear bomb products because then when you start getting feedback, the feedback kind of tells you where you go. The biggest value that I get from these challenges is that if it would have failed, I could have moved on into the next thing without any issues. But if you work for during six months, one year on a product, it's easy to get attached. It can be hard to hear like the product sucks. If I launch in the future, I would like to try to replicate this sense of urgency. Wow, that's an awesome story. Thank you for sharing that. So after you built the MVP, I see that you then launched on product time. Can you tell me more about that launch? Yeah, despite my concerns, the launch went really well for AI carousels and five users sign up and people can say that they like your product and you might have intuition that there's a demand for it, but the ultimate validation is when you get paid for it, right? And the product was super buggy. For me, that was like the ultimate proof. If they pay for this buggy product, there's really an opportunity here and it will double down. So after you get those first five customers, how did you continue to get more of them? What kind of distribution methods did you use? When it comes to distribution for both Resume Maker.Online and AI carousels, ProHunt help a lot to spread the word about it, especially with Resume Maker.Online winning first pro of the week. It was spread so quickly and I got so many bug links, but then SEO is the main channel and I'm definitely better at building that marketing. So I started building a lot of free tools for both products. I think it's about 30. It just has to be something complementary to your main product, like a natural extension. It's a good way to bring in traffic, especially if you're not an SEO expert. The building public also helps to spread the word on Twitter or LinkedIn. I think people like, especially when you try to make it personal, can be a bit cringe sometimes, but that's LinkedIn. Also, you launch an affiliate program for both products, which is working okay. It's in progress. So after you started to get more paying customers, was there a specific pricing strategy you used to monetize the product to its potential? Pricing it was a bit tricky at the beginning. I mean, I knew it wasn't beta, so I launched it at $9.99. Now, after adding so many features and the product has matured so much, it's $14.95. And I want to be seen as an affordable tool, not a cheap one, right? And when it comes to Resume Maker.Online, I started with a one-time purchase model, which made total sense for the type of product. But after I relaunched it as it says early this year, even though the turn is high, the revenue is much more predictable. It's really nice because with one-time purchases, you go back to zero. That's a bit scary each time. Got it. Okay. I want to double-click into the topic of churn. Do you have a strategy you used to reduce churn for AI carousels? Yeah, that my strategy was to start with carousels, but expand and offer other tools so people might come for the carousels and they stay for a whole package. It's way easier to communicate the proposition value when you can focus on only one decor message. Which in this case is carousels. It's easier for me to stand out among all the competitors by presenting myself as the best AI carousel generator. But when people come, they find out that there's a lot of other tools that they can use to maximize their online presence. That's really helping to make the product better so people don't cance about it to bring expired users back. I want to go into the topic of customer support. I know it can be tricky as a solepreneur, so how do you go about it? Yeah, when it comes to customer support, I think it's key. I think that's another product feature. It's part of the experience and I try to just reply as fast as possible because it's not only about helping users for me, especially when I launch. Getting this initial feedback was a bit like a cheat code. Not only help to shape the direction of the product, but also turn all these frustrated customers into loyal fans because you write about a bug or a feature request, and maybe in an hour the bug is fixed and the feature is up. I always try to embrace being small. Even in both personal maker and the Icarus Health, I have an about page that I'm saying, hey, it's only me here. You want to talk indirectly with the founder and on the email, it's always I. It's never we. It's Fernando, the sole founder. I really try to embrace that instead of pretending to be like a big company. I feel like that's really working. People don't want to deal with a faceless big company. I think as sole entrepreneurs, we should leverage on that. Okay, now let's get technical. Which tools and software do you use to make $15,000 a month as a sole entrepreneur? Yeah, when it comes to tools, I keep things very lean. I just use Notions or organize both products. I use Outseta. It's a no code tool that is perfect for sales founders. For me, no code is ideal for speeding up all the basic things like billions, CRM subscriptions, all the repetitive stuff that you don't need to reinvent. It lets me stay just focused on improving the actual product. Yeah, that's basically it. Wow, that is lean. And how much does it actually cost to run your businesses? The costs are around like 1000 per month. So the profit margins are above 90%. And I don't have any employees or our founders. It's only me. Although this year, I did bring a freelancer to help me with some more time consuming content tasks. So I just bring in whenever I need to do some type of stuff like that. Geez, 90% margin is impressive. Wow. Let's talk about competition. I'm sure since you're building and validated markets that you face a lot of it, how do you deal with competitors? I'm glad competition exists. I mean, it's a good sign. You don't want to be the only one. Also, it can be easy, I think, to get caught up on trying to one up each other, all the computers with the new cool feature when often users care about something entirely different. So that's why I keep my focus on the user feedback. All right. Now let's get a little bit more personal. What is your actual day to day look like right now? After so many hectic years of managing my office job with my personal projects, I moved to different countries. I did jobs, launched products. Early this year, I decided to take things a bit lower just to enjoy the summer. So I decided to work only four hours a day. And it was quite difficult at first. I keep thinking about the opportunity cost, right? Watching the movie, thinking about I could be working. I could be shipping features, but it turned out to be just the best decision for the business. Things start going even better by working less time. So I decided to stick with these four hours of deep work each morning. Having this constraint kind of forces you to be intentional about your to-do list. You focus on what's important. One thing I do is, though, I make sure to work even on weekends. I feel that really keeps the momentum going. It feels great just to skip the daily stand-ups of past night to five. I woke up without any alarm. My calendar is empty. I only had your call. When I'm getting by from friends, I'm always available. I'm in a better mood. I'm happier overall. I'm more patient with my girlfriend. And this gives me also the mental clarity to focus on what's important on the business, right? I think that's why the business is doing better, because I am feeling better. I think that's more important to optimize for lifestyle, not for revenue. Okay, Fernando. The last question that we always ask all the founders that we interview. If you could give a piece of advice to all solopreneurs just starting out right now, what would you say? Yeah, sure. I personally used to think that I could never ship a profitable product because I was not amazing at coding. I have all these self-improving beliefs and I was wrong. Most of the times, especially in B2C products, users don't need like a super complex solution. They just want a simpler one. So if you can provide a way to make something faster, simpler, that is value. And most likely people are going to pay for it. There's absolutely nothing bad on focusing on building a tiny little tool that takes people's time. You get paid and need free uptime for you to do whatever you care in life. I mean, I'll be honest. I personally couldn't care less about social media care systems. Like, I like helping people with all the design challenges. But what I care is caring something that allows me to free up my time, have your life, spend time with my family, with my girlfriend, spend a bit less time on the front of the screen. Being able to do that, having that freedom, that's so cool. That for me is something that's not in the chart, but this is what I'm doing. This allows me to improve my lifestyle. That's faster. That's Vantar. For startups, Vantar acts as your first security hire, using AI to get you compliant fast. For enterprises, it's your AI-powered hub for compliance, risk and automating workflows. From startups like Cursor to enterprises like Snowflake, top companies choose Vantar. Do security and compliance right? Get started today at Vantar.com. That's what I'm here for, yeah. Alright, man. Thank you for coming on. I love the business that you built. Thank you for sharing everything with our audience. Have a good one. Hey, guys. Thanks for watching. If you made it this far, I want to share something with you. As you've seen with a ton of these interviews we've done on YouTube, anybody can change their life with an idea, the ability to code in a couple of hours of work per day. In these videos, we talk about tons of cool strategies and tactics, but the thing that's really going to get you your dream outcome is taking action. And if you feel like you're struggling at all with that, no matter what you do, then I highly recommend checking out the Academy. It's the community and accountability that I wish that I had when I first started. And it's got a ton of resources to help you find an idea, help you ship that product, and help you get those first users. Just head to the first link in the description if you want to check it out. Much love, and I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace.
