Attention! Oh, there you go. Attention! Rail travellers, platform paces, window gazers and armrest negotiators. Have you heard? The big rail fare freeze is here. Railfares have been frozen across England until March 2027 on standard class tickets, including off-peak, anytime and season tickets. For more information, visit nationalrail.co.uk slash faresfreeze. See and see next week on Supply. Two years ago, I quit my job. I started building, trying, experimenting and just recently I reached the milestone of 10k MRR. How does this guy make over $10,000 a month with screenshots? Well, it's because he works within the niche he knows best. I knew how to build, like it was kind of my super skill, you know. Before becoming an indie hacker, Dmitro started his journey as an employee. I was working most of my life as a developer, writing, quote-helping startups and companies, building products. But one day, he finally had enough and decided to take the leap and go all in on his dream. Even having the best job in the world, huge salary, still I felt that something pushed me into another direction. It was kind of my childhood dream. Now, Dmitro is a solo-pernumer, making a great living, coding and building his own products. And all of his success comes down to one thing. You need to be persistent enough to try anything to just get to this first dollar. In this video, Dmitro shares exactly how he went from 9-5 to solo-pernumer and how anybody watching this could do something similar. And, spoiler alert, he shares a lot of good stuff, including his framework for building ideas faster, some unconventional marketing channels he uses to get lots of paying customers, and his unique strategy to keep those customers for longer. Now, let's jump right in. I'm Pat Walls, and this is Starter Story. Hey, man, welcome. Tell us a little bit about who you are and what you built. Let's try it. Let's try it. Hi, I'm Dmitro. I'm building a screenshot one. It's my main focus, and this is a product that helps companies from small to big. Automated screenshots. So currently, I am 280 customers, making around $12,000 of monthly revenue. This is an expression model. You subscribe to a product and pay, for example, $17 a month. And if you need extra screenshots, extra features, and so on, you pay extra. Nice. Tell us the story about how you got started out with screenshot one. Of course, I had like millions of ideas, but when I wasn't to this journey, I realized I need to, you know, to reduce my space of ideas to something that I can really build. It should be a quality product. And since I was a backend developer, server-side developer, I knew how to build APIs. Like, it was kind of my super skill. I reduced my list of ideas only to API products. One of the ideas was, and I built it, it was ML validation API. Somehow, it looked super boring for me, so I just focused on screenshot one. I went to Google and I saw so many competitors. It means there are people paying also. That was good heuristic to evaluate the niche, you know. So you realize that there were similar tools to what you wanted to build, and people were already paying for these tools. But isn't having competitors bad? How should others think about this when they're choosing their business idea? Having some niche with competitors is good. You can probably also find some numbers. You can see how many customers they have. Almost every area you want to build, it's not unique. It's really hard to invent something unique. And even if you invent this thing, who said people need it, you know? The only thing you need to check, there is enough of these users that will satisfy your goal. For example, you want to have 10K MRR, you probably need to check if there is enough of companies, for example, which needs screenshot software, and they will pay you like this amount of money. Alright, so you validated the niche, but how did you go about validating the actual product? Did you ask for people's opinions? The problem is people are really nice. Some of the people can just pay you, you know, even for non-existing product. But you still don't know whether they use it or not, whether it helps them or not, until you build it, until you see these kind of companies that don't know you're using your product, yes. But once you have at least 10 paying customers from outside network and you didn't know them, they just came and bought your product and use it, that's for me like an ultimate validation. Okay, so to validate the product, we got to build it, but we also got to make sure people want to pay for it. Tell us how this happened with screenshot one. It took me five months to build it and launch it. It was my first time, I was wanting to be everything profit and so on. It's mistake, because you anyway, your first version will be anyway, not good, let's say. Today I launch much, much faster, like I try to launch in one month or less. I quickly build something really small in one feature. I don't build authentication, I don't build payments, anything. And then I share it with my close friends for clicking and testing that it just works, like nothing is breaking, you know. Then I launch it on Twitter and so on, yes. And if I can get access to my potential paying customers directly, I would just go to them, just reach out to people. And then probably it will be payments and then it will be notification and then I will start it, ranging, getting feedback and so on. Dmitro is the perfect example of how a software engineer can turn his coding skills into a simple idea into a side project that makes thousands of dollars a month. But that comes with working on the right idea and knowing the best methods to get those first paying users. This is why I created Starter Story Academy, a place that helps you find an idea, validate that idea with real feedback and help you execute on that idea so you can turn it into a profitable side project that might just change your life. So if you're curious about building a profitable side project like Dmitro and hundreds of other founders just like him, head to the first link in the description to learn a bit more about the academy and see if it's a fit for you. Now let's get back to our interview with Dmitro. Okay, now we have a working product, but how do we get customers? Which marketing channels work for you the best? Okay, okay. So when I started it was like I was trying almost everything and then I saw for me Twitter worked, Google worked. These are currently major channels for me. Then you have a lot of unobvious channels like Zapier, Make. A lot of people are using these tools for their businesses automating and if you can put your products onto these platforms, you know, people will find you. Also, of course it was product hunt launch. It helped me with the awareness and it helped me with boosting my SEO. Some unobvious channel for me, I probably will invest more in it, it's YouTube. Somebody posted tutorial how to send cold emails with my product and I saw like paying customer coming from YouTube and they thought, wow, I can also publish tutorials on YouTube for this kind of technical product and people still can find me. In SEO and Google, it's pretty hard to get to the first position. But for some keywords, Google also shows videos, you know, like YouTube videos. So you can post YouTube video and you can be around pretty high, you know, it's kind of hot, I would say. Okay, cool. You got customers, but how about keeping them? How do you deal with churn? Of course I'm asking customers when they cancel subscription, they have pop-up and they can choose reason or write their reason. But it didn't help because somebody answers, we don't need this product anymore, something like that, you know. So I started using out through emails, I was checking their profile, their company, what was their use case, what was the reason they specified and then I was like trying to guess why they churned and then I was like saying, you know, one yes no question, did you churn because of, let's say, pricing? And people started to answer, you know, like, yes, yes, I did it because of that and so on and I almost got 100% the success rate of getting these answers. It's a lot of manual work, but it's good because it was building a mental model in me why, how people use my product, why they churn and what happens. You need to talk and support to people, you need to talk after churn because sometimes you just realize somebody came and they're not your customer and one of the ways to fix this is to change your marketing, you know, to change your copy. For example, I was getting some people who were expecting my product to be like no-cote so I emphasized that it's for developers, you know, like you need to write code to integrate my product. For me, it was like, let's 11% per month, now it's close to 7%. I want to get it down less than 5% of customers be churning, you know, per month. Alright, so talking to customers and testing your assumption is how you've reduced churn. Let's talk about monetization now. Tell us how you made your first dollar with screenshot one. I was promoting for one month my product everywhere, like on every possible platform, Twitter, Reddit, IndieHackers, everywhere, yes. And just one person saw it, found it valuable. They paid $7 per month for my product, but for me it was a huge win. It felt like a million dollars, you know, you need to be persistent enough to try anything to just get to this first dollar. That's awesome. Tell us now how you decided on the pricing for your product. At the beginning it was pretty simple. $5 felt super cheap, $7 felt, oh, okay, it's the simplest, but my margins were almost zero. So I decided to reduce the free plan and I raised prices for next plans. When you raise prices, it really helps. It's a much stronger signal to get people who really want to use your product. My current pricing is kind of an intuition like how much customers still can pay and it will be valuable for them and it will be a good profit margin for me and we can still grow, something like that, you know, it's kind of an intuition. Cool. Now let's talk tech stack. What are the different tools, software and languages you use to run this $100,000 per year SaaS product? I use TypeScript for managing headless browsers and Pappeteer library. I use Go language for rate limiting, managing API keys and so on. I use Cloudware for storing screenshots as an API gateway to my product. From the business perspective, I use Google Search Console for analyzing Google's keywords, CTR and positions. I use Google Keyword Planner for predicting volumes for keywords when I want to write some content. I use PostHawk Analytics for product, like, you know, for building funnels and if I see somebody paid for the product, I want to know from which marketing channel they came. Yes, I use PostHawk for that. And then I use GRISP chat for live chat support and answering quick questions to customers. I have, like, my phone attached to it and if I see a message, I try to answer immediately to it and if I can solve it, I also try to solve it immediately. I think that's probably most of the tools I use daily. Alright, and if you don't mind me asking, what do the profit margins look like for your product? It's around from 40 to 60% profit margins. Most of my costs are servers. It's pretty expensive. Currently, I render around, let's say, 2 million screenshots and I pay from 3 to 4 thousand dollars per month for servers. Total expenses should be around 4 thousand and 500 dollars, I think, like in total. That's awesome. So we already kind of talked about how having competitors is a good sign that you're building something lucrative. But once we're in business, how do we actually deal with those competitors and how do you go about it? I think the moment you have 10 paying customers, like real customers who are not from your network, not just for supporting you and using your product for their business and they extract value from it, you just can focus on them and deploy a feature for them, optimize all your marketing for these kind of people and search for them. For most sole founders who want to build a simple business and to just cover their current life expenses and to live off that business, you probably don't need to be harsh enough and to be bad and you can be just nice kind, build relationships with people and still get enough customers to pay your bills, you know. Got it. Okay. You've given us some great insights into what it takes to build a SaaS business, but now let's get a little bit more personal. What does a day in a life look like for you? It's pretty simple. I wake up, I help my wife to send kids to school, to kindergarten. Then I just go home and drink a cup of coffee or I just go to some local cafe and drink a cup of coffee. And I always, always, every morning I read at least one hour of some book. So then I work till the evening when the kids come home and for example today we'll go to play football, soccer with friends, yes. On weekends I do some fun stuff, traveling, having time with my friends, with my wife, kids and so on. If you're a sole entrepreneur especially, you need to take care of your mental health because it's like, it's your only tool that you use every day and if you feel bad, your quality of decisions are also much, much worse, you know. Having clear mind and thinking is one of the most leveraged things you can do in your business, I think. Okay, cool. Now the last question that we ask all founders that we interview, what would be your advice for entrepreneurs just starting out? I want to say like, don't listen to anybody including me and like any advice. Consume everything, everything you can, like try to find the most quality content you can. But at the end of the day, don't outsource your decision to anybody. You need to own it, you need to have intuition like with what are you going to build, to market, to do with your business. What kind of journey you want to have, yes. Try to act from your own mind, like if you base your decisions, don't outsource them. Don't ask people, let's say, tell me what to do or I want to quit my job, what do you think? Should I quit it or not? No, you decide. If you want to quit it, quit it. If not, then not. It's pretty hard to generalize any lessons. For example, I had good runaway but somebody quitting their job, they don't have good runaway and it makes a huge difference. Some people treat money seriously and some people don't care. For example, I was poor, so for me, losing all money, it's not a big deal. I feel I can be destroyed and start a game. But for somebody, for example, who was growing in a good family, it can be pretty scary. So it's pretty hard to give advice, for example, just quit your job, burn all the bridges and so on. It's a pretty contextual thing. Alright, thank you Dmitro for coming on. I love the business that you built. Good luck with everything and have a great day. Thank you. Yo guys, I really hope you enjoyed the video and got some actionable advice that you can take from Dmitro. But I want to say something real quick. At the end of the day, the point of these videos is to teach you guys how to find ideas, how to build them, so hopefully you can start a profitable project on your own. No, while learning is important, action is the thing that's going to get you that dream outcome. And if you're still struggling to take action... Listen up. Huh? That means you. Yes, you. We know you're pointing at yourself. When it comes to party power games, we've got a place made for all sorts. From the experts to the drama queens. It's me, the JC. The finance bros. Look at those stokes lads. We'll stick with slots. It's what we're good at. And not forgetting you. Yes, you, the one listening. Because at party power games, we've got all sorts of games for all sorts of trickles. eligibility rules in terms of conditions apply. Please come for responsibly. No matter what, then I highly recommend you check out the academy. It's the community I wish that I had when I first started. And it's got a bunch of resources to help you get those first users with your idea. Just head to the first link in the description. If you're ready to commit and you're ready to take action. Much love and I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace.
