At Betway Casino, Kelly Brooke is our casino ambassador, and for all new customers, state 20 pounds and get 150 free spins. Download the Betway Casino app today. 18 plus T's and C's apply. Bet the responsible way. GambleAware.org. Immerse yourself in Herbal Essences' new Moroccan Argon oil elixir, infused with pure argan oil. Just one drop delivers up to 100 hours of hair nourishment with the indulgent scent of a Moroccan garden. Herbal Essences' new Moroccan Argon oil elixir, spark quality hair repair without the price tag. Try it now. Herbal Essences. Service Repair to Smoothness nourishment with regimen use versus non-conditioning shampoo. My name is John Rush and I run 20 different projects during Trimelan Era. John Rush started his career working for huge VC-backed startups. But after feeling unhappy and a bit bored with the VC life, he decided to throw it all out the window and instead launched his own apps as a solo founder. And over the past three years, he's built, launched, and now runs over 26 different apps. I built in VC for 10 years until I realized this one thing. In this video, we'll take you behind the scenes of John's exact process for building a portfolio of profitable apps. We'll dive into the exact steps he uses to come up with every single idea, how he gets paying customers before building anything, and a full breakdown of all the different apps he runs. The secret of running 26 startups is... Alright, let's get into it. I'm Pat Walls and this is Starter Story. Welcome John Rush to Starter Story. Thanks for coming on. Tell me about the businesses that you built and what's your story? My name is John Rush and I'm running 26 startups at the same time after quitting the VC world and joining the Boostrap movement. My businesses have combined around one million users in B2B and combined three million ARR. Where seven products bring most of the revenue and the other products are bringing the audience and the channel to the paid products. The most popular tool I have is called Unicorn Platform. It's a website builder that helps busy founders to build their landing pages, wait lists, and directories. Okay, so let's move to a little bit about your background. How you got started as an entrepreneur and what your story looks like? Yeah, so we all started when I was little. So my father was an entrepreneur. He would involve me into everything he was doing just for fun. And by 2020, I was 10 years into building VC back startups and that's when I kind of felt that it was something against my nature. So I was so obsessed with the users. I was so obsessed with the products and love from the users for my products. But in the VC back world, I felt like the whole obsession was kind of different. In 2020, I decided to enter the Boostrap scene. I found the one tool that I liked the most called Unicorn Platform and I reached out to the founder and I said, like, do you want to sell this product to me? The whole startup. So when you sell it, you will join me for a year and you will teach me how to be a Boostrapper and how to be an Indie Maker. And he said, yes. So I paid almost a million dollars for that startup and then he guided me on and other things that he was my mentor for a year. I went from being VC back founder who knows nothing about Boostrapping to becoming a pretty prominent Boostrapper in the scene. Cool. On that topic, I would love if you actually did a deep dive on your projects. You don't have to go through all of them, but some of the products you're most proud of and that bring in the most revenue for your business. So all my products are for busy founders. So the first one is Unicorn Platform. It's a website builder and directory builder for busy founders and it has 600,000 users. The second one is SEO Bot. It has 100k MRR and it has grown in less than 12 months and it was one of the first SEO AI agent on the market. The third one is Listin Bot. It finds all relevant directories on the internet and it lists your product there. Thank you for sharing all that. You seem like you're pretty good at finding ideas that work. I would love if you walk through your process for ideating and validating an idea that you're going to end up working on and building. Yeah. So I used the same process over and over again for all my 20 plus products. It all starts with my own pain at work that I want to solve. And then I look for solutions for that pain. And if I don't find the solutions on the market, then I go and talk about this pain on the internet. And if I see other people resonate with my pain and they say, yeah, I have the same pain and I wish there was a solution, then that's kind of a grand signal for me to go to the next step. I launch a waitlist and I see whether I am able to generate 100 signups. I email them all and I offer them 90% discount on a pre-sale before I built anything. And then if I get five sales, I build the first MVP. I don't even build a product. I actually deliver the solution manually. At this stage, I don't care about the margins yet. I just care about the solution being delivered to the customers and whether they actually satisfied with that. And usually it's not that straightforward. Usually I have to iterate and I deliver solution to the customers and they don't like it. So I iterate, iterate until they like it. And it's easier to iterate when there is no product, when there is no code. It's much easier because I just have to change my own routine and my own service. And once I find the sweet spot where it satisfies the users, I go and find a co-maker. The co-maker joins in. We spend two, three months building and then I have this big launch on Twitter and that's it. That's the blueprint for all the products I have. Cool. Well, let's talk about that kind of co-maker strategy. I haven't seen that too much before or heard too much about that. So I'm curious, how does it actually work? How do you find great developers or product managers for this and how does partnerships work for that? Finding a co-maker is really hard. Same as finding a co-founder. So I usually talk to other makers and I become friends with them and that runs for years or month. And then eventually when I'm looking for a co-maker, it's not that difficult for me to figure out who to reach out to because I see that I'm building a tool for social media and there were these three founders building something similar in the past and they have failed. And now if I pitched them the idea that has passed the validation part, I have pre-sales done and I have some users, it's really easy to convince them to join. And we share the ownership 50-50. It's just regular co-ownership where I take care of all the operation, legal parts, accounting and the co-maker takes care of the coding and support. If you want to be the co-maker people want to work with, the best thing to do is to build things in public because that makes it so easy for anyone else to evaluate you and to just see whether you have things in common, etc. All right, before we finish talking about John's projects, I need you to hear this. Shipping 20 projects is insane productivity. But the minute you aim one of those apps at the enterprise, well, B2B, the questions from leads and customers start to change. Enterprise buyers don't just ask, does it work? They ask, are you socked to compliant, HIPAA compliant, ISO 27001 compliant, miss that box and your six-figure deal evaporates, especially since these frameworks can take months and months to achieve. And that's why Starter Story has partnered with Vanta on this video. 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Okay, let's talk about marketing because you told me that you handle the distribution side of things. I'd love to hear what your kind of secret sauce is that comes to marketing so many different businesses and getting hundreds of thousands of users. I think that the key essence of good marketing is good product. The ideal marketing is where the product just drives the sales and drives word of mouth. But it's difficult to build a great product right away. So usually you start with an average product and you have to do the boring marketing methods to bring first users and then use those users to improve your product and make it great. So before my product is great, I usually go for SEO and then the second most popular that they have is social media marketing. So I run that on X on LinkedIn, on Substack, on Facebook, everywhere. I report for the same content on all platforms and I do that every day. So I share at least 30 tweets a month and sometimes more. And then the third one is the listings on directories. This is very, very good way to grow your product. If your product is hot and interesting, in my case, all products are connected to AI and it's easy to package them in a way that people want to click them when they see them on directories. So if your product is also click bait, it's easy to drive traffic from directories. Then I do cross promo, which is quite unique to me. Every user that tries one of my product ends up trying at least one more product and often I have people who try all my products. The cross promo works really, really well because people trust you already and they know you deliver. Cool. What I think is really cool about how you have all these different projects is actually the marketing strategy that comes with that. And it's this idea of cross selling or cross promotion. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? So I have over 20 tools where some tools are premium tools I make money on and some tools are just to bring traffic in and channel it to the main premium tools. I do two things. So one thing is that I link tools with each other. And the other thing that's more interesting is that I integrate tools with each other. For example, an SEO bot, I have a button called boost my domain rating. And if you click that, then it brings you to my other tool called ListinBot that helps you to boost your domain rating. I have these integrations across all the products. So users natively float from product to product and end up using my entire ecosystem. Let's move on to the next topic, which is AI. I'd love to know how you are using AI to build, run, grow and make your business more efficient. The way I use AI for building the products is that I built my own tool, my own AI code generator that lets me build all my SaaS products, no code tools and AI agents. And it works extremely well. I think AI in coding is probably the best application of AI in the modern days. And then I use AI a lot for design. I make all my logos with AI. I make all my images with AI. So basically I don't use designers for most of my work. And then I use AI for research. In the past, I would hire people and I would give them research tasks. But now I just go for O3 research mode or growth research mode and I give it a task and then it spends like 10 minutes and then I have perfect table with all the data I need. And then I use AI for marketing. That's where I gain the most profit from AI, I think, because marketing is consuming a lot of resources. Otherwise, so I use it for SEO. I use it for generating emails. I use it for copyrighting and generating ads and everything. So basically I generate everything with AI. Then I use AI for operation. So I built one tool called Nova. So it's like a project manager or AI and it manages all the projects I have with the co-makers because they have a lot of co-makers and this AI is just taking care of all those processes. Well, on that note, we'll talk about some more tools. Tell me about what kind of tools and languages are you using on a daily basis? What are your favorite tools? What runs the business? Yeah, so I use JavaScript and Tailwind for coding. And it turns out that AI is perfect for these two. Then I use GROC for learning. So if I have a question, I ask GROC because GROC has connection to real time tweets. And that's where all the best data is, like all the best content is on Twitter. And then GROC has access to that. I use Discord for chats and for project management. And then I use Apple Notes for writing. I tried everything that's complicated. And then I went back to Apple Notes. And then I use Cloud and Gemini and OpenAI APIs inside my tools. It's kind of a race where every month I keep switching between them because one model is better at this month than the other model. So I use all three of them at the same time and then let users choose. The AI tools are pretty expensive to run. For example, in SEO bot, we have around 70% margins. So we make 100k a month and then we pay 30k for APIs. And then in non-AI tools where the costs are pretty low, I have 90% margins. The main cost for a unicorn platform, for example, is support agents. And I have humans doing that. And I like to have humans for that because AI doesn't have the soul. So people don't want to chat with AI. They just ask questions and they leave. But when you have humans in support, then people might just start chatting about random things and create this relationship. So I think I want to keep human support for all my products. Well, on that note, I think what's cool about your story is you did VC. You had an exit even. And then you also did solopreneurship. You've done both. You've seen both. So tell me about some of the differences between VC bootstrapping and what you think the future of startups are. In the VC world, I think people have to understand the game. And I did not understand the game. I was all about building great products, making happy users. But the game was about exit. So everything has to be optimized for an exit. In the bootstrap world, it's totally different. We optimize for profits rather than for the next funding round. In the VC world, you pay for growth. In the bootstrap world, you want to have product-led growth. In the VC world, you have many people working for you and you want to grow the headcount as much as possible because that increases your valuation. And in the bootstrap world, you want to cut the headcount as much as possible. Ideally, you want to be a solo because then there are no costs at all. OK, on more of a personal topic, I would love to learn a little bit more about what your life is like. What does a day in life look like for you? I live in a forest and I have no social life. I have family and children and animals. So I wake up in the morning, I go outside, I take care of animals. I change their water, I bring them food. I cut some grass, I do some exercise outside. And after one hour, I come back and I work for five hours. Then my kids come from studying and then we spend time together for two, three hours. Then they go to sleep. Then I go back to work for another five hours. Then I go to sleep at 4 a.m. And I wake up at 10 a.m. So I sleep six hours a day and it worked well until now. But now I feel like I have to sleep more than that. Cool. Wow. That was not the answer I was expecting that you're on a farm. But I love that. What is something that you learned in your journey that surprised you or you didn't expect? So the first time when I seen Build in Public, I thought it's all about marketing. So people do that to get more eyeballs on their products. And that's free marketing. And that's true. But I realized that even bigger value of Building in Public is that you build up a direct channel with the audience and the users that helps you to build great products. Before Building in Public, my failure rate was really high. 90% of the things I've done failed. And when I started Building in Public, it flipped. So now only 10% of my products fail and 90% don't fail because I adjust them before I ship them just because I'm Building in Public. Cool. I like that. Last question that we asked, that we asked all founders that come on Starter Story, if you could stand on John's shoulders when you were getting started with that first bootstrapped that ended up becoming in your whole portfolio, what advice would you give him or anyone building SaaS getting started today? The most important thing when you build a startup is the idea and the founder idea fit. So people start looking for random ideas and random spaces. And I think that's wrong. I think people should try to build something they understand. In my case, I went into the extreme and I built things for my own work. And that's something I understand really, really well. But I think people should build for their own work. They should solve their own problems. And I'm sure at any job in the world, there are hundreds of things you can solve with software. So don't go too far. Don't look for random things. Just look around you and see what are the pain pints in your job. Founder market fit, build something that you are passionate about or you have some expert knowledge in and you have such an advantage and such a head start. I love that. Thanks for coming on the show, John. I love what you built. 26 businesses, 3 million ARR is amazing. It's only going to keep growing. I'm out of stoke to watch your journey. Thanks for coming on and sharing all that. Thanks for having me. What I think is probably the coolest part about what you built is how all your different apps kind of all work together. That kind of cross selling and cross promotion thing. I see a lot of people building lots of different things that are unrelated. But what I think really works for him is that every app he builds kind of compounds onto the next one. But it all starts with actually building something, building that first idea and then doing that over and over and over again. So shameless plug. I would love if you checked out Starter Story Build. It is our platform to teach you how to build startups, apps and projects with AI tools. I'll put the link in the description for that. If you're serious about actually building something in 12 days, you will take an idea to a real ship product that can actually have users. And I think that's awesome. Thanks guys for watching. I'll see you in the next one. Peace.
