How I Grew My Plugin to $12K/Month | Starter Story

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1:09

My strategy is simple. I turn customer pain into contents.

1:25

This is Vikash, a guy from India who built a simple piece of software that makes $12,000 per month. But what's way more interesting than that is how he finds customers. He's not going viral or chasing TikTok trends. His approach is much smarter than that.

1:29

I create content for one specific problem for one specific customer.

1:43

So I brought Vikash onto the channel to break down his entire playbook. And in this episode we'll dive into how to find business hiding in plain sight. Why chasing views and impressions is a complete waste of time. And his three step playbook on what he would do if he had to start over today.

1:47

These don't get a lot of views, but they convert and bring us customers every day.

2:03

All right, let's get into it. I'm Pat Walls and this is Starter Story. All right, real quick before we get into the episode, Vikash is about to break down his entire marketing strategy. But it's important to Say that all of this started with a simple idea that solved a very painful problem. This story that you're about to watch will prove to you that there is no such thing as a problem that's too small. If you have even a tiny idea and you don't know where to start. Well, after you watch this video, I have something for you that will help you get started right now. I'll talk more about that a little bit later, but for now, let's dive into the episode. Vikash, welcome to Starter Story. I'm excited to have you tell me about who you are, what you built, and what's your story.

2:07

I'm Vikash. I built a Photoshop plugin called Bulk Mockup that brings me $12,000 a month. I'm excited to share my content Flywheel growth marketing strategy with you today.

2:43

Okay Vikash, there's a bunch of cool stuff going on here. We got YouTube, we got plugins. Before we get into all that in this really cool kind of system and framework you have for getting customers, I want you just walk me through what does your business do, how does the business model work, and if you can pull up some of your revenue screenshots, I'd love to see them.

2:53

So the product is very simple. Mockup creation process is a manual job that takes around 30 to 1 hour. Our plugin helps the customer convert it into 2 minutes. The business model is quite simple. We have a Photoshop plugin customer find us through YouTube. They purchase the Photoshop plugin, run it through Photoshop with their mock up template and they pay us monthly for that service. This is my Gumroad dashboard and these sales data are from last year. So I've been consistently hitting around 12,000 13,000amonth.

3:09

Okay Vikash, before we get into your strategy, how you get customers and how you found this idea, let's talk about your background. How do you get to this point?

3:34

I started doing freelance work on Upwork and Freelancer.com these were all Photoshop jobs. So one day I saw a project where a client wanted to automate some part of Photoshop. I did not knew how to do it. So instead of skipping the job, I told the client, let me figure this out. So I went into stack Overflow and learned JavaScript in one day. And by the end of the night I hacked out a Photoshop script that did the job and then it became an internal tool for my freelance gigs. I saw clients they wanted to hire virtual assistant to create mockups for their print on demand store I applied for such a job. It asked me to create 1,800 mockups. And he was expecting, I'll take maybe three or four days to complete that job. The whole 1800 mockups got done under 30 minutes. The customer was stunned. He asked, how did I do it? Hey, cannot explain. I just, you know, give me $300 and I'll give you this. And without giving any second thought, the customer wired me $300. And at that moment I realized I'm onto something. And that is how Bulk Mockup was born.

3:42

That is an amazing story. I love to hear that businesses started on platforms like Upwork or Fiverr because that's a place where there are so many business ideas hiding in plain sight. So many people needing jobs done, having to automate things. There's so many ideas on these platforms and it's just super cool to see someone who's built an amazing business that started there. So you so find the solution on Upwork. Just kind of this random script that you're able to run. But then how did you turn this into an actual business or product that you could sell even though you didn't have any technical experience?

4:38

It did not start as a SaaS at all. The first version was a hacky Photoshop script. I started selling it as a one time fee and soon realized that it cannot be defensible. So I logged myself into my room for two straight months and put that Photoshop script into a very bad UI UX product. The logic was messy, but somehow it worked. I did not know how to do license validation or user management. And because of that I had to sell it as a one time fee. So for a couple of years I sold it as a lifetime deal. And once I had enough funds, I went ahead to Upwork and hired a developer that helped me to polish the product and bring it to what it is today.

5:10

Okay, so you learn how to build this, you sort of hack this together. You figure it out. A lot of people watching this can do the same, especially with AI tools nowadays. But what I want to talk about more is the business. You got this business to $12,000 mrr. And I'm sure it didn't just come from building something, it came from growth and distribution and focusing on customers. You shared something really cool with me, which is your sort of flywheel or how you think about finding customers. Could you explain that to me and how it works?

5:44

My growth or marketing is what I call a content flywheel. And the fuel of this content flywheel is customer pain. So I Discover customer pain. Create content around that and that content attracts new customers. For me, that leads to a discovery of new problem and then it's feedbacks entirely into my new content. Again, I create YouTube videos that solve long tail customer problem. My videos do not get a lot of views, but they they are solving a real pain a customer is having. A customer watches that video, he finds that solution, he trusts me and then he purchases the product. You do not need to get a viral video to be successful at marketing your product. A simple video that solves a customer pain is what you need.

6:09

Okay, I love this concept. Building content based on customer pain. I'd love if you could show me a real example of this. These YouTube videos that you create, what do they look like, how did you create them and how much revenue does a video with a few hundred views actually drive?

6:45

I'll share two examples. The first one is this video split the design manually and automatically in Photoshop. So if you look at the view count, this sits around 370 views in past four months. But I have had three customers out of this 370 views that $15 a month multiplied by three $45MrR just from one video. And then I have another example. This video hits on the higher view. It has 12,000 views in last six months. And this video has amounted to $213 in the last six months. Every video is an asset for me. It goes there, sits on YouTube, on Google and brings me customer every month. Creating the video is very straightforward. I do not care about introduction, having a very good setup. Just record the solution and that's it. People love when you speak to the problem directly, kind of. You do not frame it as a YouTube video or a video that goes viral.

7:00

Okay, cool. I love these examples. Obviously they just have a few hundred views and each video leads to a few hundred in revenue. But compounded over time, you have all these assets on YouTube that solve legitimate problems that people are searching for. And this compounds. Right. This is going to keep growing, which I think is super cool. And I'm a huge fan of YouTube obviously. So that's why I've been really excited to bring you on the channel. My next question is, let's say anyone watching this wants to build their own SaaS or their own plugin or just some sort of software. What's your whole playbook from start to finish on how to sort of implement this marketing flywheel.

7:45

So this is my three step process for my content flywheel. Step one, collect customer pain. I do not brainstorm content Ideas. I harvest customer pain and I have four touch points to harvest the customer pain. The first touch point is I go into communities where my customers hangout. I silently go there and I read through those conversations. I make a list and see if there's a pain that is being repeated day after day. If I fail, I start a conversation there to get more context into the problem. I never sell on the communities. Touch point number two is onboarding emails. So once a customer signs up on our services, I send out an email to my customer. Do you want any custom tutorial just meant for you. And we have a lot of good tutorial ideas submitted by the customers and it exactly speaks a long tail problem the customer is facing and what is their confusion Then touch point three is our customer support. If you go into our website and look at our reviews, we have more than 100 five star reviews and most of the reviews talk about customer support. That is because we treat customer support as an education channel. Whenever a customer reaches out to us to get help on their problem, we directly ask them send us your file. We will record a custom tutorial or custom loom video for you. And at times we also get on a call with our customers and we walk them through their workflow and solve the problem on the call. We record all this conversation and over the span of three years we have over 1,500 recorded videos. Videos and these videos are gold mine for us. People talk about the real problem, the edge cases that never come up in search, keyword results or anywhere. And we create content around those support calls. And the fourth touch point for harvesting customer pain is YouTube comments. I go to my niche, find out videos that has not high views but high number of comments. High comments signals customer pain which is unresolved and then make a list of all the objections that the customers have and then I simply create a better content around that answering all those objections.

8:16

Love about Vikasha's story is that his app solves a tiny problem. And in my opinion these are the best kinds of apps. The ones that solve one problem for one very specific type of customer. And thanks to AI, apps like these are getting way easier, faster and cheaper to build. But what's still missing is the roadmap for how to do this. How do I find a good idea? What AI tools should I use and how do I get this in the hands of real customers quickly? Well this is exactly why we launched Starter Story built inside Starter Story Build. We will give you a plan to follow for building your first app. We'll teach you how to find good ideas, what tools to use, and how to build and ship your app. In just a few days, thousands of people have joined Starter Story Build and are working together to launch their first apps with zero coding experience. So if you're ready to build, head to the link in the description and use the code tiny at checkout for a special deal. That's t I n y tiny. Our next bootcamp starts very soon, so if you're ready to build, let's get started. All right, let's get back to the episode. Okay, so four different ways to find customer pain. It's crazy to see there are so many business ideas hiding in plain sight. Not just content ideas, but business ideas. You can find business ideas by going on YouTube comments and seeing what people are saying. It's absolutely insane how it's all there. Okay, so you mine this customer data, this problem data, this pain data. What do you do next?

10:06

The next step is creating content. Creating the content becomes very easy because all the customer pain are from real conversation. So when I start creating content, I kind of understand who the customer is, what's their problem? And the third step of the strategy is distribution. Before publishing, I run through a checklist. I want that video to be not only serve a YouTube audience, but sit there as an asset. So I figure out an SEO angle to it and I optimize that video for search and ranking on Google. To rank a blog content on Google, you have to have authority, backlinks, and then you get the first ranking. But a lot of people do not know that if you create a YouTube video with the same search intent and optimize that for Google, your YouTube videos will rank. And 22% views on our YouTube channel comes from Google search. The optimization is very simple. If you know on page SEO optimization, have the keyword in the title, in the description and first 30 seconds of your transcript. So this is how my distribution works, and this is the whole strategy that I use to get customers.

11:22

All right, well, thank you for sharing that, Vikash. What I think is really special about what you do is that you actually talk to customers. You get on support calls, obviously, just to be helpful and have great customer service. But also it's just this amazing opportunity to find content ideas. I think a lot of people watching this and a lot of people that I talk to, they want to sit there and they want to code all day and not talk to customers. Obviously, the classic startup advice is talk to customers. Talk to customers. Talk to customers. This is a great example of this and a cool way of how you have sort of turned talking to customers also into this amazing marketing flywheel that's helped you built this amazing business. So I think that's super cool. I want to switch topics a little bit and have you give me a demo of your app. Can you show me the app that makes $12,000? Mrr.

12:21

So this is Photoshop and this is my plugin bulk mockup. I'll show you a quick demo. I have set up my files into three folders. These are mockup templates of a woman wearing wearing a T shirt. And then we have our design files. These are 10 design files and we have five template. We want to add this design file in on those template and create mockup. So 5 template 10 design that is around 50 mock up. If you do it manually, it may take you 30 to 40 minutes. We have three folder set up PST template folder. Browse and select the template and browse and select the design file. That's it. I'll put this side by side. You can see how fast it is. So I'll click on start generating and the magic will start. It will open the template, it will start adding designs. So we have 50 mock ups in just maybe one minute. I guess if a customer had to do it manually, that would have taken somewhere around 30 to 40 minutes. So that is how bulk mockup works.

13:02

If there's any way to boil down a good business idea is does your tool make people more money? Does it save them more money or does it save them time? For anyone watching this, that's a great way to think about, hey, do I have a good business idea? Well, this is a great example of something that saves you time, saves you a lot of time. If you're doing this sort of specific thing inside of Photoshop, which is super cool. I want to change the topic slightly and talk about tech stack. What tools did you use to build this? What tools do you use now? What's the tech stack for your app?

13:51

So I use Komodo Dex. It's a loom alternative to record all the tutorials for my customers. I got it very cheaply on Appsumo lifetime deal for $19. Then I use Boldesk. It's for my customer support ticket management that cost me around 15amonth. Then I have Senja to showcase reviews on my website. I use Zoom for the support calls that cost me around $20. Then obviously I pay for Adobe $40. Then I discovered Boromi. It's a screen recorder that I have Been using to create YouTube tutorial videos and then Notion is $12 a month. It has all the content system and then I use cal.com that is $0 for scheduling calls.

14:18

Okay, well thanks for sharing that. Lots of cool tools. Last question that we ask all founders who come on Starter Story. If you could go back in time and talk to Young Vikash before you had this successful idea, before you grind in on upwork finding business ideas, what would be your advice to Young Vikash or anyone watching this that wants to do something similar?

14:54

Similar? I have two advice. The first one is do not ignore your health. I had been grinding 14, 16 hours a day in my past and that resulted in a spine surgery last year. So if you are grinding hustling, please do not ignore your health. And the second one is be obsessed about your customers problem. Listen to them create solution. The solution could be a product, a video, anything. Just be obsessed with your customer's problem.

15:11

All right, well thanks for coming on and sharing everything. Sharing those YouTube videos and the whole business you built. It's amazing. It's going to keep growing, I think and be huge. So thanks for coming on and sharing.

15:32

Thank you Pat. Thank you for having me.

15:42

Okay, Gus, producer of the Starter Story channel. What'd you think about this one?

15:44

Man, that was awesome. It was just cool to hear about his system. That's what I was most impressed by. I've heard of like Content Flywheel before, but it was really down to earth and practical, like how I find comments and then how I turn those into videos. Something you said during the call was like a lot of people are afraid to talk to customers or kind of hear from customers. That really stood out to me.

15:48

Hope people will see when they watch this is that by talking to customers you are accessing this multi million dollar gold mine of information. You're crazy to not talk to customers. Like imagine all of the ideas and marketing and content you get just by having one conversation with one customer. Well, I made the classic mistake where I didn't really do that for a long time. And once I started doing that, once I started just getting over my fear of talking to customers and talking to people, then everything changed. Then revenue went like crazy because then I understood the uncertainties, the pain, the struggle of the customer which helped me create better content that sort of address those things or was what they were looking for. I can just remember very specific months where I said, okay, I'm just going to talk to customers. That's all I'm going to do. And I Can't say enough how much that impacted me, which is why I wanted to make this video. Are you actually talking to customers? Have you talked to these customers? Because I think everything will change when you do. The other thing that I thought was a little bit of secret sauce that if you're watching at this point, then you're in the right place. Google SEO is like sort of struggling a little bit right now. He had a little hack that I think that works for him is actually people are still searching stuff for a Google, but Google is ranking YouTube videos highly. If you search something in Google search now, what Google does is they will rank videos first because they know that people that are searching want to watch.

16:07

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17:26

Video tutorial on how to do something in Photoshop. They don't want to read a blog typically. So by creating YouTube videos, he's catching people on YouTube search and Google Search and that's like a tiny little hack that maybe he didn't even realize but is super, super big. Yeah.

18:24

And then just the last thing. The product is so niche, right? It's like a plugin for Photoshop for Etsy sellers.

18:37

Yeah, yeah.

18:44

And when he showed the demo, I was like, this is clearly awesome. You've talked a lot about, like building pointy feature apps kind of thing, and that was really cool to see.

18:45

You can call it micro SaaS, you can call it one feature apps pointy Features because it does just one thing and does it very specifically. I think that's a great place to start. Rather than building a SaaS that boils the whole ocean, is you build a SaaS that does just one very, very basic thing. Like we did this interview with someone recently who just has an app that uploads bank statements and then converts the bank statement, right? So I think that's a great place to start. If you are looking to start and build something similar to that, you should definitely check out Starter Story Build. We will walk through the process of finding an idea, specifically one potentially with a pointy feature, building it and then getting it in the hands of real users, just like Vikash did, talking to those users, and then building something potentially even bigger. But starting simple. That's what Starter Story Build is about. I'll put a link in the description. You can get started right now and build something and have it in the hands of real users, thanks to AI in just a couple of days. So check that out. I'll put the link in the description. Thank you guys for watching. We'll see you in the next one. Peace.

18:53