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Meet Louis, a dude from India who spent his nights and weekends building projects. But after failing with 15 of them, he decided to try something different. I started building at noon and I wanted to know if I could take an idea all the way to revenue before midnight. I shipped his next app in under 12 hours, posted about it online. And to his surprise, it worked. All I did was just build and f**k. That app now makes $15,000 a month. When I got my 20th paying customer, I knew I was on to something. Most people waste years building an MVP that nobody ever sees. But this story proves that you can build something successful in less than a day. It's never been easier or cheaper to build a product on it. All right guys, real quick before we get into the interview, I think this story is amazing because he built this whole app in a weekend. We're going to get into all that, but I do want to show you 100 more ideas that you, yes, you can go build this weekend right now. I put a link right down there in the description for you to download it. Okay, let's jump into the interview. All right, Louis, welcome to Starter Story. Tell me about who you are, what you built and what's your story. My name is Louis. I'm a solo part-time indie hacker and I built Audio Pen in about 12 hours. It currently makes about 15,000 a month. Okay, you built it in 12 hours. That's crazy. We're going to get all into that. But first, I want to understand what is Audio Pen? Is it an app? SaaS? What is it? Audio Pen is a B2C SaaS product. It's a voice to text AI tool that lets you go from fuzzy thought to clear text very, very fast. It listens to you and then transcribes what you say. It then takes that transcription and transforms it into a writing style of your choice. It works across languages. It works on mobile. It works on desktop as well. Some folks use it just to capture ideas on the go. People use it to capture meeting notes. They use it to combat writer's block. And Audio Pen currently has about 200,000 users with over 5,000 paying customers. So there's a free version that gives users a taste of the product. And then there's a paid version. I currently sell the paid version at $99 a year or $159 for two years. Both are non-recurring subscriptions that users have full control over and can choose to renew at the end of their term. Okay, before we get into how you built this in 12 hours, I want to understand a little bit more about your background. How do you even get to this point? I have a full-time job where I work with my family business in the offline world. So a completely different side of my life. And I dabbled in the no code space back in 2015 when the tools were very early and not as powerful as they are today. But in 2021, while working with the family business, I decided to get back into the internet world. And I discovered bubble. I built a bunch of tools, probably 15 to 20 tools, most of which have failed. And Audio Pen was the first one that succeeded and made a decent amount of revenue to bring me to a place where I can rely on it today as a solid source of secondary income. Okay, so let's dive into that for a second. You built this product in half a day. No, it didn't make $15,000 a month overnight. But the core product, the core MVP was built in about 12 hours. Can you break down for me how that was even possible and how you did it? Back in 2022, I started a hackathon online called Half Day Build in the building public space on Twitter, where a bunch of us from all over the world would come together one Sunday, join a Slack channel or a Discord and decide to build products independently with the goal of going from idea to MVP and revenue within 12 hours. So we'd all started known and we tried to get to at least a dollar by midnight. I was getting frustrated with the number of products I had built in the past and with the low success rate that I had. So I decided one day to just build a bunch of tiny tools on my own personal website and host them on the homepage there. I built, I think, four or five tools that week. While I was building it, I just kept sharing them on Twitter. And Audio Pen's MVP was one of those five tools that I built. It got a lot more love than I expected it to get on Twitter. So I figured, you know what, I'm getting some signal here. Some people seem to find this weird product that I've built useful. So I said, what the hell, let me just build a full version of it, put a price tag on it and see what happens. And I definitely think there was a large portion of luck. In fact, one of the principles I try to go by is very often you will not know what will work. And the cost of experimentation is so low today that you might as well build a bunch of things and see what sticks and then double down on them. So you could say that I was lucky because Audio Pen clicked, but I had also built, you know, 15 or 20 things before that. So I was bound to get lucky at some point. Louis's story is amazing, right? Shipped in 12 hours, customers on day one, and now he's making over $15,000 a month. But here's something you had to figure out once the revenue started coming in. The actual business side of things. Invoicing customers, tracking expenses, managing cash flow, all the stuff that has nothing to do with building your product, but is very important. Well, that's exactly why we are excited to partner with Zero on this video. Zero is a cloud-based accounting platform for small businesses like yours. It handles your invoicing, bills, payments, all in one place, so you can get paid faster and stop worrying about messy spreadsheets. Millions of businesses around the world use Zero because it actually automates the bookkeeping side of things, so you can focus on what matters most, building and shipping. And right now, you can get 90% off Zero for six months by using the link right down there in the description. So if you're building something and you want to focus on shipping instead of bookkeeping, check out Zero at the link in the description. Thank you to Zero for partnering with us on this video. All right, let's get back in the interview. Okay, so you kind of posed a bunch of different tools. One of them is clearly getting validation and you said, okay, I'm going to take it to the next level. How do you actually build it, launch it and monetize it and then grow it to 15k per month? The first thing was I got signal from people. I DMed them. I was like, okay, why do you like this thing? A few people explained to me what their use cases were. I figured out, okay, fine, I can design something for these use cases. Step number two was just sitting down in Figma and designing. Prior to the 12 hours, I went to Pinterest. I got inspiration. I figured out what I wanted the app to look like. And then by the end of the hackathon, maybe about 10 hours in, I launched a waitlist for people so they could sign up in advance before the tool was ready. Got a bunch of people to sign up for it. Before the 12 hours was up, I started getting a bunch of strike notifications from the early beta testers that had just signed up for the product. And that was pretty wild to see. It was totally unexpected because I hadn't asked them to pay for it. I had just asked them to test the product. They already had access to everything that was on offer. And if I were to think about why that worked at that point, I think there were a few things that came together well for me. Of course, the product was hitting a need that I didn't know people had. Secondly was I had a certain level of credibility on Twitter because I had been out there building in public for a few months or maybe a few years at that point. I also think I managed to build enough hype prior to this product before I even built the product. And lastly, I think I had other people that were cheering me on as a part of this half day build community, which also really helps because people like to see other people that trust you before they make a purchase decision. Okay. I mean, this is an amazing story. And I think a lot of people watching this are wondering how can I also build apps fast like this? So if you were to start over today knowing what you know about how to build quickly and validate ideas quickly, what would be your playbook or framework for starting over? I think step one for me would still be what I did back then, which is just build a bunch of stuff, test ideas just for fun. So build small things that you can shut down without any negative consequences to the users. Step two, I would say design something before you build it. I know it's very easy today to just prompt an AI tool and tell them to just build a product, but it's very difficult to figure out what design will work and design today differentiates a product and it takes way longer than you expect. So figure out exactly what you want thing to look like, why you want it to look like that, and then share those designs with the world if you can. So like step three would be build in public, tell people what you're building, tell them what it will look like, see what they like about it, see what they don't like about it. Perhaps if you're seeing a lot of people resonate with what you've built, spin up a quick email list, even if it's just a simple Google form, and then step four for me would be just launch the simplest version of your product. Try your best to launch a product that doesn't look amazing if at all, but does the job that it is expected to do very well. And then keep raising the price as you refine the product, but just launch it as early as you can. My last piece of advice would just be if you're an indie hacker, behave like one, don't try to sound like a big company. People really appreciate seeing another human that's building something useful. They appreciate your story, they appreciate the effort that you put into crafting a product, and I get complimented regularly by users that one of the reasons why they like audio pen is because they like that. They've been part of my journey as a builder for the past couple of years. So leverage that as an indie builder. Don't try to be something that you're not. Alright, well thanks for sharing that playbook. We haven't really talked about it yet, but I'd love to actually see your app, how it works and what it does. Would you be able to show it off? Yep, I mean, it's a pretty simple app. All it has is a big record button in the center of the screen and a bunch of notes on it. All you do is you just press that big button and you speak for as long as you want. And the app for Prime users allows you about 15 minutes of recording. And when you're done recording, you just press the end recording button. A bunch of styles will show up, a bunch of languages will show up, a rewriting level will also show up. You can select what you want, get a verbatim transcript if you wish, you can get something that's more concise if you want, and then you just tap on what you want and wait. Give it a couple of seconds and then it'll just give you the finished product. There you can see it. A simple note that you can then share, take whatever you want, do whatever you want with it. So free users just get a taste of the product. They have a shorter amount of time that they can't record for. Premium users get a whole lot more. They have everything from writing styles to longer recordings to integrations with other apps and a bunch of other features. Okay, cool. So I'm sort of wondering right now what a lot of people are watching this wondering is why is your app making $15,000 a month when there's probably a bunch of other tools that can do this? And maybe a bunch of those tools maybe don't even make anything. What's special about your app and why do you think it was successful? I think one thing that definitely worked for me was that I was very early. When I started the app, there weren't these many products of this type. But Audio Pen focuses on doing one thing very well. A lot of the other apps try to do too many things at the same time and end up getting distracted. And that's a problem that I faced. I've been very, very tempted to expand into adjacent markets just because apps there were doing very well. But I've consciously stuck to doing the simple stuff well. I think that's low consistency is what has worked for me. I think that's so true. Do one thing and do it really, really well. I like this idea of pointy features where you have an app that just does one thing and it does it really, really well. If you can just focus on that, you can do it so good that you differentiate yourself from other apps. I'll put a link in the description right now of our database of micro SAS ideas similar to Audio Pen. You guys can download that for free right now. There's a bunch of ideas in there, including Audio Pen, which is one of our case studies from Starter Stories. So you can check that out and download it if you want. Okay, let's switch topics a little bit. I know you built this by yourself. How do you actually build apps and what do you use? I use Bubble for my web app costs about $130 a month. Zeno for the back end and logic costs about $260. Draftbit costs about $300 a year. That's what I built my native app with. Loops, which is my email platform, costs about $800 a month. And possible analytics is surprisingly cheap at $19 a month. The biggest costs are of course API costs. It depends on what sort of API you decide to use, but that differs from month to month. Okay, cool. Well, thanks for sharing that being transparent about the numbers. Last question that we asked everyone who comes on Starter Story, if you could go back in time and give young Louis advice on what not to do or what to do, what would be your number one piece of the dice? Just build many things for fun because you will have fun while building those things. You will learn a lot of stuff while building each product. Most of them will fail. It happens to all of us. The moment one looks like it's not failing and it seems to be resonating with someone, double down on it. Eventually something will click and all your failures will be forgotten by the rest of the world. All right, well, have fun. That's great advice. Thanks for coming on, Louis, and sharing everything about your business. I think what you built is awesome. The fact you did it in 12 hours is amazing. So thank you for sharing. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. If you made it this far, I'm assuming you are ready to build. So I want to give you a special gift, which is a discount to our next Starter Story bootcamp. Just use the code ready to build. That's ready. The number two and build. You can plug that into Starter Story build and get your special offer. All right, guys, I'll see you in the next one.
