David Lo Dico

I built your Startup Championship 🏆 → trustmrr.com/championship Countries are ranked by the revenue their startups generate (verified with Stripe).

@s4rah_dev Im almost done with the best tattoo simulator. My brother has a tattoo studio so he is going to be rocking it.🙂

Started working on an app in August. Never mentioned it anywhere, never posted it on Twitter, no SEO, only used Facebook ads Today it reached $1,000 MRR 💸 It's pure B2B for an industry I know nothing about = 10x harder/slower than anything I've done before (and I hate it), but still a nice win. Here is how I did it from zero: 1️⃣ Interviewed someone from the industry. This is the #1 essential part, without this I would NOT have been able to do anything 2️⃣ From the insights I got from the interview, I created a "good enough" MVP 3️⃣ Made the guy try it, he loved it it. Ok, maybe I'm into something 4️⃣ From the interview notes, I created a laser-targeted landing page and ads. Ads were super basic. No video, no fancy stuff, just simple image ads. This only worked because I knew exactly what wording to use with the audience 5️⃣ Prolem: I had no purchase data, so can be hard to ask FB to optimize for it. So I optimized for signups instead. Lower quality but easier to optimize for. 6️⃣ Started to get a ton signups for cheap. But they didn't know how to use the app and left. So I tested different onboardings with TestIt.so until I found one that worked 7️⃣ Now I had users using the app, but they weren't subscribing. So I added a special free trial offer in the onboarding (stole the idea from @timb03). Started to get free trials. But churn was super high, the app was not that good for a broader public yet. 8️⃣ I started asking for feedback, offering demo calls and added every single feature users requested even if they didn't subscribed. The churn got low enough to allow growth. I kept improving until the app was really good for users (90%+ satisfaction rate for active users according to my FeedbackWidget.co survey) 9️⃣ MRR slowly went to $1,000 (VERY VERY slowly, some weeks I would lose $100 MRR, others gain $150) There is no magic trick or hack for this one, just making what people want, driving traffic to it and improving. And some luck Now, I kinda hate working on this project because: - ⏰ This is pure B2B with long sales processes - 🤔 I don't know the industry and can't even use the app myself - ☎️ Lots of users want a call before buying (and I hate calls) - 💻 Lots of users are NOT tech-savvy - 🏘️ They have teams of 10-20 people and need special infrastructure - ❌ Users never reply to me, getting feedback/testimonials is insanely hard From the little feedback I have, I made a better product than VC-backed competitors with a team of 30 people... ...but not being an insider in this industry + no sales team = Playing in hardcore mode 🙃 (For ex, competitors easily find customers in industry salons for free, and I can't do that) In terms of costs, I reinvested every $ into ads to grow it. I don't need the $ for now, so I would rather speed up the growth VS cashing out the profit. I also tried Google Ads but competitors are burning VC money so costs are super high. Started doing a bit of SEO but the audience is not tech-savvy so there is very little keywords. Competitors' name have higher search volume than all other keywords combined lol The amount of effort I put into it is way higher than the results, but makes sense since I started from zero. Not sure what to do with it next. Will see how it goes now I crossed the $1,000 MRR mark. TL;DR: Lower churn, increase revenues