Life Of A Tech Entrepreneur: Making A $150k Startup In 2 Months, $2k In A Week, And Much More

[ueki94]

I'm creating this thread to keep a journal of my daily work and to connect with new, awesome people who are into the world of startups.

I knew I wanted to be rich since 14 years old, around that time I realised no one would get rich following the rat race, so I started researching by then how to make money online (as it is a global market, I knew the money to be made was much higher than creating a business in Portugal (Where I live)).

I first got my feet wet at 16 years old, through internet marketing, by then I had been researching around 2-4 hours a day on SEO, Adwords, Affiliate programs, etc.
I struggled a lot at first, since I had no credit card to pay for anything online.
I made my first dollars through PPD (Pay Per Download), I still remember the joy I felt when I finally withdrew the money, that moment I realised making money online was a reality, forever changing my path.

At 19 I finally realised that even though money could be made through internet marketing, the big money was on creating startups and business, so I rapidly changed my mindset, started gathering ideas and reading as much material as possible (The Millionaire Fastlane was the first business book I read).

My fist venture was Chicklopedia, an app where guys could rate their hook ups.
I got this idea from Lulu, which serves the exact oposite (girls rating their hook ups), not going to say that my goal was not to make money (being a member on various teen/young adult forums, I saw a big demand for this product), but my intent was to show the world the "double standards" of feminism.

Website Pictures
http://imgur.com/XY2eSCv
http://imgur.com/MTZjMZS

App Pictures
http://imgur.com/GLacX6D
http://imgur.com/fYRwR4t

Investors, Buyers, Etc
http://imgur.com/QJChd6C
http://imgur.com/xECIKan
http://imgur.com/Pjpi3Mu
http://imgur.com/x0MDD0E
http://imgur.com/kqiXjrI

I programed the app in 2 months, on the first 5 days of launch we had 3k users, 2k facebook likes, $150k valuation and around 50 investors wanting to get in on it.
Unfortunately, facebook poped our bubble, on our 7th day of release, by creating a new rule which prohibits the rating of people who didn't opt-in the app, and we had to take our app off the store.

It was tragic to spend 2 months executing our plan, only to have everything crumble down.
Fortunately, that didn't stop us from moving forward.

Currently we're working together on a new app which will revolutionize online anonymous chatting.

We searched reddit for common problems with chatroulette/reddit and worked really hard to find all possible solutions to those problems.

We're really confident we have solved most of the problems their users face, our app will allow gender neutrality (no more nexting 10 guys just to find a girl), allow users talk to whoom they find interesting, no more nudity, and have the possibility for users to access the app through both mobile and web.

I will use this progress thread to document updates on everything, from entrepreneurship to coding.
I'll write a post every day, detailing what was done, what needs to be done soon, and what I learned that day.

Thank you for reading!

 

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[DKNJ]

I wish I had tried getting out of the rat race at the same age as you. I knew I didn't want to be a part of it but didn't follow through.

 

[ueki94]

I wish I had tried getting out of the rat race at the same age as you. I knew I didn't want to be a part of it but didn't follow through.

Forget the past, only the present moment matters. srs.

Start taking action now, and never stop.
You'll get to a point where taking action is just second nature.

From then on, nothing is easier than taking action.

 

[Phillipbro]

I heard about this app a few months back while browsing the bodybuilding forum. There was a bit of controversy surrounding it as well. It gained traction pretty darn fast, so hats off to you for that.

How did you manage to get so much people talking about your app so quickly?

Best of luck on your upcoming goals.

 

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[GuestUser152]

Looking forward to following this thread... I do have one question:

Did you do anything to solicit these inquiries from investors? How did they learn about your app / know how to contact you?


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

[HD_edacity]

Did you do all the programming and design yourself, or did you outsource part of it?

Either way that's dam impressive...Zuckerberg started off with a rating site as well

 

[BlakeIC]

I heard about this app a few months back while browsing the bodybuilding forum. There was a bit of controversy surrounding it as well. It gained traction pretty darn fast, so hats off to you for that.

How did you manage to get so much people talking about your app so quickly?

Best of luck on your upcoming goals.

The misc is a powerful place






not really

edit: aware

 

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[ueki94]

I heard about this app a few months back while browsing the bodybuilding forum. There was a bit of controversy surrounding it as well. It gained traction pretty darn fast, so hats off to you for that.

How did you manage to get so much people talking about your app so quickly?

Best of luck on your upcoming goals.

Getting tracktion wasn't hard at all, we actually got the idea from bodybuilding.com, we saw there was a high number of threads talking bad about Lulu, and that something needed to be done.
Some event went as far as directly mentioning that a male version of the app should be created.

Having read The Millionaire Fastlane , I knew this was a good oportunity to solve a need and to offer value.

We did a small, 1 week validation/pre-launch marketing strategy, to test the idea.
We designed a nice landing page and made basic logo designs, this was enough to get around 100-200 likes and emails, just from 1 or 2 threads on the bodybuilding forum.

When development was finished, our strategy was to cause as much controversy as possible.
This was done through emailing big feminist blogs about how this new app could raise violence against women, emailing PUA websites on how this new app could be used to have a preview of the personality of the girls they wanted to meet, men's rights blogs on how we were contributing for gender neutrality between men and women, and of course, creating bodybuilding.com threads about how we were going to make the forum appear everywhere, especially on the news, if they helped us spread the word (I find they are very attracted to fame and power).

On the first 2 days, we had emailed 150 app review websites, about 50 blogs and 1k users who signed up on our landing page during our development.

 

[ueki94]

Did you do anything to solicit these inquiries from investors?

Yes, our main target was acquiring investment, we knew our project was too volatile so minimizing risk was our main priority at start.

Our strategy was being transperant, creating many threads on various forums (reddit, bodybuilding.com, etc) since the start of development, these threads talked about our vision, goal and our investment.

It's incredible how many people you can reach by forums alone, at the end of development, we where in contact with CEO's from big social media agencies, apps with 1 million+ downloads and even top social game directors.

 

[ueki94]

Did you do all the programming and design yourself, or did you outsource part of it?

Either way that's dam impressive...Zuckerberg started off with a rating site as well

Me and my team did everything.

My partners are 2 college students from my course (Computer Engeneering), and 2 college students from UK, who are masters at marketing.

 

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[100k]

That's some nice execution!

Rep'd ya!

 

[ueki94]

Thank you all for posting!

What was done today (Anonymous video chat website):
->Merged most layouts with client side code.
->Included Facebook login.
->Optimized video streaming.
->Created databases for friends and private messages (might be implemented).

What needs to be done:
->Some layouts still need to be altered and merged with client side code.
->Some app related logic still needs to be done.

How the landing page looks so far:
http://imgur.com/h0e4q4X

The project is still in a very early phase, I estimate we have about 1 month - 1 1/2 months till release, so I will be more open about the vision and how it works in about 1 or 2 weeks. (Still have some decisions to take myself regarding how it will work).

 

[GravyBoat]

Can't wait to see this, fanominal progress so far! It's a small world as I saw that stuff too

Best of luck!

Gravy

 

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[fuller]

I had no idea you were a fast-laner. I'm sad to see Chicklopedia go, it was probably the best idea Misc has ever come up with.

I actually stumbled across TMF because of the original thread. I started learning coding since I wanted to build cool apps like that. One thing led to another and I got my hands on a copy of TMF and now I'm here.

Good luck with your next venture, it seems like a great idea. And reps on sight for life

 

[ueki94]

I had no idea you were a fast-laner. I'm sad to see Chicklopedia go, it was probably the best idea Misc has ever come up with.

I'm actually stumbled across TMF because of the original thread. I started learning coding since I wanted to build cool apps like that. One thing led to another and I got my hands on a copy of TMF and now I'm here.

Good luck with your next venture, it seems like a great idea. And reps on sight for life

It's cool to see more miscers aiming big.

And don't be discouraged by that comunity, I actually read a recent thread where they were calling chicklopedia out for $150k valuation, saying the app wasn't worth that much because anyone could steal the idea , we had no revenue model or because they could do something similar with only $5k.

The truth is anyone can do a social network and steal facebook's idea, whatsapp has no revenue model, and anyone can pay a freelancer less than $5k to do a snapchat.

In today's technology market, valuations go way beyond simplicity, revenue models and development costs.

I could spend all day posting pre-launch startups who are worth 1 million+.

 

[ueki94]

And btw, if anyone in the misc asks, we still have our lawyer working on solving chicklopedia's problem (might get it back soon), and we gave back any money we had taken from investors.

 

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[Enki]

When development was finished, our strategy was to cause as much controversy as possible.
This was done through emailing big feminist blogs about how this new app could raise violence against women

You evil genius you

 

[ueki94]

What was done today (Anonymous video chat website):
->Merged the rest of the layouts with the client side code.
->Decided it's best to only implement the main functionalities of the app and let the user feedback guide us on future functionalities. (Features should be a complete reflection of the startup's vision, adding new features just because they seem interesting to you might be counter productive if they dont come from user's feedback).

What needs to be done:
->Some app related logic still needs to be finished.

 

[ueki94]

Our working prototype is finished.
My business partners are having a meeting with their mentor/investor next friday, we need to discuss with him the next steps we should take to execute the project.

Will be posting a big thread explaining the project in detail soon.

 

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[Toushi]

Very nice execution and a fair share of ingenuity in your marketing approach. If you don't mind me asking how are you handling the coding, are you a programmer? Could you go in depth about that from the perspective of a layman. Is it all outsourced, are they using any frameworks or scripts, is the backend in php, any good resources for ready made packages, etc?

By the way a good resource for making an app out of a simple website is appmakr.com a point and click software.

 

[ueki94]

Very nice execution and a fair share of ingenuity in your marketing approach. If you don't mind me asking how are you handling the coding, are you a programmer? Could you go in depth about that from the perspective of a layman. Is it all outsourced, are they using any frameworks or scripts, is the backend in php, any good resources for ready made packages, etc?

By the way a good resource for making an app out of a simple website is appmakr.com a point and click software.

Sorry for the late response, was busy the last 2 days making our y-Combinator application, wish us luck!

In terms of coding, I'm a programmer myself, I also got the best student on the course (4.0 GPA) to partner with us, we found that to take things as serious as we wanted, we definitely needed more coders.

We are generally very volatile, while our main programming languages are Java and C, we have found that different projects require different languages.

Chicklopedia had a php and sql backend, with a simple apache server.
Tickmatch (new project) has a javascript and mongoDB backend, running a node.js server.

It's very hard to do this stuff yourself if you're not familiar with coding, I would definitely recommend you to partner with a Technical Co-founder for your projects, as learning to write good code has a high learning curve.
Though, if you love technology and would like to be the one developing your products go ahead and invest all the free time you have, I suspect it will take you around 6 months to 1 year to be able to do complex things, if you spend most of your free time learning.

In terms of frameworks/scripts/packages, there is no magic pill, you wont be able to create a good application if you dont actually go through the process of learning to code, though you can create prototypes/landing pages with wordpress + custom templates, which will give you a design rich webpage to test your projects.

 

[Toushi]

It's very hard to do this stuff yourself if you're not familiar with coding, I would definitely recommend you to partner with a Technical Co-founder for your projects, as learning to write good code has a high learning curve.
Though, if you love technology and would like to be the one developing your products go ahead and invest all the free time you have, I suspect it will take you around 6 months to 1 year to be able to do complex things, if you spend most of your free time learning.

In terms of frameworks/scripts/packages, there is no magic pill, you wont be able to create a good application if you dont actually go through the process of learning to code, though you can create prototypes/landing pages with wordpress + custom templates, which will give you a design rich webpage to test your projects.

That's true, I also find the ready made CMS and other packages have no barriers to entry, which would make it near impossible to have something unique, even though you can still do a lot with them.

When you get the programmers on board, do you split the design and backend aspects? Do you work on the design yourself, or outsource that as well? There are frameworks in PHP that allow you to split those two up. Do you have each programmer working on different functions of the site at a time, how do you keep them from taking your idea for themselves? Do you find them on elance and odesk, or are these people you know? I guess you are a programmer yourself so you can check the integrity of their code, but if I wasn't a progammer how would I be able to tell if their coding is good?

Thanks for the help, it's just that most people's advice is "just outsource it," but they don't go into too much detail on the process.

 

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[Carrots]

Awesome thread. I'm surprised at the amount of awares on here

 

[ueki94]

That's true, I also find the ready made CMS and other packages have no barriers to entry, which would make it near impossible to have something unique, even though you can still do a lot with them.

When you get the programmers on board, do you split the design and backend aspects? Do you work on the design yourself, or outsource that as well? There are frameworks in PHP that allow you to split those two up. Do you have each programmer working on different functions of the site at a time, how do you keep them from taking your idea for themselves? Do you find them on elance and odesk, or are these people you know? I guess you are a programmer yourself so you can check the integrity of their code, but if I wasn't a progammer how would I be able to tell if their coding is good?

Thanks for the help, it's just that most people's advice is "just outsource it," but they don't go into too much detail on the process.

Personaly, I only went on board with my business partners because they had a track record of success and they would be doing all the marketing.

You wont get any decent programmer to join you unless you can do a decent job in another task (marketing, design, ...).

What we did was asign diferent tasks to each programmer, I coded the server backend, the two other coders did the android app.
If your goal is to make just a website, you can probably have 1 coder do the server and another do the client side.

As a programmer, I can say it's very rare for anyone to actually take your idea for themselves, most programmers can't market their software, plus no angel investor will invest in a team without a business guy.
If you actually take the time to talk to your programmers daily, interact with them, and make them see that working togheter is a win for both of you the chance of them stealing your idea is very low.

You should definitely avoid using freelancers, my advice is to look for a technical co-founder either on your social circle or online (if you can't find any motivated programmer).
Startups require continous iteration, you can't expect to have a perfect product as soon as it launches, and making updates when your programmer is a freelancer is very hard.

There are some people who take that route though, but be prepared to invest 5k-10k for a good quality app, plus recorrent payments for each update.

In terms of integrity of code, if you are hiring freelancers and have a technical co-founder, ask him to review the code.
If the technical co-founder is the one who is coding, just assume he is writing good quality code (intervine if competitors seem to have a better product).
If you are hiring freelancers and have no technical co-founder there is really no way to verify the integrity, all you can do is try it for yourself and compare it with your competitors.

As the market shifts more and more towards technology, it seems that the general consensus is also shifting, currently most startup accelerators/incubators reccomend having at least 1 technical co-founder.

 

[ueki94]

Awesome thread. I'm surprised at the amount of awares on here

We're all gonna make it!

 

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[tafy]

Im interested in how building your app in node.js will give you certain advantages, could you elaborate the advantages with node for your project?

 

[ueki94]

Im interested in how building your app in node.js will give you certain advantages, could you elaborate the advantages with node for your project?

Hey tafy,

Node.js is a framework to build web apps and api (connection between your database and other clients, ex: mobile app).
Amongst the most popular frameworks (Ruby on Rails, Django + Python, etc) it's the one which has the best performace, it is the most flexible (support's web sockets (used for real time comunication, notifications, etc), has better scalability and performance and supports semi structured databases).

All in all, each framework has it's strenghts, both Python and Rails are faster to develop, but as my project involves real time comunication between users it makes sense to use node.js.

The biggest advantage my app will have, over competitors will be webRTC though, most chats currently use flash as their framework, this is bad because smartphones stoped supporting it, webRTC will let me have a fully functional, cross-platform chat.

 

[Lawrence Barse]

I have a question,
did you release the Facebook App and then released the Mobile App, or did you release both the apps simultaneously.

I'm developing an app, and I'm thinking that I should release the Facebook version, just to make it go viral and then release the Native App.

What was your strategy?

 

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[gingerbreadman]

Sorry to be off subject a bit but Ive been wanting to start a mobile app/web app for quite some time. I've drawn it out using microsoft visio because its the best i could get my hands on to have something visual to show. My question is whats a good place to look for programmers in your area who want to start a business? I've looked into companies but its too expensive and would require constant updates which means more money. My last option is going to the local university and asking the professor for students they can think of or posting a flyer in the computer science building. I really want to get this started but I don't know how to code and would much rather split the idea 50/50 with someone who does and is willing to start a company.

 

[ueki94]

I have a question,
did you release the Facebook App and then released the Mobile App, or did you release both the apps simultaneously.

I'm developing an app, and I'm thinking that I should release the Facebook version, just to make it go viral and then release the Native App.

What was your strategy?

We released the beta version of the facebook/web app at the same time as the beta android app, and the full versions were all scheduled to be released at the same time (web+ios+android), but all in all it really depends on your situation.

We did it this way because our app was validated and we didn't want to get press without having all the versions up and running.

If your app is not validated I would advise you to release the MVP as soon as possible, and iterate from there.