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Launched SaaS, $5K MRR, on the road to FASTLANE, at 22 y.o.

A detailed account of a Fastlane process...

Lukas99

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Jun 17, 2018
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Fellow fastlaners,

It's been roughly 4 years since I had read the Millionaire Fastlane . Since then a lot has happened;
I had launched my first small business (ScoopAid) - a massive failure, tried launching a t-shirt business failed, and last but not least,
I dipped into dropshipping (which in hindsight, went against all principles of the book).

So eventually I backed up. I sucked.

I joined a local tech company, as an operations coordinator, to learn the in and outs of the software. Eventually, I taught myself coding.

It started with small steps; console logging the first 'hello world', then creating a simple todo list, transitioning into web apps and integrating simple APIs, then eventually learning the in and outs of databases and backend code; creating the first full-stack app (which ironically was a todo list as well), eventually creating an accounting software, which I had been using in my day to day work, as an operations coordinator at the tech company and ultimately, seeing a need from our marketing team within the very company, I've been working at.

This journey has led me to launch copykatAI, a web app that helps digital marketers, create awesome copywriting effortlessly, using artificial intelligence.

I'm close to 5k in MRR now, after roughly a month of (silent) launch, but of course, I'm not yet on the Fastlane, but slowly getting there. :smile2:

By the way, since many of you have your own business [REMOVED]could actually be useful for you. So in case, some of you decide to give it a shot, I'll double your free trial sessions, just quickly drop me an email [REMOVED]

[REMOVED]

Anyways, back to execution. I wish you all a sunny day! :smile:
 
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Thurlam

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wow, this puts into perspective how much I gotta get my shit together. I secured a degree in computer science half a decade ago (and I considered myself reasonably talented at it), but due to reasons I basically stopped doing any coding since then, and as a result I definitely couldn't pull off what you've done here. I'm so out of the loop I'd barely know where to begin, but I suppose that's what Google is for.

Anyway, congrats on your success. Keep it up.
 

luckyrice

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Sep 30, 2020
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Fellow fastlaners,

It's been roughly 4 years since I had read the Millionaire Fastlane . Since then a lot has happened;
I had launched my first small business (ScoopAid) - a massive failure, tried launching a t-shirt business failed, and last but not least,
I dipped into dropshipping (which in hindsight, went against all principles of the book).

So eventually I backed up. I sucked.

I joined a local tech company, as an operations coordinator, to learn the in and outs of the software. Eventually, I taught myself coding.

It started with small steps; console logging the first 'hello world', then creating a simple todo list, transitioning into web apps and integrating simple APIs, then eventually learning the in and outs of databases and backend code; creating the first full-stack app (which ironically was a todo list as well), eventually creating an accounting software, which I had been using in my day to day work, as an operations coordinator at the tech company and ultimately, seeing a need from our marketing team within the very company, I've been working at.

This journey has led me to launch copykatAI, a web app that helps digital marketers, create awesome copywriting effortlessly, using artificial intelligence.

I'm close to 5k in MRR now, after roughly a month of (silent) launch, but of course, I'm not yet on the Fastlane, but slowly getting there. :smile2:

By the way, since many of you have your own business, copykatai could actually be useful for you. So in case, some of you decide to give it a shot,
I'll double your free trial sessions, just quickly drop me an email (support@copykat.ai).

CopykatAI - Copywriting made easy, using AI.

Anyways, back to execution. I wish you all a sunny day! :smile:
Hi , great job! Did you also build your own deep learning /NLP model for the A.I aspect of your software?
 
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Branko

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Congratulations on your project Luckyrice! I want to be where you are soon :)
 

MJ DeMarco

I followed the science; all I found was money.
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Any details you can offer the community?
Can you answer questions about your progress?

Your first post about your failure was incredibly insightful.

For now, I removed your trial offer and the other "marketing" verbiage -- as of now, this just looks like a thinly veiled advertisement. Obviously if the tone changes on the thread, we can add it back.
 

maikooo

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Amazing - congrats - following! You might want to post it on indiehackers for more leads!
BTW - the feeling of succeeding after the fails is something out of this world!!
 

maikooo

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Hey @Lukas99 - if you can share - how much are your OpEx (operating expenses) in regards to paying for the NLP/AI API calls? PM me if you only want to share in private ... thanks
 

MJ DeMarco

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how much are your OpEx (operating expenses) in regards to paying for the NLP/AI API calls? PM me if you only want to share in private ... thanks

Doesn't look like we're going to get anything actionable/insightful here other than pats on the back and gold stars -- in other words, this post was a veiled advertisement. Would love to be wrong...
 
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maikooo

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Doesn't look like we're going to get anything actionable/insightful here other than pats on the back and gold stars -- in other words, this post was a veiled advertisement. Would love to be wrong...
I do hope you are wrong and he is just executing! I am very curious how much he is netting on those $5k MRR ...
 

MJ DeMarco

I followed the science; all I found was money.
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I do hope you are wrong and he is just executing!

I'm sure he is executing, as well he should.

But this post rang more like an advertisement rather than something the community could learn from.

In other words, it appears that the motive wasn't to share anything that might help someone along on their own journey, but to advertise and get more business. I don't mind advertising in a thread if the user genuinely is establishing a dialogue and being responsive to questions. He posted this, left, and never returned, never addressed one question.

Believe me, I'm terribly happy when someone succeeds and says they read my book years ago- but it gets a bit annoying when people just "drop-by" to share their success with us but don't provide any usable information, or worse, just ignore every question.

This is the second such "success story" in so many days that the person really didn't share anything, other than a desire for (I'm guessing?) likes and comments.

If I'm being honest, it is frustrating to me, and I'm sure, MORE frustrating to those who are still trying to find their entrepreneurial groove.
 

Lukas99

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Jun 17, 2018
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I'm sure he is executing, as well he should.

But this post rang more like an advertisement rather than something the community could learn from.

In other words, it appears that the motive wasn't to share anything that might help someone along on their own journey, but to advertise and get more business. I don't mind advertising in a thread if the user genuinely is establishing a dialogue and being responsive to questions. He posted this, left, and never returned, never addressed one question.

Believe me, I'm terribly happy when someone succeeds and says they read my book years ago- but it gets a bit annoying when people just "drop-by" to share their success with us but don't provide any usable information, or worse, just ignore every question.

This is the second such "success story" in so many days that the person really didn't share anything, other than a desire for (I'm guessing?) likes and comments.

If I'm being honest, it is frustrating to me, and I'm sure, MORE frustrating to those who are still trying to find their entrepreneurial groove.
Hi MJ & everyone who took the time and replied to my initial post!

I've been busy executing.

So, apart from me just wanting to share my small success, it was of course a small marketing post. ;-)

After going through the replies, it seems that many of you are curious about AI. I don't want to go too deep into the AI model and config, but I can say the following:

-I've used a third-party AI
-I've added a lot of extra configuration to that model
-Added another AI model on top of it (custom, no third party)
-Been using stripe to handle payments



...and now back to execution :smile:
 
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Lukas99

Contributor
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Jun 17, 2018
4
39
wow, this puts into perspective how much I gotta get my shit together. I secured a degree in computer science half a decade ago (and I considered myself reasonably talented at it), but due to reasons I basically stopped doing any coding since then, and as a result I definitely couldn't pull off what you've done here. I'm so out of the loop I'd barely know where to begin, but I suppose that's what Google is for.

Anyway, congrats on your success. Keep it up.
Start by finding small problems (don't have to be unique) and try to solve them with code. Don't compare yourself with others, really. This will get you super frustrated. When I started at the fintech company, I barely knew what javascript was, I was a total noob. But that's completely ok. You gotta start somewhere and increase the difficulty gradually.

Of course, if you haven't coded in a long time, you might have to work upon some fundamentals, but since you've obtained a CS degree, that shouldn't be too hard.
 

poseidn

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seen a lot of these writing AI softwares pop up recently, not knowledgable in the area but isn't this essentially a more advanced form of whitelabeling software? In that you're essentially putting your label on someone elses software? Do you use gpt-3?

I would recommend you to be careful with this, building a service off the back of someone elses service is an issue - recently i had a part of my service that relied on another companies service/tech - changes to their terms and pricing structure completely wiped out that aspect. Although this had zero impact on my core offering, it's an example of the dangers..

Another similar yet different story, i used to have a side-gig where i would scrape snapchat usernames from instagram profile bio's, that were following specific pages (i.e i would scrape all snapchats of people following a car page) and then mass-add them on snapchat, essentially building niche snapchat accounts (10s of 1000s of views on story) - this biz model got wiped out over night when IG changed their API and limited some features. Case in point, building a business on someones other business, is fine to start, but you should be VERY mindful about what could happen.

I.e if you're using GPT-3 or some other AI code, if they block commercial usage? Or then make you pay X per request? Or something like that, i'm just spitballing.

Try to create as much 'custom' value as possible - if someone comes in the market, i imagine they could create your software with little to no issue very quickly (especially some college comp sci grad), but if you have some sort of custom value that is harder to emulate, you're in a better position when that does happen.
 

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