I built, marketed and sold a startup in 4 days — literally
How I made $1769 in 4 days selling 327 lines of code and won the Product of the Day.
Hey, listen!
Last month I built a Chrome Extension on a Thursday morning — I’ve never programmed one in my life.
On Sunday launched it on Product Hunt and won the Product of the Day.
On Monday, I agreed to sell it.
This is the story of how an idea:
1. Comes to your mind.
2. Execute it.
3. Ship it.
4. Sell it (if you want).
I came over visiting my family these days. I’m writing this after having lunch with my mom.
I should better hurry up, as it looks like showers are coming… 🌨️
Doomscrolling isn’t always bad.
Yes, I’m like you. I spend uncountable hours scrolling on Twitter — much more than I’d like to admit.
A lot of times I fool myself thinking:
“You NEED to spend a lof of hours here. No, you’re not wasting your time with this! This is useful to get inspiration, learn things and engage with others.”
Well, even most of times this is a lie to keep doomscrolling, on May 9th it wasn’t that case.
It was like 9 a.m in the morning and I was checking Twitter on my couch, after having breakfast — the tough life of an indie hacker 🙃.
There were a lot of memes those days about the Stripe’s Test card expiration date. Since the number is:
4242 4242 4242 4242
Developers usually smashes repeatedly the 4 and 2 keys typing 4/24 as card’s expiration date.
This was not valid anymore since May 1st and the community were making memes and jokes about that for days.
They were pretty funny for me, as it was something I was facing a couple months ago, while I was developing Stripe payments for WrapFast landing page.
While reading replies on one of those memes that morning, someone said that:
It would be nice having a Chrome Extension for that.
I made a quick search on Twitter and checked that there were tons of testimonials struggling with this. Neither I couldn’t find an extension facing this particular tiny problem automatically.
The bulb was lit 💡
I got inspired.
It wasn’t a waste of time.
A.I. is not your enemy.
Apple Artificial Intelligence won’t take your job: leverage it to be able to build whatever you want.
I hadn’t a single clue about developing a Chrome extension, so I opened ChatGPT and asked how difficult could it be and the steps that had to be made.
It turns out it’s just like developing a mini website —JS + HTML + CSS— plus a manifest file.
So, I thought:
The idea is pretty simple. I can pause everything I have ongoing and build this in a day with ChatGPT helping me.
I instantly throw away the iPhone, grabbed the MacBook and turned on the Full Focus Mode.
Before having lunch, I had already built the MVP with everything I needed:
Autofilling fields without any click, right away once the Stripe’s page is loaded.
Configure email
Configure cardholder name
It didn’t need anything else — it was perfect for solving that tiny pain.
Finally, as usual, I spent the afternoon adding things that weren’t necessary: a counter of the times filled, adding a bit of CSS to make it a bit less ugly and researching how to distribute it from the Chrome Web Store.
I paid the $5 lifetime license to release it on the Chrome Web Store, but the review would have take a couple weeks.
So, my first distribution approach was sharing the source code with a Google Drive link, and loading it in user’s browser with developer mode.
Leverage what you have lived through.
Marketing is a lot of times about storytelling.
About standing out over the rest.
About don’t bore people.
I could had named my product “Stripe’s Autofiller” or something like that.
But I’m sure it hadn’t had as half as the success I got.
Instead of that, I put my imagination to work.
I’ve always been a fan of the books and films saga “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy”.
As many of you may know, 42 is a pretty famous internet meme coming from this saga — and I’m pretty sure the test card number gets it from them.
Due to that, it’s also my second favorite number, after the 7.
Thus, I decided to name and brand my little product around this idea.
As the extensions behaves like a little bot, filling automatically the fields, I decided to name it:
Marvin — the depressed robot that stars in the books.
I already thought about the name while the idea came to my mind, but I expanded on it once I had to craft the landing page.
Shipping Fast ⚡️
As you may know, if you come reading this from Twitter, I’m a huge advocate of the Ship Fast religion.
I had already built two websites with the ShipFast NextJS boilerplate. So, I learnt some web development skills to craft a decent landing page swiftly.
I leverage all the prebuilt components of the boilerplate to focus the hard work on a good copywriting and branding.
I spent the Friday developing it: buy domain, setup DNS stuff, Stripe payments, MongoDB cloud database, all the branding, copywriting and storytelling, etc…
You can check the result at marvinbot.com — I think it’s decent enough for a day of work.
Funny enough, Marvin was quite useful while I was developing its Stripe payments. I had a bug on MongoDB and it wasn’t creating the users after the payment. So, I had to try payments tons of times until I fix it, using Marvin to automatically fill it 😂
Preparing a launch.
I took the Saturday to make and prepare all the Product Hunt stuff to launch it on Sunday.
If you don’t know when to launch, som pretty common tricks are:
Saturday or Sunday to fight for the Product of the Day badge. Less products on the weekends, less competition.
Monday to get more traffic. It’s more difficult to get a badge because there are more products launching. On the other hand, there are more visitors. VC startups don’t work on weekends, so they don’t launch on Mondays that often.
Remember to set your launch time at 00:01 PST: Product Hunt’s days start at this time, and the first hour are crucial for receiving votes. If you start later and miss those hours, it will be almost impossible to reach the top 5.
During the day I recorded the launch promo video, edited it, filled the PH page and prepare the launch tweets for the next day…
Ignition 🚀
As I said before, I scheduled the launch for 00:01 PST, which is Sunday Morning 🎵 in Spain (9:01 am).
I got the launch tweet with the video scheduled from the day before for that time.
The tweet performed pretty well since the first hours.
I got lucky and some huge indie hackers like Nico Jeannen and Marc Lou commented or even retweeted.
After that, numbers skyrocketed 🚀
After 4 hours, PH rankings were revealed…
I was number 1! 🤪
I couldn’t believe it!
My best ranking so far was #14 with my little app crAion.
I was talking to a friend that morning that I would be happy and super satisfied if I reached the top 10.
The #2 was pretty close, and it was an AI tool! 😱
So I spent the day stick to Twitter and PH page, to double down the efforts and keep replying to everyone and engaging as much as I could.
Spoiler: Marvin never left the first place 😎
Enjoying the victory ✌️
I woke up Monday morning with the best —yet predictable— news.
Marvin won the Product of the Day! 🥇
Incredible.
I never thought I would be able to achieve it, especially not with that tiny project.
So I leverage the success to make a cool video celebrating it.
Generating more engagement.
Spreading more the word.
I received tons of DMs, mentions, comments those days.
I felt like a little Twitter rockstar during 48 hours.
I cannot imagine how big accounts can handle such a huge engagement. I even felt overwhelmed some times.
But.
At some point.
I received a different message…
Ship fast, sell even faster.
I was selling Marvin at $4.20.
A low price tag, but also the product was a little thing solving a tiny pain.
At Monday’s afternoon, I had made about $60. Not a big deal but I didn’t pretend to become rich with it.
Then, I received a DM:
Matt was familiar to me, as I used to saw him on the ShipFast Leaderboard. But we never talked to each other.
In the beginning, I was thinking he wanted to buy a unit of Marvin.
But no, he want to purchase the whole thing 😮
I’m still a pretty noob indie hacker, so I didn’t expect this kind of situations.
Luckily, with Matt was quite easy to have an agreement.
We kept chatting over an hour and we end having deal shortly.
He acquired Marvin for 1500 euros
He planned to use it as a lead magnet (thanks to the 1st Product of the Day) to funnel visitors to his Niche Tools business. He also granted me access to it, as part of the deal.
The transfer was quite easy.
As we were both building in public on Twitter, we trusted each other.
I generated a Stripe link to send the payment, and as soon as I received it, I transferred to him the domain and GitHub repositories.
Make noise.
After that, I made a tweet announcing the acquisition, which supposed a lot of engagement and interactions.
Marvin’s sale made a lot of noise within the indie hacker community.
I was mentioned in The Morning Maker Show and Marc Lou talked about this in one of his YouTube videos.
In retrospective, that little idea, that came over to my mind while doomscrolling on the sofa, was a totally success:
I learnt things during the process
Earned some money
Gained recognition within the indie hacker community
Made a leap in growing my audience
Got my first PH badge!
Don’t overthink, just do it!
I made this SwiftUI boilerplate to build iOS apps FAST 👇
