From 0 to €4k MRR and an unexpected exit.

How I bootstrapped two Twitter products in 12 months and sold them.

This issue is about my recent journey of bootstrapping two SaaS products on the side of a 9-5 job. I’ll cover how I found the product ideas, how I validated them, and why I had to sell them both.

The context

At the beginning of 2021, I launched my first SaaS product iterspace.com on Product Hunt and got only 70 upvotes. That’s when I realized for the first time, that I needed an audience, I decided to build an audience on Twitter, and until today, I never stopped being active on the platform.

Having an entrepreneurial mindset means spotting pain points everywhere. After 6 months of using Twitter professionally, I discovered that a powerful tool, Direct Messages, was lacking many features. And many big accounts were suggesting using DMs to create meaningful connections.

At that time (end of 2021) Twitter had a huge ecosystem of custom applications. The platform was open to developers, and many indie hackers were building Twitter-related applications.

So I decided to build something but around an uncovered space: DMs.

Product #1 Hivoe.com

💡 The problem to solve

In the beginning, Hivoe was just a simple feature, a welcome message DM for new followers. The idea was to use automation to kickstart meaningful conversations with people interested in your journey, understand the content they were interested in the most, and double down on it.

And finally, grow your audience while making good connections.

✅ Validation via MVP

I wasn’t very good at validating products at that time, but I built the smallest MVP possible for an automated welcome message DM for new followers.

I started talking about it on Twitter, I had around 5k followers. The main validation was given by a user who asked to pay for the service, even if I hadn’t integrated any payment processor yet. I integrated Paddle in a couple of days, and allowed him to pay — that was a good start!

That product was hivoe.com which then turned into a cold outreach platform for Twitter (welcome message DM, cold DMs, giveaway automation, integrations, and so on).

📣 Marketing

As a person with a technical background, I suck at marketing. But in this specific case, the fact that I was active on the same platform the users would use, made a difference.

I had a Welcome Message DM for my new followers, and most of them asked how I was automating it — with Hivoe of course!

I launched on Product Hunt, this time with an audience supporting me, and it was a success: 356 🔺votes and 5th product of the day.

I launched a guide about launching on Product Hunt, and the guide contained tips and tricks about how to use Hivoe to launch effectively (I strongly recommend it — get it for free).

I did a giveaway for a guide about generating leads on Twitter using Hivoe, and Inboxs.

The main source of traffic was Twitter, and it was working very well.
The amount of traffic generated was not huge (~3k unique visitors per month), but products that facilitate lead generation are a goldmine because every business struggles with it.

Product #2 Inboxs.io

While using Hivoe to send a lot of DMs, I noticed that the messaging experience on Twitter was very ugly and painful.

Compared to other platforms, like Telegram, it was (and still today is) missing tons of features to let you be productive in messaging privately on the platform.

Therefore I thought why not build something better?

I coded a POC (Proof of Concept), just to verify the technical feasibility of the solution. It was doable.

However, I didn’t want to build the SaaS MVP without validation.

This time I used a pre-launch!

With this technique, I saved time and collected money, while validating the product idea.

I explain to you how I was able to sell 20 licenses in 7 days, and 50 licenses in 2 months, collecting ~$3,000 in the process.

✨ The Pre-launch

The first step I took was to create a landing page on which I could showcase my product and offer a lifetime deal. I used a combination of visuals and text to explain why my product was unique and why customers should buy it. I was careful to make sure that the page was easy to understand and navigate.

🎟️ Offering a Lifetime Deal

Initially, I thought I would collect emails from people interested, but I needed a stronger signal that only a purchase could provide (money involved, the best validation).

So I offered a lifetime deal for $69.99. This was an attractive offer as customers would be able to use my product indefinitely, instead of having to purchase a subscription. I also included a money-back guarantee to increase people's confidence in my product.

I used Twitter (again) to showcase the product, with one tweet every day for 7 days, showing a feature or problem solved.

The results: 50 licenses sold in 2 months, ~$3,000 collected — this was the validation I was looking for!

I wrote a more in-depth article about the pre-launch.

🕺 Going live

With that validation, I focused on coding. I built the first version in a month and invited the LTD users.

I got mixed feedback from them. Users looking for a better messaging experience were a bit concerned because, due to some technical limitations of the APIs of Twitter, the messaging experience was not exactly real-time.

But another set of users were excited: people using Twitter DMs to sell their products and services (coaches, copywriters, freelancers, and so on) — so I doubled down on this use case.

I added many productivity features like tagging, quick replies, follow-up reminders, AI replies, and profile notes.

So far, the product has been growing steadily, with Twitter as the main source of traffic.

🎭 The Twitter drama

As you may have heard, between 2022 and 2023 Elon Musk started being interested in buying Twitter, the social network you probably love.

And that happened. I don’t know if this was a consequence of the deal, but Twitter announced they would have added pricing to access the Twitter APIs (that had always been free until then). They unofficially anticipated $100/month.

Expensive for a subscription, but still affordable. Most of the indie hackers with Twitter products thought it was annoying but still ok.

But the reality revealed to be completely different.

The $100/month plan was announced in March 2023, but with very low API access and restrictions, basically useless for most of the products.

And the upper-level access is… the Enterprise plan worth $42k/month (yes, it’s not a typo, forty-two thousand dollars per month!).

The community of makers was completely shocked.

🤓 (Almost) happy ending

Being part of the Twitter indie hackers community means that over time you’ll make a lot of connections. During that period, I joined a Slack community of makers struggling like me.

There, one person from an established Twitter scheduling platform contacted me to potentially buy the two products. And we started a negotiation.

I knew that it would have been difficult, I didn’t have negotiation leverage with Twitter closing down all apps that don’t migrate to the Enterprise plan.

Usually, SaaS evaluations are calculated this way (simplifying).

Annual recurrent revenues (ARR) multipled by a factor between 3 and 5.

In my case, in a normal market situation.

€4,000 x 12 x 3 = €144k

Of course, it’s not the money I received, but I sold them for much less 🥲 (I can’t tell you how much exactly).

🐢 What’s next

I sold the two products around June.

But even before that, considering the big threat, I started building another product.

3 months later, I’m happy to announce Userdesk.io

It’s an AI Chatbot platform, trained on your own data (Notion, Google Drive, websites, PDF files) that replies to the user questions like ChatGPT.

It’s a completely different market, and the Twitter growth loop is not working in this case, but I’ll work very hard to grow it to the MRR necessary to make a living out of it.

I’ll be launching it on Product Hunt on the 2nd of November and I’d love to receive your feedback — if you want to, set the reminder! 🗓️

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This issue was a bit long, and I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it for you.

Please, let me know what you would like to read on these pages by replying to this email 🙌

Or contact me via X / Twitter @ikoichi

Cheers,
Luca