From 0 to my first paying customer in 28 days

I am blown away that I can write this title.

I had to take a screenshot of the email I got from stripe

Over a month ago I was recovering from the failure of my first SaaS.

I poured my heart and soul into that project and it failed to generate money.

The saddest part is that something started moving towards the end but not enough to pay myself a salary.

I was also burned out by the entire industry I was in and I decided to move on.

A friend reached out, he wanted to start a consultancy business. I decided to join him to stop worrying about paying the mortgage.

We're offering cloud consulting services and MVP development for enterprise customers. It's a fantastic job with one downside:

I cannot use what I learned about building a SaaS. 

I spent so much time and effort learning how to get a SaaS off the ground. My new gig will not benefit much from those learnings and I'm afraid I'll forget everything I learned.

With that in mind, I decided to start something new. Besides my consulting gig, I decided to:

Create a SaaS from scratch, in public, sharing everything about the process.

I had several reasons to start this new public adventure:

• I wanted to put down "on paper" everything I learned, including lessons from my failures. Once written somewhere is hard for me to forget it

• I wanted to help people who are or have been in the same situation. I didn't know anything when I started so if I could help out at least one person then it's all worth it!

• I wanted to get feedback on my learnings. I could've learned the wrong thing and some feedback will go a long way into making sure that's not the case.

• last but not least, I wanted to see if I could do it. Check if I actually learned something.

As of today, 28 days after I started, I have my first customer.

In my first SaaS, it took me about 9 months to get my first customer.

This is HUGE progress.

Every single post is available for free on my newsletter. I went for a newsletter so that I could notify people when I had a new update. I think is better than blogging for engagement as they actively get notified of new updates.

Now that I have 1 customer I have a company. Now it needs to be a profitable company.

What's next

The sky is the limit!

From now on the main goal is to pay myself a salary.

Everything I'll do will have that as a goal.

To achieve that I won't be posting daily anymore. I have a few days off planned and then I'll change the frequency to once or twice a week.

But other things will stay the same:

• I still want to share stories, learning, and numbers in public. I'll use LinkedIn and X for this. On X I'll also post about some personal stuff like how I smash my gym workouts

• I still want to talk to people. I want to keep up the user interviews. I want to become an expert in the landing pages field. If you want to jump on a call, please let me know.

• I still want to help people. If you're seeing these posts and you're starting a company, let me know. Would love to help if I can

Let me share two final things:

• A TL;DR; on how I got from nothing to 1 customer

• Some numbers

TL;DR;

• I started a SaaS 2 years ago. I failed at making it take off.

• I was burned out and decided to move on.

• I started a consultancy gig with a friend but I wanted to do something to apply all my learnings and failures.

• I decided to live to share me build something new in public from scratch

• I had a problem in my previous SaaS: I wasted tons of time and money in creating landing pages that sucked. To make it worse, I wasted tons of money on ads that would send traffic to terrible landing pages.

• With that problem I started with a hypothesis: "People are willing to pay for a product that makes it easy to create high-converting landing pages."

• I did a few user interviews to confirm the hypothesis.

• After doing enough interviews I had enough confidence to build an MVP.

• I shared the initial MVP with a few people and I got positive results.

• I kept doing user interviews and developing the MVP in parallel.

• With the MVP ready I started looking for customers

• I booked 3 calls, 2 people who heard about my product on LinkedIn, and one from Reddit.

• All 3 had to cancel last week. I felt terrible that day.

• One of the people re-scheduled for today, we jumped on a call and decided to become a customer

The numbers

after 28 days:

• I have 1 customer. £10 MRR. I'm Rich now!

• The newsletter grew to 45 people. I promised I'd do a video with 50 push-ups if I'd reach 50 subscribers but it didn't happen. I'll still do 50 when that happens.

• The LinkedIn newsletter grew from 0 to 173 subscribers. Still can't believe that number.

• I've got 199 followers on X, and some genuinely incredible people started following me recently.

I want to tank from the bottom of my heart all the supportive people who encouraged and gave me feedback along the way.

You're absolutely amazing and I hope I'll be able to help as many people as I can in return.

If you have any questions, now or in the future, please let me know!