Hi there!
In this post, I'm gonna share my recent progress as a solopreneur. This is an opportunity for me to take stock after 1 year on this road. I hope this can help fellow devs & indiehackers in their path and hopefully inspire some of you!
I'm Clément, I code since age 10 and I've been a professional dev for about 5 years. Until recently, I was a lead dev in a small French SEO-focused web agency. I eventually resigned, for several reasons:
- I wanted more time with my family
- work was boring (mostly WP stuff)
- I wanted to experiment with freelancing
- the company had management issues
Upwork
I started with freelancing. Usually, in France, freelance devs work with companies called "ESN" (ie. Digital Services Companies). Yet, these people have never wanted to work with me (mainly because: I live in the middle of nowhere, I don't want to work fulltime, I'm self-taught). So, I signed up to Upwork.
I quickly landed gigs there, and got some recurring customers, mostly working on SaaS projects. This was waaaay more interesting than my previous job. I eventually got me the "Top Rated" & "100% job success" badges along with a 5-star profile. Customers left very positive feedback, so it was very rewarding. Yet, after a few months, I stopped looking for Upwork gigs:
- the platform is very competitive, on an international scale. Prices tend to being squeezed.
- I had to spend too much time looking for gigs, applying, interviewing, just to land a few
- I wanted to build my own online business rather than building other people's.
Wandering in the dark
That's how I stopped being a freelancer and started being more of a solopreneur. At first, I had no strategy whatsoever, I started doing absolutely random things:
- a saxophone price comparator with affiliate links to Amazon (total revenue: $0)
- a WP plugin to batch publish content with CSV (never launched, total revenue: $0)
- a "MVP as a service" one-man agency (total revenue: $0)
These 3 projects have one thing in common: I did not do any marketing. Hey! I'm not a marketer, I'm a nerd. This is the famous "throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks" strategy at work. Well, nothing stuck.
Fiat lux
Yet, I eventually discovered Rob Walling's Youtube channel and binge-watched most of his videos. It has been very helpful. I even fed the transcripts of all his videos into an LLM just to extract all the SaaS ideas he has been given away. I really dig the "micro-SaaS" approach, and above all, the idea of building upon an existing platform:
1) Choose an well-established SaaS, preferrably in the B2B space
2) Make sure it has a "partner center"/"apps marketplace"/"plugin store"/whatever they call it. Basically somewhere the users can find and install 3rd-party plugins to the SaaS
3) Look in the SaaS community forum/Reddit/FB groups for users complaining about missing features
4) Pick one.
5) Build
6) Ship!
Basically, with this framework, you ensure you're building something for people who really need your solution and are eager to pay for it (they're already paying for the "main" SaaS, aren't they?), plus you have a solid distribution channel: Once your app is approved and published on the "marketplace", you can reply to the complaining users on the forum/groups/whatever and they'll even thank you for it.
You can build plugins for a wide range of softwares: MS Office, Monday.com, ClickUp, Canvas, Pipedrive, Hubspot, Shopify, WordPress, lo que se le da la gana! I went with Pipedrive (a sales-oriented CRM)
Pipedrive integrations
I started following this blueprint about 6 months ago and started building Pipelook, an Outlook integration for Pipedrive. Actually, I spent more time waiting for the marketplace approval than building the MVP. Because the app is both a Pipedrive app and an Outlook add-in, I had to get approval from both platforms, and Microsoft AppSource approval process is kind of a kafkaian nightmare (on the other hand, the Pipedrive team is very nice). In the meanwhile, I had set up a waiting list and started sending it to the users who needed this feature. By the time the app was published (at the beginning of April), I had about 20 people on the waitlist. I notified them by email and made my first sale the very same day.
This changed everything. I had made my first magic internet money. Now everything was possible!
Later, I tried running ads and do some cold mailing, but didn't see any significant increase in sales, so now I just let customers come by themselves. They need Outlook integration? They look me up in the apps marketplace and install the app, that's it. And I listen to them to make the app better. I consistently make sales and churn rate is quite low.
Want some tech details? OK. This is really boring stuff, I must confess: The app is built using Next.js (app router), PostgreSQL, Shadcn/ui and hosted on Hetzner Cloud using Coolify. That's it. No boilerplate, no deep tech, no AI. (OK, I used Dall-E to create the logo)
A few months later, I did it again. This time, I built a Dialpad integration for Pipedrive: Dialdrive. (Yes, I know, I'm very good at finding names 🙃). Again, the hardest part was being approved on the marketplace: the MVP was ready around June 15, and eventually published nearly two months later, at the beginning of August. I already made a few sales for this app too.
I'm not ramen-profitable yet, but revenue is growing steadily!
What's next?
Now, I've started building a Shopify app. It's nearly ready and should be published soon. Aaaand, I want to build a real, standalone SaaS. This one only exists in my brain so far, but it'll eventually come out! Stay tuned!
Wanna chat? Follow me on Twitter!
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