How This Business Generates $50K/Month Building MVPs For Non-Technical Founders

Ayush Singhvi

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Published: November 4th, 2022

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Ayush Singhvi

Founder, Byldd

Founders

Employees

Byldd

byldd.com?utm-campaign=starter-story

from New York, NY, USA

started February 2019

Founders

Employees

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Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?🔗

My name is Ayush and I’m the founder and CEO of Byldd. We’re trying to democratize software entrepreneurship by making it easier (and less capital-intensive) for non-technical founders to start software businesses.

Our approach is to build very focused revenue-generating MVPs for bootstrapping founders. We define an MVP as the least complex product you can build, that solves a problem well enough that customers are willing to pay for it. Once they manage to get that revenue, we help them take customer feedback, analyze it and use that to drive further product development.

I started this as a side project in 2019 with one engineer and now we’re a team of 35 people and making over $50K MRR.

What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?🔗

Before Byldd, I spent a lot of time at early-stage companies in different product roles ranging from junior developer to senior engineer and eventually CTO at different early-stage and scaling companies.

One of the biggest problems I’ve seen founders, especially non-technical founders, struggle with is building version 1 of their product - whether that’s by bringing on interns, outsourcing development, or by hiring in-house developers. In almost all cases, the founders end up paying too much for something that just didn’t work right.

No market need is the biggest reason startups fail. Founders typically end up paying upwards of $50K for a product without knowing whether the market cares for it. It’s especially rough for non-technical founders and founders working full-time jobs - they don’t have the ability or bandwidth to build a low-cost MVP themselves and run viability tests.

This is the problem Byldd was created to solve - we help founders build products that are just good enough to generate revenue. We aim to solve the problem just well enough that customers are willing to pay for it. We then take those customers, build a feedback pipeline and use that feedback to drive further product development.

I’ve realized that most of the features any software product needs are standardized. By and large, most of the functionality that goes into building a scalable SaaS product is boring and standardized.

Take us through the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing your first product.🔗

Our starting story is a little weird. I had been thinking about solving this problem for a while when a friend approached me asking to build version 1 of his food delivery platform. I was working a full-time job at the time but decided to take it up anyway. I hired two engineers in India and spent my nights and weekends building the product and training them. In parallel to working on the project, I built the first version of our IP - a tool that wrote code for us. It formed the base of what we have now and it’s what allows us to charge the low prices we do now.

One of the things I’ve realized in my career is that most of the features any software product needs are standardized. Don’t get me wrong - there are always unique features that are different from any product. But, by and large, most of the functionality that goes into building a scalable SaaS product is boring and standardized. For example, you’re going to need administrators to be able to manage users on the platform. That means, having multiple tiers of permissions, being able to activate or deactivate users, and charge/refund payments.

That’s the first thing we tried to automate with our IP. Now, whenever we start a new project, all we need to do is check a box and all those things are ready to go out of the box. Most startups would have to custom develop that and it would take maybe 100 developer hours - which is 2-3 weeks. With Byldd, it takes nothing. In that vein, we kept on developing our infrastructure and automating the code for more and more common functionality.

It took us nearly 8 months to launch that first product when we didn’t have our tools. These days, it takes us less than 30 days to launch a similar product.

When you’re starting out, direct sales is going to be difficult. You generally won’t have a reputation, reviews, or other things that inspire trust. It’s incredibly difficult to run ads or direct outreach campaigns when you’re handicapped like this.

Describe the process of launching the business.🔗

I quit my job in Feb 2019 and started working on the business full-time. At that point, we didn’t have a website and we had one client, a friend, from which we were earning a total profit of $150 per month. That’s how we started - and I come from a product engineering background. I knew nothing about sales, outreach, or how to grow a business. I spent my time trying to bridge that gap and figure out how to get our first customers with no referrals or reviews.

Needless to say, it was incredibly difficult. No one trusts another agency. I spent months sending cold emails and trying to partner with VCs and Angels so that they would refer clients to us. I tried to learn from the best - reached out to mentors at different established businesses in New York, and read a bunch of books like Spin Selling and Crossing the Chasm - both great reads, by the way.

One of the best books (more like a series of long articles) was Pete Kazangy’s Founding Sales. It’s from a founder who was forced to move from engineering to sales to ensure his business survived and it is a wonderful, actionable read.

We caught our first break when a VC decided to take a shot with us and referred us to one of their clients. It was our first ‘real’ customer project worth 27K after negotiations and discounts. I was elated and still, even with the way we accelerated our development, we barely broke even! Over time, it worked out - they’re still clients today and we are helping them scale their business to the next level.

Over time, we came up with a more standardized offering that was a balance between what we wanted to earn and what customers were willing to pay for. That was the 10-15K range for the MVP of a product. Instead of focusing on bells and whistles, we helped founders focus on the problem they were trying to solve and build a product that was just good enough to sell to their first customers.

It was entirely bootstrapped - I wrote the copy for our first landing page myself and got someone to implement HTML/CSS design for $100. Eventually, we migrated over to GhostCMS and had our in-house team design the website. Until very recently, I still wrote all the copy for our landing pages, blogs, and other marketing material.

One of the things I’ve learned is that not all money is good money. We’ve had opportunities that were potentially lucrative but would have required us to hire the talent we couldn’t use elsewhere or would otherwise distract us from our goal of automating MVP development.

Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?🔗

Sales are about trust. It doesn’t matter how cool your technology is, business won’t happen if there isn't mutual trust. When you’re starting out, direct sales is going to be difficult. You generally won’t have a reputation, reviews, or other things that inspire trust. It’s incredibly difficult to run ads or direct outreach campaigns when you’re handicapped like this.

I would advise that you do things that don’t scale and try to build relationships and partnerships with people who have already earned the trust of your target community. Leverage those relationships through referrals or paid partnerships to help inspire trust in your early customers.

There are an infinite number of development agencies around the world of varying levels of quality. You have to find a way to stand out and focus on solving your niche's problems. In that sense, the most successful companies are the ones that create new markets and dominate them.

For example, one of my biggest sources of inspiration has been Shopify. Their tool allowed millions of people to be able to start a side hustle doing what they loved. These people didn’t have the financial capacity or knowledge needed to start an eCommerce business - Shopify made it possible to do it in under 10 clicks. They created a market from this audience and they’re doing incredibly well because of it.

Another valuable lesson when it comes to launching is that you will not find a product-market fit on day 1. “Build it and they will come” is not a marketing or sales strategy. You have to rely on your relationships - build them, provide value, and then people will trust you enough to give you business. In that regard, your approach to sales has to be highly personalized to the people you’re trying to do business with.

Once you have some business you can showcase, then you can think of running ads. You have to set up SEO - you can either do this yourself or hire an agency to take care of it. For high-ticket products or services requiring personalized proposals, your landing page has to serve two main purposes - to clearly explain what value you will bring to your customers and to establish trust so that they would want to have a conversation with you.

There are lots of resources that teach you how to find the best medium to reach your target audience. For us, it was actionable keywords on google related to MVP development and starting up. When they got to the website, our goal was to have them trust us enough to want to have a conversation.

We’ve just started running ads - almost all of the business we’ve had so far has been through partnerships and referrals. Our immediate goals would be to aggressively optimize our landing page to maximize conversations with potential customers.

How are you doing today and what does the future look like?🔗

We’re profitable and looking to scale up. We’re getting very close to a team structure that’s scalable and once we feel comfortable taking on new projects, we’ll restart our marketing efforts. At this point, we’re focusing on getting domain authority, ranking relevant topics on Google, and building partnerships with VC firms.

We’re a team of 35 people right now doing about 600K in ARR. We’re looking to hit 100 team members by the end of next year with $1.5MM in annual revenue. One of our biggest bottlenecks is sales - right now, I’m the only person handling sales on the team. We’re looking to hire someone with technical sales experience and create a sales team so that we can bring on more clients.

Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?🔗

It’s much better to risk losing a good candidate than to risk hiring a bad candidate.

One of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned - especially when it comes to hiring - is that culture fit is incredibly important. You cannot teach cultural fit and it’s never a good idea to hire someone whose values don’t align with yours. Hiring well is expensive. Let me rephrase that - hiring well has a high upfront cost. Hiring cheap has a higher lower upfront cost but is more expensive in the long run - for both your wallet and mental health.

If you see a red or yellow flag in an interview, you should immediately probe more. If at the end of the interview, you’re still not convinced that this is the best person you’ve interviewed for the role, then it’s much better to risk losing a good candidate than to risk hiring a bad candidate.

What platform/tools do you use for your business?🔗

We have a lot of tools on the technical side - we use Bitbucket, Google Cloud, Slack, AWS, and Shortcut. On the product side, one of the best tools we’ve ever seen is fullstory. This lets you see, in real-time, how users are interacting with your product. We recommend them to all of our portfolio companies. For marketing, we’re pretty simple - we use Google Analytics, Fullstory, and Ahrefs.

What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?🔗

The Lean Startup embodies our entire philosophy for MVP development. That book is filled with great actionable advice and tricks of the trade to help you get up and running.

The Idea to Startup podcast (and Tacklebox Accelerator) is an excellent resource for people who want to test whether their idea has legs - especially if they’re working a full-time job.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?🔗

Running a business has a lot to do with momentum. Starting out is going to be the hardest part but when you get that wheel turning and that flywheel effect going, all subsequent steps will only make it easier and add to your momentum. Hang in there.

Running a business is also incredibly difficult. You need good, smart people around you. Hire well. Trust your instincts.