How My Side Projects Grew To Over 20K Users
Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?
Hey! I’m Rexan, a 16 year-old in my last year of high school from Hong Kong. I’ve built text-behind-image (textbehindimage.rexanwong.xyz), a free design app that allows you to put text behind images, and VideoFast (videofast.gg), a super easy-to-use online video editor. Since launching my startups, Today I bring in $200/ month and a combined 20k users/month using them.
I’m an influencer on X/Twitter, I share what I’m building. At the time of writing, I have 4.5K followers and over 2 million views on my posts.
How did you come up with your business idea?
My business ideas simply come from problems I face every day. I’m sure everything has its own day-to-day problems, and very likely others have the same problem you’re facing as well. The most difficult thing is identifying those problems, followed by building the solution to them.
There’s no secret formula or a list of billion dollar ideas where you can pick from. Once you identify the problem, it’s easy to build and validate the solution, because people want solutions for their pain - in other words, build solutions to pain points that you and others face.
My two startups, Text Behind Image and VideoFast were born from problems related to the complexity of existing solutions. Especially as a high school student where you don’t have much time to learn complex tools like Photoshop and Premiere Pro (a video editing software), I found pain points: Text Behind Image was ‘creating stunning text-behind-image designs is tricky with current tools,’ and VideoFast was, ‘creating and editing high-quality videos is tough with current tools’. The best part was these pain points were my own problems.
Since I have experience with coding and building software from past projects and hackathon wins, I try to think of software solutions to the pain points I identify. That way, good startup ideas can be born.
In terms of validating the idea, a thing I would do is ask people close to me - my parents and my friends - if they could resonate with the problem. If so, I will start building the idea. The most important thing you can do in validating the idea is to build the idea fast, and then ship it - that’s arguably the best way to validate ideas.
Give us a step-by-step process for how you built the first version of your product.
The process of building the first version of both my products was VERY different. I like to call the first version of the product the ‘minimum viable product (MVP for short).’ VideoFast’s, my first product, MVP took 6 months to build - not a good time to build MVPs. On the contrary, text-behind-image’s MVP took 3 hours to build, mostly with the help of trendy AI tools, which I will explain further. Both MVPs I built while behind a full time student in high school.
First I’m gonna talk about my entire journey of building the MVP of VideoFast. Originally, I wanted to finish building the app in a month or two, and given it was my first product, I wanted to launch quickly and see results. But because of two things: 1. I was a junior in high school with much schoolwork and exams, and 2. An MVP for a video editor is super difficult to build, I soon found out that it would take longer than expected to build the MVP for VideoFast. That’s why I decided to go onto X/Twitter to share progress and demos of what I was building, and I built a community/audience along the way.
So what I did for six months was keep coding and keep building - but instead of staying quiet until who knows when the launch day will be, I shared my progress online and made a lot of connections with CEOs and developers from top tech companies - all while being a full time busy high school student.
Text Behind Image’s MVP was very different. I used Cursor AI, an AI tool that helps you code to build the MVP. And in three hours, I already had a working prototype. This is really the pinnacle of moving fast, breaking things and launching fast.
In terms of the tech stack for both these projects, I use what I’m best at: NextJS + React + Typescript. I used Supabase as my database, and tailwindCSS + ShadcnUI for the UI to make my apps look nice and professional. And finally, I use Vercel to deploy them. The best part is when starting out, all these tools are free. All my projects are bootstrapped. Once my apps started to get traction and had to start paying for the usage of some of the tools I use for the apps, I used the revenue gained from these apps to cover the costs - most coming from monthly subscriptions. Now, I’m paying for only two tools: Supabase and Vercel.
My early tweets:
How did you “launch” the business?
When I launched VideoFast and Text Behind Image, I went on X. Because I spent so long building an audience by ‘building in public,’ it’s easy to generate initial traction for the launch. For text behind the image, my launch post got 300K views. I made sure to include the fact I was 16 (generates more impressions haha) and a clean demo of what my app does on the post. Because the X algorithm likes these things (especially linking videos on posts), I can get the maximum amount of exposure from the initial launch.
I’ve also tried launching on Reddit. I find that launching on r/sideproject was very effective, and some of my launch posts there have garnered 50K views without any sort of large following on Reddit.
A big part is launching on Product Hunt. I’ve launched VideoFast and Text Behind Image on there and it has got #2 and #1 Product of the Day respectively. For the Text Behind Iage launch, I even had Ryan Hoover, the founder of Product Hunt, repost my Product Hunt launch tweet which got 100K views. Product Hunt is by far the easiest way to get exposure for your product, no matter if you have a big following or not. I got 600+ users for my first product VideoFast on the launch day itself.
Marc Lou, a famous startup founder, has a good blog on how to launch on Product Hunt.
Each launch helps you get a larger audience (eg. X followers). As a result, the more you launch, the easier it will be. The most important thing I’ve learned is that you can never stop launching. Keep launching.
How did you land your first customers?
Through the launches, many users discover my product. Simply, the way I land paying users is built into the DNA of the product itself. I have a free and paid plan, and I designed it in a way where while using the free plan, the user can appreciate the product, but the paid plan can unlock some essential features that the user might need. Here’s the pricing plan for VideoFast as an example:
I got my first ever internet money a day after launching VideoFast - at 16 years 8 months 6 days old. That moment felt so surreal and I’m insanely grateful for all that has happened that has led me up to that point. I just became more obsessed with startups.
How have you grown your business?
I’ve grown my startups by constantly being active on X. Posting demos, interacting with others, keep launching on this platform, and gradually my audience grew. A few viral posts gaining over 300K views here or there helped build this audience, and I even got shoutouts from some of my biggest inspirations when I started out, such as Ryan Hoover (the founder of Product Hunt) and Steven Tey (popular former Vercel dev). Almost every single post I mention my young age - I think it’s important to highlight a special thing about you in your posts, as people will be intrigued. As of writing, I have 4.5K followers on X.
While your audience grows bigger and bigger as you promote your product as well, content creators from different platforms will share about what you are doing. Recently, an Instagram account with 600K followers made a reel about text-behind-image and it got over 500K views - check out the video here:
You’ll also get invitations to join podcasts or interviews. You can promote your product on those as well. I’ve recently been interviewed by Ishan Sharma, a popular Indian Youtuber with over 1.5 million subscribers on Youtube, about my journey - check out the video here:
This is founder first marketing. Build an online presence around yourself, and you can use your own online presence to promote your brand.
Give us a breakdown of your revenue & financials.
Currently, VideoFast has 1.6K monthly users and Text Behind Image has 20K monthly users.
Since launching VideoFast in July 2024, here’s my MRR over the past few months:
July: $49.95
August: $79.92
September: $150
October: $180
And text-behind-image is a free tool.
My costs per month are $40 - from Supabase and Vercel. These revenue numbers, compared to many other products in the starter story, are small. But it covers my costs and at the moment I don’t need to pay for things like rent, car, or living expenses (still under the legal guidance of my parents haha - teens don’t have this problem). I’m just having fun and learning at the moment.
What does the future look like?
I’m currently applying for colleges and will finish high school and go to college in six months' time. I hope to still have the passion and energy to do what I’m currently doing - build, share, ship, launch. And I hope people will still find value in my existing apps.
I haven’t stated this publicly, but my goal is to get into YCombinator next year!
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
I actually have no regrets. When starting and building VideoFast and Text-Behind-Image, I’ve always treated this as a learning opportunity. I honestly didn’t have much expectation on myself with how these products should perform, and I just vibe and learn.
I’m an ISTP. I think the nature of this spontaneous personality allows me to keep trying and learning new things while building the startups. The most important thing is to be super obsessed with what you are doing, and throughout my startup journey that started at the beginning of 2024, I’ve been super obsessed with it. I get this energy to work on them at the same time with things like schoolwork and academics in high school
Don’t think too seriously. Do what your gut tells you to do. Eventually, good things will happen to you. Just have fun in the process - trust the process.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?
Don’t be like me spending 6 months building my first MVP. Find problems you can build solutions to as fast as possible.
Go online and build your online presence - and use your online presence to promote your startups. You have something unique with you - everyone does. Leverage that uniqueness in building your online presence - eg. 16 y/o building startups, 9-5 workers building startups in the night, a former dentist turned startup founder, etc. You got this!
Enjoy and trust the process!
Where can we go to learn more?
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
Thank you for the interview!
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Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
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