I've posted here a couple of times in the past. I've asked for help multiple times, nothing worked because of my lack of knowledge. I tried to build two companies before this one and I didn't even got to the part where I made a single dollar.
my entrepreneurship journey with my friends til now:
- tried to create a prediction market in Brazil (my country)
- spent 2 months believing that I could do something with it
- had no money for lawyers
- got scared i could go to jail due to law problems
- pivoted for the first time
- spent 1 month trying to 'find' startup ideas
- it did not work (no shit, lol)
- had the brilliant idea to make a software to help people organize their finances, but one that would 'actually work'
- we spent 2 months working on the MVP that was supposed to go out in one week
- we decided to market it directly with ads just to test the market
- we have a very bad communication, market and niching problem
- lost more money
i'm not going to say that i was about to give up, because I was not, I just eventually found a problem worth solving.
for really quick context: I'm Brazilian and I work as a BDR for US startups. my day was 100+ cold emails. to 'speed the process up', I used to do this whole gigantic process with copy and pasting, spreadsheets and GPT to actually do it faster. no coding background.
I started looking for ways to solve my problem, any software, google extension and could not find anything that would fit my reality and that I would not have to ask for my bosses permission to sign it up.
so one weekend i decided that i would build something i'd actually use and to see how hard would it be.
3 days went by, i had a working product to solve all that problem that would take 2 hours of my day everyday, in 10 minutes. on monday, i showed it to two colleagues, they were my first paying customers
I pushed them to pay immediately on purpose. at the time I was reading million dollar weekend, reading paul graham essays and religiously watching hormozi everyday and with all that 'knowledge' I started marketing it and it is working.
at the same time I don't want to be here promoting my own product pretending that i'm not doing it, I also don't want to pretend that I don't want the exposure of a couple of people to it lol. the product is called fulgurite.io. it automates cold email personalization and sends the drafts straight to the customers email.
we are now scaling it with instantly, linkedin, manual outreach and dogfooding my own product on the manual ones.
one thing random thing i learned recently that might be valuable for someone is even with a free trial and low pricing, getting people to book a demo converts way better than asking them to try it themselves. probably because i stop sounding like i'm begging people to try my product.
well, i'm not filthy rich yet, and i know the whole idea/product still has a lot of gaps BUT i'm more happy then I've even been in my business since now I'm finally at the part where I'm dealing with customers and actually having some money coming.
might not seem much, but it is fulfilling the whole point of having a company. make money and having problems worth solving.