// transcript — 444 segments
0:00 Intro
0:02 My name is John Rush and I run 20 different projects doing 3 million
0:06 error. John Rush started his career working for huge VCback startups. But
0:12 after feeling unhappy and a bit bored with the VC life, he decided to throw it
0:16 all out the window and instead launched his own apps as a solo founder. And over
0:21 the past 3 years, he's built, launched, and now runs over 26 different apps. I
0:28 built a VC for 10 years until I realized this one thing. In this video, we'll
0:32 take you behind the scenes of John's exact process for building a portfolio
0:37 of profitable apps. We'll dive into the exact steps he uses to come up with
0:41 every single idea, how he gets paying customers before building anything, and
0:46 a full breakdown of all the different apps he runs. The secret of running 26
0:52 startups is All right, let's get into it. I'm Pat Walls, and this is Starter
0:58 Who is John Rush
0:58 Story. Welcome John Rush to Starter Story. Thanks for coming on. Tell me about the
1:04 business that you built and what's your story. My name is John Rush and I'm
1:09 running 26 startups at the same time after quitting the VC world and joining
1:14 the bootstrap movement. All my businesses have combined around 1
1:19 million users in B2B and combined 3 million AR where seven products bring
1:24 most of the revenue and the other products are bringing the audience and
1:28 that they channel to the paid products. The most popular tool I have is called
1:33 unicorn platform. It's a website builder that helps business founders to build
1:37 their landing pages, weight lists and directories. Okay. So let's move to uh a
1:41 little bit about your background, how you got started as an entrepreneur and
1:45 uh what your story looks like. Yeah. So it all started when I was little. So my
1:48 father was entrepreneur. He would involved me into everything he was doing
1:54 just for fun. And by 2020 I was 10 years in to building VC back startups and
1:59 that's when I kind of felt that it was something against my nature. So I was so
2:04 obsessed with users. I was so obsessed with the products and the love from the
2:10 users for my products. But in the VC bag world, I felt like the whole obsession
2:13 was kind of different. In 2022, I decided to enter the bootstrap scene. I
2:18 found the one tool that I like the most called Unicorn Platform. And I reached
2:22 out to the founder and I said like do you want to sell this product to me the
2:26 whole startup and also when you sell it you will join me for a year and you will
2:31 teach me how to be a bootstrapper and how to be an Indie maker and he said
2:36 yes. So I paid almost a million dollar for that startup and then and he guided
2:41 me on and everything. So he was my mentor for a year. I went from being VC
2:45 backfounder who knows nothing about bootstrapping to becoming a pretty
2:50 prominent bootstrapper in the scene. Cool. Well, on that topic, I would love
2:55 if you actually did a deep dive on your projects. You don't have to go through
2:58 all of them, but some of the products you're most proud of and that bring in
3:01 the most revenue for your business. So, all my products are for busy founders.
3:05 So, the first one is Unicorn Platform. It's a website builder and directory
3:10 builder for busy founders and it has 600,000 users. The second one is SEO
3:16 bot. It has 100k MR and it has grown in less than 12 months and it was one of
3:21 the first SEO AI agent on the market. The third one is listing bot. It finds
3:25 all relevant directories on the internet and it lists your product there. Thank
3:29 you for sharing all that. You seem like you're pretty good at finding ideas that
3:32 work. I would love if you walk through your process for ideulating and
3:36 validating an idea that you're going to end up working on and building. Yeah.
3:41 So, I used the same process over and over again for all my 20 plus products.
3:46 It all starts with my own pain at work that I want to solve and then I look for
3:50 solutions for that pain. And if I don't find the solutions on the market, then I
3:54 go and talk about this pain on the internet. And if I see other people
3:58 resonate with my pain and they say, "Yeah, I have the same pain and I I wish
4:02 there was a solution." Then that's kind of grand signal for me to go to the next
4:08 step. I launch uh a weight list and I see whether I am able to generate 100
4:13 signups. I email them all and I offer them 90% discount on a pre-sale before I
4:18 build anything. And then if I get five sales, I build the first MVP. I don't
4:23 even build a product. I actually deliver the solution manually. At this stage, I
4:28 don't care about the margins yet. I just care about the solution being delivered
4:31 to the customers and whether they actually satisfied with that. And
4:35 usually it's not that straightforward. Usually I have to iterate and I deliver
4:39 solution to the customers and they don't like it. So I iterate iterate until they
4:43 like it. And it's easier to iterate when there is no product, when there's no
4:47 code. It's much easier because I just have to change my own routine and my own
4:51 service. And once I find a sweet spot where it satisfies the users, I go and
4:57 find a co-maker. The co-maker joins in. We spend two three months building and
5:01 then I have this big launch on Twitter and that's it. That's the blueprint for
5:07 all the products I have. Cool. Well, let's talk about that kind of co-maker
5:11 strategy. I haven't seen that too much before or heard too much about that. So,
5:14 I'm curious, how does it actually work? How do you find great developers or
5:19 product managers for this? And how does partnerships work for that? Finding a
5:23 co-maker is really hard, same as finding a co-founder. So I usually talk to other
5:29 makers and I become friends with them and that runs for years or month and
5:33 then eventually when I'm looking for a co-maker it's not that difficult for me
5:37 to figure out who to reach out to because I see that I'm building a tool
5:41 for social media and there were these three founders building something
5:45 similar in the past and they have failed and now if I pitch them the idea that
5:50 has past the validation part I have pre-sales done and I have some users
5:54 it's really easy to convince needs them to join and we share the ownership
5:59 50/50. It's just regular co-ownership where I take care of all the operation,
6:04 legal parts, accounting and the co-maker takes care of the coding and support. If
6:08 you want to be the co-maker people want to work with, the best thing to do is to
6:13 build things in public because that makes it so easy for anyone else to
6:19 evaluate you and to just see whether you have things in common, etc. All right,
6:23 before we finish talking about John's projects, I need you to hear this.
6:27 Shipping 20 projects is insane productivity. But the minute you aim one
6:31 of those apps at the enterprise, well, B2B, the questions from leads and
6:36 customers start to change. Enterprise buyers don't just ask, "Does it work?"
6:40 They ask, "Are you SOCK 2 compliant, HIPPA compliant, ISO 2701 compliant?"
6:46 Miss that box and your six-figure deal evaporates. especially since these
6:50 frameworks can take months and months to achieve. And that's why Starter Story
6:54 has partnered with Vanta on this video. Vanta is a trust management platform
6:58 that automates the painful parts of compliance. It hooks into your stack,
7:03 runs continuous checks, and keeps the evidence all clean for auditors, so you
7:07 can stay in build mode while Vanta handles the paperwork. Vanta saves teams
7:11 about $535,000 a year and pays for itself in 3 months. It's built for startup speed and
7:19 shaped by thousands of teams. No wonder 10,000 plus companies like Ramp,
7:25 Atlassian, Langchain, and Cursor use it to prove security in real time. So, if
7:29 you're looking to land enterprise and B2B customers, or just make your project
7:33 as secure as possible. Get started with Vanta's free compliance for startup
7:38 bundles. It has compliance checklists, case studies, videos, and more to help
7:41 you get compliant quickly, demonstrate security, and build customer trust. Just
7:46 head to the first link in the description, access it, get compliant,
7:50 close the deal. Huge thanks to Vanta for supporting the channel. Now, let's get
7:54 back to the video. Okay, let's talk about marketing cuz uh you told me that
7:58 you handle the distribution side of things. I'd love to hear what your kind
8:02 of secret sauce is that comes to marketing so many different businesses
8:06 and getting hundreds of thousands of users. I think that the key essence of
8:11 good marketing is good product. The ideal marketing is where the product
8:15 just drives the sales and drives the word of mouth. But it's difficult to
8:19 build a great product right away. So usually you start with an average
8:23 product and you have to do the boring marketing methods to bring first users
8:27 and then use those users to improve your product and make it great. So before my
8:32 product is great, I usually go for SEO. And then the second most popular meth I
8:37 have is social media marketing. So I run that on X, on LinkedIn, on Substack, on
8:42 Facebook, everywhere. I repurpose the same content on all platforms and I do
8:48 that every day. So I share at least 30 tweets a month and sometimes more. And
8:53 then the third one is the listings on directories. This is very very good way
8:58 to grow your product if your product is hot and interesting. In my case, all
9:02 products are connected to AI and it's easy to package them in a way that
9:05 people want to click them when they see them on directories. So if your product
9:10 is also clickbaity, it's easy to drive traffic from directories. Then I do
9:14 cross promo which is quite unique to me. Every user that tries one of my product
9:19 ends up trying at least one more product and often I have people who try all of
9:22 my products. The cross promo works really really well because people trust
9:26 you already and they know you deliver. Cool. What I think is really cool about
9:29 how you have all these different projects is actually the marketing
9:33 strategy that comes with that is this idea of cross-selling or cross
9:37 promotion. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? So I have over 20 tools
9:42 where some tools are premium tools I make money on and some tools are just to
9:46 bring traffic in and channel it to the my premium tools. I do two things. So
9:51 one thing is that I link tools with each other and the other thing that's more
9:55 interesting is that I integrate tools with each other. For example, in SEO
9:59 bot, I have a button called boost my domain rating. And if you click that,
10:03 then it brings you to my other tool called listing bot that helps you to
10:07 boost your domain rating. I have this integrations across all the products. So
10:12 users natively float from product to product and end up using my entire
10:16 ecosystem. Let's move on to the next topic which is AI. I'd love to know how
10:23 How John uses AI
10:23 you are using AI to build, run, grow, and make your business more efficient.
10:27 The way I use AI for building the products is that I built my own tool, my
10:33 own AI code generator that lets me build all my SAS products, no code tools and
10:39 AI agents and it works extremely well. I think AI in coding is probably the best
10:45 application of AI in the modern days. And then I use AI a lot for design. I
10:50 make all my logos with AI. I make all my images with AI. So basically I don't use
10:56 designers for most of my work and then I use AI for research. In the past I would
11:00 hire people and I would give them research tasks but now I just go for 03
11:05 research mode or group research mode and I give it the task and then it spends
11:09 like 10 minutes and then I have perfect table with all the data I need. And then
11:14 I use AI for marketing. That's where I gain the most profit from AI I think
11:20 because marketing is consuming a lot of resources otherwise. So I use it for
11:24 SEO, I use it for generating emails, I use it for copyrightiting and uh
11:29 generating ads and everything. So basically I generate everything with AI.
11:35 Then I use AI for operation. So I built one tool called Nova. So it's like a
11:39 project manager AI and it manages all the projects I have with the co-makers
11:43 because I have a lot of co-makers and this AI is just taking care of all those
11:48 processes. Well, on that note, when we talk about some more tools, tell me
11:51 about what kind of tools and languages are you using on a daily basis. What are
11:53 Tech Stack and profit margins
11:55 your favorite tools? What runs the business? Yeah. So, I use JavaScript and
12:00 Tailwind for coding. And it turned out that AI is perfect for these two. Then I
12:06 use Grock for learning. So, if I have a question, I ask Grock because Grock has
12:11 connection to real time tweets and that's where all the best data is like
12:15 all the best content is on Twitter and then Grog has access to that. I use
12:19 Discord for chats and for project management and then I use Apple notes
12:24 for writing. I tried everything that's complicated and then I went back to
12:28 Apple notes and then I use code and Gemini and OpenAI APIs inside my tools.
12:34 It's kind of a race where every month I keep switching between because one model
12:37 is better this month than the other model. So I use all three of them at the
12:41 same time and then let users choose. The AI tools are pretty expensive to run.
12:46 For example, in SEO bot, we have around 70% margins. So, we make 100K a month
12:52 and then we pay 30K for APIs. And then in nonAI tools where the costs are
12:58 pretty low, I have 90% margins. The main cost for unicorn platform for example is
13:03 support agents and I have humans doing that and I like to have humans for that
13:08 because AI doesn't have the soul. So people don't want to chat with AI, they
13:11 just ask question and they leave. But when you have humans in support, then
13:15 people might just start chatting about random things and create this
13:18 relationship. So I think I want to keep human support for all my products. Well,
13:22 on that note, I think what's cool about your story is you did VC, you had an
13:26 exit even, and then you also did solarreneurship. You've done both.
13:30 You've seen both. So tell me about some of the differences between VC
13:33 VC VS Bootstrapping
13:33 bootstrapping and what you think the future of startups are. In the VC world,
13:38 I think people have to understand the game. And I did not understand the game.
13:42 I was all about building great products, making happy users. But the game was
13:47 about exits. So everything has to be optimized for an exit. In a bootstrap
13:50 world, it's totally different. You optimize for profits rather than for the
13:56 next funding round. In a VC world, you pay for growth. In a bootstrap world,
14:00 you want to have productled growth. In a VC world, you have many people working
14:04 for you and you want to grow the headcount as much as possible because
14:08 that increases your valuation. And in a bootstrap world, you want to cut the
14:12 headcount as much as possible. Ideally, you want to be a solo because then there
14:17 are no cost at all. Okay. On more of a personal topic, I would love to learn a
14:19 Day in the life
14:21 little bit more about what your life is like. What does a day in the life look
14:24 like for you? I live in a forest and I have no social life. I have family and
14:29 children and animals. So, I wake up in the morning. I go outside. I take care
14:34 of animals. I change their water. I bring them food. I cut some grass. I do
14:40 some exercise outside and after 1 hour I come back and I work for 5 hours. Then
14:45 my kids come from studying and then we spend time together for 2 3 hours. Then
14:49 they go to sleep. Then I go back to work for another 5 hours. Then I go to sleep
14:55 at 4:00 a.m. and I wake up at 10:00 a.m. So I sleep 6 hours a day. And it worked
15:00 well until now, but now I I feel like I have to sleep more than that. Cool. Wow.
15:04 That was not the answer I was expecting that you're on a farm, but I love that.
15:06 Biggest lesson learned
15:06 What is something that you learned in your journey that surprised you or you
15:10 didn't expect? So the first time when I seen build in public, I thought it's all
15:16 about marketing. So people do that to get more eyeballs on their products and
15:20 that's free marketing. And that's true. But I realized that even the bigger
15:25 value of building in public is that you build up a direct channel with the
15:31 audience and the users that helps you to build great products. Before building in
15:36 public, my failure rate was really high. 90% of the things I've done failed. And
15:40 when I start building in public, it flipped. So now only 10% of my products
15:45 fail and 90% don't fail because I adjust them before I ship them just because I
15:50 build in public. Cool. I like that. Last question that we'll ask that we ask all
15:54 founders that come on Starter Story. If you could stand on John's shoulders when
15:57 you were getting started with that first bootstrapped that ended up becoming in
15:58 Advice to entrepreneurs
16:01 your whole portfolio, what advice would you give him or anyone building SAS
16:05 getting started today? The most important thing when you build a startup
16:12 is the idea and the founder idea fit. So people start looking for random ideas in
16:17 random spaces and I think that's wrong. I think people should try to build
16:20 something they understand. In my case, I went into the extreme and I built things
16:25 for my own work. And that's something I understand really really well. But I
16:29 think people should build for their own work. They should solve their own
16:33 problems. And I'm sure at any job in the world, there are hundreds of things you
16:38 can solve with software. So don't go too far. Don't look for random things. Just
16:44 look around you and see what are the pain points in your job. Founder market
16:48 fit. build something that you are passionate about or you have some expert
16:52 knowledge in and you have such an advantage and such a head start. I love
16:56 that. Thanks for coming on the show, John. I love what you built. 26
17:00 businesses, 3 million AR is amazing. It's only going to keep growing and I'm
17:03 stoked to watch your journey. Thanks for coming on and sharing all that. Thanks
17:06 for having me. What I think is probably the coolest part about what you built is
1:43 Backstory
1:45 uh what your story looks like. Yeah. So it all started when I was little. So my
1:48 father was entrepreneur. He would involved me into everything he was doing
1:54 just for fun. And by 2020 I was 10 years in to building VC back startups and
1:59 that's when I kind of felt that it was something against my nature. So I was so
2:04 obsessed with users. I was so obsessed with the products and the love from the
2:10 users for my products. But in the VC bag world, I felt like the whole obsession
2:13 was kind of different. In 2022, I decided to enter the bootstrap scene. I
2:18 found the one tool that I like the most called Unicorn Platform. And I reached
2:22 out to the founder and I said like do you want to sell this product to me the
2:26 whole startup and also when you sell it you will join me for a year and you will
2:31 teach me how to be a bootstrapper and how to be an Indie maker and he said
2:36 yes. So I paid almost a million dollar for that startup and then and he guided
2:41 me on and everything. So he was my mentor for a year. I went from being VC
2:45 backfounder who knows nothing about bootstrapping to becoming a pretty
2:50 prominent bootstrapper in the scene. Cool. Well, on that topic, I would love
2:55 if you actually did a deep dive on your projects. You don't have to go through
2:58 all of them, but some of the products you're most proud of and that bring in
2:59 Main projects
3:01 the most revenue for your business. So, all my products are for busy founders.
3:05 So, the first one is Unicorn Platform. It's a website builder and directory
3:10 builder for busy founders and it has 600,000 users. The second one is SEO
3:16 bot. It has 100k MR and it has grown in less than 12 months and it was one of
3:21 the first SEO AI agent on the market. The third one is listing bot. It finds
3:25 all relevant directories on the internet and it lists your product there. Thank
3:29 you for sharing all that. You seem like you're pretty good at finding ideas that
3:32 work. I would love if you walk through your process for ideulating and
3:34 Full ideation blueprint
3:36 validating an idea that you're going to end up working on and building. Yeah.
3:41 So, I used the same process over and over again for all my 20 plus products.
3:46 It all starts with my own pain at work that I want to solve and then I look for
3:50 solutions for that pain. And if I don't find the solutions on the market, then I
3:54 go and talk about this pain on the internet. And if I see other people
3:58 resonate with my pain and they say, "Yeah, I have the same pain and I I wish
4:02 there was a solution." Then that's kind of grand signal for me to go to the next
4:08 step. I launch uh a weight list and I see whether I am able to generate 100
4:13 signups. I email them all and I offer them 90% discount on a pre-sale before I
4:18 build anything. And then if I get five sales, I build the first MVP. I don't
4:23 even build a product. I actually deliver the solution manually. At this stage, I
4:28 don't care about the margins yet. I just care about the solution being delivered
4:31 to the customers and whether they actually satisfied with that. And
4:35 usually it's not that straightforward. Usually I have to iterate and I deliver
4:39 solution to the customers and they don't like it. So I iterate iterate until they
4:43 like it. And it's easier to iterate when there is no product, when there's no
4:47 code. It's much easier because I just have to change my own routine and my own
4:51 service. And once I find a sweet spot where it satisfies the users, I go and
4:57 find a co-maker. The co-maker joins in. We spend two three months building and
5:01 then I have this big launch on Twitter and that's it. That's the blueprint for
5:07 all the products I have. Cool. Well, let's talk about that kind of co-maker
5:11 strategy. I haven't seen that too much before or heard too much about that. So,
5:14 I'm curious, how does it actually work? How do you find great developers or
5:17 The 'Co-maker' strategy
5:19 product managers for this? And how does partnerships work for that? Finding a
5:23 co-maker is really hard, same as finding a co-founder. So I usually talk to other
5:29 makers and I become friends with them and that runs for years or month and
5:33 then eventually when I'm looking for a co-maker it's not that difficult for me
5:37 to figure out who to reach out to because I see that I'm building a tool
5:41 for social media and there were these three founders building something
5:45 similar in the past and they have failed and now if I pitch them the idea that
5:50 has past the validation part I have pre-sales done and I have some users
5:54 it's really easy to convince needs them to join and we share the ownership
5:59 50/50. It's just regular co-ownership where I take care of all the operation,
6:04 legal parts, accounting and the co-maker takes care of the coding and support. If
6:08 you want to be the co-maker people want to work with, the best thing to do is to
6:13 build things in public because that makes it so easy for anyone else to
6:19 evaluate you and to just see whether you have things in common, etc. All right,
6:22 Start securing $100k/year B2B deals
6:23 before we finish talking about John's projects, I need you to hear this.
6:27 Shipping 20 projects is insane productivity. But the minute you aim one
6:31 of those apps at the enterprise, well, B2B, the questions from leads and
6:36 customers start to change. Enterprise buyers don't just ask, "Does it work?"
6:40 They ask, "Are you SOCK 2 compliant, HIPPA compliant, ISO 2701 compliant?"
6:46 Miss that box and your six-figure deal evaporates. especially since these
6:50 frameworks can take months and months to achieve. And that's why Starter Story
6:54 has partnered with Vanta on this video. Vanta is a trust management platform
6:58 that automates the painful parts of compliance. It hooks into your stack,
7:03 runs continuous checks, and keeps the evidence all clean for auditors, so you
7:07 can stay in build mode while Vanta handles the paperwork. Vanta saves teams
7:11 about $535,000 a year and pays for itself in 3 months. It's built for startup speed and
7:19 shaped by thousands of teams. No wonder 10,000 plus companies like Ramp,
7:25 Atlassian, Langchain, and Cursor use it to prove security in real time. So, if
7:29 you're looking to land enterprise and B2B customers, or just make your project
7:33 as secure as possible. Get started with Vanta's free compliance for startup
7:38 bundles. It has compliance checklists, case studies, videos, and more to help
7:41 you get compliant quickly, demonstrate security, and build customer trust. Just
7:46 head to the first link in the description, access it, get compliant,
7:50 close the deal. Huge thanks to Vanta for supporting the channel. Now, let's get
7:54 back to the video. Okay, let's talk about marketing cuz uh you told me that
7:56 Marketing
7:58 you handle the distribution side of things. I'd love to hear what your kind
8:02 of secret sauce is that comes to marketing so many different businesses
8:06 and getting hundreds of thousands of users. I think that the key essence of
8:11 good marketing is good product. The ideal marketing is where the product
8:15 just drives the sales and drives the word of mouth. But it's difficult to
8:19 build a great product right away. So usually you start with an average
8:23 product and you have to do the boring marketing methods to bring first users
8:27 and then use those users to improve your product and make it great. So before my
8:32 product is great, I usually go for SEO. And then the second most popular meth I
8:37 have is social media marketing. So I run that on X, on LinkedIn, on Substack, on
8:42 Facebook, everywhere. I repurpose the same content on all platforms and I do
8:48 that every day. So I share at least 30 tweets a month and sometimes more. And
8:53 then the third one is the listings on directories. This is very very good way
8:58 to grow your product if your product is hot and interesting. In my case, all
9:02 products are connected to AI and it's easy to package them in a way that
9:05 people want to click them when they see them on directories. So if your product
9:10 is also clickbaity, it's easy to drive traffic from directories. Then I do
9:14 cross promo which is quite unique to me. Every user that tries one of my product
9:19 ends up trying at least one more product and often I have people who try all of
9:22 my products. The cross promo works really really well because people trust
9:26 you already and they know you deliver. Cool. What I think is really cool about
9:29 how you have all these different projects is actually the marketing
9:33 strategy that comes with that is this idea of cross-selling or cross
9:34 The 'Cross-promo' strategy
9:37 promotion. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? So I have over 20 tools
9:42 where some tools are premium tools I make money on and some tools are just to
9:46 bring traffic in and channel it to the my premium tools. I do two things. So
9:51 one thing is that I link tools with each other and the other thing that's more
9:55 interesting is that I integrate tools with each other. For example, in SEO
9:59 bot, I have a button called boost my domain rating. And if you click that,
10:03 then it brings you to my other tool called listing bot that helps you to
10:07 boost your domain rating. I have this integrations across all the products. So
10:12 users natively float from product to product and end up using my entire
10:16 ecosystem. Let's move on to the next topic which is AI. I'd love to know how
10:23 you are using AI to build, run, grow, and make your business more efficient.
10:27 The way I use AI for building the products is that I built my own tool, my
10:33 own AI code generator that lets me build all my SAS products, no code tools and
10:39 AI agents and it works extremely well. I think AI in coding is probably the best
10:45 application of AI in the modern days. And then I use AI a lot for design. I
10:50 make all my logos with AI. I make all my images with AI. So basically I don't use
10:56 designers for most of my work and then I use AI for research. In the past I would
11:00 hire people and I would give them research tasks but now I just go for 03
11:05 research mode or group research mode and I give it the task and then it spends
11:09 like 10 minutes and then I have perfect table with all the data I need. And then
11:14 I use AI for marketing. That's where I gain the most profit from AI I think
11:20 because marketing is consuming a lot of resources otherwise. So I use it for
11:24 SEO, I use it for generating emails, I use it for copyrightiting and uh
11:29 generating ads and everything. So basically I generate everything with AI.
11:35 Then I use AI for operation. So I built one tool called Nova. So it's like a
11:39 project manager AI and it manages all the projects I have with the co-makers
11:43 because I have a lot of co-makers and this AI is just taking care of all those
11:48 processes. Well, on that note, when we talk about some more tools, tell me
11:51 about what kind of tools and languages are you using on a daily basis. What are
11:55 your favorite tools? What runs the business? Yeah. So, I use JavaScript and
12:00 Tailwind for coding. And it turned out that AI is perfect for these two. Then I
12:06 use Grock for learning. So, if I have a question, I ask Grock because Grock has
12:11 connection to real time tweets and that's where all the best data is like
12:15 all the best content is on Twitter and then Grog has access to that. I use
12:19 Discord for chats and for project management and then I use Apple notes
12:24 for writing. I tried everything that's complicated and then I went back to
12:28 Apple notes and then I use code and Gemini and OpenAI APIs inside my tools.
12:34 It's kind of a race where every month I keep switching between because one model
12:37 is better this month than the other model. So I use all three of them at the
12:41 same time and then let users choose. The AI tools are pretty expensive to run.
12:46 For example, in SEO bot, we have around 70% margins. So, we make 100K a month
12:52 and then we pay 30K for APIs. And then in nonAI tools where the costs are
12:58 pretty low, I have 90% margins. The main cost for unicorn platform for example is
13:03 support agents and I have humans doing that and I like to have humans for that
13:08 because AI doesn't have the soul. So people don't want to chat with AI, they
13:11 just ask question and they leave. But when you have humans in support, then
13:15 people might just start chatting about random things and create this
13:18 relationship. So I think I want to keep human support for all my products. Well,
13:22 on that note, I think what's cool about your story is you did VC, you had an
13:26 exit even, and then you also did solarreneurship. You've done both.
13:30 You've seen both. So tell me about some of the differences between VC
13:33 bootstrapping and what you think the future of startups are. In the VC world,
13:38 I think people have to understand the game. And I did not understand the game.
13:42 I was all about building great products, making happy users. But the game was
13:47 about exits. So everything has to be optimized for an exit. In a bootstrap
13:50 world, it's totally different. You optimize for profits rather than for the
13:56 next funding round. In a VC world, you pay for growth. In a bootstrap world,
14:00 you want to have productled growth. In a VC world, you have many people working
14:04 for you and you want to grow the headcount as much as possible because
14:08 that increases your valuation. And in a bootstrap world, you want to cut the
14:12 headcount as much as possible. Ideally, you want to be a solo because then there
14:17 are no cost at all. Okay. On more of a personal topic, I would love to learn a
14:21 little bit more about what your life is like. What does a day in the life look
14:24 like for you? I live in a forest and I have no social life. I have family and
14:29 children and animals. So, I wake up in the morning. I go outside. I take care
14:34 of animals. I change their water. I bring them food. I cut some grass. I do
14:40 some exercise outside and after 1 hour I come back and I work for 5 hours. Then
14:45 my kids come from studying and then we spend time together for 2 3 hours. Then
14:49 they go to sleep. Then I go back to work for another 5 hours. Then I go to sleep
14:55 at 4:00 a.m. and I wake up at 10:00 a.m. So I sleep 6 hours a day. And it worked
15:00 well until now, but now I I feel like I have to sleep more than that. Cool. Wow.
15:04 That was not the answer I was expecting that you're on a farm, but I love that.
15:06 What is something that you learned in your journey that surprised you or you
15:10 didn't expect? So the first time when I seen build in public, I thought it's all
15:16 about marketing. So people do that to get more eyeballs on their products and
15:20 that's free marketing. And that's true. But I realized that even the bigger
15:25 value of building in public is that you build up a direct channel with the
15:31 audience and the users that helps you to build great products. Before building in
15:36 public, my failure rate was really high. 90% of the things I've done failed. And
15:40 when I start building in public, it flipped. So now only 10% of my products
15:45 fail and 90% don't fail because I adjust them before I ship them just because I
15:50 build in public. Cool. I like that. Last question that we'll ask that we ask all
15:54 founders that come on Starter Story. If you could stand on John's shoulders when
15:57 you were getting started with that first bootstrapped that ended up becoming in
16:01 your whole portfolio, what advice would you give him or anyone building SAS
16:05 getting started today? The most important thing when you build a startup
16:12 is the idea and the founder idea fit. So people start looking for random ideas in
16:17 random spaces and I think that's wrong. I think people should try to build
16:20 something they understand. In my case, I went into the extreme and I built things
16:25 for my own work. And that's something I understand really really well. But I
16:29 think people should build for their own work. They should solve their own
16:33 problems. And I'm sure at any job in the world, there are hundreds of things you
16:38 can solve with software. So don't go too far. Don't look for random things. Just
16:44 look around you and see what are the pain points in your job. Founder market
16:48 fit. build something that you are passionate about or you have some expert
16:52 knowledge in and you have such an advantage and such a head start. I love
16:56 that. Thanks for coming on the show, John. I love what you built. 26
17:00 businesses, 3 million AR is amazing. It's only going to keep growing and I'm
17:03 stoked to watch your journey. Thanks for coming on and sharing all that. Thanks
17:06 for having me. What I think is probably the coolest part about what you built is
17:11 how all your different apps kind of all work together. That kind of
17:14 cross-selling and cross promotion thing. I see a lot of people building lots of
17:18 different things that are unrelated. But what I think really works for him is
17:23 that every app he builds kind of compounds onto the next one. But it all
17:28 starts with actually building something, building that first idea and then doing
17:32 that over and over and over again. So shameless plug, I would love if you
17:36 checked out Starter Story Build. It is our platform to teach you how to build
17:42 startups, apps, and projects with AI tools. I'll put the link in the
17:45 description for that. If you're serious about actually building something, in 12
17:49 days, you will take an idea to a real ship product that can actually have
17:54 users. And I think that's awesome. Thanks guys for watching. I'll see you
