How to build a startup and start making money in 7 steps

If you want to start a business, make money on your own terms and work anywhere but you don’t know where to begin, this is how I got my first sale.

No one guided me and I learned everything on my own - programming, marketing, copywriting.

This is everything I have done and learnt, so that you can learn from my experience to save yourself the trouble.

Step 1: Find a problem to solve

I am sure you’ve had at least 1 business idea that crossed your mind, but it never comes to fruition.

We all have brilliant ideas and that’s cool! But a better way to make money is to copy what others are doing and then do it better, faster or cheaper.

This is how I’d do it - Look for problems, pain points from your favourite subreddits

Then look for existing solutions or come up with your own.

In my case, I came up with my own solution (I built a SaaS Boilerplate) because my goal is to build as many apps as I can, and then monetize them. I work a full time job, so I needed to do it efficiently, thus, I built my own boilerplate.

• Total time spent: 0 hours

• Total cost: $0

Step 2: Build an MVP with only 1 feature

Build a minimal viable product (MVP) quickly with only a single feature. Don’t waste time doing anything else.

Don’t worry about authentication, payment, admin dashboard just yet. They will come later.

The idea is to build something quickly and then get people to give you feedback to improve and to be used as social proof later.

An MVP should take no more than 1 week to build. Depending on how you do it, it can cost $0 to a few hundred dollars. Since I know how to code, I did it myself.

I’ve built a free boilerplate that helps you get started

• Total time spent: 1 week

• Total cost: $0

Step 3: Share it for free.

Now that you have an MVP, you are eager to make some money! But hold your horses, why would anyone buy from you if they don’t even know who you are?

So, we need to get people to try it, give us feedback.

If you have many friends, you could certainly get them to try your MVP and give you feedback.

But, if you are introverted, shy and don’t have many friends (like me), you could make a post on Reddit (I explained how I got people to use my product) and/or you could cold DM people.

I’d start with making a post on Reddit. Keep it short, simple and to the point. Don’t try to sell anything but genuinely try to help people. It takes 30 mins to write a post on Reddit and it costs $0.

This is the best cold DM I’ve come across:

• Total time spent: 1 week

• Total cost: $0

Step 4: Create social proof

In this step, we are trying to gather social proof. Social proof is vital to building trust with potential customers.

Feedback/testimonials are only one of many forms of social proof. There are others like:-

• Make a post on prominent websites. Here’s how

• Use statistics

• Quote famous sayings

• Video demonstrating how your product solves a problem

The more social proof you can gather, the better because we will need to use this to craft a landing page that converts. Here is how.

• Total time spent: 1 week

• Total cost: $0

Step 5: Market your product

X may be the obvious choice given it’s a text-based social media platform. You don’t need to put in too much effort into marketing your product, especially if you have other life obligations.

I am still experimenting with marketing and I noticed I’ve got more views with YouTube shorts than with X.

I have not tried Tiktok. LinkedIn banned me, and only a few views per reel on Instagram.

I do make an effort posting on X. I tried to comment on other people’s posts and I also make a batch of posts every week. Let’s assume I spend 1 day per week on marketing and I am also subscribed to X Premium + ($395 annually)

• Total time spent: 8 days

• Total cost: $395

Step 6: Do a pre-sale of the beta version and build it

The best motivation is to actually make money. We have an MVP, feedbacks and some other social proof, we are ready to build a landing page for the product and start to collect some money.

I think of a landing page as my own sales agent who works 24/7.

You will need a domain name, a hosting platform. My budget for a domain name is no more than $50, and hosting is $10 per month

I personally use Linode to host my apps and here is a technical guide. I have done this many times, so it only takes me 30 minutes to launch an app.

The landing page took me quite some time, about 1-2 days but let’s be generous and make it 3 days

• Total time spent: 11 days

• Total cost: $455

Step 7: Monetize

Once my landing page is up, I continue to post about it on X, and Reddit wherever I can. and I got my first sale just 3 days after putting up my landing page. 🎉🎉🎉

• Total marketing cost: $395

• Total development cost: $50

• Total time cost: 11 days

That’s it!

Hi, my name is George 👋 and my goal is to build as many apps as I can and make money. I write 1-3 articles a week on sales, marketing and/or technical stuff as I progress.

Here are some of the tools I built for myself:-

• Problem Bank - Find your next SaaS idea

• Django HTMX SaaS Boilerplate - Take your idea and turn it into a SaaS

• Viral Tweets - Promote your SaaS even if you don’t know what to say