Stephan Mazokha

Hi folks! I just published a new podcast! Had a great chat with Anders Lillevik, founder of Focal Point (procurement startup). Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/WOq5-EFSLHo There s a bunch of great lessons to learn from his story: 1. Don t build a product until you ve nailed your distribution; 2. Don t be shy to use cold email to gauge interest; 3. Learn your craft first (Anders spent 25 years in the industry, knew its ins & outs, and built the product on his own pain points) I really enjoyed a chat with him, and hope that you ll get some value out of it, too!

Hey Hunters, Marc here Last month I wrote here about how sold a habit tracker for $10,000 in October. Earlier this month, I got $35,000 in my bank account after selling a landing page maker with AI. Here's the story: - April 2023: Just like everyone, I get massive FOMO with AI. I played with GPT and decided to build a landing page generator with AI: Input text and the AI prefills a template with copy and AI-generated images. I'm working on it with a good friend of mine named Martin. - May: The product is called LandingAI. It's an MVP but we launched and made ~$8,000. Unfortunately, Martin and I had different visions for the project so we forked. - June LandingAI is the name of a big corp (bummer) so I rebranded it to MakeLanding. I ditch 90% of the code because users want a very different product: So here I am, building an entire website builder powered with AI... - July: I launched again, but made a BIG mistake: I swapped the one-time payment for a monthly subscription and got $20 MRR for 15k visitors... If you can avoid subscriptions, do it New pricing means new positioning users compared the app to Framer & Webflow - August: I removed the subscription and sales came back: ~$7,000 in 3 months. But I realized this was going nowhere... - September: + I don't use the product + The market is gigantic and crowded As a solopreneur, nothing is more important for me than building cool stuff for people I care about. And I didn't really care about this big market so... - October: I called my friend Dan and he said: SELL. He was right. I bought my shares of LandingAI from Martin and listed MakeLanding on Acquire: Asking $38,000 for $14,000 TTM (3x profit) Within hours, I received dozens of NDAs and a buyer started the process After a few weeks of NDA, LOI, Escrow, etc. the buyer sent the money but... Only a fraction of the transaction. Then he ghosted me. So I canceled the transition. Back to Acquire... Luckily, in 24 hours I got another buyer! - November: Within weeks, the money was in my bank account. The buyer and I never called, just a few messages. It's mind-blowing. My takeaways: - Don't build AI products just because - Don't go on a massive market you don't care - Sell if you don't know how to grow the product It's my 3rd acquisition this year. I love the freedom to build, sell, and repeat. I wrote about the process of making & selling micro-startups, if it's helpful let me know: https://marclou.beehiiv.com/p/ho...

I've recently recorded an interview that is very special to me, as I'm chatting with a Florida-based founder - Nicholas Mohnacky. Nick is building a platform called BundleIQ, which helps businesses accelerate research using an AI assistant ALANI. Join our discussion; I hope you'll find a lot of interesting bits about how Nick is approaching building his startup as (originally) a non-tech founder, and his vision for building an AI assistant in the era of OpenAI and ChatGPT. YouTube: https://youtu.be/J6U7tmlp5jg