🚪How Lee and Sathya built a tiny Canva alternative and got acquired
The No-Code Exit Story of Lee, Sathya & YVisuals
Hello there,
Katt here. Welcome to the 81 new subscribers this week. 🤘
This week I talked to serial indie makers Lee and Sathya, read about:
❤️ From internet friends around the world to co-founders
💥 Unbundling Canva and serving a specific tiny need
✨ A visual Twitter strategy for attracting new users
💰 From MVP during a hackathon to getting acquired
⭐️ 5 golden pieces of advice on what you shouldn’t do
Enjoy and happy building.
PS: missed last week’s interview? Read here how Ab helps no-code apps to scale to millions.
🎈 5 Cool Finds
A mix of paid sponsorships (in bold) and cool things I discovered. You can get featured in this section by sharing this newsletter with 8 friends.
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SaaSlanding is a library full of inspiration for your SaaS website. It helped me a lot this week.
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Shipfa.st is the #1 NextJS boilerplate to ship startups in days, not weeks. Loved by 1,000+ developers, made by indie hero Marc Lou.
🔥 No-Code Founder Interview
Learn every week from a real world no-code success story
Hello, tell a little bit about yourself
I am Sathya. And together with Lee I started YVisuals.
Lee is from the UK and has been freelancing online for the past 10+ years as video marketer and the last couple of years as a Bubble dev. Besides being an internet native, Lee has been pursuing a number of independent side projects and experiments (at a proud 99% failure rate!).
I’m from India and used to be a teacher/ educator/ author. Eventually I ended up exploring visual thinking, content marketing and the no-code space! At this moment I’m specialized in helping SaaS businesses grow with SEO-friendly strategies and social-first marketing.
Lee and I met via IWTE (I Want This to Exist), an online community of builders. We’d get together, almost every other Monday, to discuss ideas we wanted to exist. Literally.
Tell us about your product?
Lee and I kept continuing these conversations. We both had a common passion for no-code tools and similar goals to build and grow a SaaS with no-code. We created a list of ideas that we could build and monetize or sell. 100+ ideas still exist on our shared document. Haha!
Our aim was to find ideas that leveraged our skills and mutual interests, and eventually make some money out of it. We weren’t trying to be influencers or internet millionaires. We simply wanted to build stuff that we liked and hopefully others would like too and trade in money for that.
Inspired by Jack Butcher & others, I had been creating and publishing visuals under my brand handle Yellow Visuals since 2022. It gained a good following of ~4000 followers.
I always found that creating visuals without a design background is very time-consuming. Yes, I did enjoy using Canva. But I wanted a more specialized tool to make this easier. So with Yvisuals we had the idea to help anyone customize a visual in seconds from a menu of pre-designed visual concepts.
It’s unbundling a huge product like Canva and creating a very specific tool for a specific niche audience.
What went into building the initial product?
We built the MVP in a few days during 2 hackathons. We started by creating a database of my best visuals. Lee built the working model on Bubble and then recreated each visual as a template.
We love to work in sprints. We focus on one project: make an upgrade, quickly ship it and invite people to try it out (mostly by creating a short demo video) and then keep tweaking based on feedback.
We created the app to allow users to:
Pick a template of choice
Edit the text and add their content
Change the color of the text and background to suit their brand
Finally download and share the visual
Which No-Code tools did you use to build and run it?
We used:
Bubble to build the app
ConvertKit and later Loops to send emails to our users
LemonSqueezy for payments.
Canva to plan out the visuals
Figma to draw the visuals as vectors
OpenAI API for AI visual selection feature
Notion to manage and plan the workflow
What was your business model and how have you grown your revenue?
YVisuals app is a freemium model. Anyone visiting can create a visual instantly. We would then invite them to create a free account to download the visual. Users would get 5 free visuals and then would be invited to upgrade paying a minimal fee for more visuals.
We later added the AI visual selection feature which required AI credits. We gave new users free credits but then gave them the option to upgrade. This feature helped convert more users to paying customers!
Initially we had a lifetime deal offer, particularly for early believers. Later we rolled out subscription plans.
How have you attracted users and grown your product?
Our primary channel of attracting users was Twitter and later LinkedIn. We were pleasantly surprised to get our first 100 users in about 2 weeks. All thanks to the network effect Twitter has.
We focused on using the app to create visual concepts by well-known creators. We shared the visuals on the YellowVisuals Twitter account and our own personal accounts.
Doing this led to some mutual connections with other Visuals creators. They started sharing it on social media, which created a virtuous cycle. YVisuals was also featured in several popular visual newsletters.
I also ran free and paid visual workshops and invited users to get an extended trial of YVisuals. Just before we sold, the app was getting around 10 new sign-ups per day and had a handful of regular users.
Why and how did you sell it?
Like with anything, we never had any intentions of selling it when we first started. It all began as a simple experiment. One led to another and the app started growing, both because of the audience we’ve built and the easy-to-use templates that our customers found really helpful.
We slowly, yet steadily achieved the target that we had loosely set for ourselves - 1000 sign ups and $1000 revenue! While we enjoyed working on YVisuals, we eventually arrived at a stage where we wanted to work on other projects. And that someone else with fresh eyes would be better placed to grow YVisuals further.
I had recently taken a full-time marketing position. And Lee wanted to focus on building his AI Bubble boilerplate.
We waited around 3 months since we listed it on selling platforms, and had a bunch of people offer to buy. Finally at the end of last year, 2023, we struck a deal and sold it via Microns for $5,000.
Why did the buyer want to acquire your project?
The buyer is a growth marketer. He found a great product-maker fit with YVisuals. First, he became a customer before buying YVisuals from us. He is a big fan of visuals and visual repurposing of key concepts with minimalistic visuals.
He spotted an opportunity to help creators, entrepreneurs and marketers like himself in their journey with YVisuals. We’re sure he’s going to scale it and take it to places.
What's your advice for No-Code Makers who are just starting out?
YVisuals is our fifth build and our highest acquisition. So, instead of saying what you should do, I think we are well-equipped with what you shouldn’t do:
Don’t overthink your idea. Just start and build something. It’s better to build out a bad idea, than sitting and doing nothing on a good idea.
Don’t be over obsessed with your idea/ product. Build something. If you see any traction continue with it. If not, just quit and move to the next one.
Don’t be fooled by millionaire SaaS builders. Of course, take inspiration from them. That’s why you are reading this after all. But remember everyone started from point zero like most of us. In fact, we are as clueless about the next product/ venture as anyone.
Don’t do big or never. Aim to collect a series of small wins. (Side note: We even built a product named ‘Small Win’). It’ll definitely not make you a millionaire. But it would give you momentum to sustain, buy you some time to develop your skills and sharpen your business acumen. Use this newfound wisdom to build yet another product a little more intelligently. Then rinse and repeat.
Don’t do half-assed products. The world is already full of such shitty products. That doesn’t mean you have to have a great UX and the perfect product-market fit. But at least do some justice to your existing/ future customers. Solve a problem for them. Or else, there’s no reason for you to ask for their money.
Thanks for sharing all your wisdom. Give Lee and Sathya a follow and check out their projects: Create Carousels & Launchai.pro.
🍿 Katt builds in public
My actions, fails and wins on growing this no-code business to ramen profitability
Productive week here. The first no-code playbook is finally taking shape. We had some marketing wins for Build The Keyword and crossed $1500 in revenue. I hope you all had a great week!
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This is awesome.
Thank you so much for featuring our nocode journey, Katt. Really appreciate it.
A lot of value. I can’t wait to continue working on my side projects. Thank you for the inspiration