🚪How Alim sold (then took back) a mobile app for $15k
Product Hunt Launch + The No-Code Exit Story of Virally & Alim Charaniya
Hello there,
Katt here.
Panic! Excitement! Adrenaline! Today, I’m launching something new. Try it out and let me know what you think. Your support and reply on Twitter and Product Hunt would mean a lot. ❤️
Definitely too much excitement going on this week. Because I also have the amazing story of Alim Charaniya to share.
Read about:
👑 Working for startups as a mobile developer
💥 Discovering the advantages of Flutterflow
🥷 3 top tips on app store optimization
💰 Saying no to a $15k acquisition offer
🔥 Starting ambitiouslabs.io
Enjoy and happy building.
PS: missed last week’s interview? Read here how Olive made an app with Airtable and grew it to 52 paying users.
✨ Spotlight
Design the most outstanding forms in Figma and publish them in one click to the web with the Weavely plugin.
Comes with all the features (and more!) you expect from a form builder:
Unlimited customisation
Zapier integration
Conditional logic
Answer piping
Password protection
Custom domains
🎈 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.
The new Sharetribe lets you build and launch a marketplace in a day with no-code. And extend and scale it infinitely by adding custom code on top.
Microsoft Clarity my favourite free analytics tool, released smart events. They have it all: basic analytics, heat maps and session recordings.
XRay.Tools is a free automation search engine. Discover what your tools can do in Zapier, Make, Bardeen, and more.
There is a website that is full of navbars. Great navigation inspiration for your next project.
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🔥 No-Code Founder Interview
Learn every week from a real world no-code success story
The Start
Alim has been working as a software engineer for startups for over 10 years and created 2 mobile apps with millions of users. You can say that he knows a thing or 2 about mobile app entrepreneurship. To create prototypes he always used tools like Figma, Zapier and Webflow to test new ideas. While he liked these no-code tools for certain usecases, he never saw it as a solution to build real apps because of the limitations.
Debunking myths
Two years ago, Alim discovered Flutterflow, a tool to build mobile apps without code. He was blown away. There were no longer limits.
He could build apps in a fraction of the time
He could focus on the business side in stead of writing code all week
No more debugging one line of code for days
He was excited to build mobile apps again
“I used to be turned off. I had great ideas but knew it was gonna cost me months of time to build it or thousands of dollars dev time. With Flutterflow I wanted to build apps again…”
Team no sleep
When GPT-3 was released, Alim was lying awake in bed thinking about shiny new ideas (classic!). As a true mobile dev, he was wondering if there were already any good GPT-3 mobile apps in the app store. He started searching. There were only a couple apps and they were not that good. He got out of bed again around midnight and started building.
He focused on solving a personal pain point. He was trying to be active on social media to build his personal brand. But he struggled to post content consistently and to find fresh content ideas. So he decided to build an iOS app to help content creators with that. 3 days later the app was ready and published to the app store in 1 click. Virally, an AI social media coach was born.
Don’t fear competition
There were already some big players like Copy Ai and Jasper AI doing something similar. But Alim sees competitors as something positive.
Competitors with paying users means there is already some validation.
The big players can do top of the funnel education.
There is always enough space to differentiate your product or be the best for a specific niche.
Not pretty
That initial version that Alim launched in 3 days... it was not a pretty sight. That doesn’t matter. The first downloads started to trickle in. Alim saw that as a positive sign and kept improving and adding more advanced features. His startup experience paid off because he knows all the strategies to get discoverd in the app store and monetize your app. After 2 weeks he had his first paying users. Without any marketing, he could grow his app to a steady income of around $1000 monthly revenue. All by focussing on app store optimization. Here are his 3 top tips:
Always optimize your keyword phrases for verbs.
People buy outcomes and they look for products to achieve those results: go viral faster, make money fantasy sports, watch romance stories, save tiktok videos.Spend disproportionately more time doing keyword research than anything else. Use a tool like Appfigures to identify niches/keywords that have a lot of money flowing through them. Adjust your keywords every month and keep track of the performance.
Don't just look at the USA market. Optimize your keywords for other Tier 1 countries like Australia, UK, Eastern Europe, Spain, etc. Take the time to create price parities, even though its tedious. Virally ranked 50th for social media in the Netherlands. Because Alim optimized the pricing for Europe, it converted well.
Almost acquired
A few months ago Alim decided it was time to move on. He wanted to sell Virally to show the students of his academy and accelerator Ambitious Labs that they too can build a small, niche app and sell it. He listed Virally for sale on acquire.com. He was close to closing a deal for $15,000 when doubt started to creep in. “Wasn’t the price too low? Shouldn’t he try to grow it? Are we in an AI boom?”
He backed out of the deal. 15 months of revenue was not enough to justify the sale given how easy the growth potential is. He is now making plans to 3x Virally by:
Rolling out Android
Adding voice assistant features
Adding a 21 day viral challenge to increase retention and guarantee success
Rooting for you Alim! Give him a follow on LinkedIn or Twitter to follow his journey. And check out Ambitious Labs if you want to build a profitable mobile app. Thank you for sharing your story.
🍿 Katt builds in public
My actions, fails and wins on growing this no-code business to ramen profitability
This weekI caved and went all-in on the shiny new idea: Build The Keyword. I teamed up with no-code friend Lee. We made a plan, he build it with Bubble in +- a day, I curated the database and helped with all kind of things. Today we are launching on Product Hunt. Curious to hear your feedback!
🙌 When you’re ready, here’s how I can help
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