🚪How Dan Kulkov grew FounderPal to $100,000 revenue with free tools
The No-Code Success Story of Dan Kulkov and FounderPal
Hello there,
Welcome to 114 new subscribers. 🙏
I talked with annoyingly wise no-code founder Dan Kulkov.
Read about:
✨ Starting small with digital products
🔥 Replacing services by AI wrappers
💥 Building free tools for marketing
👀 Stable revenue with one-time payments
Enjoy and happy building.
PS: missed last week’s interview? Read here how John Rush built and sold the #1 GPT directory
🎈 4 Cool Finds
Startups Idea podcast became one of my regular podcasts :) (Together with No-Code SaaS, My First Million and Startups For The Rest of Us). Any other recommendations?
Pricewell is a no-code solution to easily implement Stripe subscriptions on your website built with Bubble.
Small Bets is a community with an amazing library of guest lectures that learns you how to minimize risk with building a portfolio of small businesses.
Xray is your search engine to find the right platform for your wildest automation ideas.
🔥 No-Code Founder Interview
Learn every week from a real world no-code success story
Hello! What's your background?
My name is Dan. Together with my wife Sveta, I founded FounderPal and Makerbox. We have been doing this for 2 years now. Before that, we were working in corporations and startups. We started to feel like we didn’t want to do this for another 5-10 years. We discovered indie entrepreneurship and that felt like a match. We can work for ourselves and do the things that we actually want to do.
How did you get started in No-Code?
We started our journey with digital products. I didn't know how to code, Sveta didn't know how to code. We were good in content marketing so we started with creating digital products. That’s how MakerBox was born. It are different digital content products like:
Collection of marketing frameworks
Collection of marketing mega-prompts
Video course about positioning
…
It was really good to start with digital products. We learned a lot and we got revenue traction to help us focus full-time on entrepreneurship. But at some point we didn’t know how to grow MakerBox any further and it was not sustainable. We discovered Bubble and that you can build a simple SaaS without code with it.
Tell me more about the product you have built?
After some time of building digital products for MakerBox we understood that digital products are good, but don’t solve the problem. Let's say you struggle with marketing, so you buy a video course. The problem is it's not very personalised and it still requires a lot of work to get going. As a solution we sold marketing services but we learned that solopreneurs don't like to buy services (and don't have money).
This gave us the idea to create an AI marketing co-pilot.
More personal than just digital product with generic advice
Cheaper than hiring a person
No need to manage people
Available 24/7
We decided to start with Marketing Strategy Generator. In this product, we tried to recreate the experience of working with us by using AI. At that time, ChatGPT was booming. People started to do some marketing with ChatGPT, but because they used basic prompts, the output was bad. By building specific AI wrappers, we helped them get better results with AI. Fast forward 10 months later, we rebranded to FounderPal and we added a lot of other free and paid tools to make marketing easier.
Which no-code tools did you use to build and run it?
In the first version we just used Bubble for frontend and backend. In the next version, we added Xano as backend. Bubble introduced workload based pricing. Our usage is high because of all the free tools we offer so Xano was for us a more sustainable option and I also liked it much more.
And then there are obviously some marketing tools. ConvertKit and Resend for email marketing, Plausible for analytics, Senja for social proof, Tella for videos and Stripe for payments.
What is the business model?
Our paid product (Marketing Strategy Generator) within Founderpal works with a one-time payment. So a person doesn't subscribe, they pay a one-time fee. We started with a lifetime deal, now it's an annual pass and they receive credits. We didn't start with a subscription because most users don't plan to create a marketing strategy every week.
Don’t underestimate one-time payments. Obviously the revenue is not very stable. It can fluctuate. But if your marketing funnel is stable (you get a stable level of traffic and have a stable conversion rate) you will get almost stable revenue. In total Marketing Strategy Generator made around $100,000 in 10 months. It's stable and growing. It's not like a one-time thing and then it just falls. It's a business that generates money every month.
How have you attracted users and grown your product?
Our main channel is Google thanks to side project marketing. The idea is simple:
We build a great free tool
We launch it on Twitter, on Product Hunt, on Reddit, Hacker News, …
We create a Youtube video around it and a blog post
We submit it to some directories
People use it, love it, share it
The best part is that we haven't reached out and asked for backlinks. We just focus on building free tools that are valuable and people want.
I also use Twitter but it's not our main channel because the algorithm is unpredictable and we don't want to rely on this. We tried a lot of things: newsletter sponsorships, pay-per-click ads on directories (like on Uneed), TikTok, YouTube videos. Some things are working, some not. Some take time. At this moment we're more focused on improving the funnel before we go to this more cold audience.
What's your advice for people just getting started?
First of all, try to build something that you understand how to sell to people. Don’t start with what to build but first try to understand who your ideal customer is, where to find them, how to price it,… if your goal is to have a business, you start with marketing, not with the product.
Second, start as simple as possible. You don't need Xano to start and build your first product. Build it with Bubble existing backend functions. High chances are you will have no paying customers, no users. The less features you build for the first version, the better.
And probably the third one is to improve your design. Customer requirement for tools are very high these days. They want intuitive things, not crappy MVP’s. The design shouldn’t be on the level of Apple but make sure it’s intuitive and looks nice.
Thanks for sharing your story Dan! You can follow him here on Twitter. Definitely check out his free (amazing) marketing guide and his Bubble x AI Wrapper course!
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great issue! so many insights!