🚪How I built and sold a B2B sales tool in 2 months for 5-figures
The No-Code Exit story of Chris Ikharo and TacticalEngage
Hi, Katt here.
Welcome to the 54 new subscribers this week. 👯♀️
For this week’s No-Code Exit story I talked with Chris Ikharo. He built and sold a product without revenue for 5-figures. I think it was possible because the product was ready to scale:
🩹 Solving a clear problem for a certain niche
💎 Sleek website and branding
🏗️ Functional product
💰 Ready to monetize (subscriptions and email flow set up)
This makes it attractive for non-technical founders with marketing skills and specific industry knowledge to acquire a product and use their skills to monetize it as quickly as possible.
I hope the interview can inspire you and happy building!
PS: missed last week’s interview? Tom breaks down how went from failed app for everyone to a niche product with happy and paying users. Read it here
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🔥 Maker Interview
Hello, what is your background?
Hi, I'm Chris. My journey to no-code started long before no-code was a thing.
I always fancied the idea of location freedom and being able to make money online. I remember reading John Chow's blog in 2010 and getting inspired to build one for myself, so I started learning to code. After a while I discovered WordPress and this was my first real experience of seeing how powerful no-code is. Later I got to explore a number of no-code tools like Zapier, Airtable, Make, Notion, Bubble...
Tell us about your product that you made?
In 2021, I was running an e-commerce email marketing agency. For one of the Black Friday campaigns for a client we wanted to send out personalized notecards to all their customers via direct mail. AI wasn't on the horizon yet, so we could only do the basic personalizations.
Fast-forward to 2023, I wanted again to send out personalized cold emails and notecards via direct mail for another product I was building. This time AI has become a thing.
So I glued a number of tools together for my campaign. Afterwards I thought others might be interested in a product like this so I decided to turn it into a SaaS. TacticalEngage was born, a sales enhancement tool that helps sales people create personalized micro-sites and notecards for prospecting.
What went into building the initial version?
There wasn't much of validation that went into it at the early stage. I just built it, as it was solving my own problem. The tools I used were:
Bubble for the web app
Open AI to personalize the different prospecting pages, note cards and also email content.
Zapier for connecting with other tools
Loops.so for emails
Can you share how you got your first users?
Cold email is what I like to use as main acquisition channel for my projects. Here are some things I learned:
Never use your main domain for sending cold emails.
Only do it if you're in the B2B space, I noticed it doesn't work well for B2C.
Keep your message brief. Don’t talk about each feature but hit one major pain point and the benefits.
Focus on one CTA to buy right away with a discount or a free trial.
Send 4 followups and then stop sending
Tell us about the acquisition?
After a few weeks of building I decided to list TacticalEngage on acquire.com. It was pre-revenue but had a couple of users on the free tier. I believed it would do better in the hands of someone with experience in the niche. I listed it on Acquire and after a number of signed NDAs and 3 real interested offers, it was acquired for 5 figures. From building to acquisition took 2 months.
Why did they buyer acquire your project?
The buyer was someone without technical knowledge but with 10+ years experience in sales. He was in the market for a project he could acquire and scale, TacticalEngage seemed like a no-brainer for him.
What's your advice for makers who are just starting out?
Validating your idea can save you a lot of stress and especially motivate you to keep building. I feel that when I don’t validate an idea I lose motivation to finish it.
Thank you Chris for sharing your story! Do you need a Bubble dev? Hire Chris here.
☝️One more thing
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