🚪How I sold a landing page builder made with Bubble
The No-Code Exit story of Kieran Nocodelife and Yep.so
Hi, Katt here.
Welcome to the 75 new subscribers this week. 👯♀️
Oeh, it is an EXCITING one today.
It’s an update from Kieran, who I interviewed a year ago on how he built landing page builder yep.so and grew it to $700MRR.
Now he is back, because Yep was acquired!
Enjoy.
PS: Missed last week’s interview? Read here how Ranjit made a smart move by acquiring a product in stead of building it from 0.
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🔥 No-Code Maker Story
How it all started
Kieran got the idea for Yep from his own experiences. He needed something that would help him share ideas faster with the world. In stead of just sitting on them forever or whispering them to one friend.
So he started working on a super fast landing page builder with Bubble. His goal was to remove all the barriers and add some smart features to track interest and talk to interested users. Testing and analyzing different ideas was suddenly much easier.
That tiny seed
In June, Kieran noticed that building Yep started to excite him less and less. That wave of energy to build and improve the product was fading. It planted a seed in his brain that it might be time to move on….
By chance a few weeks later, he received an interesting DM. It was Steven and he asked if Kieran would consider selling Yep. And that is how the ball started rolling…
Talk talk talk
Kieran shared some data on usage, revenue and costs. Next, he recorded an in-depth video where he talked through the entire app, not in great detail but just an overview of the features and set-up.
Over the next few months they had a few calls to answer questions. Kieran was very honest about everything. From negative (for example: indie makers are a tough audience to sell to) to positive (the app has had a consistent stream of new users without any marketing).
The big moment
Steven's an entrepreneur and had previously bought and sold other apps. Without any marketing Yep had steady monthly recurring revenue. For Steven, it represented a good opportunity to take an unloved app and grow it.
So they sealed the deal for an undisclosed amount and went through the different steps to hand it over:
Putting together an asset purchase agreement.
Agreeing to a transaction day
Transferring payment and assets
Next to that Kieran offered, as part of the agreement, to include 10 hours of dev work, a fixed hourly rate for future work and access to all of Kieran his Bubble courses. Like that Steven will be able to maintain the app himself eventually.
Messy stuff
And here some great final advice for No-Code makers that are just getting started:
“If I were starting out now and wanted to build apps that I could later sell, I would do things a bit differently. I learned by building my own projects, which meant I didn't really know the best ways to structure apps, so as a result my earlier builds like Yep were a bit messy.
I would recommend doing some structured courses or bootcamps from the outset to learn the best practices so that when you come to sell an app it's much easier for you to hand over a well-built, well-documented app.
After all, the beauty of no-code is that people who buy our projects will hopefully be able to learn to maintain them themselves!”
Thank you for sharing your story Kieran. You can follow Kieran on Twitter or check out his course about learning Bubble from scratch in a structured and detailed way.
☝️One more thing
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