🚪How Marc his passion side project was acquired for 6-figures

The No-Code Exit Story of Marc and WatchAuctionHQ

Sep 06, 2024

Hello there,

Welcome to 548 new subscribers. 🙏

Summer break is over. Time to catch up on the newsletters you missed while you were busy sipping Aperol on a terrace🍷:).

Here are the No-Code stories you missed:

And this week I talked to Marc, someone who lives and breathes mechanical watches.

Read about:

✨ Turning his passion into a profitable side project
💎 Growing to five-figure ARR
🧰 Building with a simple no-code stack
🔥 Staying in one niche
👑 Getting acquired by an ambitious competitor

Enjoy and happy building.

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🎈 6 Cool Finds

Do Things That Don’t Scale shares user acquisition strategies from the early days of startups. My favourite read this week.
Simple Analytics offers an amazing free and clean alternative to overwhelming Google Analytics.
MapsScraper helps you get data from Google Maps to Google Sheets. Perfect for your next directory project?
Napkin is an AI-powered tool that turns text into visuals
Midjourney is offering you now 25 free ai-generated images (through their website, not discord anymore). Just create an account and go for it!
No-Code Maker James shared a great tutorial on how to scrape data and use it in your Bubble app

🔥 No-Code Founder Interview

Learn every week from a real world no-code success story

Hello! What's your background?

Hey there! My name is Marc Montagne, I'm originally from Paris where I studied engineering and business before moving to Switzerland 11 years ago as I wanted to work in the luxury watch industry. I had a background in tech and had always built projects on the side but this was amplified when I discovered how slow the corporate world is. No-Code allowed me to either have fun on the side or quickly come up with prototypes that I could then implement at work.

Tell me more about your product?

I am a big believer in focus and passion. Being passionate about mechanical watches, I have never really felt that my career in the watchmaking industry was a job. This gave me the motivation and freedom to experiment and allow myself to simply build things. I have therefore been building products in that field for years. In 2021 I decided to launch WatchAuctionHQ, a database of watch auctions results, simply because I needed it myself as a collector.

Which No-Code platforms did you use?

I used Hexact to scrape data, Google Sheets to store that data, Glide to visually display it, Memberful to manage subscriptions and Carrrd to create a landing page. Simple stuff that wasn't too complex for me to use!

What went into building the first version?

The validation was quite straightforward as I needed it for myself. Even without any paid customer, this would have already have been worth it! The architecture being quite straightforward, I was able to have a running prototype in less than two months by working on it during nights and weekends. It was also the period of Covid so evenings were less busy.

What is the business model?

The business model consisted of a paid subscription (monthly or yearly plans) that would give access to the full range of data whereas free users would only get limited data. Growing revenue therefore required to grow the user base.

I cannot share exact figures but I grew WatchAuctionHQ to a five-figure ARR product with a growing and very sticky user base without any crazy user acquisition efforts.

How have you attracted users and grown your product?

The good thing with focusing on watches is that all my other products could promote my new product. For example: I later released a book called "Invest in Watches: The Art of Watch Collecting" which was quite successful and obviously mentioned WatchAuctionHQ extensively.

I could even use my LinkedIn and Instagram account where I have a large network within the watch world to effectively communicate about this new product as it was still "on brand".

I'm also an active member of the watch community and I engage with potential users every day. I didn't hesitate to plug it in the discussion whenever relevant.

Every day, watch collectors are discovering my products (apps, book, course, podcast, content, social accounts etc.) and are therefore funnelled in that "galaxy".

How did the acquisition happen?

EveryWatch, a competitor with higher ambition, reached out to me at the beginning of the year. I was quickly impressed by their product and vision. We figured out the best way of collaborating would be for them to acquire WatchAuctionHQ and for me to join their board as an advisor.

I was about to start a new job at another watch brand which would require my full focus. So this came at a convenient time. I had been running WatchAuctionHQ for almost 3 years and it took up my weekend to keep it going (feeding the database & customer management) and I much preferred the passive income from my book and course. I thought it would be better to let go WatchAuctionHQ and help EveryWatch build an even better product that would also benefit me.

Buying my project allowed EveryWatch to remove a competitor while also benefiting from my experience and network within the luxury watch industry.

What's your advice for people just getting started?

Focus on YOUR niche. Not just a niche but YOUR niche. If you solve an issue you have, you are making your life easier which is already worth the cost of the no-code tools you will be using. From there, the only thing that can happen is that you attract users that are facing the same issue and eventually want to pay you for that.

Thanks for sharing your story Marc, check out his course, book and other projects.

🍿 Katt builds in public

My actions, fails and wins on the road to ramen profitability with no-code

I’m still focused on growing Build The Keyword. But there is something exciting happening to one of the experiments I built during the Build The Keyword challenge. I created a simple landing page with a waitlist around an untapped keyword and 3 weeks later (without any further marketing efforts and 0 domain rating) there are 7 people on the waitlist. It are still tiny tiny numbers but that seems promising?

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