Topic of the Week

What to Build?

Chances are that you want to build something on the Internet but you are confused. You don’t know where to start. Or maybe you are not sure what you want to do.

First things first, don’t get overwhelmed by all those revenue, growth and acqusitions screenshots and posts on the Internet. All of that content is nothing but engagement farming.

Everyone has their own journey and it takes a lot of time and effort to build something worthwhile. If you are just getting started -

• Build something small and ship

• Don’t spend too much money on these projects

• Be very clear of what you want to achieve

• Build something that excites you

But but but what should you exactly build? There is a lot that you can build on the Internet. SaaS maybe sexy, but there’s a lot more that you can build on the Internet and make a shit ton of money.

Listing down everything that you can build online 👇🏻 

Curate Directories & Resource Packs

• Curation is the lowest-hanging fruit in the journey of building products on the Internet. You can curate resources around a niche that you are interested in or excited about.

• You can find an existing need in a market by looking at specific industries and see if there is value that can be unlocked by curation.

• You can curate on Notion, Github Repos, Softr Directories, Airtable Databases, Google Sheets, and Google Docs, and even create Ebooks & PDFs.

• ⚡️ SaaS brands need emails of influencers to reach out to, Agencies need a list of recently funded companies to reach out to, and Event companies need a list of CMO’s to invite for the event. Identify a need and start curating a directory. You can sell this as one time product or on subscription basis by adding X number of leads every month. Cyberleads makes $500k ARR by doing this.

• ⚡️ Theresanaiforthat started as a simple AI Tools directory and now generates $$$ in revenue with listing fees and Ads

Create Templates

• If you are good at a particular tool, you can create templates and make quite some money out of it.

• You an create Notion Templates, Figma Templates, Framer Templates, Webflow Templates, WordPress Themes, and more

• ⚡️ Easlo, a 20 yo from Singapore, makes over a million dollars every year with his Notion Templates, Sick! Isn’t it?

• ⚡️ Dmytri made $20K in sales from Framer Templates in 6 months

• ⚡️ Avada, the highest-selling theme on WordPress, has generated over $65mm in revenue

Start a Newsletter

• If you like to research and a topic interests you, you can consider starting a newsletter. Curate events and information related to the industry, add your opinions to it and send a newsletter every week. You can be a part of the boost program of Beehive for getting sponsorships. A newsletter with 10000 subscribers can easily make upwards of >$2000 every month by sending 4 issues a month.

• ⚡️ Shushant’s AI newsletter was acquired by Horizon AI

• ⚡️ Angad’s Newsletters (ProductMonk & Marketing Monk) have crossed 30K in subscriber base each, generating at least $2000/mo

Start a Community

• If you are good at interacting with people, starting a community is a great option for you. Start a community around a topic you like or have expertise in and invite like-minded people.

• You can monetize a community by offering a premium gated community, running courses, or via sponsorships

• *⚡️ Daniel Vassalo does ~$600-800K in ARR with his Small Bets community (~$150 membership)

Teach Courses

• If you are good at something, why not teach that? You can do live or recorded or hybrid sessions. You can also explore tieing up a community around it

• ⚡️ Max Haining runs the popular 100 days of no-code, 100 days of AI and many other popular courses

Start a Niche Blog

• Master keyword research, learn SEO and find opportunities to start a niche blog that generate traffic. You can monetise that traffic via Ads or by cross-selling something else.

• ⚡️ Sayan Neogi’s Prosmartrepreneur generates over $10K in MRR

• ⚡️ Karthik runs a bunch of niche blogs that generate $$$ in revenue

Build Boiler Plates

• A Boiler plate is nothing but a pre-prepared set of code or a design system or design elements that can be re-used, effectively reducing the time to development.

• We feel that there’s a lot of alpha in building boiler plate for niches

• ⚡️ Marc Lou built Shipfast, a NextJS boiler plate, that generates over $75K/mo

Start Productised Services

• Services but with a fixed scope and amount of work

• Eg. Landing Page Design for $250, UI/UX for a SaaS tool for $1000, MVP in 4 weeks for $999 and so on

• ⚡️ Nick Buzz runs a wildly popular design service called Baked Design which has generated over

Build a Micro-SaaS

• SaaS but for a Niche, often built by a solo founder or by lean teams, profitable since Day 1

• The Builder OS largely focuses on Micro SaaS but the methods work across most of the above categories

• ⚡️ Pieter Levels generates over $53K in MRR with PhotoAI, an AI headshot generator tool

• ⚡️ Damon Chen generates over $30K in MRR with PDF.ai, a Chat with PDF tool

• ⚡️ Wilson built Senja, testimonial collection tool, that generates over $26K in MRR

There’s more - D2C Brands, Dropshipping, Flipping Domains, Freelancing etc but these are our top nine picks. All the best!

Community learnings for the Week

Tony Dinh

Nationality - Vietnamese
Age - 30
Top Product(s0) - TypingMind
Current MRR - ~$40K
Products Sold - Black Magic ($128K), Xnapper ($150K)

Tony Dinh, a 30 year old Indie Hacker from Vietnam, is perhaps one of the most successful indie hackers recently.

Before diving into the indie world, Tony was a seasoned software engineer with a love for building from scratch—his journey started way back in high school with Visual Basic 6. With seven years in the tech industry under his belt, Tony had mastered everything from frontend to backend development, not to mention DevOps and mobile app development. But when the pandemic hit in 2020, the boredom of remote work led him to IndieHackers.com, sparking a desire to forge his own path.

Tony’s initial attempt was a macOS log viewer app, which, despite being a technical masterpiece, ended up on the abandoned project pile. But he didn't let this setback stop him. Instead, he bounced back with DevUtils, an all-in-one offline tool for developers. After a successful launch on Hacker News and a boost from Product Hunt, Tony saw his first sales trickle in.

As the buzz from launch spikes waned, Tony turned to Twitter, engaging with the #buildinpublic community. His strategy was simple yet effective: share interesting projects, engage with others, and sprinkle in humor and memes. This approach not only built his follower count but also sustained traffic to DevUtils.

With a growing Twitter audience, Tony launched Black Magic, a tool that added a progress bar to profile pictures—an instant hit. This quirky tool eventually evolved into a suite of Twitter engagement tools, transforming it into his first serious business venture.

In August 2021, Tony took the plunge and quit his job. His adventures in indie hacking ramped up with Black Magic and DevUtils gaining traction and revenue. The freedom of self-employment allowed him to explore new ideas and even travel around Vietnam, balancing work and life like never before.

Tony continued to innovate, launching Xnapper, a screenshot app, and later Typing Mind, leveraging OpenAI’s ChatGPT API. Each new product added to his growing revenue and expertise. However, 2023 brought unexpected challenges with Twitter API changes, forcing tough decisions and leading to the sale of Black Magic. He sold Black Magic for $128K (at $14K MRR) - He had rejected an offer of $500K before the Twitter API changes kicked in.

As revenue and responsibilities grew, Tony expanded his solo operations, bringing on a mix of full-time and freelance talent to help scale his ventures. This shift allowed him to focus more on what he loved, reducing stress and maintaining customer satisfaction.

By Jan 2024, Typing Mind hit $50K MRR and he sold Xnapper for a whopping $150K by March to focus on Typing Mind.

Tony’s journey is nothing short of an inspiration - But remember, nothing happened overnight and he has had his fair share of failures. Nonetheless, we hope his journey inspires you to build something on the Internet!

Community learnings for the Week

• Fekri shares how he built product around SEO and gets over 4k impressions daily

• Samarth shares tools you can use to search for problems worth solving on different platforms

• Sabba (Founder @veed.io) shares how he got first paying user for Veed

Story of the Week

Reddit trend —> $6M ARR beauty app for men

UMAX, simple tool, generates over $6 Mn in ARR by solving the a problem that the founder came across on Reddit.

If you head over to r/malegrooming, you'll find tons of guys sharing their photos and asking for advice on how to up their grooming game. We're talking 25+ posts every single day! The founder of UMAX saw this and had a lightbulb moment.

He created an AI-powered app that rates people's looks based on a few photos and offers personalized suggestions for improvement. He started marketing the app right there on the subreddits where the problem was being discussed.

The result? In just 6 months since its launch in November 2023, UMAX is already raking in a cool $6 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR). That's right, $6 million!

UMAX is a very good example of how paying attention to your surroundings can help you identify problems worth solving. Who knows, maybe the next big idea is hiding in plain sight, just waiting for you to notice it.

Keep an eye out, that million dollar idea might just be hiding around you in plain sight!

Parting Notes

Did you like today’s edition of The Builder OS? Is there something that we can do better? Please share your feedback with us ♥️

Don’t forget to checkout The Builder OS - a repository of all our learnings, playbooks, frameworks and resources around building, growing, scaling and selling products on the Internet. Backed by our experience in building 10+ products, selling 4 and generating over $150K in 12 months.

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