My last project chocolab.com.au was an ecommerce business doing around $500 000 in Revenue a year which I sold earlier this year. The problem – no recurring revenue, big spikes around gift giving times, and a considerable amount of physical energy required to scale and meet orders during these times.
The uncertain and inconsistent nature of my revenue drove me mental. My next project needs to solve these problems. In the seven years of running Chocolab I learnt a huge amount, and I’m fortunate enough to have successfully sold the business, buying me time to work on my next thing. However, that time is quickly running out. It’s time to build a Software-as-a-service app.
The web app challenge
I’ve gone down the road of trying to build a web app in secret before. I spent six months building my dream note-taking app, and guess what – I never launched it. I’m building this in public as quickly as I can. Here’s the challenge:
I have five months to build a web application to $5000 in recurring revenue monthly. Here are the details:
- I’m making and designing the app myself.
- I can’t exceed 40 hours per week working on this. I have a two year old who I don’t want to miss growing up.
- I’m starting with an existing idea that I’ve been building out the MVP for the past month (hence the five not six months)
- I have to launch the MVP before Christmas.
I’m going to be transparent about every step of the journey, follow along on this blog or on my Twitter, to see how things are going, what I am learning and the mistakes you shouldn’t make. The deadline is 15th April to have $5000 a month worth of paying customers.
The idea
Over time your email inbox accumulates new email subscriptions, whether added by you or illegally added by a marketer. Without consistently staying on top of unsubscribing your inbox quickly becomes filled with subscriptions you don’t want.
My app will attempt to solve this problem by automatically unsubscribing you from subscriptions that you never open, to let your inbox manage itself.
I’m using Ruby on Rails to build the prototype out as quickly as possible. I’m staying away from complex frontend Javascript frameworks and just using the fairly new Stimulus as it is built into rails already and very simple. I didn’t want to waste any time on choosing a framework so I made these choices very quickly.
To be on the waitlist to try it you can sign up here: autounsubscribe.me
Time to get building.
2 replies on “My Web App Challenge: From Zero to $5000/month in 5 months”
hello, I have used various similar tools and what I have never liked is how they managed privacy.
I don’t want a tool to read my personal emails, how do you plan to solve it?
I’m be doing everything in as private way as possible, I won’t be storing things like full emails etc. When I launch the app I’ll have a document outlining the entire approach to keeping your data as safe as possible as there will be a lot to cover.