| Readwise URL | https://read.readwise.io/read/01kt2ktcbfswb2td9j6t27kbwy |
|---|---|
| Readwise ID | 01kt2ktcbfswb2td9j6t27kbwy |
| Date | 2025-07-20 |
| Author | youtube.com |
| Category | video |
\n\nSource: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EF3uyvHHBfM
I built a simple website that makes 40Ka month. This is Angus Chang. He livesin Hong Kong, and he built the simplestwebsite I’ve ever seen.I built a website that literally doesone thing.And what’s even crazier is that heoperates this business entirely as asolopreneur. Solo founder, zeroemployees, 100% bootstrapped.I bootstrapped this entire business bymyself.
I brought Angus onto the channel and hebroke down how he found a silly ideathat thousands of people also happen toneed. Why spending money on ads actuallyhurt his business and why having a bigstrategy is for losers. All right, let’sdive in. I’m Pat Walls, and this isStarter Story.All right, welcome Angus to the channel.Thank you for coming on. Tell me aboutwho you are, what you built, and what’syour story.My name is Angus Chang. I built aBusiness that does just one thing. Ilaunched it in 2021 and today it makes$40,000 a month and I run it entirely bymyself. All right, before we get intothe numbers of this amazing businessthat you built, I want to hear how didyou come up with the idea for BankStatement Converter?
I had just quit my job and I knew I wasgoing to build some sort of product. Iactually had planned to build somethingelse. But on the side, I was thinking,you know, I’ve got X amount of money inthe bank. I want to know how long I cancontinue living the way I’m living. Andto do that, I wanted multiple years ofbank data. I wanted it all in a niceExcel spreadsheet so I can kind offigure out, okay, it looks like I’mspending this much a month. And that wasa lot harder than I thought it would bebecause my bank only provided PDF bankstatements. So, I wrote some code to getthe transaction data out of the bankstatements and that was also reallyHard. So, I figured it must be a realproblem.
Okay, you found the idea. Lots of peoplehave ideas all the time. How did youknow that this could be a business?Often I like to just make an MVP asquickly as possible, get it intoproduction and then get it in front ofreal users. And that’s kind of what Idid. So, me and a friend worked on itfor about a week. We got a domain, welaunched it, and then we bought Googleads to get people to start clicking intothe domain. And immediately peoplestarted uploading bank statements, whichkind of validated the problem. You know,I think a lot of people watching thiswill be looking for how do I find asimple idea? How do I find this kind ofapp that can do one thing? I can buildit myself and it can become a business.
Do you have any sort of framework orstrategy around finding these ideas?I think a good way is if you encounterthe problem yourself or a pain pointYourself. Another way is your colleaguesor friends complain about stuff at work.
But sometimes I just get ideas and Ijust think of the smallest possible wayto implement that idea. You know, get itout there and see if people will use it.You can try to validate beforelaunching, but if it takes you like oneor two weeks to make an MVP, it’s notthat much of a risk anyway. So, youmight as well just build it.
Okay. So, we talked about finding theidea, but I want to hear more about howyou actually built this thing. How didyou go from idea to real live website?When I proved this out, I had a localversion that would work for my own bank.I wrote this in Kotlin. It was basicallya console application. And then Igeneralized it a bit so that it wouldwork with other bank statements. Likeobviously, I don’t know if it works forevery bank statement, but I tried it outwith some of my other banks and some ofmy friends’ banks, and then I convinced aFriend to help me build the UI for this,and he did this in Nex.js, and then wegot the two things deployed. I got thefront end on Netlify. I deployed the backend to EC2 on AWS, and that’s kind ofhow we did it.
Cool. You probably build a bunch ofother apps, and you learned a lot in theprocess of what works and what doesn’t.What’s your kind of framework forbuilding? What’s the Angus method?
It’s kind of like a lean startupapproach. You know, you make an MVP,launch it as quickly as possible. Try toget it in front of your target audience,whoever they are. Don’t show it to yourfriends and family; they willjust lie to you, and they’re probably notgoing to buy your product anyway. Andthen you build your features based onreal user feedback. So maybe somebodyemails you, or maybe like analytics. Soif you notice that people are droppingoff on this page, maybe you need to dosomething there. If people are not usingA certain feature, maybe don’t continueworking on it.
All right. Well, let’s get into some ofthe numbers of this. Can you give me atimeline of the growth of bank statementconverter? So, 2021 we launched bankstatement converter. In 2022, we hit 6,000USD MRR. In 2023, it was 14,000. In 2024, 27,000. Andtoday, it’s at 40,000 USD MRR.
The total number of users is 75,000. Payingcustomers are about 1,000, and traffic permonth is about 40,000.
All right. So everyone watching thisright now is probably wondering, okay,it’s cool how you built it, but how didyou actually market it? How did you getcustomers? Was there a specific strategythat made this thing go up?At first, I bought Google search ads.These were good for getting the initialusers, but I was never able to run an adcampaign profitably. So, I would spendmaybe 300 in sales. I spent a lot of timetrying to optimize these ads, trying toGet them more profitable, but neverreally worked out. I tried blogging andbuilding in public. That gets quite a
lot of attention. However, I don’t thinkI get many users from doing that becausemy users don’t seem to be using Twitteror reading my blog. I also tried sendingout cold emails, and in 3 months of doingthat, I got one sale, and I also annoyeda lot of people. I got a lot of angrymessages back. People don’t really likecold emails. After about 6 months ofrunning Google search ads, I decided,you know, I’m just not going to do thisanymore. I might not even do this appanymore. I cut the ads, and I thoughtmaybe go back to work. Andinterestingly, I stopped paying for ads.
So, I knew everyone who was clicking onthe website was an organic user. And Inoticed I started getting new users. I’dget like two or three new signups a day.From that point on, I kind of focused onimproving the products. When customerscomplained about things, I would fixThem, and I just basically focused ondoing what the customers wanted.
All right, real quick before we get intohow Angus built this $30,000 per monthbusiness, let’s talk about somethingthat matters a lot once your businessstarts making money. Banking. The truthis most banks aren’t built for solofounders and SAS builders. They slow youdown with low card limits, delayedpayments, and systems that feel likethey were made in 2004. That’s why we’repartnering with Brex, the modern financeplatform that’s built from the ground upfor startups. With Brex, you can get upto 20x higher card limits. Earn highyields on your cash, automate expenses,invoices, and vendor payments, and movemoney instantly when you need it. It’s
fast, flexible, and made to scale withyou, no matter how small or scrappy yourSAS is right now. We worked with them toput together a free guide called TheStartup’s Guide to Modern Banking. Itbreaks down how to protect your cash,Extend runway, and upgrade your financestack without wasting time. Just clickthe first link in the description todownload it. Thank you to Brex forsupporting the channel. Let’s get backto the video. All right, so you got thiswebsite making a bunch of money. It’s agreat business. You have a team workingon this.
No, it’s just me. I started thisbusiness with a friend, but he leftafter a few weeks. I do all thedevelopment, customer support, sales,and marketing.
All right. So, you went from working a 9to five job to being a solopreneur, runningyour own business. What was thattransition like? Working for a company,you kind of spend a lot of time likeplaying, you know, refactoring code,trying out databases you think are cool.But when you work for yourself, youquickly realize these things don’t makeany money and potentially are a waste oftime. So, your focus is reallyDifferent. You go from being like adeveloper who cares about writing nicecode to a developer who cares aboutbusiness features and more businessaligned, I suppose.
Yeah. In your experience becoming asolarreneur, what are some of the prosand cons of the solarreneur lifestyle?When I first started, it was a bigchange. Most of my friends I knew, mostof the people I hung out with werepeople from work. You know, you go outfor drinks or whatever. And then I wentto working for myself, just being athome all day, basically not socializing.
It’s kind of a big change when you gofrom making maybe like $10,000 a monthto 200 a month and you’re basicallyhanging out with no one. So being asoloreneur can be pretty depressing.
Another thing is people often don’treally get what you’re doing, especiallywhen you’re failing to make money. Iremember in the first two years peopledidn’t understand why I did it, and theyWould also, you know, hear the revenueand they would tell me, “Oh, this islike a crappy business. You shouldn’t goafter this.” And then, multiple yearslater, when it’s making a lot more money,those same people will say, “Oh,it’s a great business.” Some pros, it’sgood to have your own schedule. Often Iwake up and go hiking instead of goingto work. It’s nice to be like on a
different schedule from everyone else. Ifyou’re starting up a VC-backed startup,you have a boss, you have investors, yougot a lot of time pressure. As asolopreneur, you can go a bit slower. Imean, depending on how much money youhave saved up, and you can also go aftermuch smaller markets. A venturecapitalist wouldn’t want to invest inbank statement converter. It doesn’tmake enough money. The market’s not bigenough. But for a single person, youknow, it’s enough, right? And you can bequite happy with that revenue.
Cool. Now, you have this great business.
You’re a solopreneur. What were youdoing before? Were you a developer? Whatwas your kind of journey to startingyour own business?I’ve always been a developer. In 2010, Iworked for an EPS machine company. 2010to 2014, I worked for myself developingindie games for the Xbox Live indie gamestore. I also developed a virtualgirlfriend app for Android and iOS. It’scalled Girlfriend Plus. 2017 to 2019, Iworked in an investment bank in HongKong. 2020, I worked at a crypto company.We’re building a crypto exchange. 2021, Ilaunched bank statement converter.
Okay, let’s talk about tech stack. Iknow you’re a developer. Can you sharewith me the entire stack of how youbuilt this app? The core engine iswritten in Kotlin. It’s like a JVMlanguage. Next.js is what the front endis written in. I use Brevo fortransactional emails. I use AWS EC2instances to host the back end. Netlifyto host the front end. Stripe forPayment processing. And that’s about it.
A lot of profit. It’s like 39 out of$40,000 is profit. Yeah.All right. So, you built this awesomebusiness. You’ve been working on it fora number of years. What have you learnedin the process that surprised you?
In the first two years, I was workingextremely hard on the business andmaking basically no money. You know, Ispent a lot of hours developing the app.I’d reply to customer emails as soon aspossible. If a customer email came in at3:00 a.m., I would deal with it rightaway. You know, at that time, everyextra customer made a big impact on MR.And what I realized was that those firsttwo years of hard work, you don’t getpaid much, but you kind of get the moneyfor that hard work in like years fourand onwards. The last question that Iwant to ask is what we ask everyone whocomes on to Starter Story. If you couldstand on Angus’ shoulder when you quityour job, you’re building that app. ItWas making a few dollars in revenue.
What advice would you give him?SAS is an excellent business model. Make sure you save enough money to survive multiple years of no income.If you only have enough money for a few months of runway, you’re probably not going to make it, you know?I mean, it took me two or three years before I could pay rent with the revenue I was getting in.
Ignore social media. That’s, you know, a lot of people think they need to build a following on social media before building a business.I think it’s a waste of time. Building a following on social media is hard work. And even if you have it, your business might still not be very good.So, just focus on the business. Focus on the product. Get some real users. Improve the product. And it should be easy to get more users if your product solves their problem.Don’t make a Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter page for your business. See a lot of people do this, and I think it’s a waste of time.
Time as well. That was awesome. Thankyou, Angus, for coming on. I love thebusiness that you built. It’s going tokeep growing. It’s awesome. Thanks forsharing everything with the audience andhope to see you back on soon.
Angus is proof that you can build simple appsthat actually make money. He found atiny problem, built a solution forhimself, and then turned it into alife-changing business. I think anyonecan take this framework and strategy andturn it into their own micro SASS.If you want to learn more about how tobuild simple apps, check out StarterStory Build. In about 2 weeks, you’ll gofrom a simple idea to a fullyoperational app. We’ll guide you on howto use AI to build and design your app,and then we’ll challenge you on how tolaunch it into the real world. Just headto the link in the description to learnmore and join Starter Story Build.
All right, guys. Thanks for watching. I’llsee you in the next one. Peace.