| Source | https://read.readwise.io/read/01kvxr9ym4s5mky6ww8av99s6p |
|---|---|
| Readwise URL | https://read.readwise.io/read/01kvxr9ym4s5mky6ww8av99s6p |
| Readwise ID | 01kvxr9ym4s5mky6ww8av99s6p |
| Date | 2025-06-10 |
| Author | Your Average Tech Bro |
| Category | video |
| Site | YouTube |
I’m currently building a startup that iscompletely failing, and I need to figureout what I can do to fix this problem.And in this video, I’m going to doexactly just that — talk about thevarious ideas and strategies that Imight have to figure out how to revivemy startup and probably also crash outover how bad things are going. So staytuned for a potential generational crashout. So just for a little bit ofcontext, my name is your average techbro, and I have been building appspart-time on the side while working a
full-time job the past four years. I’vebuilt over 14 different apps, and thevast majority of them have failed. Butover the past couple of years, maybe thepast year or so, I built maybe fourseparate apps that have made greaterthan $1,000 a month of revenue at theirpeak. And the current app that I’mworking on with my co-founder is an appcalled Perfect Interview.ai. It is an AIpowered job prepping tool. Essentially,The way that it works is it is a suiteof tools that helps anyone land the job.
We have a bunch of micro tools builtinto it like an AI resume builder,interview question generator wherepeople upload a job description. Wegenerate all the interview questionmaterial for them, they can practiceagainst it, blah blah blah blah. Andthen we also have an interview co-pilottool which essentially just helps youcheat on your interviews by listening inon your interviews, transcribing themand answering all the questions for you,there. So, that’s the product that wehave. Objectively, not doing horrible.It’s currently doing around 2K a monthof revenue for the past 2-3 months orso, which you asked me a year ago, Iwould have been so ecstatic for. Id be like, “Holy [__] I made it 2 grand amonth. That’s crazy.” But then Irealized we have a problem. This wouldbe great if this was just a side hustlethat I want to have for the rest of my
Life. But I don’t want this to be a sidehustle. I no longer want to work afull-time job if I don’t have to. Mydream life is being able to go all infull-time on my apps. But right now, twogrand a month for an app split betweentwo co-founders isn’t enough to survivein the USA. So, my co-founder and I, wewere thinking pretty deeply about whatcan we do to turn this from a sidehustle that just generates a fewthousand bucks a month to a properstartup that makes millions of dollarsof revenue per year. And we startedthinking deeply about what we’rebuilding. One of the big problems ofPerfect Interview is that at its coresuccessful state, if you were to imaginewhat the most successful version of thisproduct is, it essentially has a 100%churn rate. Kind of like a dating app.
How, theoretically, dating apps shouldhelp you get a date. You no longer willneed to use the app. You shoulduninstall the app from your phone.
Similarly, with Perfect Interview, ifsomeone were to use our product and itworked really, really well, they’regoing to get a job, and they no longerhave a use case for our tool. So, it’skind of like a flash in the pan. You useit for a very short period of time, butit kind of disappears for a couple of years.That’s why our app has 100%churn built into it. So then, if we wereto do the math to try to figure out howcould we scale this product into anactually multi-million dollar per yearproduct, there are kind of two options
that we could go down. Number one is tocharge extremely high prices like three,four, 500 bucks per customer so that ourlifetime value per customer is so highthat it’s okay if they churn becausewe’ve already got a lot of money fromthem. But that option doesn’t feel thatgreat because it feels kind of predatorytrying to raise prices on a product thatis designed to help people look for ajob to make more money. It just doesn’tFeel right. It’s like you’re kicking
somebody while they’re already down. Andthen option number two would be tofigure out how to out-distribute and howto out-market some of the existingincumbents in the space that havepotentially multi-millions of dollars ofcash in their war chest from investors,or multi-million dollars of cash fromjust being first to the market and beingaround longer. And that’s less predatoryand less morally ambiguous, but a lotharder to execute. So that’s why myco-founder and I are kind of stuck inthis middle ground where it makes moneyand it’s not enough money to like go allin on it, but it’s also not too littlemoney for us to just quit and neverthink about it again. We’re kind ofstuck in this limbo area where we’relike, I guess we can kind of still workon it. We can still keep it alive. Andlike I mentioned earlier in the video, Ispent four years building like 14different apps, and then this past year.
And a half building apps with myco-founder. And this has kind of been arecurring pattern that we’ve beennoticing with the things that we arebuilding. So for some context, myco-founder and I initially startedworking together because we were friendsfrom social media. He’s also a contentcreator, Mangm Duck on social media. Andso we originally teamed up because wesaid, “Hey, I’m a builder. He’s amarketer. He’s run a social mediamarketing agency before in the past. Sowe figured why don’t we come together? Ibuild apps and he handles all themarketing.” And with that mindset, weessentially only built apps in theconsumer space. Apps that we couldmarket via organic social media because
that’s his bread and butter, and that’san area that we’re both very familiarwith, making social media content. And itdid work because we were able to buildthree, four different apps that madeover $1,000 a month of revenue at theirPeak. But I think the biggest mistakethat we made so far, oh, I don’t evenknow if I’d call it a mistake, butsomething that we’ve always been doingso far is that every single product webuild, we try to build it with like nota really clear target demographic ortarget customer in mind. Every singleapp that we build is so generic wherefor example, perfect interview, who is thetarget customer we’re building an app
for all job seekers. For a previous appthat we built called Monty.AI, it’s likean AI note-taking tool. We said, oh, we’rebuilding this productivity app for allknowledge workers in the world becausewe casted such a wide net. It was reallyhard for us to find something that wasreally differentiating. And becauseour target customer was just so wide, anda lot of these industries and businessesthat we’re going into are really popular,and already have a lot of competition inthem. There really wasn’t too much thatdifferentiated us from the existingCompetition. There was no way for us tolike gain a little advantage by comingin at a different angle. We were justlike another fish in the ocean being
like, “Hey, this is us. We do everythingthat the other apps do.” But yeah,that’s us. We didn’t give any reason foranyone to use our app over others. So, Ido think it’s kind of a mistake or anerror on our end, at least in the pastyear and a half, for not making a very,very targeted demographic. So, I dothink that’s a mistake that we’ve kindof made on our end of just trying to bea general purpose application foreverybody. But in the end, if you’rebuilding for everybody, you’re almostbuilding for nobody. So, that’s whatwe’ve been doing for the past year and ahalf. And we realized, hey, it’s worked.
It’s kind of worked. It’s helped usbuild a couple of apps that are greatside hustles that make a couple thousandbucks a month, which is awesome, don’tget me wrong. But right now, we’re in aPhase where we want to really grow intoa proper business that makes multiplemillions of dollars a year. So, we’retrying to shake things up completely anddo everything that feels wrong in ourgut. Just do the polar opposite of whatwe thought was right in the past yearand a half. And with that in mind, came athird option of what we are going to try forthe next couple of months or so to pivotand improve and revive our startup ofperfect interview. So, we found optionnumber three, which is to pivot ourtechnology into a B2B use case. I usedto meme on all of the B2B SaaS boys beinglike, man, consumer is so much cooler. B2B
is whack as [ __ ] bro. Why would you everbuild in that space? But now, I’m goingto eat my words, and I think I’m going tobecome a B2B SaaS player. So, it hurts myego, hurts my soul, but I think it isthe right decision forward. And thereason for that is because, well, withB2B products, you can charge way moreper month for your product becauseBusinesses have deeper pockets. And witha B2B pivot that we’re making right now,we’re actually solving a much longer andpersistent pain point instead of justbeing like a short 3 to 6 month stint oflike, oh, yay, I got a job. I don’t needthis app anymore. Instead, we’re goingto try to use our technology and sell itas a technology to solve a pivotal painpoint that comes up every single day,every single month for these businesses.
So then our LTV, our lifetime value percustomer goes from just a singlepurchase from the B TOC angle tohopefully multimonth, multi-yearcontracts with much bigger businessesinstead. And right now, the angle thatwe’re trying to go with the B2B play forthe perfect interview is by trying to whitelabel our technology to other Instagramsocial media career coaches out there inthe world. This actually all startedback in January when an existing careercoach on Instagram DM’d us saying, "Heyguys, I really love your tool, PerfectInterview. Can I white label it andupload my own questions and my ownanswer guidelines and use into yourplatform and then I can use your
platform for my students to practicepreparing for their interviews with. "Wewere like, “Huh, that’s reallyinteresting.” And then we did a littlebit more research. We’re like, “Okay, wehave one data point. Let’s DM a couplemore people, a couple of other careercoaches, and see if there’s any otherinterests out there.” And lo and behold,we did get some pretty good interest. Ithink we DM’d like three, four peopleand we had like a 100% hit rate. Theyall replied back to us saying, “I’minterested. Tell me more.” So, we thinkwe have an interesting angle here whereessentially these career coaches, theyare already doing these mock interviews.
They already have these practicequestions that they give their studentsand they have to manually review theiranswers, grade their answers, manuallyGo through mock interviews and providefeedback on every single mock interview.
So, the bottleneck is the career coachright there. But now the idea is that ifthese career coaches can instead use ourplatform, upload all of their questionsonto our platform, their students canpractice against these questions inunlimited amount of times, AI canprovide unlimited amount of feedback.
Their students can do unlimited amountof mock interviews and then the careercoach only has to step in at the veryvery end and maybe do one final mockinterview before an actual job interviewthat their student is getting. So thenit becomes a core part of these careercoaches’ business because it’s helpedautomating like 80 to 90% of manual workthat they were previously doing. Andthen this flip side, the students canget more and more practice because theyare no longer bottlenecked by the careercoach not being available to hop on acall for a practice interview orPractice question feedback. So that is apivot that we are going for right now.
We are just working with a small groupof like two career coaches right now.Keeping it very, very small. And I’mgoing to be honest, this feels wrong tome. I feel like, oh, the market’s toosmall. What if we can’t find enoughcustomers? Can we really find that manycareer coaches out there that arewilling to pay for this tool? It feelswrong within every bone and like part ofmy body. But I think that is a goodsignal because that’s exactly what I’mtrying to do. I’m trying to shake thingsup, switch things around, do somethingdifferent. And I saw this banger quotefrom another entrepreneur who said, "In
the beginning stages, don’t build forpersonas, build for persons." I waslike, “Wo, that’s a bar right there.” Soright now, I’m not thinking aboutpersona. Actually, I kind of am. It’slike social media career coaches. Butforget the persona. We have two actualIRL people that we have their contactinfo for that are very interested inusing our product to help make theirbusinesses run smoother and free up timeon their end and provide a betterexperience for their students. Andthat’s what we’re focusing on right now.
I don’t know if this pivot is going towork. We’ll see. I’m going to documentit. We will find out in real timewhether it works or not. I’ll keepyou all updated on this YouTube channelwhether this pivot is actually going towork. But I’m hopeful. I think thispivot is the right thing to do. Justswitching things up. So, I’m hoping inthe next few months I have some goodupdates to provide all of you that thisB2B pivot will work out. If you’reinterested in that, make sure to hitthat subscribe button. I’ll keep you allupdated on how this all goes. I didn’tactually crash out all that much. I keptit pretty normal, pretty cool and calm.Maybe next time I’ll do a bigger crash.
Out if I really go crazy. But anyway,that’s it for today’s video. Thanks so much for watching,and I’ll see you in the next one. Peace.