he had nothing.. until he built a stupid simple $30k/mo app with AI

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyaWU1qxQg4 Channel: Superwall (Superwall Podcast, host Joseph Choi / Consumer Club) Upload date: 20260104

Imagine working 20 hours a week from anywhere in the world on a business you love while it prints money in your sleep. That was Dimmetri’s life for 5 months. There was like a period of like 5 months during which I was just working on your movie AI and it was making money and I was just working like 20 30 hours a week traveling exploring having fun watching numbers go up. Being not accountable to anybody and just like making money in your sleep is incredible. >> But getting there was a brutal 2 and 1/2 year grind. He wasn’t a marketer. He didn’t know how to build apps. And for the first year and a half, he made almost nothing. >> Six months before I started monetizing, another year to hit the first thousand dollars, then a year to hit like 10. And then a year later, I was at 28. >> So, what changed? Some would say he got lucky. He was early to AI and he was building with GPT3 before ChatGpt was even a thing. And the novelty of his app got him featured everywhere. >> We were early to this. So, there was also a lot of excitement around AI. So, we wound up getting a lot of media attention. At one point I was on like Fox, CNBC, Wired, Washington Post. >> But here’s a twist. These PR articles didn’t actually bring in users. It gave him something a lot more valuable. >> The PR itself didn’t generate any money but allow us like a really good SEO strategy. We had very good domain authority at the door. >> With that domain authority, he built an SEO machine that drove half his traffic all the way to 30K a month. But he didn’t do that part alone. While he was still working his full-time tech job, he hired a team all from Upwork. At >> one point, I had like 10 to 12 different contractors, most of them working only a couple of hours per week. I was a manager at the time. I didn’t need to pay myself the money. I could afford to be not profitable for a while cuz I still had my day job. >> He scaled the business to ,000. Like 6 months before I started monetizing, another year to hit the first 10,000 bounty to anyone who introduces me to my future wife. >> And it’s like a very weird thing to say. Like nobody like does that really, but when you think about it like Yeah. I guess I would too. Yeah. >> Yeah. I um I’ve seen numbers at 50. I’ve seen numbers at 100. I think ALF famously has a 15,000 and I really don’t have to do anything like that. like however you want to handle that freedom like it’s it is absolutely magical. >> That’s cool. >> Well, how Wait, can I ask when when was your moment? What was your breakthrough moment? I feel like you got there earlier than I did. I’m always a little jealous of the folks that like discovered this. I’m annoyed that it took me until 25 to be like, “Wait, what?” >> Yeah. I think it’s just cuz like the internet just keeps I don’t know. There’s just more and more information so it reaches people faster. Like I feel like these days it’s reaching kids at like 13. But yeah, like I was probably 19 or 20. I was in college and I read some of these things online and uh I was studying computer science and so the path was like oh I’m going to become a software engineer. Y >> and then I started, you know, listening to these gurus online and then it’s like, oh, actually, you know, and they they they always they make fun of 9 to5s and they, you know, they show the differences and lifestyle between different and and just like the whole like approach to life and I was just like, oh yeah, it makes sense. Like I’d rather rather be entrepreneurial. So, I started drop shipping and all these like online businesses and let’s try to make money online. >> So, did you ever end up having like a normal ass 9 to 5 job? >> No, I did. So, I actually I I hedged it really really hard. I I did both tracks at the same time. So, I applied to internships. I I got tech internships. I I did Google product management as my first job. But the entire time I was doing side projects. So I was doing side projects while I was in college, while I was applying to jobs, while I was in the job at Google, and I built Consumer Club while I was at Google and then quit. >> Wow. >> Earlier this year, actually. So I I I I did the similar thing as you where I did like the whole corporate path, but I was trying side projects for multiple years before. >> So when I met you last year, you were still full-time at Google. >> Yeah. I don’t think many people knew. I yeah for a little while I like I put Google as my personal brand and I’d be like hey I’m a I’m a Googler like but like nobody in startups cares so I just kind of just stop talking about it. >> Yeah >> it’s like an anti- signal sometimes >> I I feel like Google it it depends on what circles you’re in but yeah it’s like like big tech is like much less of a signal than it was. I feel like I feel like 10 years ago there was still like >> now there’s just like enough antipathy and like cynicism I think around the whole thing. >> Yeah. Yeah. Nowadays it’s like if you work at Stripe or RAMP maybe it would be like oh that’s kind of cool like maybe you’re smart >> but if you work at Google it’s like >> I I do think there is like something important there which is that like there’s there’s a lot of different ways to slice this but the whole like keep your keep your 9 to 5 job and like do this on the side like it’s not a terrible idea. Um, I don’t know if it was the right path, but like but having that like financial cushion, I think it goes a long way. I feel like I see a lot of people like quitting their jobs and then flounder. They like try to do something for 3 to 6 months, can’t figure anything out, start panicking, get a job again, and then it goes nowhere. There’s something about like do this aggressively on nights and weekends that like you don’t you don’t have a deadline, so to speak. like you have I mean you should still move fast but like but the I think the like lack of like time pressure on the opportunity to discover versus just cool I’m giving myself 6 months full time to build a business. Yeah, it’s it’s a different psychology for sure. And you have for me, one of the one of the psychological elements was I had a six-figure job in tech. So then that that’s the the benchmark for success for the side project. Like if I if I don’t make that much at least with the side project, then it’s not worth quitting. So, um, or it could be for some people, but I just like it kind of reframed all the ideas that I would think of towards that benchmark. Like if this idea can’t make this much, then I it’s not worth trying. >> Yeah. Like like if this if this drop shipping project or like this particular consumer project, like if it can’t get to the point where it’s comparable to Google, like is it worth pursuing? And that >> um there’s one more like slightly grosser thing there which is that like the like sense of selfworth that you get um like the sense of like legibility like I’m doing something that is like moderate to high status. Doing low status things is terrifying and like not going to lie like maintaining a high status job until what I was doing was adequately high status like is it stupid? Is it kind of vain? Yes. But it it made the like transition a lot easier psychologically. >> Yeah. I think if you’re trained to be high status, sir, like look like I went to, you know, it’s like >> you see same [ __ ] just down south. >> Yeah. It’s like you Yeah, exactly. Like you you it’s hard to get out of that mindset even though it’s probably the better thing to do or like the thing that you truly want to do. So, it took a year to make your first you said $1,000. >> Yeah, it was it was a very slow curve. I mean, I can pull it up on Stripe. Um, but it was it was like took like 6 months from when I started building it to like when a personal mentor of mine convinced me like, "Why aren't you monetizing?" And then from there like like 11 months until what was like a,000 bucks um altogether cuz at the time I didn't know how to build apps. I didn't know how to market. Are you doing all this yourself? Are you hiring people? >> Yeah. Um, I think something else that I did differently from a lot of other indie hackers is like I I hired people pretty early on. Not full-time people, but like literally like contractors on Upwork. Um, people doing like everything from like our our dev was working 40 hours a week, but like everybody else like people that helped me write email sequences, people that helped me with SEO, people that helped me manage ads, people that like like a designer, people that helped with web flow. I think at one point I had like 10 to 12 different contractors, most of them working only a couple of hours per week. I was a manager at the time and like I I don't know, I've been doing management BS for a while and so like it helped that I had like still like I I didn't need to pay myself the money. I could afford to be not profitable for a while cuz I still had my day job. But I I found it much easier to like scale by like having people to help out. there was like a customer support person that I paid like$ 5 an hour that would handle a lot of different things and handle a lot of small pieces. The the other thing that I wound up being quite helpful was that like a lot of times I was getting ramped up on something new like Google Ads for example, I would hire a person that would do some of the work but also like train me and like I would like learn from them and like get onboarded to at the same time. So a person that was like both doing the work and also like acting as a coach so that I could like the process and understand it. It’s hard to hire people when you don’t know what’s going on. And so a lot of times what wound up is like I’d make a hire, we’d spin something up. It was kind of janky, but I’d also like learn what good looked like, what bad looked like, what worked, what didn’t work, and it would make it a lot easier to hire the next person. Um, dev that I hired was terrible. The second that I hired was like pretty good. And then from the second one, I learned and I got help from that to like hire people. Hiring devs is like one of the biggest problems in starting uh you know starting software companies because you’re just especially if you’re non-technical you just don’t know what to look for and it’s expensive. It can be expensive. So did you just dive in and say like I’m just going to waste the money if I waste the money and I’ll learn something or were you like careful about the initial vetting? >> I was trying to be super careful when you don’t know how the blackbox works and like you don’t know the code yourself and you don’t know how long something takes. I think the the first project that we wound up building with a dev team was the like we had a keyboard app which that in itself turned out to be a really bad product bet actually performed much worse than literally just our core flow. It was like an app that integrated into your keyboard so that you wouldn’t have to switch screens and just like tell you what to text like right there while you were on the dating app. interviewed a bunch of people, were super careful, were like very aggressive about budgets, but then like what they built was still like it looked and felt like what we needed, but it was like deeply broken on the inside and took like longer and cost more than it was intended to cost, which I think is the case with I think every story that I hear of somebody like not that technical building something out. It helped that I was technical enough that I like worked with devs and that like I operated the back end myself so I had like some sense of smell for what was good and what was bad but like god hiring an agency terrible time and then like yeah hiring somebody before you know what you’re doing. I’m wondering like how do other people do this? Like is there is there any sort of shortcut or are you basically just kind of [ __ ] the first time you hire a dev if you’re like not that technical? Has anybody actually found a good workound for this? I’ve talked to >> there’s this guy lots. He was one of the um first members of Consumer Club and he was on this channel as well. I interviewed him and he uses Upwork for all his apps. He he’s like a multi- uh time founder. He built all these iOS apps and he just he hires out of uh Upwork every time. And I think there’s just some basic stuff that you can do. Like he says that you basically just you got to break down the functions of the app into at least three parts, like three to five parts, and then put a price on each of the parts. Because one of the biggest problems is the costs bloat over time when the dev says like, “Oh, sorry. This is taking longer than I expected.” And then you just don’t know how to say no to that. You’re just like, “Okay, I guess I’ll trust you.” But part of it is is also like chachbt where you you know you can use chatbt to estimate you know how complex are each of these features and then put a price on that based on a benchmark of you know what are the costs and then he just has his own like I don’t know if this is arbitrary but he just sets his own like cap on each iOS app. So, he’s he has like very problem-solving type of apps that are just painpoint solution, hard payw wall, and all he does is um I think his cap is like something around $2,000. So, he never pays more than like$ 2,000 per iOS app. I think that requires just good SOPs, good vetting, and negotiating on price. I think a lot of people just don’t negotiate on price or are really clear about like build this part it’s 18,000 mark and I was like cool it’s time for me to go. M um and then I was I was on track to leave I think in December like hiring for a replacement. My manager and the whole like team half the team knew about it. Um and then Open Door did a giant layoff in November. >> So I got a severance package and an exit on top of everything else. That was like the happiest probably the happiest moment in the past couple of years. >> Yeah. >> The one time when you really want to get fired. The timing could not have been better. >> Yeah. So, why why 20K a month? Why was that the milestone that you said you quit? >> I’m a terrible like I don’t know like I I’m an immigrant. My parents are immigrants. There’s like something like I don’t know like I borrowed money from like a drug dealer at one point to pay for like food in college. There’s like there’s just like there’s some there’s some like scarcity mindset that I think certain people have and I’m one of those people where like it is I found it very very terrifying to like leave something that was like secure up until I knew that like I had like something resembling an infinite runway. Um and I also told myself that like honestly like my the the the argument that I made with myself was that like I was making a lot of money at open door and I would actually take that money and reinvest more of it into growth. So, I actually wound up being unprofitable for the last year that I was at Open Door because I was spending I I would like pour extra money into experimenting with things, experimenting with new growth channels, experimenting with stuff versus doing it all myself. I like wound up hiring more talent and like running it in the red and treating this as like this is better than me leaving Open Door and just doing everything by hand. It’s like if my hourly rate is like what, like $150 an hour and I can hire a bunch of people for$ 50 an hour that know better than what I’m doing. Yeah. >> Um, so the line in the sand was explicitly the moment where I can cover all of my expenses like I without burning any savings. It was like 20k profit. It wound up being like or sorry 20k revenue wound up being like 10k profit a month without having to like cut any staff. New York is expensive. >> Um, and I didn’t want to cut down on my lifestyle either cuz I like partying in New York and being an idiot. Um, again, lots of variables in that equation. If you’re willing to be more frugal or if you’re willing to play things less safe. That’s actually a very interesting mindset that I don’t know if if that many people take that mindset of you’re almost treating your job, your full-time uh W2 job as it’s like when people have an agency business on top of their uh tech business and they’re building a product and the product costs a lot of money to build. So then they do agency services on the side and then use that cash flow to fund the thing that they actually care about. And you’re basically doing that but with your jobs. And so you take your your job money and then you put that into the thing that will allow you to escape the the service job. I think I see the the the version that you’re describing. I almost see that more often, but actually no. There’s there’s I feel like there’s a decent amount of people that like are like doing their day jobs and like have a hustle on the side, but yeah, it it worked great. >> Yeah. >> Um was I very effective at my day job? Not nearly as much as I’d like to be. >> You made it. It worked. >> Trade-offs. >> Yeah. >> Um caveats. Um did it suck? Was it like a lot of hours? Was I working most weekends? that I have to like ditch a lot of social events so that I could like work on Sundays. Yeah. Um but I think having a community in New York City of other people that are builders and like literally just like a group chat called Shriet Sundays I’ve made a bunch of friends that would meet up every Sunday to like build stuff a lot of different ways up to the top of the mountain. >> Thanks so much Tamishi. This is awesome. Great great story and very inspiring. Thanks for being on the pod. >> Of course. Something you might not know, most of the founders I cover on this podcast are hanging out right now in the Consumer Club Discord, sharing with each other what’s working now for consumer apps. So, you can apply to join Consumer Club if that sounds interesting to you. And this is the Superwwell podcast. Of course, you got to check out superwall.com. We have more videos on the channel.