AudioPen · B2C · voice-to-text note app
Build 4-5 tiny tools in a week, post each on Twitter, keep the winner
One of them got far more love than expected and became a $15K/month app
Workedvalidationfounder-brand
What they did
Frustrated after 15-20 mostly failed tools, he built 4-5 tiny tools in one week on his personal website's home page, sharing each on Twitter as he built it. AudioPen's MVP, built within a 12-hour Halfday Build hackathon (start at noon, aim for $1 of revenue by midnight), got much more attention than the others, so he built a full version with a price tag. His advice: build small things you can shut down without hurting users; the cost of experimentation is low, so build a bunch and double down on what resonates.
What happened
AudioPen's MVP got 'a lot more love than I expected' on Twitter; it became the product that now makes ~$15K/month
- Stage
- Pre-launch (Idea / pre-launch)
- Effort
- 4-5 tools in one week, after 15-20 earlier products
“So I decided one day to just build a bunch of tiny tools on my own personal website and host them on the home page there. I built, I think, four or five tools that week. While I was building it, I just kept sharing them on Twitter, and AudioPen's MVP was one of those five tools that I built.”
“It got a lot more love than I expected it to get on Twitter. So I figured, you know what? I'm getting some signal here.”
“So build small things that you can shut down without any negative consequences to the users.”
Related topics
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More from this episode
- AudioPen: Message the people who liked your prototype and ask whyLearned their use cases and designed the full version around them
- AudioPen: Open a waitlist before the app is ready and let beta testers inBeta testers paid on Stripe within 12 hours, without being asked to
- AudioPen: Build in public on Twitter for years so people trust your launchFounder credits it for first-day sales; users say they like following his journey
- AudioPen: Do one thing well and skip tempting nearby marketsFounder credits focus (and being early) for standing out; no numbers
- AudioPen: Sell $99/year and $159/2-year plans that don't auto-renew, with a limited free tier5,000+ paying customers out of ~200K users