Had a full-time job, bootstrapped a side project to 7 digit ARR, now building another side project that became popular while being a CEO AMA

Glad you have enjoyed it @RomaTesla.

I started building in public, on Twitter.

Shared my work in a few subreddits where I was active before and which were relevant. This is where I was getting a lot of feedback and motivation.

Where it skyrocketed was with an introduction of support for Notion - you can embed Kairo blocks into your Notion. People got excited as it is something unique and it was fairly easy to market on social than just Time and Habit tracking app. The audience was easy to pin point.

It got shared mainly on facebook in various groups, not by me, but others, who were really excited they have found it. The embed blocks are for free (with limited features) and have branding on them with a link to Kairo. Notion is known for templates, so I have seen a lot of creators make templates for free and adding Kairo widgets to it. Some of the traffic comes from those free embedded blocks.

Some people convert when they find Kairo being useful to them for tracking time and habits instead of embedding them into Notion.

I still have plenty of ideas where to take the marketing for this, but a little time. :)

Does that answer your question? Anything else or any other details you would like to know?

Hi @CheekyRugo,
The easiest way to find a problem or an idea is by looking around you while experiencing different situations/environments/etc. There is always something to improve and too many problems to fix. Be curious, ask questions. :)

My ideas and problems come from the environments I have been working in. If I did not have any ideas anymore, I would pick an interesting industry and get hired. I would search for problems while learning from my colleagues. :)

For example, I always wanted to make a game, but I know I don't have skills for it yet. If I will want to follow this path, I would be trying to get hired by a game studio, just to understand how the business works. Stay there for a year or two or how long I will find it that I am learning new things. And then make a game. :)

And it was always problem first for me. All the ideas I have are based on some problem. Sometimes I think it is an idea, but when I dig further, I usually uncover a problem where it is coming from.

Is it a long time? Back then, four years was just fine. :) But yes, I made many mistakes a first-time founder will make.

What kept me going was the motivation and constant feedback from users and potential customers (problem and solution interviews). I was regularly making sure it still makes sense to me, and yes, I thought that we would launch in three months, which ended up being a year (again, many mistakes were made). :)

Thank you @robert_balazsi!

This is a great question, and I was thinking about it a lot but didn't gather all my thoughts on this yet. So here is the fast train of thought. :)

I do believe being distinctive helps a lot to make it.

With Kairo, being a time tracking application (amongst other things), I have looked at whether other people see time-tracking the same way I do. I concluded that we all know that tracking your time is useful, but it is also annoying.

So the main problem was to make it less annoying and find out why is it annoying. For example, others offer a play and stop button in a spreadsheet-like interface. After identifying this, it was easier to understand which direction to go.

I didn't need to re-invent the time-tracking or invent more features that others do not have. I did not need to sell time tracking and explain what it does, as others in the space have been doing this for years (this is one of the benefits of entering a crowded market, people are aware).

Here it also plays well with me wanting to try several concepts (for an upcoming other product) regarding visuals, animations, and UI interactions. First, eye candy from the very first experience, but functional. That first experience is currently selling Kairo even before the trial expires.

Does that make sense? :) I would like to try some other crowded markets in the future, just to try to differentiate.

Thank you @Shaunau. Yes, I did all of it. I have used this project as a test to the skills I have acquired throughout the years, not just from the product building perspective. :)

I am a college drop out from the University of the Arts London - Animation, I left for IT offer that back then I could not refuse. So I am slowly getting back to animation. :)

But side projects are for learning new things too, so it was my first time with Vue 3, Netlify, Fauna DB and other approaches from the technology perspective. Next thing I would like to try is Electron and building this into a mobile app, which I took into consideration from the beginning.

Hey @kinge,
I would say the initial look took about three months (120 hours). There was a lot of small tweaks to make certain parts feel natural, especially the animations. You would not have noticed them immediately, but it would bother your eye. I geeked out about it a bit. :D

It is hard, not going to lie. It can get lonely. And I am making sure that people (when joining) are aware of these consequences and how it is like working for a distributed and asynchronous company.

I believe there are no good ways to replace real-life interactions, not yet. I try to encourage everyone to embrace their local community. You will enjoy the work, the focus without distractions, to push you forward professionally, but you won't be able to say, "Let's grab a coffee after the work", etc.

This seems possible with the calm approach. Where you do not have a problem to close your laptop after 8 hours of work and not to think about it anymore until next day. It allows you to have more quality time outside of work, in local community, with friends, with family. And with being asynchronous, you can schedule the work around your life. It has its pros and cons, we still have to figure out what is the best way to make everyone feel they are part of all of it. Clear goals help here.

We have live meeting when someone new joins (which is almost every month), then people work in teams, where they manage themselves - they have full trust and are held accountable for how they decide to do things.

If you have any suggestions or what worked for you, I would be happy to hear if you have some experience with this. :)

Thank you @IHkishan.

I would first ask you, why are you looking for a problem? What is it that you want to achieve? And why? Do you want to one day have your own product or a company with employees, a huge corporate, do you want to take it to IPO, etc?

What is your goal now?

Running an asynchronous company has been my goal for the last nine years. But you are right, it is not for everyone, and it is easier to start with like-minded people.

At some point, I have found myself in a place where I couldn't "convert" some of our people to an asynchronous mindset. The mental shift was too significant for them, and at that time, as the CEO, I didn't know how to make it easy. I have tried many things, but still, it didn't work. Not their fault, but mine, that I didn't know how to approach it. We parted on good terms (with most), which was necessary for moving forward.

It was a hard decision, but looking back, it was also one of the best decisions I have made.

When we are hiring, I know what questions to ask and how to set the right expectations for anyone who applies for a job with us. This includes talking about how sometimes it can get lonely and how we embrace the local community instead of replacing real-life events at work (which is not possible with current online tools). All of this allows us to hire the right people into our environment, even if they want to try it out.

The most significant pain point I would say is to keep new colleagues in sync with how we want to operate (which is an excellent problem to have and not a pain anymore). So many times, they bring their ways of communication from real life, which they are unknowingly sneaking in. On the other hand, it tests our knowledge of how we want to operate. For example, I just had a two-week async argument (😅) with one new colleague, who was challenging the way we work and wanted to work differently because a few things weren't understood. The async argument is excellent, so much time to think through it properly, no emotions.

The second pain point is that I did not find a good platform for async communication yet for the way I would like to work, which will embrace async and lead to good async habits.

Async is life-changing. It allows people to make their work revolve around life, not the other way. This and everything as a result of that is what we are embracing.

Feel free to ask more questions about async if anything has not been answered. I am very passionate about async as you can see. :) Thank you for asking!

Thank you @brandonHacker,
I am glad that the calm approach resonates with so many.

And yes, there is no rush. When rushed, we make bad decisions. :)

Thanks for your comment! If there is anything I can help with, do let me know.

Hello @NontechAna!
Once you go calm, you will never want to go back to hustle and grind. :)

What's the monetization model with Kairo?

It is a simple monthly subscription. However, I am going to play with add-ons. E.g. buy different themes or packs of different block faces, colour themes, etc.

What has been the most lucrative acquisition channel so far? How did #buildinpublic on Twitter help?

Thus far, an integration with Notion - https://getkairo.com/notion-blocks - is a simple way to embed Kairo blocks into your Notion. This became very popular. People created videos on how to use it on youtube, shared in different communities.

Do you use any specific framework while building in public on Twitter (like, I don't know, every week — 1 post on the process, 1 thread on pain points, 1 post on marketing, etc.), or is it more of a spur of the moment kind of thing?

I don't have any framework, I am afraid. :) I have been thinking about having one, but the urge to build was stronger. So I share only what has been developed with a delay. I have noticed that sharing what I am building gives me a certain feeling that I have done it already and might not finish it afterwards. :)

Can you give actionable advice for the first-time founders who start building in public?

You don't need to share everything, like MRR or other metrics. Share what you are comfortable with sharing. And don't aim for just one big launch in public. Launch continuously. Launch. Learn. Improve. Repeat!

And if there are any first-time founders, my DMs are open. Happy to help.

I hope this answers your questions. :)

Thank you @musakurel 🙌

How did you transition from full-time gig to a full-time hacker / company?

Before working on Inline Manual full-time, I had a full-time job. So I did my problem and solution interviews in my free time. This took about three months.

After all those interviews and thinking, I was confident and, most importantly, motivated. This is what I want to pursue and invest in. I hired a friend, with whom I was working on other projects. He was working on the backend, and I was working on the front-end part.

About a year later, I quit but still did a few agency jobs to stay afloat and without stress on finances. I didn't want to find myself in the corner, running out of money.

It took about 2.5 years to get the first paying customer. FYI none of those I interviewed subscribed, even though they verbally committed to paying for the service once it goes live. I found out that whilst they found it worth the investment back then, they have realised it would take money away from them. They would instead be paid for executing painful tasks than make it easier for their client who paid them well for these. :D Nevertheless, they gave me the motivation needed.

If you would start from scratch today, what would you do?

I think I can describe what I did with Kairo. As I have a full-time job (even though it is my company), my motivation is different than breaking out from my current employer (me :), but I want to build and experiment. I am a maker, after all. The full-time job gives me security.

I would find a problem, explore it, being curious about it. Then, see what chances are to make it profitable - self-sustainable.

There is no need for hustle or grind, so I would slowly work on it without the stress. I would not care about the competitors and other makers in the space. There are over 213 million companies and over 7.7 billion people worldwide. There is a slice of the pie for everyone, especially for indie makers who do not have to have a billion company as their target but a sustainable livelihood.

I would not quit my job, but I would wait until more confident.

I would build in public, but with a delayed approach. Share what you have already done instead of what you are about to do.

And lastly, which was the most exciting find with Kairo, I would not care about whether the project will be successful or not. There is already a reason why I want to build it. It made making tough decisions easy and allowed me to experiment more. Like suddenly stopping new registrations and testing out waitlist when there were around ~100 new trials a day. :)

I like this question @sokirill . :) Thank you for asking. I hope it makes sense.

The first conversion in Kairo happened out of the blue. And it was exciting because I didn't know those people who signed up. I think they came from LinkedIn, since I posted there. It was very early, MAY 24, 2021. So roughly after 5 months (200 hours) of work.

There is a simple email drip campaign, and an onboarding guide. There is also a free version, which does not save data, so you can test it out. This created quality funnel, mostly those who signed up for the trial, converted.

I tweeted about the experience I have seen, people signed up for the trial, and few minutes later they signed up for full account and started paying, even if they were on the first day of their trial. I think the UI played a big role in this conversion and also the free version.

Does that help? :)

Thank you @OusmaneNdiaye! I needed to make it fun for me, so this is the result. 😅

I have checked CronoCloud, well done! What made you build it in such a saturated market and how is it going?

Hey @carefreeai, I assume you are after web design (visual), not game or other design.

It is hard to say now, having 20 years of career behind me. :) We are influenced by everything around us, and it depends on how well we look and observe. I have a background in arts, UI/UX design, web design, etc...

Not necessarily you need to learn everything when it comes to the design, e.g. you can use ready-made UI kits with design best practices implemented and skip the design and focus on the features and how the product works (mechanics) - the whole experience.

Or you can take inspiration from all the other products, combine UX and design you like and take it from there. And add in your touches, don't just copy; try to understand it.

And certainly, some UX/Design courses will help to give you the basic understanding of what a design is - colour theory, etc.

Sorry, been a while and it is hard to point at specific resources, if any other indie members have any suggestions, please do suggest. Would love to look through them too.

Hi @ShaneBellone,
Very accurate about the time. I am ensuring that nobody can easily "invade" my space, hence why asynchronous works very well for me.

I only thought about how well employee count can scale when we were planning for partnerships. This was to plan how many partners we can onboard and how many successful managers we will need to provide the services we want and keep the 24/5 support.

Other than that, we grow organically. If there is a need, we try to see it beforehand. We don't stress about not being able to execute fast, and we don't need to fill in the headcount to cope with the growth; instead, I like to wait for the right people to hire and not be pressured into hiring. And if we are not scaling for more customers, then we can close our doors to new customers and wait till we can make it work. :)

Does that answer your question?