How I Bootstrapped My SaaS Business With $0

Let’s go back in time...

Date: November 21th, 2018

Location: Montreal, Canada

The Idea

I’m thinking about startup ideas, looking at my 13-inch Thinkpad screen with a medium sized coffee in a Tim Horton’s coffee shop at around 10:00 PM. It’s a cold snowy day, snow flakes are slowly falling to the ground, as I’m watching outside through a window facing the street, a beautiful sight. Being a night owl, I always loved working at night, there’s something about night time work that helps me focus. Probably because everyone is sleeping and there’s less distraction.

So here I am thinking about starting a business without spending a dime, I challenged myself.

Tim Horton’s coffee, the best (I'm joking)

At that time, I knew enough of Python to scrape websites, from data extraction to cleaning and loading to a database, that’s the easy part. If something doesn’t work, Google it. Fixing issues in the business world is the hardest part. You can’t Google that and find a straigth forward solution. That’s what business is all about, fixing problems and getting paid for it.

I knew that presenting the right data to the right person would be profitable, that was my vantage point.

We all consume data, like when we look at weather forecasts before going outside, if it’s going to rain, we bring an umbrella. That’s actionable data, information that changes our behavior, it helps us act the right way at the right time. I was looking for a continuous source of data that was monetizable and actionable. I wasn’t interested in building a machine learning model, just a simple data reporting service. I believe there’s plenty of untapped opportunities in the AaaS(Analytics as a Service) domain, going straigth to automated models is a bit too far fetched for what I was looking for.

Keeping it simple, not everyone needs machine learning models and it doesn’t solve everything.

At that time, I was also looking for new ways to make money, and I found out about phone flipping. You’re basically buying used phones and reselling them for profit on sites like eBay. I knew a couple guys in the US that were doing some good money doing that. I joined a couple phone reselling groups on Facebook, and I noticed that many were struggling when estimating phone resale prices. One way that some did it was by going on eBay, type the phone model and estimate the price from the first couple listings. That solved the problem, but still tiresome if you got a lot of phones to sell.

So I thought to myself, why not automate that ?

That’s what I did.

Coding it

Bots running on my laptop turned Linux server… At a coffee shop. lol
Everything was done in Python using Scrapy and running automatically on my laptop with Debian Linux, Thanks to crontab. Sleepless nights and a visit to the hospital due to a panic attack right in the middle of the night. Sacrifices, definitely not a walk in the park, man.

At one point, I was thinking about giving up.

I can’t do that, I’ve put in so many hours in that project

I told myself.

The hardest part by far, was trying to get quality data. Separating each phones (i.e cleaning and separating the iPhone X 64G from iPhone XS 256G), that took me weeks to get it right. I ended up many times with false positives/negatives.

One of the techniques I used to remove bad data, was to look at the title used for the listing. Listings with the keyword “fake”, “not working”, “bad esn” or “iCloud” were separated from the rest.

The naming of my business was the least of my issues at that point, but I ended going with Phone Flipping.

MVP Release

Finally, after months of hard work, I’ve finally got something out and running without issues. I had around 70 bots pulling data from listing websites, then transforming, cleaning and storing it into a database. A fully automated data pipeline.

My bots were pulling data everyday at 8:00 AM from those listing websites. I was rotating my proxies and user-agents for each request. I also added random intervals between requests, to avoid getting detected by anti-bot systems.

I was sending the pricing reports every Friday morning at 8:00 AM by email.

I was using Gmail’s free SMTP server, and some python code to automate the whole thing.

That was my mail server! I really wanted to spend 0$.

On the marketing side, I did everything organically, no paid ads. All I did is post content in Facebook Groups and have an opt-in form on a website to get emails. Why emails ? Because they’re super easy to get, and it’s one of the best marketing channel in terms of ROI.

You want free eBay phone pricing updates ?

We need an email

As simple as that.

There’s one YouTuber that helped me a lot, Kish Israni. He let me post my charts every week in his Facebook Group. A lot of my users were from his following. I leveraged his distribution channel. So shoutout to him !

If you have no idea what’s a distribution channel, it just means a way to distribute your content to a wider audience.

In those Facebook groups, I was helping phone resellers with price estimation and I was answering their questions. Having a close relationship with potential customers is crucial for growth when you’re bootstrapped. Showing authenticity, empathy and understanding is key.

I focused on giving value first, I was not trying to sell anything!

2–3 days later, after sharing free pricing sheets on multiple phone reselling Groups on Facebook.

I got dozens of subscribers messaging me. My inbox was full of interested users wondering what the heck I was doing and where I got the data. In a couple months, it grew to hundreds of users on the free and paid plan. I was charging between 20$–40$ per month.

I still remember the first person wanting to join the paid plan, a store manager. He payed me 40$ a month. A surreal moment for me, seeing that 40$ in my PayPal account.

Here’s the email I sent inviting free user to join the Pro plan:

I played a lot with the pricing to get it right. Should I go with a trial or not?, should I have a single plan or not? A lot of testing, trials and errors.

Before monetizing, I sent out a Google survey to get an idea of how many were interested in a paid plan. Around 20% were interested in giving money to me.

It was weird, because I felt like an imposter:

Do they really like my service ?

I kept thinking.

I couldn’t believe it, people were really giving me money for a PDF file I was sending every Friday morning.

Everything was automated, the only thing that needed some maintenance was the crawling bots that were pulling data from eBay listings. Because as soon eBay was updating their DOM structure, 90% of the time my bots would crash and require me to extract the data again using either CSS or XPATH. That was a real pain in the ass, at one point, I was staying up the whole night debugging my bots and going to sleep when the sun was rising at 5 AM.

This is how it worked:

1. Pull pricing data from eBay using Scrapy
2. Store data in text files
3. Clean data and analyze
4. Plot data in graphs inside Jupyter Notebook
5. Generate PDF reports from Jupyter Notebook
6. Send PDF reports using Gmail's SMTP Mail server

Conclusion

So this is how I launched my first online business, my first 1$ online. The things I’ve learned in the process of building my business is worth more than the money I’ve made. Especially in marketing and sales, I’ve learned a ton !

I ended taking down Phone Flipping, because during the pandemic my paid users stopped paying. I was also dealing with some serious mental health issues. The pandemic had a huge impact on me, which led me to stop everything.

It was unsustainable.

Overall this is how it worked:

There's a couple things I’ve learned in the journey:

• Bringing the right information to the right person is monetizable.
• People will pay you for automating small parts of their business.
• Keep it simple, find solutions to simple problems.
• Getting quality data is the hardest part, quality over quantity.
• Network, network, network
• Have a close relationship with your clients and have a feedback loop.
• Just do it ! Like Nike.