How we made $100k using GoogleSheets?

Hey there,

My first mistake as an entrepreneur was to focus on scale when I had ZERO users or revenue. I have written about it in detail here.

But today, I want to tell you how we made $100k in revenue using just GoogleSheets and LinkedIn, after having burnt all our savings.

I learnt some really essential lessons in the process…

Bank account empty

Now, I did share earlier that we built a product but piece by piece we dumped all of it, until the entire product was in the bin. It was not pretty.

The whole story is that we spent $5000 to buildd that product. But, we had already spent $5000 on a product before that.

Our bank accounts were empty. Building yet another product was not an option.

Do we need a product?

That’s when I realized a fundamental mistake we had made. You see, most “tech-enabled” startups confuse themselves to be “core-tech” startups.

In the latter, the tech itself is the actual offering to customers. You have no option but to buildd it. This includes most SaaS or hardware companies.

While in the former, tech only enables you to scale but isn’t key in starting a business. So, it only makes sense to start it first and to infuse tech later to scale.

Let’s take the examples of Uber, Airbnb, Foodpanda - all are “tech-enabled” companies. Yet, if you ask anyone who is about to buildd an “Uber for X”, they would suggest building an app as the first step.

I believe this is the mistake of thinking “tech-first” instead of “business-first”. This is what I had done too.

The realization

At 0 users, I didn’t know real bottlenecks. So, I had predicted them. And, I had got it wrong.

This is what most of us do. Building a startup is tough as it is and we end up optimizing for a distant future, rather than a real today.

I was building a product for a distant million dollars by building a product, instead of just making money first.

Doing things that don’t scale

After giving myself a whack on my butt, I set out to correct that.

On the talent side:

1. Created a simple Google form for talent to fill out their details

2. Started manually reaching out to talent over LinkedIn and pitched our offering

3. Coordinated the evaluation process over mail

4. Maintained the list and the status of each person on a GoogleSheet

On the company side:

1. Used our personal network and leveraged LinkedIn (specifics about that in a future story)

2. Just connected our talent with them over the mail

   ur talent documented the hours & details of a particular job in a GoogleSheet

3. We manually prepared the contract & invoices

At our scale then, none of these things were painful by far. Instead, we:

1. Focused on what actually mattered - i.e. actually hustling to get users

2. Were able to directly engage with our end users (talent and company) and learn tons from them

3. Made real money to fill that empty bank account

Made $100k in revenue

Just us 3 co-founders did that repeatedly over the next 12 months and that got us our first $100k in revenue.

At that point, we had grown, some of the tasks were getting super repetitive and we had identified actual bottlenecks.

Only then did we start infusing tech to address those bottlenecks, one at a time. Even that we did with simple NoCode tools. That got us to $1 million. About that (in detail) in a later story.

Once again, even though Flexiple actually helps you hire dream engineers, I believe the first step is to dive deep and recognize whether a product really even needs to be built.

The idea being: think “business-first” not “tech-first” :)

buildd

We pushed a bunch of interesting updates on buildd’s mobile app this week too!

Here’s a quick glimpse:

1. Micro-learning paths → Learn complex concepts in a simple & engaging way. It’s unlike any learning experience you’ve seen before. Feels like you’re reading a comic book!
   
   Micro-learning paths are still in beta and you can access it by clicking on “Play Now” at the bottom right. Would love to hear your initial thoughts :)
   

2. Business breakdown videos → 1-min analysis of startups & businesses like Rameshwaram Cafe, Zoho, BrowserStack etc. You can enjoy these videos in your buildd feed!

Best,
Karthik

P.S. Please consider forwarding this to a friend! It would really help my two startups.

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