WEBVTT 1 00:00:00.171 --> 00:00:05.555 A couple of nights ago, I was scrolling Twitter like I usually do looking for ideas when I came across this. 2 00:00:06.075 --> 00:00:11.319 An anonymous startup making over $40,000 a month launched just about a year ago. 3 00:00:11.780 --> 00:00:13.521 I was interested, so I DMed the guy. 4 00:00:13.901 --> 00:00:15.562 I said, hey, cool business. 5 00:00:15.923 --> 00:00:16.703 Want to share your story? 6 00:00:16.963 --> 00:00:18.925 And to my surprise, he said yes. 7 00:00:19.405 --> 00:00:25.950 My name is Tom and my brother and I built Avenue together and we built a website widget for trades and mechanics. 8 00:00:26.290 --> 00:00:31.773 This is Tom and he built a really simple app that today makes over $50,000 a month. 9 00:00:31.993 --> 00:00:36.415 But when I dug into the idea with him and asked him why it works, I was blown away. 10 00:00:37.035 --> 00:00:38.896 I did the one thing you're not meant to do, which was 11 00:00:40.078 --> 00:00:42.480 I asked Tom to come onto the channel and break it all down for us. 12 00:00:42.720 --> 00:00:57.334 And in this episode, we're going to dive into the dead simple app he built that today makes over $50,000 a month, the growth tactic that almost nobody is using that helped him get his first 10 customers, and why he built an app in a category that almost everyone is ignoring. 13 00:00:57.654 --> 00:00:58.515 I'm excited for this one. 14 00:00:58.775 --> 00:00:59.356 Let's dive in. 15 00:00:59.796 --> 00:01:01.698 I'm Gus, and this is Starter Story. 16 00:01:02.877 --> 00:01:04.258 Tom, welcome to Starter Story. 17 00:01:04.419 --> 00:01:06.241 Super excited to have you on the channel. 18 00:01:06.641 --> 00:01:09.704 Could you tell us who you are, what you built and what's your story? 19 00:01:09.824 --> 00:01:13.668 My name's Tom and my brother and I built Avenue together with a team. 20 00:01:13.808 --> 00:01:21.917 We do 85,000 a month in revenue now in Australian dollars and we built a website widget for trades and electricians and mechanics. 21 00:01:22.117 --> 00:01:26.679 Today I'm excited to show kind of a bit more about how we got to where we are and what we do. 22 00:01:26.879 --> 00:01:27.900 Tom, that's so awesome. 23 00:01:27.920 --> 00:01:32.262 I'm super excited to talk about the widget aspect of this, the trades aspect of this. 24 00:01:32.322 --> 00:01:37.365 I think this is going to be really interesting, but let's take a quick step back and just tell us about Avenue. 25 00:01:37.645 --> 00:01:38.225 What is it? 26 00:01:38.345 --> 00:01:39.246 Who are your customers? 27 00:01:39.286 --> 00:01:40.106 Pull up your website. 28 00:01:40.406 --> 00:01:41.787 Tell us a little bit about the business. 29 00:01:42.147 --> 00:01:43.529 Avenue is a website embed. 30 00:01:43.709 --> 00:01:46.012 So it goes directly onto the client's website. 31 00:01:46.193 --> 00:01:48.676 It just offers all their services in a visual way. 32 00:01:49.097 --> 00:01:53.422 That way they can kind of be guided through to a purchase or even put through an inquiry. 33 00:01:53.643 --> 00:01:55.866 It does go onto Google reservations as well. 34 00:01:56.086 --> 00:01:58.169 So we go onto their Google My Business profile also. 35 00:01:59.256 --> 00:02:05.420 So this kind of looks like one of those widgets that you see on websites to help you book a call with somebody. 36 00:02:05.440 --> 00:02:08.301 Or I've used something like this to book a call with like my barber. 37 00:02:08.381 --> 00:02:10.603 Is that the same thing or is it a little bit different than that? 38 00:02:10.783 --> 00:02:16.526 I think the back end is very fundamentally different because of the automations that we've built for them. 39 00:02:16.746 --> 00:02:20.048 But yes, essentially it's solving like an age old problem. 40 00:02:20.288 --> 00:02:20.969 I have money. 41 00:02:21.229 --> 00:02:22.650 I want to buy from a service business. 42 00:02:23.070 --> 00:02:24.231 Why do I have to call them? 43 00:02:24.351 --> 00:02:27.873 Why do I have to kind of send them an email where I could just tell them what I want? 44 00:02:27.893 --> 00:02:29.473 All right, Tom, this seems really awesome. 45 00:02:29.513 --> 00:02:30.674 Just tell us a little bit about the revenue. 46 00:02:30.694 --> 00:02:31.654 How much is it making? 47 00:02:31.754 --> 00:02:35.475 Pull up your Stripe dashboard to show the audience that this thing is legit. 48 00:02:35.735 --> 00:02:37.455 So this is what we do through Stripe. 49 00:02:37.655 --> 00:02:41.076 We're still growing and reinvesting back into the business. 50 00:02:41.376 --> 00:02:42.636 It's been pretty steady. 51 00:02:42.656 --> 00:02:48.738 I feel like from August last year, $597,000, and then August now, $63,000 Australian. 52 00:02:48.918 --> 00:02:49.718 It's been a wild ride. 53 00:02:49.918 --> 00:02:53.000 What I love about Tom's story is how simple his product is. 54 00:02:53.300 --> 00:02:57.242 He noticed a tiny problem and built a really simple solution that solved it. 55 00:02:57.442 --> 00:03:03.286 He is proof once again that you do not need a complex or even an original idea in order to be successful. 56 00:03:03.526 --> 00:03:05.287 You just need to spot a real problem and solve it. 57 00:03:05.367 --> 00:03:12.091 And that's exactly why we worked with the team at HubSpot to pull together a free database of over 90 business ideas worth solving. 58 00:03:12.411 --> 00:03:15.995 Every idea is backed by real data, things like revenue and cost to start. 59 00:03:16.276 --> 00:03:20.040 Plus, it has a full case study attached to it on how they built and grew the business. 60 00:03:20.300 --> 00:03:26.588 If you're looking for your next idea or looking for a problem to solve, head to the link in the description and grab this database 100% for free. 61 00:03:26.808 --> 00:03:28.230 All right, let's get back to the episode. 62 00:03:28.470 --> 00:03:28.910 Cool, Tom. 63 00:03:29.231 --> 00:03:30.212 Thanks for sharing all that. 64 00:03:30.512 --> 00:03:35.396 Just tell us a little bit about what you were doing before you built this $50,000 per month widget. 65 00:03:35.596 --> 00:03:37.598 Well, I left school early. 66 00:03:37.838 --> 00:03:42.542 So freshman year for the Americans watching, that probably taught me the biggest lessons ever. 67 00:03:42.742 --> 00:03:45.125 Like I got my first job and it was like $4 an hour. 68 00:03:45.545 --> 00:03:51.250 And my brain just couldn't comprehend how I was making $4 an hour, but all these people around me were kind of making way more money. 69 00:03:51.390 --> 00:03:54.972 So I started to obsess about like business and what are different business models. 70 00:03:55.412 --> 00:04:04.998 So I kind of just kept obsessing over like software as a business model and just seeing like, you can still be making money while you're sleeping, even though you've already done the work. 71 00:04:05.278 --> 00:04:12.503 Once you kind of realize the direction you want to go in and then you just won't stop iterating and trying stuff until you kind of find something that clicks. 72 00:04:12.763 --> 00:04:12.963 Cool. 73 00:04:12.983 --> 00:04:18.687 So how does that lead to this particular idea, this widget that you built? 74 00:04:18.927 --> 00:04:25.291 I think realizing that this was a problem I kind of obsessed over where I was like, why is it so difficult to inquire with certain types of businesses? 75 00:04:25.471 --> 00:04:32.275 Yet they seem to make like heaps of money and just thinking, surely there's a better way they could do this leading to the fact that it was like, 76 00:04:32.855 --> 00:04:35.156 I didn't have any coding experience. 77 00:04:35.336 --> 00:04:41.638 I'd never kind of designed anything myself, but I knew what it would take to kind of put the team together to get these things. 78 00:04:42.298 --> 00:04:47.440 And seeing that anything I'd previously done had some success, I was like, well, why couldn't we do this? 79 00:04:47.500 --> 00:04:50.681 Like, why not me if we start it and just give it a go? 80 00:04:51.421 --> 00:04:53.302 You don't have technical background. 81 00:04:53.362 --> 00:04:54.523 So how did you build this? 82 00:04:54.563 --> 00:04:55.724 What was sort of the timeline? 83 00:04:55.764 --> 00:05:04.249 Like how long did it take you from idea to a working project that is now, you know, scale to over $50,000 US per month? 84 00:05:04.549 --> 00:05:12.453 February last year, I had a friend that was a developer and he helped like create like the MVP basically to see that it could be done. 85 00:05:12.613 --> 00:05:16.336 What we're kind of talking about, like embedding it naturally into a client's website. 86 00:05:16.796 --> 00:05:19.678 Once we kind of saw the layout begin to come to life. 87 00:05:20.598 --> 00:05:22.199 I kind of went all in at that stage. 88 00:05:22.219 --> 00:05:25.700 So I hired like a lead designer that could actually make them look better. 89 00:05:26.180 --> 00:05:28.981 I hired like a head developer that could actually build out the backend. 90 00:05:29.241 --> 00:05:30.722 And then we hired like a front end developer. 91 00:05:31.262 --> 00:05:32.543 Yet we had zero revenue. 92 00:05:32.723 --> 00:05:34.703 So on paper, terrible idea. 93 00:05:34.724 --> 00:05:36.044 Don't recommend it at all. 94 00:05:36.544 --> 00:05:44.027 But with that gave us a confidence to sell into these bigger companies that we kind of needed to get on board to pay us to kind of make it possible. 95 00:05:44.207 --> 00:05:45.047 Yeah, for sure. 96 00:05:45.147 --> 00:05:46.288 You didn't have any customers. 97 00:05:46.668 --> 00:05:49.011 you didn't have any revenue, but you were able to hire all these people. 98 00:05:49.031 --> 00:05:50.132 How did you like afford that? 99 00:05:50.212 --> 00:05:56.199 I did run a marketing agency for 10 years, which still had like 70 plus clients paying like website hosting. 100 00:05:56.799 --> 00:06:06.430 So I used my like very precious income that I did have to live to basically fund the start of this and try and transition out of the agency into this full time. 101 00:06:06.650 --> 00:06:17.418 So I was very, very fortunate that the past business was still like actively running without a whole lot of like attention required, but needed that income to kind of be able to hire staff to then get the product up and running. 102 00:06:17.807 --> 00:06:18.067 Awesome. 103 00:06:18.167 --> 00:06:28.389 Can you tell us a little bit more about how you grew this business from zero to over $50,000 a month in a relatively short timeframe, like a year, year and a half? 104 00:06:28.609 --> 00:06:29.889 So tell us a little bit about that growth. 105 00:06:30.249 --> 00:06:31.550 How'd you get that initial traction? 106 00:06:31.910 --> 00:06:36.410 Door to door sales, essentially, like going and showing people our product. 107 00:06:36.811 --> 00:06:39.771 Initially, we showed it on an iPhone and they'd go, Oh, what is it? 108 00:06:39.851 --> 00:06:40.491 It's like an app. 109 00:06:40.511 --> 00:06:41.911 And like, no, it goes on your website. 110 00:06:41.931 --> 00:06:44.352 There was a lot of confusion about what the product actually was. 111 00:06:44.912 --> 00:06:46.173 Then we switched to iPads. 112 00:06:46.293 --> 00:06:51.758 One of our early staff was like, why don't we just show it on like an iPad so they can understand that it's like embedded onto a website. 113 00:06:52.179 --> 00:06:53.400 I can see it's in their branding. 114 00:06:53.780 --> 00:06:57.964 So we switched to iPads and then printed like brochures explaining what the product was. 115 00:06:58.605 --> 00:07:09.415 And that quickly kind of got us really early traction where it's like, when you show someone the problem they have and you can explain it quite clearly, like you can't get sales outside of ours, this fixes that. 116 00:07:10.135 --> 00:07:19.844 they're very open to trying something new that they're being shown in person with a real person, which has then led to us being able to get bigger clients because they go, I've seen you guys everywhere. 117 00:07:19.864 --> 00:07:21.486 A lot of people must trust you. 118 00:07:22.107 --> 00:07:27.071 But we didn't have any connections to get into those bigger clients and we didn't do the hard work of getting the smaller ones first. 119 00:07:27.952 --> 00:07:28.392 That's awesome. 120 00:07:28.753 --> 00:07:37.437 Just tell me a little bit how you landed on kind of working or building an app or building this widget for this particular type of customer. 121 00:07:37.778 --> 00:07:39.379 So we definitely fell into it. 122 00:07:39.639 --> 00:07:42.961 Like when we first went door knocking, we didn't skip a business. 123 00:07:43.181 --> 00:07:52.306 So we'd even go into like music studios, electrician repair shops, like anything that was open, we would walk in and basically just try and show them our product. 124 00:07:52.566 --> 00:07:55.528 What we found from like taking action and doing that was like, 125 00:07:56.208 --> 00:07:58.929 the trade started to respond to us better and better. 126 00:07:59.369 --> 00:08:02.790 And it kind of revealed itself that they're no bullshit kind of people. 127 00:08:02.850 --> 00:08:04.470 They're very direct in their feedback. 128 00:08:04.710 --> 00:08:07.511 They don't like giving money away if something doesn't pay for itself. 129 00:08:07.891 --> 00:08:09.491 And that's kind of exactly what we needed. 130 00:08:09.531 --> 00:08:11.432 We wanted really tangible results. 131 00:08:11.472 --> 00:08:14.913 So we weren't just building something that was kind of based on hype temporarily. 132 00:08:14.953 --> 00:08:16.713 We wanted to build like long term clients. 133 00:08:17.153 --> 00:08:18.513 So trades kind of found us. 134 00:08:18.594 --> 00:08:22.775 We went looking, but they kind of kept being interested or kept showing kind of interest in the product. 135 00:08:22.895 --> 00:08:24.475 And we kind of adapted it to suit. 136 00:08:24.835 --> 00:08:26.956 their needs as their kind of business type. 137 00:08:26.976 --> 00:08:27.076 Cool. 138 00:08:28.616 --> 00:08:35.237 You know, for someone watching who's maybe getting some inspiration and say, oh, maybe I'll go door to door, find people in my local area. 139 00:08:35.257 --> 00:08:36.978 What would be kind of your advice or playbook for them? 140 00:08:37.118 --> 00:08:38.338 Definitely starting. 141 00:08:38.658 --> 00:08:40.398 It is incredibly intimidating. 142 00:08:40.559 --> 00:08:46.880 You're about to show them something you put like your love and effort into, and then they're either going to like it or they're going to just rip it to shreds. 143 00:08:47.400 --> 00:08:51.342 But if you really do love your product, that's the feedback you're actually looking for. 144 00:08:51.483 --> 00:08:56.285 So maybe it doesn't end up being a product for trades and they'll tell you why directly to your face. 145 00:08:56.486 --> 00:09:03.149 But sometimes we've even had certain types of businesses refer us to the right business being like, oh, this has no use for me whatsoever. 146 00:09:03.670 --> 00:09:08.092 However, you should speak to my friend because this would work so well for his business. 147 00:09:08.453 --> 00:09:08.673 Yeah. 148 00:09:09.386 --> 00:09:09.566 Cool. 149 00:09:09.946 --> 00:09:12.427 Let's switch gears and go to the tech sec. 150 00:09:12.467 --> 00:09:19.350 What's the tools or tech sec that you used to build this business or that you used to still run your business on a regular basis? 151 00:09:19.930 --> 00:09:26.993 So AWS is 150, which I absolutely love because that's like the essential biggest part of our business is the hosting. 152 00:09:27.213 --> 00:09:29.994 Slack 120, Google Workspaces 130. 153 00:09:31.535 --> 00:09:32.756 Vapi at 500. 154 00:09:32.876 --> 00:09:40.443 So we do use a lot of like AI voice credits and then Twilio being 4,000, which is a huge part of our SMS costs, which is another part of our product. 155 00:09:40.783 --> 00:09:43.146 Lusha to find like very specific leads. 156 00:09:43.606 --> 00:09:45.548 And then of course, Claude. 157 00:09:45.788 --> 00:09:46.889 Everyone's using Claude. 158 00:09:47.169 --> 00:09:48.010 We're no different. 159 00:09:48.210 --> 00:09:50.072 We need it to survive at this point. 160 00:09:50.452 --> 00:09:50.773 Cool. 161 00:09:50.813 --> 00:09:55.478 So we've been talking about this widget, you know, used for these trades and you've told us a little bit about the story. 162 00:09:56.039 --> 00:09:56.680 Now I want to see it. 163 00:09:56.720 --> 00:10:00.585 Can you just give us a little quick demo of how this widget works? 164 00:10:01.046 --> 00:10:01.566 For sure. 165 00:10:01.907 --> 00:10:02.908 So this is one of our clients. 166 00:10:03.228 --> 00:10:04.930 First thing they get is a book online button. 167 00:10:05.611 --> 00:10:08.332 with Google, so it's actually partnership with Google directly. 168 00:10:09.012 --> 00:10:13.453 They click on that, they come through to the client's branded form where they can kind of tap through the product. 169 00:10:13.634 --> 00:10:20.876 If customers exit out of it, they're actually sent back to the customer's website where we also have embedded the product directly on the website as well. 170 00:10:21.376 --> 00:10:28.038 So that way clients can kind of contact them through Google or they can contact them directly through the website, leading it all to one place essentially. 171 00:10:28.493 --> 00:10:28.933 I love that. 172 00:10:29.414 --> 00:10:45.527 The final question that we ask all founders to come onto the channel is if you were standing on your shoulders a year ago, five years ago, or for somebody watching who is just getting started in their business journey, what advice would you give to yourself or give to them? 173 00:10:46.400 --> 00:10:47.961 Definitely to sell before you build. 174 00:10:48.041 --> 00:10:54.844 I know it's said so many times, but customers don't care how much went into something sometimes it's really sad. 175 00:10:54.864 --> 00:10:59.466 If you can get someone to commit before building the product, you've probably found something worth pursuing. 176 00:10:59.486 --> 00:11:03.488 So if someone, you tell them about what the problem you fix is and they go, great, how much is it? 177 00:11:03.588 --> 00:11:11.032 You tell them the price and they get to the point where they're actually willing to hand that cash over, then you definitely could be onto a really good idea. 178 00:11:11.412 --> 00:11:12.093 That's great advice. 179 00:11:12.813 --> 00:11:15.016 Tom, thanks for coming on the channel. 180 00:11:15.196 --> 00:11:17.698 So fun to have you on and congratulations. 181 00:11:18.019 --> 00:11:18.359 Thank you. 182 00:11:18.499 --> 00:11:18.940 Appreciate it. 183 00:11:19.260 --> 00:11:19.500 All right. 184 00:11:19.540 --> 00:11:20.441 I just wrapped up with Tom. 185 00:11:20.942 --> 00:11:22.063 That was a really fun interview. 186 00:11:22.183 --> 00:11:26.167 I loved learning about the widget that he built and kind of how simple the business is. 187 00:11:26.507 --> 00:11:27.949 I have like two takeaways. 188 00:11:28.209 --> 00:11:33.795 The first one, which really stood out to me, was the like door to door sales piece that he talked about. 189 00:11:34.155 --> 00:11:37.857 So many of the founders that we bring on the channel, and I think I mentioned this in the interview, though. 190 00:11:37.957 --> 00:11:38.998 I don't know if it stayed in there. 191 00:11:39.618 --> 00:11:49.945 So many of the founders that we bring onto the channel are using TikTok, UGC programs, posting, building in public, posting on Twitter to get their first customers. 192 00:11:50.445 --> 00:11:53.127 Obviously, all that works, as you've seen from our interviews. 193 00:11:53.267 --> 00:12:00.131 But there's something I think, especially in a world that's moving so online, I'm sure a lot of his customers really... 194 00:12:00.711 --> 00:12:06.672 respected him for coming in, knocking on their door and asking for kind of the sale or the service. 195 00:12:06.872 --> 00:12:22.796 And not that I'm necessarily going to go do that, but it just, it's a little bit compelling to think about all the people in this area that I live in, probably in the area that you live in, who are not familiar with AI, who aren't using Claude or Codex every single day, but you've built a solution to, 196 00:12:23.596 --> 00:12:29.717 there might be a hundred customers in your back door who need this service or need something built for them. 197 00:12:29.917 --> 00:12:33.478 You know, you're never going to find them unless you go kind of walk down the street and do it. 198 00:12:33.618 --> 00:12:37.439 So that was like, I think really, really good piece of advice. 199 00:12:37.899 --> 00:12:46.201 And my second takeaway is the widget aspect is so simple, a button that helps one business, you know, earn more from their clients. 200 00:12:46.841 --> 00:12:50.322 That's something you've probably seen a hundred times and you've probably used yourself. 201 00:12:50.654 --> 00:12:52.855 He was able to do it for mechanics and electricians. 202 00:12:52.895 --> 00:12:56.476 I'm sure there's a bunch of other niches out there that could use a product like this. 203 00:12:56.516 --> 00:13:04.178 And so my takeaway is like, even though it's something I've seen done a hundred times, it's proof that you don't need like an original idea to go do it. 204 00:13:04.418 --> 00:13:11.120 My last takeaway is that he solved a really big problem for these businesses that now use his widget. 205 00:13:11.560 --> 00:13:13.061 to help complete their transactions. 206 00:13:13.621 --> 00:13:17.622 And I think that's probably the real secret sauce of this whole thing is that you solve the real problem. 207 00:13:18.122 --> 00:13:29.805 Which reminds me, in the link below, we have our database to 90 business ideas that are solving real problems right now, all backed by data that you can download 100% for free. 208 00:13:30.105 --> 00:13:31.446 All right, thanks for watching. 209 00:13:31.466 --> 00:13:32.946 I hope you enjoyed this episode. 210 00:13:33.266 --> 00:13:34.587 We will see you in the next one. 211 00:13:34.927 --> 00:13:35.147 Peace.