Without Any Capital Book

How to bootstrap profitable startups the hacker way

18 followers

How to bootstrap profitable startups the hacker way

18 followers

The bootstrapped way to 🕵hack revenue: 📧Cold outreach script I used to get first $700 💰Copy testing for my first paywall 🚥Using Excel doc as MVP 🕺 Hacking growth in Chrome Web Store (75k list in 30 minutes)

Launch tags:Productivity•Startup Books•Growth Hacking

Launch Team

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Founderpath

Maker

I’m lazier than most of you. lol I’ve upvoted many items on product hunt that help with things like list building. But I didn’t want to spend ad dollars and do content marketing for years to build the list. Like you, I get distracted easy... have no time haha. So I tried to find a way to buy small companies that already had big lists and I ended up cold emailing a bunch of Chrome Extension owners:

This was process I ran: - Search chrome web store - See where the “Last Updated” date was more than 6 months old (good change creators didn’t care about, meaning I could acquire cheap) - Hunt down creator email and reach out I ended up buying SndLatr for $1000 and rebranded it to The Top Inbox. Was tons of fun (adrenaline!) No lawyers. This was our “official deal”:

So I spent $1000 to buy SndLatr which had 30,000 active users (according to chrome web store) with over 1000 five star reviews. It was a completely free tool. My first priority was trying to figure out how to hack some revenue out of this without pissing off the user base. So I thought… I only want 5% of the total free users to even see the paywall. And I only wanted to show the paywall to the “most active” users. I defined “most active” as how many times they sent an email using “SndLatr” button. So after looking at usage metrics, if I only wanted 5% of the free users to see the paywall, it would show to anyone who had 15 or more uses in the past 7 days. This is the first paywall I launched:

I wanted to “protect the opportunity cost” of this paywall too. Meaning, I didn’t want to lose users because of it. (especially my most active ones!) So I let people get around it, but they’d have to click “use one more time for free” every time (not productive, but at least they didn’t have to pay $5). This performed well. I didn’t lose users, and over the first 2 years, here’s what happened. (May 2016 when I acquired to May 2018) Stripe account from first 2 years after I bought the tool for $1k:

$153,700 ain’t to shabby for something I acquired for $1,000, and added one paywall to. (Growth was organic due to high position in Chrome Store, I never had to run promotions or content or anything to keep growing this outside of the rebrand and website code/dev at TheTopInbox.com) Anyways, I don’t say all this to brag. I know most of us are ground level kind of folks. I just wanted you guys to see that sometimes, if you get super creative, you can save yourselves years of building by doing a fun deal with a Chrome developer :) This story is 1 out of more than 36 in my new book “How To Be A Capitalist Without Any Capital”. I hate the word capital, but Random House - my publishers - said it “tested well”, so we’re rolling with it haha. Lastly….. I feel kinda guilty about posting something that’s “for sale” here on product hunt…. So I set up CapitalistBook.com to give anyone who can’t afford to pay the $27 to buy the book a big free preview. I’m sitting here in LA at Rose enjoying a coffee while I write this (btw $5 for basic coffee is ridiculous... LA thing?):

how meta meta meta :D Anyways, I think you guys will enjoy the stories in the last couple chapters (this one especially):

Talks about when you find a blog post ranked #1 for a keyword you want, how to convince the writer to go edit the old post and put your backlink at top… The email script I had to test 100’s of times to get this to work turned out insane. Put finals in book for you guys :) Ok… gonna go top off this coffee. Getting cold.

Gonna chill here most of the day to engage with you guys! Hope everyone has fun weekend plans. - Nathan CapitalistBook.com for 35 other hack things I've done like the chrome story above. 🐱🐱🐱 Put your questions below so I don't get bored haha :)

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7yr ago

Brown Noise

@nathanlatka Ahahah did you actually take photos of your screen with a camera? Man you deserve an upvote :D

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7yr ago

Founderpath

Maker

@sidyakinian i know... super meta haha

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7yr ago

@nathanlatka @sidyakinian well he had to get the coffee and the book cover in there somehow, didn't he? ;)

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7yr ago

Operation Pie

@nathanlatka Congrats on the book launch. The content and step-by-step process in the book is what makes this book a must have! *Disclaimer: I have a pre-release copy and the content is amazing.

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7yr ago

Founderpath

Maker

@sethlouey howd you get that early copy :P nice meeting you the other day Seth!

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7yr ago

UserGuiding

Can't wait to read it! Sneak peek looks awesome. @nathanlatka, you have been doing amazing things. How can you find so much energy?

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7yr ago

Founderpath

Maker

@mert_aktas I have a really incredible team. I couldn't tag her because she's not really online but my editor/writer's name is Maria. Then had lots of help on creative in book from my design team. And now have really incredible team helping with book launch (we are the SWAT team haha). I'm a lucky dude to have these other smart women and men around me :)

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7yr ago

@mert_aktas @nathanlatka What's your approach for team building / management? Are you doing it remotely?

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7yr ago

Founderpath

Maker

@mert_aktas @cameronjroe yes sir everyone remote

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7yr ago

@mert_aktas @nathanlatka Cool. How did you source your management strategies?

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7yr ago

Acute

Just looked at your chrome reviews and how you allegedly don't allow your users to cancel their subscription: https://chrome.google.com/websto... YIKES

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7yr ago

Founderpath

Maker

@alexandrapersea we do its just we did a poor job making it obvious where to click. most of those are very old posts and I cancelled them manually. you should email them and they can tell you :)

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7yr ago

Acute

@nathanlatka Lenny Longo2 days ago Has no back end billing support. I think it's just one guy collecting cash and hoping no one cares about back end billing support. I called Nathan on his receipt and emailed him. Nothing. I then placed a stop payment on our credit cards. A one sentence email would have been sufficient and saved me a lot of time. Kara HobbyModified Feb 4, 2019 WARNING - there is no way to cancel once you subscribe, they will keep billing you! My bank opened a dispute but said the only way out was to cancel my credit card. Very dishonest company with no cancellation policy and doesn't answer emails! Been billing me for a year. BEWARE A Google Use Jan 4, 2019 STILL unable to cancel despite multiple attempts. No answers from emails or customer service or Nathan and they keep charging me. There is no "gear icon" to click to cancel. Total scam. "very old posts"

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7yr ago

@nathanlatka @alexandrapersea oof!

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7yr ago

Founderpath

Maker

@alexandrapersea Thats 1 a month out of 1000 customers, and 30,000+ users. Very proud of that actually. Totally cool with you pulling screenshots but you should be fair and pull not just the negative ones. Many more positive ones:

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7yr ago

Where is the chrome extension? I can only see this one, which has 30K users (today, not 2 years ago)... https://chrome.google.com/websto...

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7yr ago

Acute

@mehul_patel1 That's the one. Just look at the reviews

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7yr ago

@alexandrapersea Yeah, I figured. This def seems like some bullshit because it only has 500 reviews today and he says it had 1000 5 star reviews. Things just don't add up.

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7yr ago

Based on the reviews of your chrome extension sounds like that 153k was from scamming users in not being able to cancel https://chrome.google.com/websto... well done....

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7yr ago

NoteGPT

@mroptiontrader hmm legit observation! curious what are your thoughts on this @nathanlatka?

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7yr ago

I have followed Nathan for a few years now and had a Skype call with him in my Entrepreneurship class. He's the real deal!

Pros:

--there is nothing hypothetical about this book --this dude "walks the walk" --It's a "disruptor" approach

Cons:

This book can be improved on, only by putting out Volume 2 asap.

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7yr ago

The Global Startup Movement - Slush CEO Marianne Vikkula

I agree @gus5706 :)

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7yr ago

That's what's great ... It's like an addicting "when's the next book coming" type of product.

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7yr ago

Vurku

@nathanlatka is a great, outside-of-the-box thinker - brings me back to entrepreneur club @ VT. I'm sure this book is worth it. Upvoted. All the best Nathan!

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7yr ago

Founderpath

Maker

@kraftykyle been forever man! that was almost 10 years ago :) thanks for popping in and for the nice words.

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7yr ago

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