Hey everyone,
I'm a french guy that for some weird reasons is now living in London. My day job involves doing marketing stuff on the interweb, also known as growth hacking (with air quotes) for Pusher. I'm probably not the right profile for this forum, but here goes nothing.
18 months ago, I got super frustrated because I couldn't create anything ( and got screwed over by a freelancer) on my own so I decide to learn how to code, because it's easy, right?
Since then, I have launched multiple side projects and being a "business guy", I'm always looking to make some quick ££ out of it.
First one was Dropdock, An awesome (IMHO) cool cross platform file sharing app that let you share files to online and offline people easily. I did it with one of my Allmyapps co-worker/friend. We pitched in Berlin infront of VCs and co and had some interesting meetings and conversations after that. We declined all the offers because we wanted to bootstrap it to the moon, like Joel, my idol at that time.
We got ~2000 signups when we release our obligatory teaser landing page. We released the cross platofrm app to the beta tester the next week and the android App to some of them after that. However, the adventure stopped after 6 fun months because my friend had the opportunity to make his long life dream come true and make a trip around the world. I wasn't that into file sharing anyway...
After Dropdock, there was Foodsterbox. A fine food subscription base business were we would send 5 to 7 fine food products with recipes from great belgian chefs to our customers. We quickly ramped up to 112 subscribers ( at 30€ a month ) but we quickly run into problems with our distributors and my co-founder / friend at that was really not up to the job on handling the whole sale process he was in charge off and I discovered I wasn't into food. We decided to call it quick 2 months ago. We made a small profit and learn a ton so I guess that is a win.
Being a massive Football fan ( the beautiful game, not egghand) I'm a big Fantasy Player. The official website being shit, I decided to improve it and create a tool to make the leagues realtime ( this is actually how I discovered Pusher and got a job there) and more interactive. I learned web Scrapping, Redis, Websockets, and all kind of other crazy shits I didn't know existed at that time. I could see myself making millions ( not really ) by charging the 2.5m Fantasy Players a small fee per league and per season to access this awesome experience.
Being a good marketer that I am, I reached out to a blogger to test out my tool and build some early buzz. He loved the idea but there was a small problem, my app was buggy as hell and I couldn't really figure out to fix it. I was to proud to reach out for help from my developers friends and didn't want to pay a freelancer to do it for me, after all, I went through hell and learned how to code for this?! The idea died by itself as I was too busy shipping fine food in brown boxes... Oh well, guess I won't buy a yacht with Fantasy game money...
Or not! Steven, the blogger, came back to me and wanted to work together on something. He had great content ideas, could churn out quality content faster than Foxconn can produce iPhones but no tech /internet savvy skills whatsoever behind setting up a blog on blogger... It's at that time that the our improbable duo was born, the non tech savvy writer and the marketer turned developer would conquer the Fantasy Premier league, or FPL as we like to call it in the biz, market with insideFPL!
We couldn't really produce a lot together so we decided to go with the minimal viable whatever we could do; It end up being a free newsletter (we <3 Mailchimp) with a sexy landing page (thank you Flat-ui). We build a good amount of traction and a loyal fanbase in the last ~3months of the season... Biggest problem was that affiliate links to betting website in our newsletter weren't brining in the £££ that would allow me to build my own personal assistant app.
So here we are now. Last week, we launched our Pre-season Guide, one of the first paid product in the land of the "everything-is-free-because-we-don't-care" FPL Market. After 3 days, we sold for 1.5k£ (~2.5K$) worth of virtual paper guide which is a CMS I build myself like an idiot because I wanted to learn Ruby on Rails (I was previously coding in Python Flask/Django).
So what's ahead? Well, I will continue to work at Pusher for the time being to pay the bill and put food in my Corgi's bowl but the paid guide experience was awesome so we are building on that. We are launching a Dashboard for managers private FPL Leagues in September that we will charge for out of the gate.
So why do I want to be part of Bootstrapped.fm? Well, when I was learning how to code, the best thing was having people around to help me and point me in the right direction. So I'd like to give back to the developer community by doing what those guys did for me, but instead give out marketing & co help because at the end of day, this is my day job and this is what I'm good at.
So ask me about anything that is vaguely related to growing a business, user acquisition and retention, a/b testing, copy writing strategy,PR , marketing processes and frameworks, the best tools for X or Y, etc ... Or we can talk about how cute my dog is, I like that too.
Thank you for reading this far and sorry for the typos... English is not my 1st language and to be honest, I didn't read my wall of text to spellcheck & co.