Leaving Paypal to become a full-time Indie Hacker
Nikita built 8+ side-projects before deciding to quit his full-time job and focus 100% on them.
This week we are with Nikita Jerschow. Nikita was employed full-time at Paypal and spent nights building side-projects. When Sendblue, one of his projects, hit recurring revenue and started to get traction, he decided to quit and concentrate himself on it. Let’s dive in!
TL ; DR
👦 Intro: Graduation, studied physics and CS, went on to work on Paypal.
🚀 Project: Indie hacking by night, decided to quit after hitting recurring revenue with Sendblue. Launching Pave.so in private beta.
💡 Idea origination: disappointment with SMS performance.
📈 Growth: Initial traction, trying to close enterprise deals.
💲 Pricing strategy: guessing a good price for the service.
🔍 Finding users: doubling down on SEO.
⚡ Lessons learned: focus more on the product, say no, build more, tweet more.
Hi Nikita. Could you give us a brief intro about you and tell us about your background?
Hey Filippo, my name is Nikita and I graduated 2 years ago after studying physics and CS. I went on to work at PayPal using Java to work on features for the payment processing engine.
As you and your readers can probably imagine, work at PayPal is incredibly slow + therefore incredibly boring.
During my 1 year and 10 months at PayPal I became an indie-hacker by night, spending 2+ hours a night building my projects.
It took me 8+ projects to start seeing any revenue online. I’m now at ~$800 MRR and growing steadily.
What are you working on? Can you give us a description of your project?
Sendblue is an iMessage API that functions similar to Twilio, but can send iMessages.
I started this about a year ago, but have only been seriously working on it for the past 6 months. It’s now running pretty solidly on autopilot.
The main focus currently is on building Pave.so, though.
Pave.so allows you to launch your startup with one terminal command. It sets you up with Stripe, authentication, database, hosting, etc. and plugs everything into a ready-to-launch website.
I also build a lot of smaller projects as a way to diversify my investments, but these are the main ones for now.
How did you come up with the idea for iMessage?
Last year, I was building my second-ever business idea and wanted to use SMS for sending reminders, but I was pretty disappointed with the engagement rates I was getting.
At the time I was also exploring the messaging space, and was pretty puzzled as to why there was no official iMessage API. A week into the COVID isolation I set up the first proof-of-concept and have been using it for my projects ever since!
Which strategy did you use to find your first users? Which channels worked well for you and which didn’t?
I used a lot of the same strategies that you hear everyone else talk about (Indiehackers, Hackernews, Twitter, etc..), but those were pretty inefficient channels (high effort, low return).
What ended up working better was finding niche communities on Reddit and posting helpful information. It wasn’t a foolproof strategy, but it definitely had the highest return on investment for me.
Some tools that I used heavily early on are:
Tweetdeck: be there when a conversation about your target problem is going on.
F5Bot: same idea as Tweetdeck.
These tools are great for watching mentions of your competition and being there for the conversation.
How is the product growing?
Sendblue is growing slowly, actually this month was very slow because I was testing new pricing, which ended up being too high.
After reverting pricing, people have started signing up again. A ton of people have signed up recently, but the most painful part is waiting for a conversion off of the 30 day free trial 😂.
Pave.so is in closed beta at the moment, my strategy is to get on a call with every single beta tester and watch them use it.
I’m on track to do 5-10 calls a week, and after 3 weeks I’ll launch.
Nothing beats getting feedback in real time.
Could you give us a general overview of your growth strategy?
The strategy for Sendblue is fairly simple right now.
I am doubling down on SEO because that’s where I’ve seen the best customers come from. The general strategy is to keep ranking for the right keywords and increase the amount of traffic coming from Google (currently ~200/month)
I am also working with whitelabel products that serve agencies such as High Level. These companies are the most open to adding iMessage to their feature-set.
The last strategy is giving away free-forever “indie-hacker” plans, this is great for growing the Twitter account but also for supporting the side-hustle culture that’s becoming so popular.
For Pave I’m trying to be highly intentional with my marketing strategy. Each marketing step should be carefully planned out based on my learnings over the past 1.5 years of indie-hacking.
The primary strategy right now is to keep sharing on Twitter, keep involving my small following and getting feedback.
Once I’m ready to launch (and post launch), a big part of the strategy will become answering Quora questions, StackOverflow questions, etc. This will also set me up with solid SEO backlinks.
Are you writing all the content yourself or do you hire people for this? Do you have some advice for founders just starting out on how to approach SEO?
So far everything has been my own writing. The good thing is that writing good documentation will basically do the SEO job for me.
SEO isn’t actually that hard, it just takes a while. I see a ton of people hit 100% on their lighthouse scores and immediately ask: so when do I start seeing SEO results?
SEO is an investment and should be treated as such, I have a pretty long post about it here.
Many founders struggle with pricing. How do your pricing tiers work and how did you decide to price your product? Do you have any particular suggestions on how to approach pricing?
I just guessed a good price to charge, I think a big part of pricing comes down to how much it costs to run a service, but beyond that it’s mostly just a guess.
For me: $19.99 just seems like a cheap price for a service like Sendblue so that’s what I went with.
I did recently increase it to $29.99 a month, but I saw a sharp decrease in sign-ups.
Still, I let the test run for a whole month to be sure. Though I probably lost out on some $, I’m glad I ran the test. I now have two points on the demand curve which will be great for informing holiday discounts and partnerships.
If you could talk to your younger self at the time of launch, what would you say? Would you do something different?
There’s a lot of things I would say. Here are the main ones:
Say no to projects you aren’t interested in
Build more stuff - doubting yourself and thinking through the long-term scenario often takes longer than just validating (or invalidating) your business ideas. I missed at least 2 BIG opportunities in the past year because of my own self-doubt.
Focus on product and UX. Sure, features are cool. But if no one can get past your log-in screen then they are useless.
Tweet more - Twitter is a big thing that I’ve only recently discovered the power of.
Could you talk a little bit more about your decision to quit your full-time job at Paypal to concentrate more on indie-hacking? This is not an easy choice to make (congrats btw) and I see it’s a kind of situation that many founders struggle with. How did you come up with the decision and what’s the rationale behind it?
So I had been on the fence about this for ages. Last year, my friend and I made a pact that we would leave by May of last year, but then Covid hit and we figured it might be better to hold down the job while we had no side-project revenue.
A year later and we finally made it out and I couldn’t be happier. I would highly recommend taking time off and full-timing side projects, even if it’s just in between jobs.
It’s worth mentioning that I’m super lucky to be able to do something like this. I have a supportive family, no student loans, and can come back into an industry which I’m confident will continue to exist and grow if I don’t make it as an indie-hacker.
I’m still not in the clear though, I have ~$800 in MRR which is not enough to support myself, and I have strict revenue goals that I have to hit by the end of July, otherwise I’ll need to get another job.
Thank you Nikita for your time!
You can follow Nikita on Twitter to stay up to date with his journey.
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