When i got fired as a software engineer in november i started to build side project fast forward to today i launched side project of them became profitable startups and i m now earning a month as a solo entrepreneur in this video i am going to share how i get startup ids and why building them really fast was the key to x my software engineer salary let s get into.

It all right so let s talk about how to find startup idas there are three ways to find them the first one is to solve your own problems let me illustrate this with an example those are all my site projects and of them are making money and one of the most common customer requests i receive is can i get a proper invoice i work with stripe to process all the payments that go through my startups and sometimes the receipt is not enough in customer mostly europeans want to have an invoice that is properly formatted and as a business owner this is not a very fun part. So i bu i m building zen voice it s a little wrapper around the stripe api that gives stripe business owners a special link that they can send to the customers where they input their email addresses. And then they can retrieve all the purchases they ve made with the business. And then they can see the invoice they can edit some details to it add their name or their business detail like v number all that kind of things and they can download their invoice and they re happy this is my way of solving my own problems and yours might be different so you might want to look at what s going on around in your life that you can solve a perfect example to do that is to look around if you have a job what s going on there maybe it could be a little piece of software for your team to be more productive during meeting using and ai video summary tool or something like that there are a bunch of problem that you can search around if this is not in your job you can look around in your hobbies for instance maybe you feel lonely playing tennis by yourself and you need to find a partners that are relevant skills with you and you could make an app to find some of those people those kind of ids are the best because first if your stup fail you still end up having a solution to your own problem so you re happy with that and second it s much easier to sell a software or whatever a product if you speak the language of your customer so if it s for a problem that you ve been.

Experiencing sometimes you might not have any problem in mind and you want to solve universal problems un what i call universal problems are problems like every businesses want to make more money and everybody in life wants to have good quality sleep eat healthy food and whatever read books or be productive those are pr that pretty much anyone could experience and those are good way to get started in entrepreneurship if you don t find any problem so for instance that s how i made my first internet dollar i used to work with escape room businesses and i used to sell them a mini tool like a little piece of software that will help improve the conversions on their websites i do not care about the escapo industry at all whatsoever. But i found out that if i manage to get more money for some businesses so universal need using one of my software product then this is a perfect combo they re happy i m happy this is a quick demo this is one of my customer that is actually still paying after years for my software this is an escape room business and they you they use my software at the bottom left this little key here will be shown to every visitor and if you visit the website of the escape room business you l be able to play an escape room small online escape room game on the business website so this is a tool that just in to convert to have some fun engaging game for visitors and to convert those visitors into more customers and in never ed businesses that i work with would get more customers from their website which is really great i ended up ditching the business because i have no specific care for the escape rooms industry but that was a really great way to get stting into entrepreneurship because you still have to build a product do the marketing launching and all that and in the case you have no.

Problem that you want to solve and you you don t want to do this like solving those universal problems there s nothing that comes to your mind you can try experiencing a brand new life that means traveling abroad and meeting new people that means starting a new hobby try new stuff with an open mind where you will experience new problems that will come to your life and that could bring you some startups ideas once you get an ide the next part is to actually build it and we re going to talk about this to make sure that you build it fast so in the case it s a flop you don t burn out all right.

Tell you a little story when i started entrepreneurship in i believed i was mark zukerberg. And i had a secret brilliant id in mind that was that was going to become a unicorn after spending a year in my bedroom building that id i ended up having zero users and zer in revenue i burned out. I quit the product i couldn t see it. Anymore i also left my girlfriend and go change travel to a new country and change my life the thing is when you spend so much time building a product the brain start to have some expectations and the more time you spend on it the more your expectations will be so the better the reward will be expected and if the reward isn t coming as it s mostly the case in entrepreneurship you will burn out and you want to avoid that at all cost and the second reason is that most startups fail the main reason is that people don t actually need the startup i think the number is around of startup fail. So you want to avoid losing your time on something that might not even work out. And so that s why u building and shipping fast is very important and at the same time when you ship fast you going to learn how to market your startup how to launch it how to handle customer support tax legal and a bunch of other things that will be useful for the future and at the same times if you like you know sharing what you learn along the way you can grow a little audience like i did in the last two years on my twitter where now i have over k followers because i was sharing everything that i was doing and learning just like i m doing now on youtube.

We ve set up the mindset it s important to know which feature you will or will not build and as a general rule of themb build just one fe feature that feature that you cannot remove from your product otherwise it just doesn t exist so for every feature that you have in mind ask yourself is it necessary for the users to have this feature if the answer is yes keep it but if it s not a necessary like absolute necessary feature just remove it let s get to a concrete example of zenvo the startup that i m building right now the goal is to simplify stripe invoices for small business owners like me and the main feature is just this people input their email and they get their invoice from stripe i have a bunch of other ids for invoice. So u business owners to be able to view all the invoices that have been generated to simplify the texting to interact with a stripe api to upload those invoices and ab like really a numerous number of features that i want to implement. But i m going to launch with just one feature this one that i just show you right now which is generating invoices that way i will be able to launch my startup faster to get customers feedback earlier and it s likely that nobody will actually need the product maybe it s just me or maybe i m faking a need in my head and nobody will want to use it.

On launching your product the pricing is also very important because that will determine whether you validate or not a need as a general ru them there are two things you want to avoid or at least make better is at first you want to avoid free users in the vc world it s very common to have free plans and to burn a lot of money get a lot of users and then later convert those users into pay plans but as a solo entrepreneur like me if you have a limited budget you might not be able to burn lots of money or you might not be able to bring millions of visitors to your website and most of free users never convert to paid plans so if you have a pay a free plan that might be killing your paid plan and reducing your actual income so you want to get rid of that the second part is that there is a real subscription headache going on out there are subscriptions for absolutely everything nowadays and it s much harder to sell a month subscription than it is to sell a bucks onetime payment this is what i m going to do for my new startup zenvo tr business owners could use my product every day every week so it could make sense to have some recurring payments but i m not going to do that instead i m going to go with one time payments and so that i can validate the le as soon as i can and if i see that there are some customers who actually use the product and want more of that then later on i can eventually switch to a recuring membership but for now i m going to stick to the simplest which is onetime.

Payment and finally when you re about to build you want to choose a text tack so if you are a programmer and you already know your text tacks you re familiar with that you can build anything on web apps or whatever stick with it don. T change it the customers don t care about the text tack so there is no need to change any of the things that you re using stick with what you already know and if you are getting started this is my textt here i m using react and nextjs on top of it stripe for payments tailin css for the components with daisy ui as a library mongodb as a database next authentification for user authentification accounts and all that and mail gun for email transactional emails this is also a little product that i built it s a ball plate that encapsulates all those stack that i m using and if you want to check it out it s called chipas if you are curious about the coding part of it i am actually live streaming myself coding zen voice in public on youtube so you can see my youtube channel all the replays from the last couple days you will see me mostly trying to debug my.

Own code currently the product is working so people can create accounts they can connect their stripe accounts to it and have a little link that they can share to the customers so they can input their email and retrieve their invoice edit them and download them i m going to spend the next weeks or so finishing the product before launching it on platforms like reddits productons and twitter the strategy i m using in this video about finding ids and building them pass is the exact same strategy that i used to build my side project and this is working better and better for me as you can see here my heat rate is increasing in more of the startups that i built are profitable and making more money than they used to in when i got started from scratch i m taking also youtube seriously this year. And i m going to be sharing one video per week so if you want to see what i m doing and what i m learning you can subscribe to your channel and if you like the video you can like the video cheers.