Without Any Capital Book: How to bootstrap profitable startups the hacker way

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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 :)

Without Any Capital Book

How to bootstrap profitable startups the hacker way

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