2 SaaS failed, 1 sold, 1 SaaS growing. My SaaS stories explained

Hello there! I'm Pauline, a full time employee in a big company (IBM) and an indie hacker for 3 years. My entrepreneurial journey is a rollercoaster. Buckle up, I'm taking you on my adventure - complete with falls and rebounds to avoid you (I hope) mistakes, and give you transparency about entrepreneurship.

Let’s launch this newsletter (my first personal one) with an overview of my Indie Hacker’s journey.

Automated Trading: My First Tech Crush
It all started during the Covid lockdown - you know, that time when our grandest journey was from the bedroom to the living room. As boredom loomed, I had an idea: automated trading. Indeed, I used to spend hours to analyze the different crypto charts. It was very time consuming.
I enlisted a developer friend to help me build it. Together, we crafted a trading robot that worked 24/7. Result? A ROI five times our initial stake! Amazing isn’t it? We were super happy.

From Gold Bars to Zero Clients: The fail of Trading Alerts as SaaS
Emboldened by this success, when we were at a 2x multiple, we thought about monetizing our technlogy. But becoming a trading company in France is complicated: you have to be certified by financial organisms. So, we went for plan B - selling customizable trading alerts. We were saving hours of analysis for traders, so we thought it was an excellent idea, traders would love it… Guess how many alerts we sold? Zero. Yes, zero sales. Our ideal audience was not easy to reach (crypto traders). And we spent several months on this.
Lesson learned:
- What's amazing for us might not be for others.
- It’s better to know how to reach your targeted clients before building something.
- Don’t spend too much time on a project if you see no traction, no interest from the people you target.

The Twitter Experiment
Post-trading fiasco, I reached out to Thibault, an entrepreneur friend of mine. I proposed to him to work on a project together, but I had no idea he already have profitable companies (TweetHunter & Taplio) at that time. He gave me a few advices. One of them was to build an online presence.
So, there I was on Twitter (X, now) with my 11 followers, tweeting about data science and entrepreneurship. One day, a tweet I wrote in a bus when I was on holidays went viral: +1,000 new followers in 48 hours!
X isn't just a platform; it’s the ideal place to learn from others and share stories to - maybe - inspire and help others who want to start a business project.

Digital art: the first $ earned online (€, actually)
I failed my first products, but I was still motivated to build online services. So I pivoted. I teamed up with my friend Constance again to create an AI that transformed photos into funky styles (painting of yourself, 3D, in a fireman suit, …).
This time, I was relying on my then 10,000 Twitter followers to promote it. We made some sales, but it wasn't a life-changer business, it was far from being ramen profitable (around 500$ earned in 3 months).
Marketing was tough since it wasn’t a frequently needed tool. And it was “fun” but not useful.
So we finally decided to sell it. In a few weeks we agreed on a deal with someone who found us on Microns .

Platform-risks are real and I experienced it. TwittExplorer: the disaster.
As a data scientist with a Twitter and data analysis addiction, my next venture was TwittExplorer. We built a tool to automatically export Twitter data to Google Sheets with fancy dashboards. Just as we launched, Twitter announced their API would cost a small fortune: 42k$/month. So, that dream evaporated, many hours lost developing it :(.

IACrea: The first project validated
Fast forward to March 2023, I dived into iacrea, an instant home staging service. I knew nothing about Real Estate at that time, but I had skills in AI with images, and I loved that domain. The first version was basic. But it was a hit! People loved saving time and actually paid for it - the ultimate validation!

I hope you enjoyed that first overview. In my next posts I will go deeper on the subjects : how I found the first 100 IACrea’s clients, how I can launch quickly projects, how an online presence brings opportunities, invite other founders… I haven’t decided all topics yet, having a newsletter is new for me so feel free to contact me on my social medias (X, LinkedIn) to discuss or suggest subjects. All feedbacks are welcome :) and you can subscribe here to receive my next posts.

One last thing: meme section