From $200/mo to $18k in 5 years as solo founder
I start making money when I was in my final year of Master Degree in 2017 at the age of 25. I’m sharing breakdown of 5-years earnings by year.
#2017 — $2,500 ($208 / month) Internship for US based company as a web developer with Angular.js
#2018 — $6,500 ($542 / month) I joined a full-time job as web developer in a company & was doing extra work in night as freelancer.
I quit my job in 8-months & moved to south India to building company of one.
#2019 — $24,691 ( $2058 / month ) I sold my first project that I build out of a GitHub repository for $22k and did some extra side work to make more money. From now, I stop taking freelance work and start exploring ideas in APIs software. In Nov, 2019 I build NoCodeAPI and Launched in Jan’2020 before covid.
#2020 — $42,124 ( $3,510 / month ) I grow my SAAS business nocodeapi to $2k MRR & built a small website with Twitter API in 11 hours and I sold that for $5k within a month.
#2021 — $153,609 ( $12,800 / month ) NoCodeAPI MRR $3.5k and sold two side project for $95k while growing my SAAS business.
#2022 — $216,433 ( $18,036 / month ) NoCodeAPI MRR grows to $5k and this got acquired for 6 figures.
#2023 — ? Currently, I’m building a new software to make apps with table data. → tableapps.io
Published in 2023, this chronicle by @mddanishyusuf details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing. Key verified financial milestone: $200/mo.
The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.
You have a typo on the View API Docs button at https://nocodeapi.com/marketplace/youtube/ that leads to https://nocodeapi.com/docs/youotube-api/. I think it's supposed to lead to https://nocodeapi.com/docs/youtube-api/.
Congratulations!
Things I've noticed: no way to get back to nocodeapi landing page once logged in.
I am surprised that the list of big-names you give on your landing page rely on this because all users of nocodeapi have to trust you with their security tokens and API tokens. We have to trust the are properly encrypted, that no one could decrypt and use them... I would have thought most companies legal coding guidelines would prevent them from trusting a 3rd party with such tokens.
Nice! Is it safe to put the token inside the URL like that though (Looking at https://github.com/nocodeapi/embed-instagram-feed)? Like would I be able to see the URL by inspecting the page/watching the network tab, or does the element that takes this URL as a parameter do something fancy?
Congrats! On a related note, can someone on HN can educate me on why MRR is the primary metric? MRR doesn't tell you if the startup is profitable, which is presumably the goal - to make money. If your costs are $3M/month, an MRR of $100K sounds like a terrible deal. Wouldn't it make more sense to report profits?
This is super cool, congrats!
I run https://www.startups.fyi and feature profitable startups/side-projects along with revenue info (a lot of them are from solo-founders like yourself).
Would love to feature you if you're up for it?