I'm challenging to launch 12 startups in 12 months.
I would like to introduce great Chinese developer and founder Mr. "Ping"!
He currently operates four services and now earns $25.5k per month.
Let's take a look at him in focus!
⏰Developed a hit product based on his experience of trying logo creation while working for a company.
He is not the type of person who created his own business right after graduating from university.
After graduating from university, he spent a total of nearly 12 years as a company employee, working for semiconductor manufacturers and software development companies in Silicon Valley and China.
Then he got tired of the corporate life and decided he wanted to create something on his own, so he started a side project.
First of all, he launched an e-commerce platform.
When deciding on a logo for the service, he was impressed by 99designs, a service that allows freelance designers to create logos for you.
Ping felt this idea and service were so great, so launched a logo creation platform like 99designs.
He created a platform that would allow people to have higher-quality logos made at a lower cost.
The name of the service is 48hourslogo.
In this service,
- First, the client submits a rough draft of the service for which he/she wants a logo.
- Multiple designers will then create a logo accordingly.
- The client chooses the best logo, and the designer who created the chosen logo is paid.
When you actually visit the site, you will see that there are always various competitions going on, and many of them have more than 100 logos (one designer can submit multiple logos) submitted per competition.
You can see that it is very exciting.
The minimum fee is set at 129$, although it varies depending on the plan.
He currently earns $100k/month in revenue from this service.
🪐Launched an AI product before the AI wave
He had been running a logo creation platform, but he felt that the logo creation process had many steps that could be automated and that somehow the wasted effort could be reduced so that designers could dedicate more time to being creative.
Then he launched LogoAI.
He began developing this product in 2018. This was long before the world entered into the boom of generative AI.
At the time, he had no intention of using the AI to automatically generate logos, but rather to provide a platform with multiple templates to automate as much of the human work as possible.
However, he only predicted that such AI would eventually appear and most of the designers' jobs would be replaced by AI.
He then named the service LogoAI and acquired the domain LogoAI, and he says that this kind of move from the eve of the AI boom paid off.
The service is designed to suggest several designs after entering the service name, concept of the service, concept, and font of the letters.
Currently, the service generates $150k/month in revenue.
🚀Launched uBrand, an AI-based brand management support for startups.
In 2023, he launched uBrand, a service that uses AI to provide comprehensive support for brand management.
This service includes logo creation, mission/vision/strategy development, social media and PR release creation, and other important tasks for brand building for startups, all done by an AI assistant.
Pricing is relatively inexpensive, starting at $19/month.
The service is generating about $5k/month in revenue. The scale of the service is still small compared to previous services, but it is expected to grow in the future.
🔗Building a service to obtain SEO links for entrepreneurs
The next service he recently launched is Linktopia, a service to obtain SEO links.
Mr Ping said that in growing the service so far, he has spent a lot of time on marketing.
When we develop a service, we tend to devote a lot of resources to development, but in his case, it is 50:50 between development and marketing.
Other successful developers also spend as much time on marketing as they do on development.
That's how important marketing is.
And in his case, he has put a great deal of effort into SEO within marketing.
SEO is a good marketing channel that does not produce short-term results, but it is a channel that can be used slowly and continuously.
However, competition is fierce these days, and it is very difficult to achieve high search rankings simply by creating good content.
To rise to the top of the search rankings, it is important to have other sites link to you.
It has long been said that links are important in SEO, and they are still quite important.
However, black SEO, such as creating many satellite sites and posting many self-made links, which was popular in the past, is not effective because Google has updated against it.
So they decided to create Linktopia to create links between sites that have good content and seem to have synergy with each other.
People who are registered with this service can make links to each other's sites.
He has just recently released it and has already started to get users.
The secret behind why his services are doing so well across the board
Have you noticed something so far?
Mr Ping seems to have launched a variety of services, but in fact, he seems to consistently launch the next service after adhering to a certain principle.
That is, "launch the service where there is already the customer",
With the success of the first 48hourslogo, the platform attracted many logo designers and clients who wanted a good logo at a reasonable price.
Then, he launched LogoAI. LogoAI is beneficial to the client side, and depending on how it is used, it can also make the designer's job easier.
The service grew immediately after the launch because there were already potential customers.
In addition, many of the users who try to order logos from 48hourslogo as cheaply as possible are startups who are about to launch their services.
Therefore, He developed uBrand, an AI assistant that handles not only logo design but also branding for startups.
This is also a great way to get into the market and get up and running quickly, since there are already customers and the issues are already apparent.
Also, even if branding is done, it is meaningless if it does not attract customers, so he launched Linktopia for startups, which helps with SEO link building.
This is also easy to start up because he already has contacts with customers.
In this way, he was putting a service where there were already customers.
When developing a service, it is common for people to blindly believe that if they create a good service, it will sell!
But that is absolutely not true.
A large company with a lot of capital or a start-up that has raised a lot of funds may be able to spend a huge amount on advertising to attract customers, but founders who are competing only with their own funds cannot pull off such a way.
The important thing to do is to launch services where there are customers.
The developers we have introduced so far basically all have some kind of marketing channel (usually Twitter), and they generate revenue by offering services that are a good match for their followers.
Yes, it's not about product-out, it's about market-in.
The importance of designing with SEO in mind from the beginning
In the case of Mr. Ping, he has been continuously attracting new users by using SEO as mentioned above.
48hourslogo ranks well for common logo keywords such as "food truck logo" and "racing logo" (according to Ahrefs).
The platform is designed to have Google index a page that collects logos submitted within the platform for each specific theme.
This is expected to attract visitors from long-tail keywords. This is an SEO design that database-type sites should refer to.
In addition, LogoAI is ranked №1 across the board for AI logo related keywords such as "ai logo generator," which is searched 110,000 times per month, and "ai logo maker," which is searched 25,000 times (according to Ahrefs).
It's no wonder, then, that LogoAI has been operating under the name LogoAI since 2018, so there's no way it can lose to those recently emerged AI services.
The number of keyword searches for this area has increased tremendously in recent years, so it should be attracting a lot of customers.
👂The importance of developers & founders listening to customers
He also places great importance on listening to his customers.
He has not raised any funds nor brought in any board members, and he is currently running the service with a staff of 8 people.
Even in such a situation, he still checks all the emails from customers and reads them by himself.
He says that he continues to do so because listening to customer feedback is very important for service improvement.
As the service grows, it may become more difficult to read each and every customer's voice, but it is wonderful to see that he is still improving the service by listening to their customers' voices.
We should learn from Mr. Ping's attitude and keep listening to our customers no matter how much the service grows.
His story is very helpful.
So this time we have focused on Mr. Ping.
If you like, comment and share, it will encourage me to continue!
See you next time!