I'm trying to build a new web app for the global market(Recently launched: https://books-explorer.com/).

I've researched many successful developer. So, today I'd like to introduce one of the most famous developers "Danny Postma"!

Danny Postma has developed and sold a number of AI services alone, and his name is always mentioned as an AI solo developer.

His representative product is "http://HeadshotPro.com," which can output an image of a person wearing a specific outfit in a specific scene based on a photo of the person's face, but he has also developed many other products.

Danny Postma is now attracting a lot of attention as a successful individual developer, but he was not successful from the beginning.

In this article, we will take a look at how he was able to achieve such success!

From a Dutch-born marketer to indivisual development

He was born in the Netherlands. He was not originally an engineer. His first career was as a web marketer, improving websites.

However, at the age of 25, he decided to learn programming and develop his own products.

Launching "landingfolio", a service to share landing page design ideas

So, first Danny Postma launched landingfolio (a platform for sharing landing page designs) based on his experience as a web marketer.

The service was a hit, attracting 1,000 users a day, but monetization was still difficult, and for four years, the service did not generate any revenue.

Customers simply checked out the shared designs and created their own designs based on them, and no purchases (CV) were made.

Even if you create a service that attracts a good number of people, it is very difficult to generate revenue if you do not have a well thought-out monetization process.

I myself am not very good at monetization, so I understand this story.

Reducing client work at once and studying programming properly

When he made products, his main job was a web marketer. He had never focused on studying programming so far.

Then, he made a big decision.

He decided to reduce his client work as a web marketer to two days a week and devote four days a week to studying programming.

It is not easy to make such a big decision.

But if you really want to create your own service and be successful, you have to make this decision somewhere.

For a while after I became independent, I was doing a lot of client work for companies. It is true that it brings in immediate cash and stabilizes sales, but if you spend all your resources on that, you will never be able to launch and scale your own service/product.

If you are in such a dilemma, gradually reduce the number of outsourced projects and invest your time in what you really need to focus on.

Launch of Headlime, an AI writing service

After launching several services, Danny Postma finally launched his hit product "Headlime" in 2020.

Headlime is a service that uses AI to generate sentences. launching such a service in 2020 was far-sighted.

While there are now a myriad of similar services out there (and I have tried to develop one myself), in 2020 there will be very few services that can generate sentences by AI.

Headlime became a hit, and as of February 2021, it was generating $20,000/month in revenue.

He eventually succeeded in selling Headlime for $1,000,000 , making him a very wealthy man.

The sale was made only eight months after the launch of Headlime.

Looking at it this way, it seems as if the service just happened to hit the mark by following the trend of AI, but it was a success because he had experienced several unsuccessful attempts at creating services before that.

launching Headshotpro, big hit

The service he is now devoting himself to developing is called Headshotpro.

This service uses image-generating AI to generate a photo of a person wearing a specific outfit against a specific background.

The company's revenue has reached about $300k per month within a year of its launch, an astonishing amount of money for a product developed by an individual.

It is even larger than the sum of all the services run by Pieter Levels, whom we introduced last week.

However, the API usage fees for AI-related services are so high, and it is quite possible that the profit is not so high compared to the scale of the sales.

Nevertheless, it is still too amazing for an individual to develop a service that earns nearly $3.6M a year.

So how could he scale his service so far?

He says that the power of SEO has greatly contributed to gathering customers.

First, he used a program to automatically generate pages targeting long-tail keywords (since this is a database-type site, he can generate such pages by connecting contents).

He also writes articles on big-tail keywords. He also says that one of the factors behind the success of the SEO was that the domain power of the site was increased by obtaining many links through sharing on Product Hunt, a famous service for sharing overseas products, and on Twitter, where he already had a large number of followers.

As engineers, we often spend our resources on creating products and don't think about how to attract customers.

In this respect, Danny Postma, who used to be a web marketer, seems to think strategically about how to attract customers.

After all, even if you create a good product, it is meaningless if you do not reach people. It is important to develop both development and marketing skills.

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See you next time!