> We all start with an idea, 0 customers, 0 followers

wat. No, this is not true at all. Most successful startups work through many ideas until they already have potential customers to work with as they build. And if the idea doesn't come together and prove that is can generate revenue, people don't build it. They move on.

This idea that someone has a vision that nobody else has bought into and turn it into a startup unicorn is a rare exception to how things go. It makes a good story, but isn't how thing play out in reality 99% of the time. Don't fall into the trap of thinking the other 1% is a reasonable expectation of how your idea will go.

>> AT some point, you get conviction, this will work and worth pursuing full-time even though 0 revenue to begin with.

My conviction was seeing myself using what I built growing from a few times a week to everyday use. Then when one random signup hit the analytics, I watched that person come back consistently too. That was the shift.

The harder part is the gap between "people use it" and "people pay for it". Usage is validating but it doesn't pay rent :( hence I press on.

I've been thinking about starting a business for a while now, but I haven't come up with a really good idea for a great app yet. I'm currently doing a lot of reading and trying to figure out what the market needs. Maybe that will spark the crucial idea. Best regards

The job market sucked. The average job was paying less than $1000/month. I was getting freelance work that paid better, but they weren't actually paying what they promised. I started selling crackers and coffee with my wife, until a mentor told me what a fucking idiot I was not doing apps. Everyone wanted apps then, just like they wanted AI, but they didn't want to pay market rates for them.

After pitching a price comparison app to the consumer ministry and getting lowballed, I decided I could make more money just making the app and selling ad space to groceries.

A lot of stuff happened. We pivoted to recipes instead of price comparison. We segmented that into low carb recipes, hardcoded it all. 1200 downloads in 24 hours. We found a grocery partner who was selling low carb stuff like flaxseed. 3000 downloads in the 12 hours after that, with 3% of users actually trying to buy something. We didn't actually build a shopping cart yet, it was in the validation space.

I ended up doing this for a year. We got rabid fans. Our users were losing crazy amounts of weight, like 5 kg per week. We moved our users into WhatsApp groups because it was easier than coding a chat in the app. The fans eventually became so damn rabid, like at one point people were recommending eating fish head with slabs of butter to lose weight. They were passing out from ketosis and malnutrition and telling each other that the passing out was part of the process.

They were becoming so rabid that our suppliers didn't want to deal with them. I didn't want that kind of liability. As admin, I'd correct people and get snapped at.

We sold the company to a weight loss pill company. They offered about a little over a year's salary, and after a year of taking $30 monthly salary, me and my partner were happy to let it go. Plus no taxes and I could actually afford a real computer and chair and freelance.

Since our traffic was organic, the acquirer saved money just putting their product in the app. They hired an SEO consultant. Traffic dropped. They pivoted away from the low carb stuff, hired a motivational speaker, dietitian and tried to make it legit. Traffic dropped further. People were losing healthy amounts of weight on eating veggies and exercising, like 1-2 kg/week. Nobody wanted to eat veggies and exercise to only lose 1-2 kg/week, when they could eat flaxseed pizza and steak and lose 5.