Introducing 50k.tech
We are launching a Product studio
Sankalp and Preetam are building a new company. Through this post, we would like to introduce ourselves, explain the work we will be doing at our company, our story so far and what got us here, long-term goals, and what to expect in the coming months. We will be writing more about our experiences as we progress in our journey, so we would love for you to subscribe and join us for the ride!
Tl;dr
We’re launching a Product studio called 50k.tech, under which we will be building, launching and marketing well-designed products targeted at enabling digital entrepreneurs to succeed.
Who are “we”?
Sankalp is a full stack engineer with 5 years of experience building apps and backend for a multitude of startups in Bangalore. His code supports millions of API calls every day. Reach him on Twitter or Email.
Preetam has helped grow products in Ed-tech, E-commerce, Recruitment, Hyperlocal and F&B markets to millions of users over the past 4 years. He consults with companies helping them overcome Product and Growth problems. Reach him on Twitter or Email.
We both want to learn how to market digital products, and turn them into profitable businesses that can support our lifestyle, and some more.
Fun fact, both Sankalp and and Preetam studied at the same college (MIT, Manipal) one year apart, but didn’t know each other until they worked at Goodbox in 2016.
What is 50k.tech?
We are a Product studio, but that’s just a term we’re using. What’s important to know is:
50k.tech builds products with the aim of turning them into profitable businesses within 0–6 months of launch. We will also launch simpler (code and no-code) and free products that will serve as distribution channels to help our other ideas succeed.
50k.tech is a product agency where we will be partnering with online businesses to build and develop specific solutions for them. We intend to work with businesses that sell software (think SaaS) as well as non-software products (think e-commerce).
50k.tech is a creative outlet for us to publish content containing learnings from our journey that may be of use to others facing similar problems, release open source code to help other creators develop faster and more easily, create information products and much more. We have tons of ideas, and we are no longer stressing ourselves to produce a business forcibly. We want to fall in love with product building again, and have fun while we’re at it!
50.tech is a team that will build digital businesses — apps and websites — with the aim of turning them profitable within 0–6 months of launch. Our vision is to help internet entrepreneurs overcome hurdles to grow their businesses. Right now, it’s just the two of us, and that’s because we are perfectly aligned on our long-term goals. We might find more partners to join us in the future, but we will get there when we get there.
Who do we serve?
Seth Godin taught me to be clear on who you serve, before you delve into their problems and start building solutions to solve them.
We’ve been flirting with the thought that we want to serve other people like ourselves, running their own businesses on the internet. These could be software or non-software businesses. As of now we haven’t narrowed down any further. It’s just a bunch of thoughts.
Like we mentioned earlier, it could be SaaS or E-commerce type businesses. We will explore these audiences and narrow down as we learn more about them. But for now, it’s quite a broad landscape.
Our story so far, and what got us here
In the past, we worked together on a side project called SessionFox, which was an SDK that enabled screen recording on any Android app. After building an MVP and getting beta users, we took a hard decision to shut down after learning about the market, the problems that we could solve, and the future of such a tool in an increasingly privacy-conscious world. We will share learnings about from it and other ventures in future blog posts.
During our time dabbling in startups, we learnt a few lessons about the nature of businesses, venture capital, the importance of market first, and several other things. We were also quite burnt out working for others, and wanted to give ourselves the opportunity and room to do interesting things. We want to bootstrap our way to success, and we don’t mind if in the end we only build a $1mn ARR product, because even that would be a “very successful” outcome in our books.
Long-term goals
Every business exists to make money, and so do we. We want to learn the art of building profitable online businesses. In the long-term, we find alignment with the idea of helping other internet entrepreneurs succeed in their ventures. But we may not always build and launch products that fit under that bill.
We have milestones, our first one being hitting $10k in MRR before the end of 2019, and $50k in MRR before the end of 2020.
Both of us have quit our jobs and are working full-time at 50k.tech, therefore our livelihoods depend on the success of our products. However, we have sufficient runway that gives us a cushion to not make hurried decisions and get into something with half-baked interest or research. We have first-hand experienced that in the past, and we don’t want to go down that road ever again.
Product #1, #2 and what’s in store for the coming months
Product #1 — WhatsApp Chat Button
Our first product is ridiculously simple, it’s an app that adds a configurable WhatsApp Chat Button to any e-commerce store hosted on Shopify. We thought to start experimenting with the e-commerce entrepreneur audience since we already had prior knowledge about Shopify. Our app is undergoing review and should be live in about 2 weeks.
You can find all our apps here.
Product #2 — SaaS boilerplate in Django
We have also released an Open Source SaaS boilerplate written in Django, which was first built for our previous product SessionFox. The purpose of the boilerplate is for any developer to quickly add login, signup, reset password, invite team member, and me (retrieve user info) functionality to their SaaS application without writing code from scratch. We’ve also written an article explaining the approach and the implementation.
You can find all our open source work here.
Coming months
We’re going to launch a host of information products and simple applications. In the immediate weeks, we will launch resources that are helpful for Shopify store owners to succeed in their business. We even have a chrome extension in the pipeline. Subscribe to our newsletter to be informed of our new launches.
Public roadmap
The best ideas can come from anywhere, it can even come from you! That’s why we decided to make our roadmap public. We would love to hear your comments and product suggestions. Do drop by :)
What’s with the name?
I can’t even begin to tell you how bad we are at naming our products. It’s laughable, we’re aware of it, and we will get better at it in good time. Since we already know our limits to coming up with good names, we didn’t stress too much.
Often times, we had discussed $50k MRR as a magical milestone that we would be grateful so many times. Combine that with a blog post I came across a founder who named his company (close.io) in such a way that whenever it is mentioned online, it tends to becomes a clickable link.
We also wanted our name to be short and memorable, so that we can easily communicate it verbally or orally.
A few minutes of brainstorming later, 50k.tech was born. We bought the domain and sealed the deal right away.
Subscribe for more
If you’ve read until this point, I thank you for your time and patience. Subscribe to our newsletter down below and we will keep you posted on our adventures!
And if you have any feedback or thoughts, you can reach us @hipreetam93 or @sankalpjonna. We would love to chat :)
Originally published at www.50k.tech/blog
