Speaker 1A couple nights ago, I was scrolling Twitter like I usually do, looking for ideas, when I came across this. An anonymous startup, making over $40,000 a month, launched just about a year ago. I was interested, so I DM'd the guy. I said, hey, cool business, want to share your story? And to my surprise, he said yes.
Speaker 2My name's Tom, and my brother and I built Avenue together, and we built a website widget for trades and mechanics.
Speaker 1This is Tom, and he built a really simple app that today makes over $50,000 a month. But when I dug into the idea with him and asked him why it works, I was blown away.
Speaker 2I did the one thing you're not meant to do, which was.
Speaker 1I asked Tom to come onto the channel and break it all down for us. And in this episode, we're going to dive into the dead simple app he built that today makes over $50,000 a month, the growth tactic that almost nobody is using that helped him get his first 10 customers, and why he built an app in a category that almost everyone is ignoring. I'm excited for this one. Let's dive in. I'm Gus, and this is Starter Story. Tom, welcome to Starter Story. Super excited to have you on the channel. Could you tell us who you are, what you built, and what's your story?
Speaker 2My name's Tom, and my brother and I built Avenue together with a team. We do $85,000 a month in revenue now in Australian dollars, and we built a website widget for trades and electricians and mechanics. Today, I'm excited to show kind of a bit more about how we got to where we are and what we do. Tom, that's so awesome.
Speaker 1I'm super excited to talk to you. The widget aspect of this, the trades aspect of this, I think this is going to be really interesting. But let's take a quick step back and just tell us about Avenue. What is it? Who are your customers? Pull up your website. Tell us a little bit about the business.
Speaker 2Avenue is a website embed, so it goes directly onto the client's website. It just offers all their services in a visual way. That way, they can kind of be guided through to a purchase or even put through an inquiry. It does go into Google reservations as well, so we go onto Google My Business profile also.
Speaker 1Cool. So this kind of looks like one of those widgets that you see on websites to help you book a call with somebody, or I've used something like this to book a call with my barber. Is that the same thing, or is it a little bit different than that?
Speaker 2I think the back end is very fundamentally different because of the automations that we've built for them. But yes, essentially, it's solving like an age-old problem. I have money I want to buy from a service business. Why do I have to call them? Why do I have to kind of send them an email? Well, I could just tell them what I want.
Speaker 1That seems really awesome. Just tell us a little bit about the revenue. How much is it making? Pull up your Stripe dashboard to show the audience that this thing is legit.
Speaker 2So this is what we do through Stripe. We're still growing and reinvesting back into the business. It's been pretty steady. I feel like from August last year, 597, and then August now, 63,000 Australian. It's been a wild ride.
Speaker 1What I love about Tom's story is how simple his product is. He noticed a tiny problem and built a really simple solution that solved it. Here's proof once again that you do not need a complex or even an original idea in order to be successful. You just need to spot a real problem and solve it. And that's exactly why we worked with the team at HubSpot to pull together a free database of over 90 business ideas worth solving. Every idea is backed by real data, things like revenue and cost to start. Plus, it has a full case study attached to it on how they built and grew the business. If you're looking for your next idea or looking for a problem to solve, head to the link in the description and grab this database 100% for free. All right, let's get back to the episode. Cool, Tom. Thanks for sharing all that. Just tell us a little bit about what you were doing before you built this $50,000 per month widget.
Speaker 2Well, I left school early. So freshman year for the Americans watching, that probably taught me the biggest lessons ever. Like I got my first job and it was like $4 an hour. And my brain just couldn't comprehend how I was making $4 an hour, but all these people around me were kind of making way more money. So I started to obsess about like business and what are different business models. So I kind of just kept obsessing over like where I was a business model and just seeing like, you can still be making money while you're sleeping, even though you've already done the work. Once you kind of realize the direction you want to go in, and then you just won't stop iterating and trying stuff until you kind of find something that clicks.
Speaker 1Cool. So how does that lead to this particular idea, this widget that you built?
Speaker 2I think realizing that this was a problem I kind of obsessed over where I was like, why is it so difficult to inquire with certain types of businesses, yet they seem to make like a lot of money? And just thinking, surely there's a better way they could do this, leading to the fact that it was like, I didn't have any coding experience. I'd never kind of designed anything myself. But I knew what it would take to kind of put the team together to get these things. And seeing that anything I'd previously done had some success. I was like, why couldn't we do this? Like, why not me? If we start it and just give it a go?
Speaker 1Yeah, you don't have technical background. So how did you build this? What was sort of the timeline? Like, how long did it take you from, idea to a working project that is now, you know, scale to, you know, over $50,000 US per month?
Speaker 2February last year, I had a friend that was a developer, and he helped like create like the MVP, basically, to see that it could be done what we're kind of talking about, like embedding it naturally into a client's website. Once we kind of saw the layout begin to come to life, I kind of went all in at that stage. So I hired like, a lead designer that could actually make them look better. I hired like a head developer that could actually build out the back end, and then we hired like a front end developer. Yet we had zero revenue. So on paper, terrible idea, don't recommend it at all. But with that gave us a confidence to sell into these bigger companies that we kind of needed to get on board to pay us to kind of make it possible.
Speaker 1Yeah, for sure. You didn't have any customers, you didn't have any revenue, but you were able to hire all these people. How did you like afford that?
Speaker 2I did run a marketing agency for 10 years, which still had like 70 plus clients paying like website hosting. So I used my like very precious income that I did have to live to basically fund the start of this and try and transition out of the agency into this full time. So I was very, very fortunate that a past business was still like, actively running without a whole lot of like attention required, but needed that income to kind of be able to hire staff to then get the product up and
Speaker 1running. Awesome. Can you tell us a little bit more about how you grew this business from zero to over $50,000 a month in a relatively short timeframe, like a year? Year, year and a half. So tell us a little bit about that growth. How'd you get that initial traction?
Speaker 2Door to door sales, essentially, like going and showing people our product. Initially, we showed it on an iPhone, and they'd go, Oh, what is it? It's like an app. I'm like, No, it goes on your website. There was a lot of confusion about what product actually was. Then we switched to iPads. One of our early stuff was like, why don't we just show it on like an iPad so I can understand that it's like embedded onto a website. I can see it's in their branding. So we switched to iPads and then printed like brochures explaining what the product was. And that quickly kind of got us really early traction where it's like, when you show someone the problem they have, and you can explain it quite clearly, like you can't get sales outside of hours, this fixes that. They're very open to trying something new that they're being shown in person with a real person, which has then led to us being able to get bigger clients because they go, I've seen you guys everywhere. A lot of people must trust you. But we didn't have any connections to get into those bigger clients. And we didn't do the hard work of getting the smaller ones first.
Speaker 1That's awesome. Just tell me a little bit how you landed on kind of working or building an app or building this widget for this particular type of customer.
Speaker 2So we definitely fell into it. Like when we first went door knocking, we didn't skip a business. So we'd even go into like, music studios, electrician repair shops, like anything that was open, we would walk in and basically just try and show them our product. What we found from like taking action and doing that was the trade started to respond to us better and better. And it kind of revealed itself that they're no bullshit kind of people. They're very direct in their feedback. They don't like giving money away if something doesn't pay for itself. And that's kind of exactly what we needed. We wanted really tangible results. So we weren't just building something that was kind of based on hype temporarily, we wanted to build like long term clients. So trades kind of found us we went looking, but they kind of kept being interested or kept showing kind of interest in the product. And we kind of adapted it to suit their needs as their kind of business type. Cool. You know, for someone
Speaker 1watching who's maybe getting some inspiration and say, Oh, maybe I'll go door to door, find people in my local area, what would be kind of your advice or playbook for them?
Speaker 2Definitely starting, it is incredibly intimidating, you're about to show them something you put like your love and effort into, and then they're either gonna like it, or they're gonna just rip it to shreds. But if you really do love your product, that's the feedback you're actually looking for. So maybe it doesn't end up being a product for trades, and they'll tell you why directly to your face. But sometimes, we've even had certain types of businesses refer us to the right business being like, Oh, this has no use for me whatsoever. However, you should speak to my friend, because this would work so well for his business.
Speaker 1Yeah. Cool. Let's switch gears and go to the tech sec. What's the tools or tech sec that you used to build this business or that you use to still run your business on a regular basis?
Speaker 2So AWS is 150, which I absolutely love, because that's like the essential biggest part of our business is the hosting. Slack, 120. Google Workspaces, 130. Vapi at 500. So we do use a lot of like AI voice credits, and then Twilio being 4000, which is a huge part of our SMS costs, which is another part of our product. Lusher to find like very specific leads. And then of course, Claude, everyone's using Claude, we're no different. We need it to survive at this point.
Speaker 1Cool. So we've been talking about this widget, you know, used for these trades, and you've told us a little bit about the story. Now I want to see it. Can you just give us a little quick demo of how this would
Speaker 2it works for sure so it's one of our clients first thing they get is a book online button with google so it's actually partnership with google directly they click on that they come through to the client's branded form where they can kind of tap through the product if customers exit out of it they're actually sent back to the customer's website where we also have embedded the product directly on the website as well so that way clients can kind of contact them through google or they can contact them directly through the website leading it all to one place essentially
Speaker 1i love that the final question that we ask all founders to come onto the channel is if you're standing on your shoulders you know a year ago five years ago or for somebody watching who is just getting started in their you know business journey what advice would you give to yourself
Speaker 2or give to them definitely to sell before you build i know it's said so many times but customers don't care how much went into something sometimes it's really sad if you can get someone to commit before building the product you can get someone to commit before building the product you've probably found something worth assuring so if someone you tell them about what the problem you fix is and they go great how much is it you tell them the price and they get to the point where they're actually willing to hand that cash over then you definitely could be on to a really
Speaker 1good idea that's great advice tom thanks for coming on the channel so fun to have you on and congratulations thank you
Speaker 2appreciate it all right i
Speaker 1just wrapped up with tom that was a really fun interview i loved learning about the widget that he built and kind of how simple the business is i have like two takeaways the first one which really stood out to me was the like door-to-door sales piece that he talked about so many of the founders that we bring on the channel and i think i mentioned this in the interview though i don't know if it stayed in there so many of the founders that we bring onto the channel are using you know tiktok ugc programs posting building in public posting on twitter to get their first customers obviously all that works as you've seen from our interviews but there's something i think especially in a world that's moving so online that i think it's really important to be able to get that customer that's coming in and asking for the service and i'm sure a lot of his customers really respected him for coming in knocking on their door and asking for kind of the sale or the service and not that i'm necessarily gonna go do that but it just it's a little bit compelling to think about all the people in this area that i live in probably in the area that you live in who are not familiar with ai who aren't using clod or codex every single day but you've built a solution there might be 100 customers in your back door who need this service or need something built for them you know you're never gonna find them unless you go kind of walk down the street and do it so that was i think a really really good piece of advice and my second takeaway is the widget aspect is so simple a button that helps one business you know earn more from their clients that's something you've probably seen 100 times and you've probably used yourself he was able to do it for mechanics and electricians i'm sure there's a bunch of other niches out there that could use a product like this and so my takeaway is like even though it's something i've seen done 100 times it's proof that you don't need like an original idea to go do it my last takeaway is that he solved a really big problem for these businesses that now use his widget to help complete their transactions and i think that's probably the real secret sauce of this whole thing is that he solved the real problem which reminds me in the link below we have our database to 90 business ideas that are solving real problems right now all backed by data that you can download 100 for free all right thanks for watching i hope you enjoyed this episode we will see you in the next one peace
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