I launched a SaaS in 7 days while working full-time

I was just sitting in this random coffee shop in Brugge and decided to challenge myself and see if it's possible to launch not one but two startups in just seven days and make an actual revenue from them. Right now I'm on a mini vacation and I'm supposed to be resting but I feel that I've been building those startups in silence for too long and if I'm gonna keep delaying the launch I'm never gonna do it. So I decided that it's time to push myself and actually launch it this week. But to be honest, I've never done like a big public launch of my startup on different platforms and so on and so on. So in the next seven days, I'll have to teach myself on how to launch a startup on an actual platform. And besides learning on how to launch a startup, I'll also have to prepare my startup for the launch, build landing pages, finalize the product, and market it over all possible channels, and combine it all with traveling. So this week is going to be absolutely crazy. I want to document every single step in this video on this YouTube channel. So let's get freaking started. All right, it's around 10 p.m. I got back to my apartment, finished my full-time job and was working a bit on the first step that's gonna prepare me for the launch of the startups next Monday. When you're launching your startup, the first and the most obvious step is to list your startup on as many launch directories as possible. Launch directories is basically simple websites where you can make a post about your startup and say, hey guys, I've launched this startup. please check it out. The most popular one is of course Product Hunt. It gets the most traffic and if you're going to be able to push your startup there and get to the top three products of the day, you're going to be pushed by the platform and a lot of people who visit this website daily are going to see your launch, see your website, visit it and potentially convert. But besides Product Hunt, there are dozens of other websites. Since it's my very first launch and I don't have a huge audience, I don't expect to get a lot of traffic from that. But what's going to be useful is that those websites are going to mention my website and it's going to improve the rating of my domain. And rating of your domain is actually a useful thing for CEO. CEO is basically traffic that you're getting from Google. And with good CEO, you're going to be getting free traffic from Google and nowadays also from ChatDBT and other AI agents that are going to recommend your website. That's definitely a long-term game. I don't expect to get any CEO results in just like seven days, but that's just a nice bonus that you're getting from launching on those directories. So today, I prepared a huge list of directories where I'm going to be listing my startup, but I'm just getting started. There are a lot of other things that I'll try within this video. So see you tomorrow. Okay, it's the end of day two. I'm recording super quick update and going to sleep because tomorrow at 5am I have a flight. So I have just like four hours left to sleep. But I still wanted to record a quick update to show you like all of the steps to be super transparent. Today I work mainly on the product because I feel that my product is not yet fully ready. And I know you have a bunch of questions of like, what are you building? Who you are? What are you doing? And within this video I'll be answering those questions step by step so hold on just an hour ago I was sitting on the Hans Zimmer concert by the way it was absolutely amazing these guys freaking genius but it made me think about why am I doing all that and the answer for that is freedom like today I can be in Belgium on the Hans Zimmer concert with the people who are important to me tomorrow I'll be back home in Warsaw in a month I'm gonna go to Asia for example do some cool stuff there so basically at any moment of my life I can be at any point of the world and that freedom can be only achievable if you work online. And the last piece of freedom that I'm missing is the actually freedom of work. Because I work 9 to 5 I don't have full freedom of work because I still have to do what I have to do but with indie hacking even though with indie hacking most likely gonna work way more than I work on my full-time job I'll still have like full freedom of what I'm doing and that's what really missing in my life and that's why I'm doing those challenges that's why I'm building those mini startups. So yeah, okay, time to sleep. See you tomorrow. Okay, it's day three, I don't have much time to make any progress. So I think it's a good chance to actually tell you a bit about who I am and what I'm building. My name is Andrew, I work nine to five and love building SaaS products and document this whole journey online. In one of my previous challenges, I pre launched a product named Contensor. It's an AI tool that allows users to create nice shorts in just a few minutes. While building the SaaS, I needed a bunch of video processing logic and spent a lot of time on building a good backend for it that can handle a lot of videos. And I got a thought at that moment. I wish there were a video processing API that I could have just used instead of spending all of that time building it. So on the next day, I decided to turn this thought into a product that will help a bunch of other SaaS founders and AI automation builders who work with videos. As a developer, I've been working with video processing for quite a while, so I have enough expertise to do it. And that's how the idea of Video Cascade was born. I've been building this product for quite a while, added a bunch of different features to it that allow you to compress, combine, edit videos, add elements on top of videos, remove noise, silence and a bunch of other things. But I was constantly thinking that I need just one more feature before launching it. But this will never end, so I think this challenge is a perfect time to get out of my comfort zone and actually start marketing it instead of just building. It's day four and I gotta admit that I up a little bit. Yesterday, I made absolutely zero updates with my SaaS, my progress, my launch strategy. And the reason for that, because yesterday for half of the day I was traveling and later on, I had to fully focus on my full-time job because I had a bunch of tasks to finish and complete there. And that's honestly and unfortunately the reality when you work full-time and try to build your startup on the side. There will be days when you're going to have to fully skip your SaaS and focus on your full-time job because if you don't want to quit, you have to perform there as well. That's sad, but that's the reality. Because of my full-time job, I have enough money to keep trying SaaS things every single day, every single month. And if I'm going to quit my job, I'm going to have just like a few months, maybe a bit more of a runway until I'm going to run out of money and won't have enough time and tries for my SaaS. Plus, with the money, I can try more expensive SaaS strategies like ads, promotions, and things like that. Buy some courses, consultations, and even outsource some of the work, which basically saves me some time. But I have four more full days before the final launch. So I think it will be enough to prepare everything to launch two startups on Monday. And the very first thing I'm doing this morning is actually working on my X account. And that's actually the second strategy. Besides launching my startup on all of those websites and directories, I'll also be publicly launching it on X. Unfortunately, I've never been posting on X. So I don't have any followers, any attention there. That's why for the next four days, I want to be a reply guy. And every day for 30 to 60 minutes, I'll be replying to posts in my niche. to start getting first attention and first followers. That's basically the best strategy to start growing on X, especially if you're starting from zero. It's not posting actually, but just replying to people. And if your replies are good and not generic, they can actually get 500, 1000, even few thousand views. And from that views, you can get some followers. But to get followers, your profile has to catch attention. That's why I've just prepared the very first post, which talks about me, my goals, and a nice cinematic video about how I work and what do I do. So yeah, wish me luck and let's get freaking back to work. Time to fully focus and lock in. Let's go. Okay, just got back home from the gym and I feel so much better now. I feel that my brain can finally think well and I clearly see the vision and what I need to do. So I already grabbed my first coffee of the day and time to focus on the work. This morning I've been replying a lot on X and I'm already at 23 subscribers, which is not a lot, but like I've started at zero literally yesterday and I'm already at 23. Plus I even found an accountability body. This is the person who also tries to grow an X and we're gonna be trying to support each other and grow together, which is pretty cool. And growing together is actually way easier than doing it by yourself just because you have a person who will motivate you to keep going every single day. Plus the person who will give you feedback to your landing pages, your SaaS and so on and so on. That's actually why soon I'll be launching a community called Full-Time Founders. This is the place, a chill place for people like me and you who try to build their own SaaS while working full-time. And this is the place where you can connect with like-minded people, find a co-founder, get feedback on your SaaS, on your marketing strategy, and simply just grow and build together. You can join the waitlist and find more details in the description. And yeah, I guess it's time now to focus on the actual work. Okay, it's end of day six and I don't feel as energized as I felt at the beginning of this week because I have just like literally one day to go before the launch and nothing is practically ready. Today I spent the whole day coding the landing page and I ended up building just one section, even though it's like quite pretty. Have a look. So it looks like this. The best thing that I really love is this section where you can play around with settings of the video you want to generate. You can press process the video and it's going to proceed the video and actually generate the video based on the settings that you applied here, which is like pretty decent. And I absolutely love how this section looks and feels, but that's the only section I managed to fully finish, all other sections are still like work in progress because I spent most of the time setting up this section and making sure it like works good making sure it looks good and so on and so on and also today I had to make like a hard really hard decision not to launch the second startup on Monday I really wanted to do two startups launch at like one day but I see that practically I don't have enough time and resources to launch two startups properly that's why I'm gonna delay the launch of the second startup, I'm still going to launch this one startup and I'm still going to kind of launch the second one on the same day. I'm going to launch it not as like a regular startup, but as a case study for my video API, because my second startup under the hood uses my video API. So it's going to be a really good case study to show what my API is capable of, what it can do, and how it can be used by other startups. So yeah, I have literally just one day to go. nothing is ready i still have to put bunch of work tomorrow so yeah let's get back to work okay it's last day before the launch as you can see today is the first day when it started snowing here in europe i just had a great gym session positive vibes from the snow and now i'm going to the cozy coffee shop to work on the last day before the launch yesterday i was working until 2 a.m because i had a stupid crazy bug which i was trying to fix it finally started to work so at least that's a good sign but because of that bug i didn't have enough time to prepare fully for the launch that's why today i have to work really really hard to get ready for launching on different platforms plus prepare some initial marketing strategies for tomorrow because the goal is to get as many visitors to the website as possible and try to convert at least some so yeah i'm going around the snow like that really nicely not the best shoes for the snow but whatever let's get some caffeine and get to work. Okay, it's already midnight. I've been coding and coding and coding the whole freaking day. And I think the landing page is finally ready. I fixed all of the bugs. And landing page actually looks pretty decent. I love the feel, the look, especially I like this interactive element on the landing page, where you can play around with the API and see it in practice and how it works. Now it's time, no, not to go to sleep, but implement payments, because I want to start accepting payments on my website. This functionality is not yet implemented. So time to set up the Stripe account, connect API keys and refine my home pricing strategy. So yeah, the night is going to be pretty fun today. Okay, it's 2 a.m. Literally falling asleep. Stripe integration is almost finished. And I guess I'll finalize it tomorrow. Plus for tomorrow, I have to finalize the landing, like polish last small pieces and also finalize the documentation. Today I prepared like really, really huge documentation for my API, but I need to go through everything, double check if everything is correct and ready for the launch. Plus for tomorrow, I'll have to DM a bunch of people to get like initial traction because I think I'll get some traffic from launching on the platform, but that definitely not going to be enough to convert people. So I'll have to DM a bunch of like SaaS founders to see if they're interested in my SaaS. So yeah, fingers crossed for tomorrow. Time to sleep and see you on the last day of the challenge. Okay, it's Monday, the launch day, and it's already 6 p.m. And honestly, I haven't made any progress so far, even though it's launch day today. Because I was focusing on my full-time job. Unfortunately, I had some tasks that were urgent and that I had to handle throughout the day. But I still have the whole evening and the whole night and also this thing in my fridge. Don't recommend drinking it, but sometimes you just have to get some energy drinks when you just have to work a lot. Sleep, normal and good sleep is important. but sometimes you have to sacrifice something if you're building a startup while working 9-5. But even though I was working the whole day, I still managed to spend a little bit of time to reply on X and I'm right now at 40 something, at 49 followers, so almost at 50 followers on X, even though I started just like four days ago. And the legend itself, Florin Pop, a really famous indie hacker with 200,000 subscribers on X also followed me on X, which is absolutely insane and motivates me to just keep posting there so yeah time to really really log in for the rest of the evening and this night to fully fully finish polish the landing page make sure payments and everything works make sure documentation for my api is super clear and also prepare good launch posts because it's not enough just to make a good landing you first have to attract some traffic to your landing page and for that you need to have really really attractive nice post that easily promotes your product. That's why I'm going to focus on that as well. And by the middle of that night, I should have everything ready to launch and start getting first traffic, first potential customers, or at least the first feedback for my product. Because even if launch is not going to go well, I still believe in my product. I still believe that it solves a really, really good problem. Like there are no good video processing APIs on the market, and I have enough of good relevant experience to build a really good product for that niche. So we are just getting started and see you soon with updates when everything is ready but i'm still coding still finishing documentation bugs and even though i'm literally falling asleep i've already prepared like the setup to record the launch video for x because it's better when you add like a video to your launch x post so yeah i now have to focus and collect my last pieces of energy to record this video nicely and then i think I'll be able to go to sleep finally. Okay it's almost 4 a.m. and I think I finally, fingers crossed, managed to finish everything. And honestly there is like crazy amount of work that I did. Like I built this whole huge documentation page which fully describes my API and what it does. I built this nice beautiful landing page. I recorded this demo usage of my API, how it can be used i installed like some analytics some some other stuff i've just set up the stripe payments i also added this nice dashboard where api users can nicely track their like usage of videos i built this like nice stripe integration with some payments uh within like actual payments proceeding with the payment page i prepared the profile on the launch platform to be ready to launch tomorrow and I even prepared this launch video with some subtitles which I'm gonna publish on X right now as my launch post and yes I also prepared my launch X post so I guess with that I can officially say that in terms of preparation the challenge is kind of completed so within this week I managed to finish the product fully and right now I'm gonna be launching it with my X post and this morning I'm gonna also launch it on the platform and we'll go from there so yeah let's make x tweet and go to sleep finally okay it's end of day eight and I think it's a perfect time to wrap up this challenge as you know yesterday I made a launch post and it got 42 views of course I didn't expect it to go viral maybe I had like a really really small hole but I didn't expect it to happen because my product is very, very niche and it's suitable only for people who build SaaS and AI automation in video industry, which is a big amount of people, but which is a pretty small niche. Also, I wasn't able to launch on the platform today because you need to schedule your launch one day before. So I scheduled it for tomorrow and it's going to be live basically tomorrow morning. But honestly, I don't expect to get much traffic or any sales from that page. And I can say that this challenge is officially lost because I didn't manage to get some sales in seven days. But for myself, I still consider it a big win because just one week ago, the only thing I had is half finished product. And now just seven days later, I have a fully finished polished product. I have a nice landing page. I have a beautiful customer portal where users can buy the subscription and view their usage. I have big, detailed, nice documentation, even though I didn't launch my other product, but I managed to also almost fully finish it. Additionally, I started posting on X, grew my X account to 55 followers, which is not huge, but I spent just one week and maybe like 30 to 60 minutes a day. Imagine what can I achieve with X if I'm going to be consistent and going to dedicate more and more time to it. And I managed to fill this whole YouTube video while also visited gym three times and visited a different country. So I think this video proves to me and you that in just seven days, you can achieve insane results if you're going to keep pushing every single day. Yes, it's going to be freaking hard. Like today, half of the day I felt kind of depressed because for the last week I was working so so so hard and I barely got any sales and any results but before I started recording this fragment I kind of reflexed on what I did throughout this week and honestly I started feeling so much better about myself and even though I didn't get the result I wanted I still got a bunch of other things that I didn't expect to get from this challenge. For example like a huge account with 200 followers followed me on x. I got a bunch of nice connections there and I have a ready-to-go product that I just have to start marketing from now on. So since I managed to do a lot of things in just seven days, imagine what can you do if you're going to be consistent for like, I don't know, a month, two months, a year. That's why from the next week, I'm going to be starting a next challenge where I'm going to be marketing my API every single day for at least two hours until I'm going to find a good marketing channel and going to start getting sales. So subscribe if you want to see how it's going to go. Check out Fulltime Founders website if you want to join my community when it's going to be ready for launch. And if you're building a SaaS and working with videos, definitely check out Video Cascade API and save yourself a bunch of time and struggles related to working with videos in your SaaS. So thanks a lot for watching. Check out this another video where I launch a startup in just 14 days and see you soon. Bye-bye.

Join the Full-Time Founders waitlist ➡️ https://www.fulltimefounders.com/
Video Processing API ➡️ https://www.videocascade.com/

In this video I tried to build and launch a startup in just 7 days while travelling the world and working full time.

Documented my SaaS launching strategies, what worked and what didn't, and tried to enjoy the process.

Timestamps:
00:00 Day 1
02:42 Day 2
04:02 Day 3
05:20 Day 4
07:23 Day 5
08:38 Day 6
10:18 Day 7
12:40 Day 8
16:36 Day 9

https://clk.ac/l/jC54GsR

Song: Markvard - Life Is a Moment
Music provided by Vlog No Copyright Music.
Video Link: https://bit.ly/3A03zO6