Hi Friends!😀

I am starting a weekend edition of The Day 1 Lab where I will be interviewing startup founders each week to showcase their startup journey and the lessons we can learnt.

In today’s edition, we are featuring:

Uneed.best(💵 $6.8K ARR)

Online directory to find useful websites

👨‍🚀Founder: Thomas Sanlis

🌎️Location: France

💰️Funding: Bootstrapped

💳️Monetization: Affiliate fees, Advertising

🏠️Category: Web app

1. Hi Thomas, what's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?

I've been building side projects alongside my freelance activities for three years now, and Uneed was my first "real" one 😄. I was struggling a lot to discover, compare and save somewhere all the tools I was using. I wanted a place where I could share the best of them, so I started working on Uneed and published the first version in September 2020. At the time, I didn't think I would make money with it: it was mostly for training, and for myself!

2. How did you build Uneed and get your first 1K users?

I'm a developer so I've built Uneed with the tech stack I've the most familiar with: NuxtJS and Supabase. Regarding the design, I've been through a lof of design iterations over the years! At first, Uneed was... well, it was ugly 😅. I often design directly on the browser, thanks to TailwindCSS.

I had a few customers the first two years, but nothing incredible. I wasn't really marketing. In fact, I was just adding a new tool a day!

Things really started to take off in October 2022, when I launched Uneed on Product Hunt after a complete redesign. Some people reached out to me wanting to promote their products, so I started to offer premium subscriptions allowing to put its tool in the spotlights.

3. Since launch, what strategies have worked to attract and retain partnerships and customers?

The key thing with Uneed's business model is to keep the traffic high. The more traffic I have, the more interesting it is to have your tool featured on the website. So it's my main focus: I work a lot on SEO, build in public on twitter, share the project around me, etc.

I'm currently working on more advanced analytics to share with creators: how many clicks they get per month, what their conversion rate is, etc.

4. What were the biggest challenges you faced and lessons learnt?

I neglected marketing for too long. The product is important of course, but if no one show up on your website, no matter how amazing it is, you'll not gonna earn anything. I thought for a long time that keeping the site up to date with one new tool a day would be enough to attract people, and that you just had to be patient.

But that was completely wrong!

5. What is your advice to entrepreneurs who are just starting?

I would try to focus on one or two projects maximum at once. The hardest thing is to keep believing in your ideas in the long run, when they don't pay off. We're often tempted to give up and move on to another idea!

If you want to do indie making, be careful: don't quit your job before you have some income. Moreover, it's a job that requires a lot of personal investment: you can't succeed without being passionate!

That’s all for today!

Stay tuned for next weekend’s interview with a founder who created online directory to find your AI website and tools!

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