Closa
SUMMARY
Background
I quit my job to bootstrapped a product studio with a team of two.
We built Closa — a smart discord with a virtual coworking space for builders to stay consistent & focused on shipping their ideas.
The idea comes from our own problem as builders.
Goals
Bootstrap a product to 1000 users with a team of two & hit ramen profitability.
Experiments
We need to quickly validate the idea, build & launch it in 2 weeks.
Slow & stagnant growth for months, then I took major changes:
Iterated Product Positioning. The ideas evolve over time from a habit-forming community to a passion projects community for builders.
Took a major shift in our growth & monetization strategy focused on self-serve onboarding, user-generated content, & freemium model.
Results
We validated the idea in two weeks resulting in 17 paid users.
Grew organically with avg. 27% weekly growth rate for 19 weeks.
Grew organically from 31 to 1167 users in 3 months (37x).
Exceeded our all-time revenue in one single month.
BACKGROUND
I quit my job to build a lifestyle business
About two years ago, I quit my corporate job to create a lifestyle business following the bootstrapping path instead of a VC-backed model. I just wanted to build a small profitable SaaS business / Consumer App that grows sustainably & supports my simple lifestyle.
Looking back here’s what shaped my decision when I finally made a call to quit my job:
A passion for building 0 to 1 products. Previously I’ve been building many side-projects & a startup since I was in college (2017) until now. Some projects grew to thousands of users & making ramen profitable. My passion for building products has grown ever since.
Opportunity. I have enough savings to support me with 2 years of runway. I think this is the perfect time to take a leap of faith & learn as earliest possible.
Optimizing for regrets. I have the privilege to choose this path because I don’t have that much responsibility other than taking care of myself. I don’t want to wake up someday with more responsibility and regret not pursuing this path earlier.
Push factor — Due to strategic changes from my previous company, I started burning out because the latest project I worked on was not exciting compared to previous projects. None of my teammates were into it. Although we managed to ship & launch the product, It didn’t support my growth & plan in the long term.
Bootstrapping products with a team of two
I am building closa remotely with my lifelong friend Taufiq, we’ve been building projects together for the past 6 years & he’s one of the people that I have enjoyed working with for years.
My role is everything, but coding. From strategy, product, design, community, marketing, & growth.
Taufiq will take care of building the product end-to-end.
Challenge 1: Validating Ideas
Problem
Start by scratching my own itch & understanding the trade-off.
I want to work on a product that I would love to use every day. I believe the best way to start is to scratch my own itch & see whether there is a demand for it or not.
Building habits is hard
especially in the early days — first 4 weeks
App didn’t work
only helps visualize the habit, not accountability.
No extra push
When the motivation is low & things gets hard.
The idea came from our own personal problem in building habits.
Where it’s hard to stay consistent & accountable in building habits in the early days.
Over the years I’ve tried a lot of apps nothing works the way I wanted it.
Apps only help me visualize my habits, but there is no extra push when things don’t go well to help me stay accountable.
Hypothesis
if you have friends that also trying to build habits, they’ll help you be more accountable & make it easier to establish the habit, especially in the early days.
I believe you don’t need a new app for that, but instead a better way to keep each other accountable.
I believe if you want to validate the idea, you have two options:
If this is the problem you have yourself & can ship it in weeks then better to launch it quickly & iterate, rather than spending weeks finding & talking to users.
If you have a specific user in mind & want better insight you should talk to users first to have a better clarity from the problem you want to solve.
In this case, my goal is to go with option one to build it & launch it in weeks.
RISKS
No market
no demand, only a few people need it.
Marketing Problem
Hard to find where the people like me hang out.
Limited runway
need to survive & get ramen profitable quickly.
Decision
Goals
How might we help people stick to their habits in the first 4 weeks?
Timeline
I set a two-week hard deadline for us to build & launch the idea:
The first week is to build the 0.1 version of the product.
The second week is to find our early adopters & start our first cohort.
It will help us do small experiments before we decide to go all in with the idea.
SOLUTION
Help people find friends to build habits & stay accountable in the first 4 weeks on our discord with the help of an accountability bot.
The v0.1 goal is to have 1 promise that solves the user’s problem with one simple user journey then expand the use case over time. Here is our simple process:
Closa v0.1
Users pay to get access to the community & accountability group.
Join live onboarding: kick-off together & set 4 weeks goal.
Share daily progress in a group chat & keep your day’s streak.
Join weekly community milestones check & reflect together.
Celebrate at the end of 4 weeks, share your results & learnings on demo day with the community.
V0.1 Scope
The simple process above helps us to stay focused & prioritize what matters the most. Here’s what we did to ship the 0.1 version of the product:
I picked Discord as the main platform. We are familiar with the API & this allow us to ship & iterate fast. We can also leverage the discord’s network — but we might face a platform risk in the future (for now it’s fine).
Monetization with paid access. It’s a subscription model, where people pay for community access. If no one pays we just can move on & try the next experiment.
Shipped a simple bot with a streak feature in a day. Inspired by Duolingo, my goal was to help the user stay motivated with a simple bot that recorded the number of days’ streaks whenever the user submitted their progress on our discord. See:
How our early users share daily progress to stay accountable — see the image below:
How they stay motivated to share daily progress — using streak tier:
VALIDATION
Finding the first 10 paid users through warm outreach
We only have 1 week left before launch, I believe rather than selling it to strangers, it’s better to reach out to the people who already know you first to get more trust.
So, we started by doing warm outreach to friends, these are exactly what we did:
Reached out to friends through direct messages one by one.
Invite for a 15-minute research interview to find qualified people.
If the potential user has a match with the problem we immediately invite them to join our community & ask if they would love to pay.
Results
We got +17 paid users as our early adopters in a week.
12 people resubscribed at the end of 4 weeks (70.5% monthly retention) and invited a few new friends to the community,
Now we have 21 members (23% of monthly organic growth).
This was the highest signal that we had to continue working on the idea. It only takes us two weeks to ship & get people pay for our solution.
Lesson learned — On validating ideas
Pick a problem that you genuinely care about. It makes it easier to stay focused & prioritize what to build because you know what’s good.
Start with the smallest experiment before going all in.
Launch in weeks not months. Set a hard deadline, build, launch, & learn.
What to build? build 1 feature that solves 1 painful problem at a time.
Reach out to people who already give you their trust (friends/followers).
Monetize as earliest as possible, this is the highest signal you can get.
After building many ideas over the years, I write my own playbook here ↗
Challenge 2: Finding the right positioning
PROBLEM
Stagnant growth, no marketing strategy, & rely on word of mouth.
Months went by & the growth was stagnant because we relied too much on word of mouth with the hope that it would grow sustainably. Even if I did cold reach & content marketing on the side—at some point we had more people churning than growing.
INSIGHTS
Learn more about marketing & growth to find out what we did wrong.
I tried to find the most recommended resources in the industry. I started reading 7 recommended books, tons of essays, & following the people with skin in the game on Twitter to rebuild my mental model on how to approach marketing & growth.
While educating myself, I took notes & started to see some patterns in what we did wrong. Here are a few:
Unclear positioning. Still figuring out the right market that matches our product use cases. As April Dunford said in her positioning book Obviously Awesome:
From Obviously Awesome book by April Dunford
“Market confusion starts with our disconnect between understanding the product as product creators, and understanding the product as customers first perceive it.”
Hard to understand the product offers. After we conducted 5s landing page testing for our potential users, it showed that what we offer is not clear enough.
Taking too much time making sales deals. When we try to cold reach people & do sales calls, it takes more time to understand how our solution works than quickly making a deal.
Went too broad on our problem space. The scope of the problem that we tried to solve is too broad (because habits may vary for different people). Some people want to get fit, read more, build projects, sleep well, & so on. It serves no one.
The product was not sticky enough. Most users churned after the first month, but some sets of users keep coming back months over months.
No marketing strategy. We don’t have the strategy to generate traffic sustainably.
“Word of mouth” is not a strategy. Relying on people to tell their friends is the same as waiting for your business to slowly die, especially pre-product market fit.
Goals
Find our best members & understand what we did the best.
How might we increase awareness of our product positioning so our members get it & invite similar people to the community?
SOLUTIONS
Change our positioning from a habit-forming community to a passion-project community to help builders ship their passion projects faster.
When in doubt the best way is to talk to our power members to understand better how they tell their friends about our product & community.
From our users’ interview, we map out what we did best & what we will not do for our product. Then focus on the problem & the type of users that have the most painful problem. The illustration below reflects our users’ pain points:
The positioning exercise starts by understanding who uses & loves our product the most. So, we can understand what makes us different before selling our product to strangers.
I don’t think the habit-forming community for our case is going to work if we don’t make a change by focusing on specific use cases. So, I tried to step back to understand what people actually want, what we enjoy working with the most, & who we want to serve at closa.
Key insights from User interview & Positioning Exercise
The main benefits our best users received were making new friends, accountability, & feeling inspired to ship their passion projects
Most passion projects don’t get done, because it’s hard to stay consistent & keep the motivation up for the long term.
Our power users struggling with how to explain closa in simple words.
Based on our user interview we plan to shift from a habit-forming community to a passion project community.
Our focus now is serving builders/creators who build things for the internet & want to stay consistent to work on their ideas & ship faster.
ACTION PLAN
Align our positioning message, community programs, & roadmap to help builders stay accountable & ship passion projects faster.
This positioning exercise helps us understand what to build, who our best-fit customers are, and what to prioritize in our product in the future. So, these are our next action plan to reflect our new positioning strategy:
Redesigned & launched our new landing page that reflects our new positioning.
Make the community invite-only to find & focus on high-intention leads.
Built, prioritized, & doubled down on features that help builders stay accountable. Like progress tracker, accountability group, streaks, & more. See some below:
We hosted a live community event to share new closa updates & direction.
To generate traffic & demand for our community, I continuously create content on Instagram, build in public on Twitter, maintain our changelog page, & share updates via our newsletter post with our new positioning & direction.
Results
We grew slowly & maintained 40+ paid users after months — the outcomes are still below our expectations.
But more similar people started to be formed— (more builders, designers, & creators) onboarded to our community.
Lesson learned
On positioning strategy:
Scratching your own itch might solve your problem & easy to execute in the beginning, but it only works if you know the market you’re in.
At first, I can easily find 17 paid users in a week but it’s hard to grow from there if you don’t have the right marketing & growth strategy.
Understand the distribution channel & the market you're in before validating your idea will save tons of time from the mistakes we made.
Target as narrowly as you can to meet your near-term sales objectives. You can broaden the targets later.
Great positioning resonates with your best-fit customers right now and will evolve with them over time.
Challenge 3: Growing to first 1000 users
PROBLEM
Stuck with growth, we need major strategic changes to run closa.
After months of slow growth, shipping set of features, and burning our runway — we still haven’t reached ramen profitability yet.
I tried to reflect on how we operate closa from end to end & see what could be improved to make it sustainably grow. I came up with these hypotheses:
Paid community & free trial model didn’t help us grow sustainably. We have no audience. Going for a free trial & paid access to the community made us lose the acquisition advantage & network effect from our free users. Once our free user loses access, it’s harder to resurrect in the future.
Slow activation: I onboarded every user with a 30-min 1:1 call for user research. I believe the strategy for consumers should be self-serve onboarding to boost our growth sustainably. After onboarding 100+ people, I had seen enough patterns on what problem we should focus on, so I wanted to stop the 1:1 onboarding call.
Sharing the daily progress in async didn’t help much to make people stick around. Before sharing your progress you should make time for your projects. I believe the best way to help users make progress is to combine async & sync experience daily.
Acquisition problem: creating content for multiple channels & cold reach. With only me as the person who take care of our marketing efforts, these were not sustainable. Why? It requires different efforts & skill sets to build a product, run a community, create content, do cold reach & sales calls. I did everything & got burned out. I want to prioritize what matters the most to get better outcomes.
Building and growing your audience in multiple channels is hard. For months I tried to do content marketing on various channels but stuck with hundreds of followers for both our personal accounts & closa accounts. It didn’t work out for us & there must be better ways to grow our users, the way that we enjoy doing it.
Goals
Finding the right growth model & marketing channel.
How might we generate traffic sustainably to grow the community & get people onboarded & stick around in the first 7 days?
20% of our users converted in the first 7 days.
We only have 3 months of runway left from April. I believe there must be major strategic changes on how to build, grow, & operate closa to help us grow & make our users stick around—so we can generate sustainable revenue & hit ramen profitability.
SOLUTIONS
Design the growth loop of our product to generate organic traffic sustainably
I learned a concept called “growth loop” where the strategy to grow the product is to make the marketing & product strategy as interlinked parts. Where the input of your existing user generates an output that brings new users to your product.
How our growth model helps builders stay consistent & ship faster
The new closa growth strategy & monetization model, in short:
Free access to the community instead of free trial or paid access.
Bet on one channel Twitter / X, instead of multiple channels.
Self-serve onboarding instead of 1:1 in-depth 30 min onboarding call.
6-week accountability challenge & weekly community sharing session to inspire each other to stay accountable & ship faster.
Daily coworking sessions with a gamified time tracker & productivity report to help you make time (sync) & share daily progress (async).
Focus on user-generated content to increase awareness in the first 7 days. Streak, achievement badges, productivity reports, & habit trackers.
Share your achievement badge on twitter to claim points reward.
Freemium. Upgrade for unlimited coworking sessions & pro features.
EXPECTED OUTCOMES
How the new growth strategy potentially helps us boost our growth.
Every users get free access to our community.
↓
Then make progress in the first week with daily virtual coworking sessions.
↓
Earned the first 7 days’ achievement badge.
↓
Share the badge on twitter to claim points rewards for useful community perks.
↓
New users join.
↺
If the strategy above works—it could bring awareness to closa & make members invite more people to join the community. This potentially boosts our growth & revenue.
Sharing the teaser of our core features first before we start building
Our goal is to see the demand & find potential users before relaunch. I scoped down & designed all the core features in 2 weeks then shared the teaser on twitter.
Results
With over 500+ interactions on the post we got 60+ new members.
Out of 60+ qualified people, 40+ joined the community.
We grew from 30+ to 100+ builders (3x) by sharing our work in progress on twitter for 3 weeks.
DESIGN > BUILD > SHIP
After done with the strategy above, my framework to execute it is super simple:
Design what our users might want → ship it in 1 up to 2 weeks → share it on twitter & discord → get feedback → iterate → repeat ↩
We shipped our new core features to help builders stay consistent & ship faster that help us grow to 1000+ users
Daily recap
Get daily coworking & time recap
Habit Tracker
A fun way to show your consistency & streak tier
Advance Report
Get insights from advanced productivity reports
Time tracker
Live time tracker to keep track of your daily goal
Achievement badges
Collect badges & stay motivated to build productive habit
Daily Coworking
Unlimited daily coworking session for pro members
Making major changes to existing products & the way we operate closa all at once would probably take me months to ship everything. The best way is to batch our work & commit to ship our features every one or two weeks & iterate along the way.
Features Breakdown
Here are the prioritization breakdown & the results of our new strategy:
Core features: Daily coworking & insightful time recap 👩💻👨💻
Problem — Sharing your progress in a group chat is not helping enough to make you stay motivated to make time for your projects.
Solution — I believe combining both async & sync experiences will help people make time to work on their passion projects daily.
Expected outcomes — Users sharing their time recap on socials as a mark of today’s productivity working alongside with other builders. This would generate traffic organically & potentially bring new users to our community.
Results
People start sharing their closa daily time recap & projects on twitter.
We grew 39,75% week over week on average in the next four weeks with our new growth model & core features (daily coworking & time recap).
At this point our members are 200+ & activation rate is around 30% (considered as a good activation rate).
Then these UGC features helped us accelerate our growth by 310% in a month — Achievement badges & habit tracker 2.0🎖️
Every time users hit a certain milestone in their productivity they will get an achievement badge & claim rewards by sharing these badges on twitter. This is the best way to generate hype about closa on twitter as our main distribution channel.
On the other hand, with our new habit tracker design we want to help users stay motivated reaching their first 7-day milestone to get their first achievement badge.
These are the two best UGC features that we shipped so far that help us bring more awareness & boost our growth. You can scroll down on our twitter likes tab if you want to see the results yourself → here
see more
We validated our initial hypothesis that the achievements badge & our new habit tracker help users stay motivated, bring more awareness, & boost our growth.
Results
My initial hypothesis on the new strategy has been proven to be working.
We grew our user base from 284 to 1067 (+310%) a month after launching the achievements badge & new habit tracker features.
Pro features & new monetization model : Paid to Freemium Model 💳 💵
After the core features & UGC features has shipped, we started working on our pro features to support our freemium model.
Our goal for the freemium model is to offer our free users enough value from free usage & give an overview of our pro features before deciding to upgrade.
Compared to paid for access model—freemium model gives users:
a free access to the community,
a flexible time to immersed to build the habit with of the product first,
and not be constrained by 7, 14, 30 days time limit.
Here are some of our pro features we shipped & the membership plan comparison:
PRO
Advance report
With advance reports users can see more detailed info on how they spend their time & evaluate their productivity week over week. This will give them more insights into how they spent their time compared to our basic feature with only a daily time recap↑.
PRO
GLOWING STREAK TIER
PRO
Features & USAGE COMPARISON
Then we shipped our new landing page to reflect the major update ✨
With every major feature shipped, we need to renew our landing page as our marketing asset to reflect the new update of closa product & community.
We earn a lot of word of mouth over twitter that builds up our wall of love—this helps us show more trust & proof of our product is helpful — see our wall of love page ↗.
If you want to see how our landing page evolves over time you can see it here
v1 (paid model) · v2 (free trial) · v2.5 (free trial) · v3 (freemium).
Overall results from our major strategic changes — April to August
Overall Results · Apr - Aug
Growth
Grew from 31 to 1167 users in 3 months (37x) from W4 April to W2 July.
Grew our twitter from 100+ followers to 1000+ (10x) W4 April to W4 July.
27% avg. weekly growth rate for the past 19 weeks. (W4 April to W4 Aug).
3% paid users from 1500+ members in August.
Exceeded all-time revenue in a single month with an early supporter campaign.
Product Deliverables
Shipped 8 major features, 97 bug fixes & improvements.
12 lectures & resources to help builders ship from 0 → 1
Community
600+ passion projects, 50+ launches, and thousands of coworking hours.
Now our users are made up of 40% devs, 30% designers, 30% other roles. (discovered niche to focus on).
still haven’t reach ramen profitable yet, due to low activation rate.
That's all my thought process & the results that's help us grow closa to 1000+ users.
I consider our new major strategic changes to be working. Our growth rate is doing exceptionally well with avg. 27% WoW for 19 weeks. But sadly, when it started taking off—we didn’t have any runway left & still haven’t reached ramen profitability yet. If we continue working on closa full-time, we still need to work on our activation rate to make it work. We could experiment with our onboarding to improve the activation rate, but we don’t want to take more risks to continue working on it with our current recurring revenue. It will harm my co-founder’s life as he needs to take care of his new little family.
Some people reaching out to help us & offer funding—but since the beginning, we both agree to not pursue that path. I think it’s proof that we still need to learn more to build a bootstrapping business after building 2 major products in the past 2 years. I also appreciate a lot for people who offer their help & reach out to us.
Top lesson learned & key takeaways
Top 10 lessons learned on bootstrapping my product
Key takeaways & lesson learned:
Pick an established or growing market & work on your positioning. If your number one goal is to survive as quickly as possible. Start with a market with a validated demand & add your own differentiation.
Too late to take a major pivot. My mistake is trying to scratch my own itch without knowing what market I am trying to play in. I should stop or act faster once we know that our growth is stagnant.
Don’t be falling in love with your idea. Don’t focus on one solution & stick to it for too long. We stuck to one idea for too long & realized we needed major changes when we had little runway left.
Know when to pivot. Pick a minimum bar for whether you should work or move to your next experiments, these are the signals I am looking for:
Look for 10x improvements, not 10%. Framing the problem this way will help you approach it in a completely different way with a chance for exponential results. In the early days, you have time & more shots to make mistakes. Focus on the big picture first, then double down.
Focus on finding one distribution channel that works. My mistake was trying multiple channels all at once when I just starting out & which led me to burn out. If you’re a small team with no audience, don’t spread your effort too thin. Experiments with one channel at a time. If no significant results in 6 weeks after consistent effort, then move on.
Design your product & marketing strategy as a system of loop. For consumer products, this growth model will help you reduce acquisition costs & grow your user base faster. (1, 2, 3).
Invest in onboarding. If your new users don’t get how your product works from the landing page to your core value, none of your product efforts or initiatives matter.
Go freemium. For consumer products with network effects, if the operational costs are cheap—I believe going freemium as your acquisition strategy will help you boost your growth more easily & find your best-fit customer faster. (1, 2, 3, 4).
Iterate quickly. If there is only one key takeaways you have to apply I would tell you to launch fast, learn, & iterate quickly. Remember your number one goal before success is to survive.
What’s next for closa?
Currently, we put closa in maintenance mode with a casual community agenda while looking for our next venture. I think at this moment, closa in a low-demand market with a problem that is not the high urgent thing for people to solve with money—or we just still haven't found a good niche to focus on.
But if I still have the runway to experiments, these are what I would do next:
Work on our onboarding experience to increase our activation rate.
We can reach out to our new high-intent registered users why they haven’t onboard yet & try to reactivate our existing users.
Iterate our onboarding experience until no significant improvements are needed.
Ship standalone bot
Scope down our closa custom discord bot to the very core features as a powerful time tracker with advanced productivity reports.
Make our bot available to any communities who hosted coworking sessions on discord — we called it timerstag (waitlist open).
Our standalone bot would potentially unlock new revenue streams & distribution for the product.
Change the target market
Create a dedicated discord server for final-year students/academics.
I believe It helps them find friends, boost their productivity, & stay consistent to make progress to finish their thesis/paper.
I believe this is a painkiller instead of a vitamin type of product.
They’ve got a deadline that needed to finish the paper/thesis otherwise you’ll pay for another semester if you didn’t finish it on time.
Easier to market & we can start small experiments on our campus.
With a team of two, I believe it’s enough to support both of us.
After they finished with thesis they might still need closa to help them stay focus for job prep & prepare their portfolio.
If none of our plans above work, we might shut it down & move on.
Final thoughts
I hope you learned something from my bootstrapping journey. Everything that helps us grow to this day is nothing without the help of our community in the early days. I am forever grateful for having the privilege to pursue this path. Even if I didn’t make it for now, I am sure I would do it again in the future.
2 years after I quit my first full-time corporate job and then tried bootstrapping my business in my mid-20s taught me a lot of things. My long-term goal is to invest my time in learning again & honing my skills to be able to build & sell my own stuff. I’ve learned a lot about design, product, community, growth & marketing in the past 6 years. I want to go back to code. I'm planning to spend my free time in the next few years picking up these skills—or I might just take a break for a while enjoying life doing passion projects outside tech.
My plan for now is to go back to 9 - 5 job as a product manager who cares about design & growth (especially in consumer / SaaS but open for different types of industry). If you’re looking for a PM feel free to contact me :)
That's all—thank you for reading my story.
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