Thread by @agazdecki

I was a broke college student in 2010.

4 years later I was a millionaire running San Fransisco's #2 fastest-growing company with $6M in ARR.

Over 500,000+ apps were built on my platform.

Story of my first bootstrapped startup that taught me entrepreneurship: 🧵

I felt mobile apps are the best tools to build consumer loyalty for small businesses.

And what was I insanely good at?

Building mobile apps.

I knew I could print a lot of money by just shipping apps to the businesses around me.

After all, the requirements were very similar most of the time.

Everybody just wanted the same restaurant-style app.

But one person can only do so much.

There should be a way to give a mobile app to 10,000 businesses.

And so the idea was born.

"a no-code mobile app builder that allows small businesses to create and manage their own mobile apps at an affordable price"

Now every small business can have an Andrew on their team! Yikes!

I started working on it as a college project.

I had one goal

— to build the simplest mobile app development platform in the world.

Any business owner with 0 technical knowledge should be able to launch their own app within minutes.

We named it Bizness Apps, set up an office in Chico, and started making 100s of cold calls every week.

To be honest, the office was a dump.

But we were just too excited about the product that we barely cared about where we sat.

This is what it looked like.

Within a few months of building, we received investment offers from multiple angels.

I took a small sum of $100k from 2 gentlemen for the initial setup.

Shoutout to my man, Christian Friedland, for believing in me

Since the cost of building on our platform was way less than hiring a developer, we started to take off.

We targeted resellers who would pay us a fee to white-label our platform and present the product as their own.

We had cracked the code.

Our platform supported a variety of mobile devices and offered an arsenal of features.

Mobile ordering, loyalty programs, review campaigns, messaging, and whatnot.

You name it. We had it.

The volume-based discount strategy worked like a charm for us.

One Sunday afternoon, I sent out an email with a 20% discount on the reseller package.

The same day, with no sales support, we closed $70k worth of business.

We started getting a lot of press coverage, which brought us more leads.

To be honest, we were in the right place at the right time in a gigantic market.

As we scaled, the team grew bigger and the Chico office felt smaller and smaller.

We decided to move to San Fransisco.

With enhanced customer experience and reduced costs, our clients started to compete with large corporate brands,

and we started building a strong reputation in the mobile app industry.

We even got an offer to sell 70% of the company for $30M. I was pumped.

I flew out to Boston to meet with the private equity firm and had a steak dinner with them.

But as soon as I landed back in SF, the deal no longer made sense.

I knew the company was worth more. I rejected the offer.

In no time, we were a team of 70+ people, serving a rapidly expanding customer base.

We skyrocketed from $0 to $6 million in revenue by 2013 with a three-year growth rate of more than 5,000 percent.

Damn! I still think about this a lot.

Along with being a successful startup, we were also one of the most fun places to work at.

You could always hear someone laughing or playing in some corner of the office.

Halloweens were the most fun.

At the heart of San Fransisco, this young startup was setting benchmarks for incumbents.

In 2014, Inc 500 featured us as the #2 fastest-growing company in SF and #58 across the US.

We even had a 2-year streak with Inc 500 awarding us #91 in 2015 again.

There was a time when Apple made our lives really hard. This was one of the roughest times of my journey.

Apple announced a guideline change that said templatized apps are not allowed anymore.

I remember dropping an email to Tim Cook on a Saturday evening and explaining what we do and how it is helping society.

After 5 months of back-and-forth communications, we were finally able to push through.

We produced more mobile apps than any other company in the world.

To put it in perspective, 1 in every 20 apps uploaded on the App Store was developed using our platform.

We scaled the technology to serve 20m+ MAUs in 40+ countries.

From Entrepreneur to TechCrunch, Wall Street Journal to New York Times, we were in every magazine and blog you could think of.

We made a couple of blunders too but we had a strong community, and we recovered quickly.

Bizness Apps continued to win awards in the following years.

In 2015, Nicereply recognized us as the #1 Customer Success and Best Entrepreneurial Company in America.

By 2016, we were among the Top 50 SMB products and the Top 10% in Employee Happiness.

But in 2016, we had to make a huge decision.

Being a bootstrapped startup in San Francisco, it was really hard to recruit top-tier talent.

In terms of hiring, we were up against the likes of Apple, Uber, Google, and Twitter.

So we moved to San Diego.

We got a beautiful office in La Jolla and I lived in Pacific Beach.

I'd often surf in the morning before work.

The team was fantastic and the San Diego chapter still remains to be my all-time favorite.

In 2018, we got acquired by ESW Capital, a private equity fund.

We were operating in 40 countries, doing ~$10M in ARR at the time.

I was also offered a no-strings-attached $500,000 check for my next venture.

My team meant everything to me. Instead of keeping the $500k check, I gave it to my entire team.

Having spent 8 years of my life building the company, it was hard to let go.

But the deal also meant I will have more time to spend with my family and try new things.

The funniest part was I used to go to the bank, take out a $20 bill and watch the balance.

It all felt crazy.

In these 8 years, I learned the most important aspects of entrepreneurship.

You don't need to have degrees, skills, or experience.

You just have to get started.

Bizness Apps went from being a college project to a multi-million dollar exit.

All you have to do is be a little curious and a little stubborn.

Rest just falls into place.

After I sold my first company, I went on to build two more.

1. Altcoin, a decentralized exchange (DEX) that later became a champion of security in a market dominated by custodial platforms and got acquired in 2019.

2. Acquire (fka MicroAcquire), a startup sale marketplace that is currently valued at $85m and has so far facilitated $500m+ in closed deals.

To know more about how I built Bizness Apps, Altcoin and Acquire, follow me @agazdecki.

Retweet the first tweet if you found the story inspiring.

https://twitter.com/agazdecki/status/1689629704960327680