Running A Portfolio Of Micro-Saas

Hello! Can you introduce yourself and tell us about your business?

Hello everyone, I'm Domenico and I'm from Italy!

I'm a full-time analyst for an international gaming company, and I'm currently specializing in finance and risk management at La Sapienza, Rome. I'm 27 years old, and I've always dreamt of building my startup.

I co-built and co-sold 6 micro-saas during 2022 and 2023 (my portfolio: https://iworkedon.com/@dg), and currently, I'm running a new business named SecondSoul (https://secondsoul.io/).

I read interesting trends about AI clones during the last few months, so we decided to put efforts and resources into this business. SecondSoul allows you to monetize your community with your AI Clone.

In a poor words, SecondSoul is a chatbot platform that allows you to generate your AI version and offer 24/7 conversations to your fans.

How did you start this business? Take us through the process.

Since I'm an analyst in my full-time job, I'm always a data-driven person. Then I try to start something only when I have good numbers on the basis.

The idea behind is not related to a problem I had, or something similar. It's all related to an analytical study about a new trend: AI girls and boys.

Do you remember the AI Avatars at the end of 2022? The data says that we're at a good point for seeing something similar here, but with long-term effects. So I studied the market, identified a niche, and joined the resources with a tech guy, a friend of mine.

I'm always for "validate it before building it". So how did we validate the idea? Pretty simple: we set up a simple landing page using the service yep.so, and promoted the page using our communities like Twitter, Reddit, and Medium.

I think this is the best way for the validation stage because you can spend 0$ on it, without spending hours and money on a product that nobody is going to use.

After the validation (we collected 300+ emails between the yep.so page and our website), we started to implement the first beta version (we're currently in this stage).

Our idea is to test the beta page with 10-15% of users that left the email, hear the feedback, improve the product, test again, and so on, until we have a good product, enough for the official launch.

As you can read here, I love validating something as quickly as possible. Only after that stage, we can put efforts into the prod dev, and assume we're going to use the next 2-3 months for the final product.

How did you get your first initial customers?

As said in the above section, we got the first 100 early adopters by simply promoting the landing page using our social networks. You can do that without products or 1 line of code. That's the craziest thing today.

You can validate something with 0$ and almost 0 time spent on it. I would suggest validating any idea you have in this way because you can maximize the return and you can manage a better trade-off between risk and return.

I validated my businesses following this process every time, and it worked pretty well so far. The point to stay focused is related to the number of emails that can prove that your idea is a good idea.

It depends on the type of business you're validating, but based on my experience, a good conversion rate between views and emails is between 15% and 20%. More than 20% is so good, while less than 15% I'd try to understand by writing to single users what do they think about the idea, and what you can do to solve their pain points.

Since launch, what are your marketing strategies or channels to get new customers?

I'm always betting on organic growth rather than paid adv (at least for the early stage of a startup).

For example, for my last product , we only spent 500 dollars on Tiktok which brought us 12k+ users in 3 months (mid-long term effects)

Then I would suggest, for the first stage, promoting the tool according to your target on organic and free channels, like subreddits (you can find a lot of communities there); your Twitter account (I would suggest using the hashtag #buildinpublic); medium blog (if you've it); Facebook groups (this is not for all the ideas, but it could be a good fit if you find something related to your product).

How does your business make money?

We're developing a simple business model for secondsoul.io: free registration for creators and final users, and we charge a commission fee (we have not set yet the %) from the creators' subscribers (monthly or annually).

I'm a fan of the freemium model by the way, or I think that giving 7 days of free trial and then a premium plan is one of the best business models because it allows you to "cut off" users that will not use your product at the end.

I don't like free + premium models because you risk having costs for free users which will be not the best solution.

Well, we're in the early stage of our business right now, so we don't have yet an MRR point here.

Where can we go to lean more about you and your business?

You can follow my journey here: https://twitter.com/DG96

My blog with more insights: https://medium.com/@gagliardidomenico