🎉 Hey Failories! It's Nico here.

This week I bring an interview with the founder of Headlime, an AI-writing SaaS. Below that, three curated resources for startup founders.

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content 📚

💰 Building & selling a SaaS for +$1M in 8 months. This is one of the greatest bootstrapping stories of the last few years and one that I had the luck to follow closely through Twitter.

Danny Postma is a Conversion Rate Expert from The Netherlands. In early-2020, he became a digital nomad, which led him to meet some SaaS founders. Talking with them, he realized that if he could learn to code, he could stop working as a freelance and build his startup.

That's when he decided to embark on an 8-month full-time journey to learn to code. Once he had mastered the skill, he started brainstorming software ideas to work in, when he came up with the plan of turning a book he had previously created, called Headline Formulas, into a tool.

The first version of this tool, called Headlime, was launched a few months later and allowed users to fill some variables and get +200 headlines they could use in their marketing content. The launch was a complete success. Headlime's lifetime deal made over $60k in sales.

But talking with customers, Danny realized he could grow the scope of the product to solve more of their challenges when creating copy for their businesses. Therefore, he decided to pivot and turn Headlime into an AI-powered copy generator.

He spent 5 months building Headlime v2 publicly on Twitter and launched it in December 2020 to his hyped audience. It was an instant success. MRR went from $1k in December to $20k in February. Headlime was featured on Techcrunch. Most of Danny's tweets would go viral.

But, soon, lots of VC-backed SaaS started to emerge in Headlime's market. Danny wasn't interested in following that same path, which meant he faced the massive risk of being overtaken by competitors.

That's when he got contacted by Jarvis.ai, a competitor company interested in acquiring Headlime, and he decided to take their 7-figure offer. Check out our interview with Danny to learn more about how he built, grew and sold Headlime for +$1M in less than a year.​

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what I'm reading 👀

​Copywriting Examples. Harry Dry, founder of Marketing Examples, launched this week a swipe file of +330 great copywriting examples, along with concise analyses on what they did well.

​How We Created the Biggest Slack Community in Our Niche. Imagine owning a Slack community formed by all of your target customers, to whom you can promote your product. That's what Intermix achieved. This articles goes over the specific strategies they used to grow the community.

​Airtable: The $7.7B Roblox of the Enterprise. At more than $100M ARR, Sacra estimates Airtable to have a valuation at $7.7B, one of the highest in the B2B SaaS market. In this article, the author analyzes Airtable's business model and its GTM strategy.

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I hope you enjoyed this week's newsletter with its different format!

Cheers,

Nico

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