So, I just turned 23 today, and I am planning to do a fun #buildinpublic experiment this coming year.

🎯 Goal: Build 2 Profitable Indie Projects with 1000$ in MRR in 365 Days.

✅  No Audience – I have less than 400 Followers on Twitter, and I’ll be only using Twitter for this challenge because I have a private account on Instagram and I don’t want to annoy my friends that just don’t care about it. I have 7,000+ followers on Linkedin, but who uses Linkedin these days 🙂
✅  Bootstrapped – the projects that I am building are not suitable for funding. They are not scalable beyond a point and are solving a problem of a very small niche. So all the operations will be bootstrapped for now. RIP to my Credit Card and all the Valorant Skins that I wanted to buy.
✅  2h/day + Weekends – I am currently working as a Product Manager at a Tech Startup in Chandigarh, India. So I won’t be able to devote my full time to these projects. I love my day job, and these are the projects which optimise my learning, so I’ll be majorly working on them after work and mostly on weekends.

Here are some details of – what the projects are, current progress and more.

With weekly updates on this blog, I’ll share my progress on –
✅  All the relevant numbers (revenue made, money spent, tools used etc)
✅  All the Lessons learned in Product Design, Marketing (Paid and Organic, ASO) and more.

Project One

Plencils – Build India’s Eco-Friendly Stationery Store. So basically it will be a D2C e-commerce brand that sells Plantable Pens and Pencils, made out of recycled newspape rs.(will be shipping orders to PAN India for now)

Why do it care about it? – India alone consumes more than a Billion Pencils every year, and nearly 4,00,000 trees are cut to meet this demand. Doesn’t it seem unnecessary that we still need wooden pencils when there are other alternatives out there that use far fewer resources? Thus Plencils.

Current Progress – I have been working on this project’s phase 1 for a couple of months now.
✅ Website is almost ready.
✅ Inventory Procured for the first lot.
✅  Have shipped the product to 20+ customers (mainly friends and family, DM me to get a discount code)

What’s Ahead? – In the next couple of weeks, I’ll be building the sales funnel from scratch, all the marketing campaigns (Google, Facebook and Instagram). Also looking to onboard some businesses that want to go green with their office supplies.

Project Two

Add Letter App – Build a Newsletter Discovery and Reading App. The idea is to build an app to easily read all your subscribed newsletters in one place and discover new newsletters based on your interest.

Why do I care about it? – I have been a newsletter junkie for a long time. But I soon realised that 95% of newsletters are never read. It’s tough keeping up with all the newsletters you’re signed up for, and it can be hard to find the ones worth reading. Thus Add Letter.

Current Progress – So far,
✅ I have Completed the App’s Design
✅ I have Kicked off Early Access Waitlist on the Landing Page (made on WordPress and Viral Loops)
✅  I am collaborating with Devashish and Dakhsraj Sharma for its development.

What’s Ahead? – In the next couple of weeks, we’ll onboard early adopters on the app and start the beta testing.
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