How I bootstrapped Mylance to $30k in revenue — Part 1

Mylance is about 9 months into its lifespan. From “I want to start a company that helps freelancers” to where we are today, with ~$30k in revenue to date, cash flow positive (although not paying ourselves yet), are growing 70% MoM in revenue, and our customer NPS for July 2020 was a perfect +100.

I’m often asked how I got this off the ground without any investment, and without building a product. You can debate what “a product” is, but we didn’t code anything and for a while, didn’t use any platform besides Slack, email, and Google docs.

There have been countless articles about how to start a company by user testing, validating hypotheses, and building manual processes to service your customers to validate a willingness to pay. This is a story of executing those principles to start a company from scratch and generating revenue without an investment.

Part 1 of this series includes:

1. Using my own experiences to find a niche
2. User interviews
3. Testing with our first customers

Using my own experiences to find a niche

After 4.5 years at Uber across Rides, EATS, and Freight, I started to freelance for start-ups. I helped them launch marketplaces, scale their businesses, and automate manual processes. I loved this life — I made great money averaging ~$20,000 / month, worked part-time 25–30 hours per week, and worked on fulfilling projects by adding real value to impact these start-ups.

However, I had challenges as a freelancer. I had an LLC to maintain, including keeping my own books, paying estimated taxes, invoicing clients, finding my own healthcare, etc. I also experienced a ton of unknowns about my freelance business. What rate should I charge? Should I charge hourly or monthly? What’s important when writing up a contract with a new client? How do I consistently find new clients? As I navigated this through the months, I learned a ton. I learned the answers to all of these questions, and only got better and better at navigating this freelance life.

I started to help friends with their freelance businesses, and I learned I could add significant value to them. I was also incredibly frustrated at the lack of a bookkeeping service for freelancers. Everything in the market was $200+ per month, and it wasn’t intended for freelancers.

User interviews

In doing some secondary research online, I saw this freelance market in the US was enormous. 57 million freelancers earned over $1 Trillion in gross revenue in 2019. However, those numbers included all freelancers, from an Uber driver to a journalist. I needed to learn about my target market, their biggest challenges, and how significant that challenge was.

So, I talked to friends, networked within the freelance community, and spoke to a few dozen folks. I asked them unbiased questions: their biggest challenges, what they were doing to solve those challenges today, and how effective those solutions were. After aggregating the interview data, I learned they all struggled with accounting and bookkeeping, but it wasn’t clear how big of a problem it was. I decided it was big enough.

Testing with our first customers

So I built a bookkeeping offering. And by “built,” I mean I found a CPA / bookkeeper to service customers, threw up a landing page through Wordpress, and started asking freelancers if they needed help with their books. Most already had already found ways manage their books. I did find one customer, a friend, and started to serve his bookkeeping needs. What was great about this was he gave us incredible feedback about what he needed as a freelancer, and so we refined our offering. But, customers weren’t streaming in. Our value wasn’t strong enough for the customer we were targeting.

What was happening though, was people kept asking me about their freelance businesses. How did I get such high rates. Where I found clients. One conversation it finally occurred to me that I could get paid to help. So I said, “I’m happy to walk you through how to get your freelance business off the ground for a cut of your revenue.” And she was ecstatic.

I worked with her over the next few weeks, building out “modules” in Google docs for her to read and exercises for her to complete. As I had more conversations, I started to tell people I had a “course” for freelancers to launch their businesses. I’d get back “Oh you do? How much is it?” Now I needed a price. And I needed to finish the course. I tested a few prices. I built the course as I went. What was the right price? I settled on $299 up front and 7.5% of their revenue for 6 months. I found 6 customers to agree to this!

Then, nobody finished the course. Engagement was low, and people were dropping off. We’ll explore in Part 2 what I did next!