Davis is the co-founder of OneUp, a startup making $1m in annual revenue. It's a tool for scheduling social media posts across a range of platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn and many more. Davis joined me for an interview about joining the business as a marketer, why you can compete on price and how he started a community for founders making $20k/m.
Can you tell us about the start of OneUp?
OneUp was originally started by my co-founder Vishal as a side project back in 2016, but it floundered along for the first year or two, with Vishal struggling to find paying customers (Vishal is a developer and would be the first to admit that marketing is not his strong suit).
Fast-forward to 2018, I was doing some freelance marketing, but was looking for something that I could put my full-time focus behind. I posted on Indie Hackers that I was a marketer looking for a new opportunity. I got a decent amount or replies and DMs from that post, one of which was this message from Vishal:
We did a couple of Zoom calls, and then eventually agreed to come together as 50%-50% co-founders of OneUp.
It meant basically making $0 of personal income for the early stages of OneUp, but I knew the upside potential was quite large based on the competitors in the social media scheduling space.
I also had the luxury of my wife working a full-time job, so even if things didn’t work out with OneUp, I’d still be able to eat. But within a few months of partnering up, Vishal and I were able to reach $1k MRR with OneUp, and have kept that momentum ever since.
What are the pros and cons of having a co-founder?
The biggest advantage of running a solo business is obviously that you own 100% and have full control. But I hear a lot of solo founders talk about how lonely the journey can feel.
Having a co-founder means less equity and less control, but can ultimately lead to a bigger, better, and more profitable company with the right co-founder. If you're a dev and you struggle with marketing, bringing on a marketing co-founder could be the key to success. Vishal often says that he thinks OneUp would still be at basically $0 MRR if we didn't parter up :)
How did you get your first users?
Our first handful of users came from launching on Product Hunt. Nowadays, most of our users find OneUp via SEO and content marketing.
