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.
What tips do you have for making your first SaaS?
I know this is counter to the “raise your price” maxim that you hear in the bootstrapper space, but competing on price is actually a huge competitive advantage, especially if you are in a competitive space with incumbents that have more features than you.
Starting as the most affordable solution makes it easier to get a foothold. You can always raise prices as your SaaS gets closer to feature parity with your competitors.
Why did you create SaaS Friends and how’s that going?
SaaS Friends is a private community for SaaS founders that are over $20k MRR.
It kind of started accidentally after tweeting this:
After a couple of hours, we had a group DM with 40+ SaaS founders, which was chaos. I decided to move it to Circle where it became an actually community with it’s own domain (www.SaaSFriends.com), and it’s now up to ~400 SaaS founders that are over $20k MRR. We even had an in-person SaaS Friends retreat last year at a giant Airbnb.
What are the pros and cons of having a co-founder vs being a solo 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 :)
Thanks for the interview!
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