Mohd went from being a blacksmith working for his father to creating his own software businesses. He's made $200k from selling NoCodeAPI. Read his interview to learn how he's done it.
Hey Mohd, can you introduce yourself?
My name is Mohd Danish and I was born in 1992 in India. I have been building things for the internet since 2012. After finishing my Master degree, In 2017 started my company as a solo founder.
I built more than 16 side projects in those 7 that failed and 8 acquired. Currently, I’m running iconbuddy.com and I’m also building another B2B software talentok.com.
You used to work as a blacksmith. Can you talk about getting into tech?
This is a really interesting question. We are blacksmiths and we have had a family shop for 3 generations. So, I always helped at my father's shop to mold melted iron in farming tools, sitting in front of a fire pit. My task was to hit a 7kg hammer on things we were making and selling these things at shops. So, by doing that I got the skills to make things and I also learned how to sell things at shops. I also continued my schooling in a small village. There was no internet available in 2009, after high school no idea what to do. We were not guided where to go. I did my schooling in Hindi medium.
So, I got to know about higher studies in a city (60 km from my town). I prepared myself for an entrance exam in English and I failed. We did not have much money to get admission in private colleges. So I decided to try next year. I got admission in Central University with a Bachelor of Computer Science. I had no idea what a computer was but I took admission because in state universities fees were just nothing and we also got scholarships each year.
So, in the first year of my university I got interested in computers and especially in web designing. I was just learning HTML and CSS. So, I kept building small projects for others like movie websites, event websites, and some university projects.
In 2016, I built a project and shared it in a Slack Community. So, from there I got an internship offer from a US company. And that was $300 per month. And that was a lot of money for me at that time. After 4 months, they made me an offer of hourly work. So, they offered me $8/hour (I was making $1200 per month) and after 6 months, $18 per hour. I worked with them for almost 2 years. I finished my Master's degree in 2017 and I read a book called “Company of One”. From there I decided to go Solo to build my own company.
Why did you make NoCodeAPI?
I actively started to understand Twitter in 2017, I was actively following many people who were doing great as solo founders (indie-hacking). So, at that time everyone was building NoCode tools. And my expertise was at that time in APIs.
This was my own problem. I was facing that everytime, I had to set up a NodeJS server to write API logic and secure keys. So, from there I got the idea that you can connect with any public API with no code. I just went to NameCheap and search domain name “NoCodeAPI” and I got the .com.
