Rox sold a YouTube A/B testing tool for 6 figures as a bootstrapped founder. Now he's building a video podcast platform. I talked to him about building and selling a project for six figures, the advantages of video podcasting and hiring developers for the first time.
Can you tell us a bit about yourself?
I’m Rox, and I build tools for creators. I’m best known for previously working for MrBeast, and for building and selling ThumbnailTest.com. Now, I’m building Flightcast.com - a video-first podcast hosting platform with a heavy focus on YouTube.
My background is pretty standard - CS degree at a random college, interned at a couple FAANG companies, tried and failed at restaurant tech startups for a few years. Then, during COVID, I was unproductive, so I started live-streaming myself programming. I ended up building all my tools live on stream, and got into the content creation world.
That made me want to build tools for creators, and the rest is history 😄
Can you talk about building Thumbnail Test?
The idea for Thumbnail Test came from my girlfriend, Aprilynne! She was subscribed to TubeBuddy, which offered A/B testing for YouTube thumbnails, but only as part of a bundle of other tools. She said many people in her cohort were only using the A/B tester, but paying $50/month for the full suite.
I said “I could build just the A/B tester in a month and charge $20/mo for it!”. So I did. I built it using the T3 stack (TypeScript, Tailwind, tRPC), Nextjs, and Mongo. I built it solo for the first 6 months, then brought on a contractor friend to help when the MrBeast job came around.
How did you grow Thumbnail Test?
First, I reached out to all my streamer friends who also had YouTube channels to try it out. Then, mostly twitter. I just kept tweeting about every feature I added. I also started DMing anyone with a lot of subscribers on YouTube but few followers on Twitter (it worked alright)
But the big winner was affiliates. In creator tools, affiliates are always the most successful marketing strategy - in particular for me it was mostly consultants and managers in the early days. In the long term though, a handful of creator affiliates probably brought me 50% of my MRR.
Random question - what’s the best thing you’ve bought for $20?
$30, but I got a lifetime subscription to freedom.to. It blocks my social media for about 85% of the day. When my social media is unblocked I’m a zombie. Freedom isn’t perfect but it’s better than most of what’s out there.
