My Journey from $0 → $500k in last 5 years
Today I’m flying from Hyderabad to Delhi via Air India flight and on check-in my seat upgraded to business class.

So enjoying more legs space and writing my 10 year journey in building, selling, and acquiring businesses.

In 2014, studying master in computer application and learning how to build web apps using javascript.

In 2016, I built github search project using JavaScript and My work got spotted by a company founder from US and wants to give me paid internship for $500 per month and I accepted that.

They were happy with my work and offered me as contractor work at $10 per hour, after 6 months $18 per hour. I was giving 40 hours a week and making ~$3k per month.

In 2018, I quit all the contract work and decide to work on my own ideas.

I built simple directory app where you can find more than 600 public apis for your side projects.

Launched on ProductHunt, after couple of hours i see that it’s #1 of the day and got really good response, Founder of producthunt love the idea.

I had no idea how to make money with this, So I keep this on side to run and start working on next 6 ideas and all of them failed.

After 6 months directory website was getting more more than 100k pageviews and 40% traffic from google searches.

Good things happened to me and one big API company approached to acquire this api directory website for $20k and I sold that for $22k.

Chunk of money direct into my bank account. What I do now, I decided to travel my first international trip to Singapore to meet my friend Fajar and he hosted me at his place for 1 month.

In Singapore I started my first saas idea called nocodeapi.com

I built this in 20 days and launch on PH and on my twitter. And boom this got featured on ph #1 and people love the idea.

After 2 weeks launch got my first monthly subscription for $5 per month and you can’t believe I was sooo happy.

Now my focus was talk to users those are signup and using. To understand their requirements and their experience.

In 4 months, Working hard I reached $300 MRR and that’s a good milestone but i wants to push this into market.

So I launch lifetime subscription plan for $99, $149, $199.

Boom in 7 days made $45k with lifetime subscription. After 30 days, I stop the lifetime subscription and full focus on recurring revenue. I also double the plan pricing.

In 2 years, $4.5k MRR and made more than $120k revenue from NoCodeAPI.

While working on NoCodeAPI, I was also building small ideas to solve my own problems and sold 3 ideas for $60k+ while working on NoCodeAPI.

In 2021, built my own house from scratch, Got married, Our first daughter born in October, 2022.

Life got more responsibilities and feelings little work load to manage 30k users if nocodeapi.

So I decided to sell business and got the price in mind 5x ARR. I listed on acquire.com for $200k and sold the business for $180k in one month.

At this point I made total more than $450k with all my projects.

Biggest mistake of my life that I sold a running business and invested all the money in assets that can’t use for next 5 to 10 years.

In 2023, I launch a service called mvp as a service. Get your mvp idea done in 15 days for $10k and I made $30k by building 3 MVPs in 2 months.

After that, I acquired a project iconbuddy.app for $4k. No revenue and no traffic. I rebuilt the website in 3 days launched on PH and again featured #1.

My plan to make $1k MRR means 4 slots to list ads on the website. Next, I added restrictions on icon search that can only be use by lifetime subscribers.

Yes, it’s worked. Now Iconbuddy is making average $3k revenue each month.

In 2024, I also launched a service called dev as a service for $3999 per month for unlimited web dev and automation tasks.

Currently, I'm making total $8000 per month from Iconbuddy + Dev As A Service + Other tiny websites.

This is all my life jounry to make $500k in last 5 years with my own projects.