Smash Notes
How AJ's boredom turned Carrd into a Profitable Business
AJ is the founder of Carrd, a SaaS platform for building simple and fully responsive one-page websites. The Show Notes Carrd HTML5 UP Pixelarity Product Hunt Carrd: The Making Of AJ on Twitter Omer on Twitter Enjoyed this episode? Subscribe to the podcast Leave a rating and review Follow Omer on Twitter Need help with your SaaS? 1. Join SaaS Club Plus …
Notes
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On The SaaS Podcast, host Omer Khan says Carrd founder AJ is anonymous on purpose. Khan never gives a last name, because nobody knows it, and nobody knows what AJ looks like. AJ built Carrd, a one-page site builder people use for profiles, portfolios, and selling products, and was still running Carrd essentially alone. A longtime business partner had only recently started helping with moderation, because AJ had no time left. Khan introduces Carrd at about $30,000 in monthly recurring revenue and already profitable.
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AJ, founder of the one-page site builder Carrd, tells Omer Khan on The SaaS Podcast that monthly recurring revenue had hovered between about $25,000 and $30,000 for the previous few months and was climbing steadily. Expenses were low. AJ says Carrd had been profitable since the first day. At the time of the interview he was still a one-person company, with a longtime partner only recently taking on moderation so AJ was not doing every job himself.
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AJ learned computer science in school, but mostly everything that he wanted to know for his job, he learned doing it.
His advice for anyone who wants to learn something new is to actually do it. You don't have to go to school anymore.
You don't even have to get really good at whatever it is, just good enough to let you do the job at hand.
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There was no plan. He put out a few free templates and let people download them for free.
Once that site got a lot of traction, he started to put a lot more effort into the site, and the feedback loop started.
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Enough people started asking AJ to drop Creative Commons license on his HTML5 templates where it made sense to actually sell his templates for money, giving customers access to support and some exclusive templates.
It was a great deal for customers, and the project really took off.
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AJ created ~70% of all the templates by himself, and then he also hired a designer and a few coders to help.
It worked really well, but he did make sure to set the standards and validate/verify what his helpers were producing.
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While AJ was somewhat bored of making individual HTML5 templates, he also started to create one-page fillers, just something to put up on the site for new content. Little did he know, those one page templates were actually really popular.
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AJ wanted to challenge himself and try out his own ideas. It was an entirely new approach, so it didn't matter what the competition was doing.