We created Dripl because we wanted to find out if we could build a small, independent, profitable internet business together and quit our jobs.
If you want to do the same, you are in the right place. This is a live, honest and transparent account of our journey. It covers massive f**k ups as much as small victories. It’s not meant to inspire you or any such BS because: Hey! It might all come to nothing!
Why?
Between us, we have spent ~20y at startups. Most of them failed. We think we know why and so the primary idea here is that Dripl is funded by customers and not VC.
We believe that no one is buying the sh*t you are selling is a useful signal. At pre-product-market-fit startups, VC damps this signal.
We know 100s of these - Catered lunches, fancy parties, spa vouchers for star employees, 30-under-30 founders, operating at losses of tens of thousands a month and going in flames when the FOMO 💰 leaves for the next crypto (or AI or BigData or Cloud).
We wanted to explore if there was a better way of creating an internet business in 2020.
Here we are then.
First generation migrants. Not very rich. With a couple of kids. Half of us is rebooting her career. The other half has to have a day job to put food on the table. We are trying to get a small, independent, profitable internet business going so that we can quit our jobs.
What are we building?
About 175,000 people take the Life in the UK test every year to qualify for residence. In 2019, Ainy was one of them. She tried several apps on the App Store to help her prepare for the test but didn't like any of them so we decided to build an app she would love.
During research, we found that ~5 out of the top 20 best-selling apps on the App Store were for test-preparation so we took a step back & built an engine that transforms a spreadsheet of multiple-choice questions into a beautiful, singing-and-dancing test-preparation app for the iPhone. The engine lets us build test-prep apps as fast as we can type content in a spreadsheet.
We are dogfooding the engine to build apps for citizenship tests, driving tests, language proficiency tests, school entrance tests etc. In a lot of cases, these apps are better than the incumbents, cheaper to produce and any improvements in the engine improves all of our apps.
Here is our story.
<aside> 🔥 We post regular progress updates on Twitter: @alixedi & @ainyxedi
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<aside> 🆕 Reading this for the first time? You might want to start with the posts highlighted in green to get a taster
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