Written by David Heikka
In the summer of 2024 we first had the idea for Buildpad.
We wanted to create a platform where founders get everything they need to build their products.
I’m writing this 9 months later and I’m proud to say that we now have more than 7,000 founders on our platform.
But let’s back up a bit so you can see how I got here.
I never thought building businesses was something I would do. It all started when a friend asked me to join a niche project he had started building. It seemed like something fun to do and maybe we would even make some money, so I joined as the marketing/sales founder.
We were clueless when it came to business at the time. We didn’t know what SEO was and had no landing page or users. But we worked hard, learned fast, and things took off. We hit our first $5,000 month, then $10,000, and even $30,000 at some point.
While the money was great, the real value came from the business lessons I learned. I could actually build a profitable business.
We had issues scaling further than $30,000/month and the whole project was dependent on one developer. To be fair he was a great developer, but I wanted us to move faster and it was frustrating to be limited to his pace.
In July of 2023 I finally decided to take things into my own hands so I signed up for a course and learn to code. I spent the next 5 months going through the course until I finally had a decent foundation. I was ready to build my first project and was super excited.
3 months later my first project was finally done. It was an AI form that was meant to help high-ticket businesses qualify their leads. The idea came from a problem we had experienced at my previous business. I thought worst case scenario I’ll build something that we would have use for at least.
At the same time I get a call that would change the trajectory of my life. It was Felix, my brother, and he was looking for a career change. We had briefly talked about running a business together but it was just talk, until now.
He left Sweden and moved in with me in Budapest. Two brothers living together trying to improve their lives and build some great products. It was the dream.
But when we launched the app I had been working on we got a reality check. No one wanted it.
We spent months trying different marketing strategies. Many a fool have tried to run Facebook ads to their unvalidated product, and we were one of them. We wasted $800+ on that.
We also tried changing the landing page a bunch of times, rebrand the app, building out new features, but nothing worked. We couldn’t manage to get users. It was stressful and I felt the dream life slipping away from me.
After 6 months of effort we had to face reality and shut the project down. It was not an easy decision after investing so much in it but I knew it was time.
There were a lot of lessons to learn here. What was the difference between this failed project compared to my successful one? After reflecting for some time, we started to understand our mistakes.
We also realized that these mistakes are not personal to us. They are mistakes that most entrepreneurs make, especially when starting out. It’s why their products fail. Why they don’t get any users or manage to become profitable.
That’s when the idea was born.
We knew more and more people were using AI to get help with their business. But one huge problem with AI was that it would forget your project all the time. Wouldn’t it be great with an AI that learns about your project as you build and actually remembers it?
We also realized that what people really want from the AI is guidance. That’s why they are talking to it. But the guidance you get from general AI was seriously lacking. We wanted to create an experience where the founder is guided through phases of building their product. The kind of guidance that will ensure the founder is building something that people actually want.
And those two principles became the core of Buildpad.
We launched the MVP of Buildpad on the 19th of August 2024 with the goal of getting our first 20 users in two weeks. We felt it was an ambitious goal at the time but were proven wrong when two weeks later we had reached 100 users.
One month later we had taken in all the feedback and built out the full product. We were ready for the official launch. The early success of the MVP had felt great but we still weren’t sure if people would actually pay for the product.
So we launched on Product Hunt and it went fantastic. People could really relate to the problem we were solving and they loved Buildpad. The launch got a lot of attention and new users started coming in.
Then finally at 7pm the same evening we got our first paying customer. This time we had built something that people actually wanted to pay for.
Now it’s 6 months since the launch and we have paying customers from 40+ countries. It still kind of blows my mind to write that.
But we’re not stopping there. We are working more than ever with the goal of making Buildpad a truly great product.