If you build it, they will come. That’s the notion many non-founders have, and it’s probably what some of us to start a business. We get an idea that excites us enough to start the mind train. Very few of us will make it past the first blocker, which makes founders unique. The truth is it’s really hard to start a business, even more so without the funds or skills it requires to build the product you want to launch.
The difficulty makes the feat of 24-year-old Firdaus from Indonesia much more impressive.
He signed up to toddle.dev on January 24th, and in ten days, he built a fully-fledged CRM system and got his first customer. It took him another 5 days to get five other customers to pay for his CRM system.
The 24-year-old founder has no coding background and built a healthy software business with ingenuity and drive.
The CRM system was not his first venture. During his time at university, Firdaus quickly realized that he preferred to work alone, and after he graduated, he tried to find ways to earn a living on his terms rather than take a regular job. He stumbled upon a website builder called WordPress that enabled him to build complex websites without coding.
One of the first things he built was a membership platform for marketers. A platform that now has more than 200 customers who pay him a monthly subscription fee. He built the platform by copying stylesheets from other websites and patching them together the best way he knew how. He now operates more than 20 sites, and he has a team of five people to help him maintain and grow the sites.
He now builds for his community and sources new ideas directly from his current customers, and it’s paying off. The CRM system he created was a customer request, and when he shared that it was ready, he immediately landed his first customer. It only took him five days to get to his first 10 customers, and he has product feedback from an additional 10 prospects who will commit if he adds certain features. He estimates he’ll have over half of his members using the software when he goes out of beta mid-February this year.
“toddle is a combination of design and if you need data? You connect whatever you need.”
One of his secrets is to listen to his community and understand their requirements well. He could have started to build a CRM with all the bells and whistles, but he knows his audience struggles with tech. They only need a few good features to benefit a lot. His audience is always on the move, and often close deals on the go. They just needed a simple way to structure their deal flow and ensure they never lose a potential customer. The product must work on their phones, requiring only a few features to succeed. Too many features could do more harm than good.
Firdaus built a community and then started building products that could serve his community. It’s brilliant as it gives him immediate access to his community's needs, and when he solves them, he has several potential customers lined up to buy. Firdaus has found a way to leverage his work and continue to build upon his empire of websites and web apps.
Maintenance cost - the hidden cost of doing business
The most significant pain for Firdaus is that he needs to update his many sites all the time. When a plugin is outdated or not updated correctly, his users experience error messages as they use his products. This has implications for his business, and as his business grows, he now adds more people to handle the maintenance of his many websites. He now has a team of 15, where two employees dedicate 100% of their time to maintaining his sites by updating outdated plugins or fixing minor bugs. The maintenance cost started to weigh heavily on the 24-year-old, and he needed to find a better way to run his many sites.
“Let’s say I have 10 plugins and one break, only one break. It can break the whole website.”
Firdaus wanted a tool that wouldn’t break on its own. One of the main issues he runs into is that his websites run on old plugins that would break the site as plugins got new releases or stopped supporting a specific version of WordPress he was running.
He took to the social media giant X, browsed through tweets from other app builders, and stumbled upon
toddle.dev
. A service that would give him the same advanced developer tools coders had in their toolbox but in a visual builder.
He’d no longer need to upload files through an FTP server to make simple changes or rely on plugins he has no control over. His changes are now deployed with no downtime for his customers, and the system automatically tests his changes. He can quickly revert his changes if something is wrong with the built-in version control.
He now handles things that are highly unpredictable and takes hours with a smile. The best part is that his app doesn’t break, regardless of how long he’s away. It’s constantly running the latest version and quickly pushing new features to its existing products without downtime.
Firdaus favourite thing about toddle is:
“The ability to connect with whatever you want, wherever you want.”
What’s next for Firdaus?
His marketing community has a lot of good ideas for how they could make their daily lives easier. His mind is already off to the next project, an automated ad buyer that will buy ads across Facebook, Google, and TikTok. It’s something his community needs, but before starts to build, he’s moving all his existing projects to toddle.dev to reduce the hosting and maintenance costs.
