Hey r/Entrepreneur this story is from 2018 but I always wanted to share it.
In 2018 I launched my first SaaS, it was 100% funded by my student loans (I don’t recommend anyone do this 😅). I was extremely lucky that the launch went viral on Hacker News, Producthunt, and Twitter which resulted in 4-6 paying customers a day.
After about a month the paying customers were dwindling to around 2-3 a day and I needed to find a cost effective way to bring this back up. My SaaS was a website builder called Launchaco and it was impossibly expensive to acquire customers via paid ads. I landed on making a free / open-sourced AI logo builder as a loss leader when I realized a lot of our users were paying for “AI logo makers”.
At the time “AI Logo makers“ were quite literally just vertically aligning icons + fonts with fake loading screens saying “generating logos with AI”, and then charging between $20 - $250 for the resulting logos. From the get-go the business model of these logo makers seemed sketchy at best, but when I started to dig into how they were licensing their fonts that’s when alarm bells really started to go off.
For those unfamiliar with font licensing, the short of it is that not all fonts are licensed to use as logos, and a handful of our competitors were ignoring this (some were profiting 100’s of thousands from fonts they didn’t have a license to distribute). I made a massive spreadsheet of all the biggest logo builders, dug into their source code to see what fonts they were using and manually checked if they were properly licensed. The result was hundreds of improperly licensed fonts across several very popular logo builder tools.
Fast forward 2 months to the launch day of our logo builder, I sent emails to about 100 different font foundries and independent typographers showing them how these logo builders were abusing their fonts.
Not coincidentally some of these companies temporarily shut down for a couple months after I sent those emails and some are still being sued to this day. All the fonts used for Launchaco’s AI Logo Maker were creative commons and we attributed the author per logo downloaded, we also open-sourced the brain behind our AI Logo Maker; we were excited to ship an Open-Core product for the first time & it was well received! 😬
Post launch- Launchaco was getting a dozen or so paying customers a day and eventually was acquired by Namecheap. I recently left and now am working on a free / open source tool which you can check out here: https://github.com/scalar/scalar :)
Well played, Sometimes I also think, if instead of building something I should just start catching companies doing wrong things and start suing them for huge money, I got a lawyer friend so we can do this together😂😂😂😂
competitive advantage… well played
Haha nice you smoked out the competition, they deserved it too.
How long did you spend to develop it also what are you working on next ? Hope you got paid well from namecheap
3 months while being a full time student. Making a font is exceptionally harder than making a basic ai logo builder
Nice man. Yes I agree. Font faces are really amazing
This is the content I subbed for not shitty newsletters or 3rd person hearsay stories. Thanks for sharing
Appreciate it, hope to make some more posts in the new year :)
what’s your current customer acquisition strategy?
Impressive!
We need to change the definition of snitching to reporting/informing on someone or some group that you have a duty/obligation to protect. Is it snitching if you report someone you witness assaulting and robbing an old lady? Someone who commits SA on a minor? Someone who is planning a mass casualty event? I don’t think so, or at least that shouldn’t be the case.
Did you have a duty to protect your customers/clients? Maybe yes, maybe no, depending on how you view that duty.
So i say to the guy, “SNITCHING?” Really, im just taking care of business . Straight business for the business, man, and they’ll never know what hit them … gato
This is a technically a plug but really it’s the best kind of plug because the story is awesome. Nice job!
I fucking love niche, business stories. Interesting read, thanks and good luck on your other ventures man 👍
As a graphic designer whos had millions of copies of my artwork cloned over the years i salute you sir - well played!
lol nice
wow, that was savage, remind me to never get on your bad side! congrats on your success.