How airgpu CEO Sven Frese grew airgpu to $1.5K revenue and 5 customers in 2021.

hello everyone my guest today is van friesa he's bootstrapping air gpu a service to play the latest games on your laptop next his day job as a software engineer after working on multiple side projects over several years that either weren't released or generated zero revenue he recently onboarded his first paying customer at air gpu which we love it's found you're ready it takes the top yep let's do it nothing like that first dollar revenue is it ah it's it's really amazing like it was the perfect moment i was just feeding my son and like guns and roses was on uh and then i got that sweet sweet uh notification from my payment provider that uh yeah my first dollar that was it was really great how much was the sale for uh that was 25 25 bucks i love that okay what are they paying for what are you building yeah so air gpu basically lets you play the latest games just in your laptop or any other low spec device so your uh your raspberry pi your smartphone whatever um so how that works you're getting access to a full gaming pc in the cloud essentially where you can just install your games and just uh stream it to your local device okay got it and where did you like when you write first i code for this what year what yeah that was uh last year in december so it's like yeah five months yep yep and what did you do to get the first customer how did you onboard them um so for me how i started this whole project was in one of the bigger gaming communities on reddit um so yeah what i did when i had this idea and i decided to start building it is to basically go back to those communities talk to the people there um you know there are always threats every day what people are looking for for something like that um and you know you can't really self-advertise those threats usually so uh what thread got you the most traction what was the name of the reddit sub sub community or subgroup uh cloudygamer is the name the subreddit cloudgamer subreddit interesting yeah exactly so reach out to a few people uh via personal messages because i know that yeah they had a struggle and i had a had a solution for them um and i posted a few comments here and there in uh uh yeah in some of the questions uh yeah and that's how i got a few visitors on my website this is great and so how do you go from one customer to ten customers where do you think the growth is gonna come from um i think it's going to be uh pretty similar um so gpu is currently in beta so i'm not really like pushing it too much right now um my goal is really to get the first few customers in and see if the tech works if they're happy um then my plan for um yeah getting more customers on board would really be to um go back to the communities um look into questions that are commonly asked um turn those into blog posts potentially that has worked for me with past projects uh do a bit of seo um yeah and i think uh that's gonna be one part you have one customer right now or do you have multiple oh i've got uh five at this point oh five i'll let 25 bucks a month yeah yeah that's that's 125 bucks a month man that's that's good stuff how big is correct for you to quit your full-time job uh i don't think i'm quite there yet um the thing with the product is um you know you're basically renting out cloud uh computers that are pretty powerful and and pretty expensive um so the the cost side is pretty high for me so uh yeah creating my day time job that would be what's it cost you per month uh it depends on usage i mean i'm using uh amazon web services um for most of my stuff and there you pay-per-use essentially um so yeah one of the things i'm trying to figure out with the beta right now is uh how are people using the product um and then i can uh better get it get a better understanding of what my costs are gonna be once i scale up um yeah so that's really hard to answer at this point and you've bootstrapped it today correct yeah yeah that's correct anyone else on the team besides you no just me just you okay we love that um and and so what are the plan i mean you mentioned some of the seo plays you mentioned some other things i mean where are you spending the most time in terms most time in terms of driving growth um as i said like driving growth is not really my focus at this point um you know uh i've got my first users uh why is that not why is that not a focus to get more users if you get more users maybe you can bring your costs down on a per economic basis for you for facility bases definitely it's going to be a focus really really soon um but i found that with first customers there were a couple of um issues with the platform that uh i really wanted to address i mean i want the customers that i have right now to stick around that was my first priority obviously um but then yeah i'm gonna jump into uh blog post real soon i'm planning uh to go on youtube like show people how they can play the the games that they love on on their raspberry pi or whatever without buying a gaming pc which is just really expensive uh these days i mean with the uh cryptocurrencies going up like everyone's mining on their graphics cards um you can't really get one for like a reasonable price um anymore so people are looking for different things i mean can you do this profitably if you have a thousand customers would you be losing a bunch of money no no i would not okay it'll be feasible the the margins are going to be uh are not going to be as high as other um businesses of course but it's profitable yeah yeah yeah interesting so what's the number how much revenue do you have per month to quit your full-time job um i think that would really have to be uh 10k or higher okay are you single do you have a spouse uh i do have a wife and a kid since last year yeah so she would kill you if you quit early before you attend oh oh yeah oh yeah for sure no that's not an option at this point what does she think about this when you were holding your baby and you said hey we just got our first sale what'd she say she wasn't even home unfortunately so uh but but my baby actually loved it so as i fed him and then i actually jumped up and uh we danced apparently and he was just like laughing at me it was that was an awesome moment i love this well sven i always want to support folks like you you're bootstrapping on the side it's a side project you have your first five customers i want to celebrate you if people want to go support you where can they find you online uh so my website is airgpu.com um gpu.com you have airgpu.com that's great correct yeah uh um yeah i'm fairly active on twitter um i'm trying to build in public it's not always working you know um i think my twitter handle is gonna be uh attached to the podcast uh twitter handle uh at spinforazer senate fraser guys we'll link it up spend let's wrap it here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book business book uh everyone produces leading startup i'm gonna say uh from zero to zold by uh arvid khal yep that's a good one number two their ceo you're following are studying um difficult i'm really digging the the building public community on twitter and one of the early influences there was uh marco surge from plausible analytics you're doing an amazing yeah yeah doing an amazing job bootstrapping their business number three what's your favorite online tool for building air gpu um that would have to be notion everything is in there all my planning on my my tweets or my concepts number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night i've got a kid so uh listen i would want probably around six or seven okay fair enough so one kid married how old are you i'm 31 31 last question what's something you wish you knew when you were 20 who um i would probably tell myself to think a bit smaller you know think think in small projects and then uh go up from there from there and everything is going to be fine really guys he's got a full-time job but his side project is starting to take off airgpu.com first side project that's actually generating revenue five customers paying 25 dollars per month so they can get more capacity on their local devices by using extra capacity that he brings to the table that's what rgp is all about got his first customer from a reddit sub thread called cloudygamer just him right now building us we'll see what happens sven thanks for taking us to the top thank you nation for everyone one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do...