How Airgpu Landed Its First 5 Customers at $25 Per Month as a Solo Bootstrapped Side Project (Interview with Founder Sven Frese)

Introduction and First Sale Story

Nathan Latka

00:00Hello, everyone. My guest today is Sven Frese. He's bootstrapping airgpu, a service to play the latest games on your laptop next to 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 airgpu, which we love. Sven, are ready to take us to the top?

Sven Frese

00:19>> Yep.

Nathan Latka

00:20Let's do it. Nothing like that first dollar revenue, is it?

Sven Frese

00:23>> It's really amazing. It was the perfect moment. I was just feeding my son and Guns N' Roses was on. Then I got that sweet, sweet notification from my payment provider that, yeah, earned my first dollar. That was really great.

Nathan Latka

00:37How much was the sale for?

Sven Frese

00:39>> That was $25. $25.

Nathan Latka

00:41I love that. Okay.

What Airgpu Does

Nathan Latka

00:43What are they paying for? What are you building?

Sven Frese

00:45>> Yeah. So airgpu basically lets you play the latest games just in your laptop or any other low spec device. So your your Raspberry Pi, your smartphone, whatever.

00:56>> So how that works, you're getting access to a full gaming PC in the cloud essentially, you can just install your games and just stream it to your local device.

Nathan Latka

01:04Okay, got it. And where did you like, when did write the first line of code for this? What year?

01:09What year?

Sven Frese

01:10>> That was last year in December. So it's like five months.

Nathan Latka

01:15Yep. And what did you do to get the first customer? How did you onboard them?

How the First Customer Was Acquired on Reddit

Sven Frese

01:24>> For me, how I started this whole project was in one of the bigger cloud gaming communities on Reddit.

01:32>> So what I did when I had this idea and I decided to start building it

01:39>> is to basically go back to those communities, talk to the people there. There are always threads every day where people are looking for something like that, and you can't really self advertise those threads usually.

Nathan Latka

01:54What thread got you the most traction? What was the name of the Reddit sub community or subgroup?

Sven Frese

02:00>> Cloudy Gamer is the name, the subreddit. Cloudy Gamer subreddit.

Nathan Latka

02:05Interesting.

Sven Frese

02:06>> Yeah, exactly. So I reached out to a few people via personal messages because I know that they had a struggle and I had solution for them.

02:17>> And I posted a few comments here and there

02:22>> in some of the questions. Yeah, and that's how I got a few visitors on my website.

Nathan Latka

02:27This is great. And so how do you go from one customer to 10 customers? Where do you think the growth is going to come from?

Sven Frese

02:35>> I think it's going to be pretty similar. So airgpu is currently in beta, so I'm not really pushing it too much right now. My goal is really to get the first few customers in and see if the tech works, if they're happy.

02:52>> Then my plan for getting more customers on board would really be to go back to the communities, look into questions that are commonly asked,

03:04>> turn those into blog posts potentially. That has worked for me with past projects, do a bit of SEO. Yeah, and I think that's going be one part.

Current Customer Count and Pricing

Nathan Latka

03:14Do you have one customer right now or do have multiple?

Sven Frese

03:17>> Oh, I've got five at this point.

Nathan Latka

03:19Oh, five? All at

03:20$25 a month? Yeah.

Sven Frese

03:21>> Yeah. Correct.

Nathan Latka

03:22That's $125 a month, man. That's good stuff.

Cost Structure and AWS Infrastructure

Sven Frese

03:26>> Big does it take you to quit your full time job?

03:31>> I don't think I'm quite there yet. The thing with the product is you're basically renting out cloud computers that are pretty powerful and pretty expensive. So the cost side is pretty high for me. Yeah, quitting my daytime job, that would be What's

Nathan Latka

03:49it cost you month per month?

Sven Frese

03:52>> That depends on usage. I mean, I'm using Amazon Web Services for most of my stuff, and they pay per use essentially.

04:01>> One of the things I'm trying to figure out with the beta right now is how are people using the product, and then I can get a better understanding of what my costs are going to be once I scale up.

Nathan Latka

04:12Yeah.

Bootstrapped and Solo Founder

Sven Frese

04:14>> So that's really hard to answer at this point. And you've bootstrapped it to date.

Nathan Latka

04:17Correct?

Sven Frese

04:18>> Yep. Yep. That's correct.

Nathan Latka

04:19Anyone else on the team besides you?

Sven Frese

04:21>> No. Just me.

Nathan Latka

04:22Just you? Okay.

Growth Plans: Blog, SEO, and YouTube

Nathan Latka

04:23We love that. 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 term most time in terms of driving growth?

Sven Frese

04:36>> As I said, driving growth is not really my focus at this point. I've got my first users.

Nathan Latka

04:43Why is that not a focus to get more users? To get more users, maybe you can bring your costs down on a per economic basis, per facility basis.

Sven Frese

04:51>> Definitely. It's going to be a focus really, really soon, but I found that with the first customers, there were a couple of issues with the platform that I really wanted to address. I mean, want the customers that I have right now to stick around. That was my first priority, obviously. But then, yeah, I'm gonna jump into blog posts real soon. I'm planning to go on YouTube, like show people how they can play the games that they

05:15>> love on their Raspberry Pi or whatever without buying a gaming PC, which is just

05:22>> really expensive these days. I mean, with cryptocurrencies going up, like everyone's mining on their graphics cards, you can't really get one for a reasonable price anymore. So people are looking for different things. I mean,

Profitability at Scale

Nathan Latka

05:38you do this profitably? If you have a thousand customers, would you be losing a bunch of money?

Sven Frese

05:42>> No. No, would not. That would be feasible. The margins are not going to be as high as other businesses, of course, but it's profitable.

Revenue Target to Leave Day Job

Nathan Latka

05:52Yeah. Interesting. So what's the number? How much revenue do you have per month to quit your full time job?

Sven Frese

06:00>> I think that would really have to be 10 or higher.

Nathan Latka

06:04Okay. Are you single? Do you have a spouse?

Sven Frese

06:07>> I do have a wife and a kid since last year, yeah.

Nathan Latka

06:10So she would kill you if you quit early before you attended?

Sven Frese

06:12>> Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. For sure. No. That's not an option at this point.

Nathan Latka

06:17What did she think about this when you were holding your baby and you said, Hey, we just got our first sale. What did she say?

Sven Frese

06:23>> She wasn't even home, unfortunately. But my baby actually loved it, I fed him, and then I actually jumped up and I did a weird dance, apparently, and he was just laughing at me. Was an awesome moment.

Nathan Latka

06:35I 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 support you. If people want to go support you, where can they find you online?

Sven Frese

06:46>> So our website is airgpu.com.

06:51>> Gpu.com. Yep, airgpu.com.

Nathan Latka

06:53That's great.

Sven Frese

06:55>> Correct. Yeah.

06:57>> I'm fairly active on Twitter. I'm trying to build in public. It's not always working.

Nathan Latka

07:06Think my Twitter handle is going be attached to podcast.

Sven Frese

07:10>> Twitter handle?

07:12>> Sven Frese.

Famous Five: Favorite Business Book

Nathan Latka

07:13Sven Frese. Guys, we'll link it up. Sven, let's wrap it here with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite business book?

Sven Frese

07:20>> Business book. Everyone probably says Lean Startup. I'm going to say From Zero to Sold by Arvid Kahl.

07:27>> Yep, that's a good one.

Famous Five: CEO Inspiration and Tools

Nathan Latka

07:28Number two, there a CEO you're following or studying?

Sven Frese

07:33>> Difficult. I'm really digging the building in public community on Twitter, and one of the early influences there was Marko Saric from Plausible Analytics.

07:44>> Yeah, yeah, doing an amazing job with bootstrapping their business.

Nathan Latka

07:47Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building airgpu?

Sven Frese

07:52>> That would have to be Notion. Everything's in there, all my planning, all my tweets, all my concepts.

Nathan Latka

07:58Number four, how many hours of sleep do get every night?

Sven Frese

08:01>> I've got a kid, so less than I would want, probably around six or seven.

Nathan Latka

08:05Okay, fair enough. So one kid and married, how old are you?

Sven Frese

08:09>> I'm 31.

Nathan Latka

08:1031, last question, what's something you wish you knew when you were 20?

Sven Frese

08:15>> I would probably tell myself to think a bit smaller, you know, think in small projects and then go up from and everything is going to be fine, really.

Nathan Latka

08:26He'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 per month so they can get more capacity on their local devices by using the extra capacity that he brings to the table. That's what airgpu is all about. He got his first customer from a Reddit sub thread called Cloudy Gamer. Just him right now building us. We'll see what happens. Sven,

08:46thanks for taking us to the top.

Sven Frese

08:48>> Thank you, Nathan, for having me.

Nathan Latka

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