How AlgoExpert CEO Clement Mihailescu grew AlgoExpert to $1.9M revenue and 70K customers in 2024.

Intro what's up everybody how's it going so in this video I want to share with you a comprehensive high-level overview and I realize that that's sort of an oxymoronic pair of words they're comprehensive and high level just bear with me so I want to share with you a comprehensive high-level overview of the story behind my side business algo expert how algo expert came to be how it went from literally just an idea in my mind to now an established company with thousands of satisfied customers that's generating roughly 50,000 US dollars per month during the last few months and this video is really meant for me to share with you this story transparently in an effort to maybe inspire you encourage you to go out and do something similar create your own business maybe pursue your own endeavors because really at the end of the day as you'll soon see all it really is is a combination of hardwork grit patience and maybe a little bit of luck sprinkled in there so without further ado let's dive into it I Metaphor want to try to paint a little metaphor for you here if the story of algo expert is a book then we are by no means at the end of the book right now we're probably only at the end of chapter 3 maybe the beginning of chapter 4 and of course if I want to tell this story properly I have to bring you back all the way to the very first page of chapter 1 and that's gonna be roughly two and a half years ago back in February early February of 2017 when I found myself preparing for coding interviews on site coding interviews at Google for a software engineering position at Google Why AlgoExpert preparing for the coding interviews was one of the most frustrating discouraging and annoying things I've ever done in my life back then all that I had access to were books and the internet and so I vividly remember spending hours upon hours trying to understand these complex algorithms and you know coding interview questions from a written solution and plus I only knew JavaScript and a bit of Python at the time and the books were written in Java or C++ so that was a nightmare then I would spend hours online trying to understand or find better solutions there were no like clear consistent you know sources online and so all in all it was a really bad experience and I remember thinking I was pacing in this living room right here I remember pacing and thinking there's got to be a better way there's got to be a better way to prepare for coding interviews and of course you might have guessed it that's when I sort of conceptualized the idea behind algo expert that's something that I find a The idea behind AlgoExpert really awesome the fact that I can pinpoint the exact moment or roughly the moment when algo expert was born right the idea behind algo expert and at the end of the day every business out there comes from some idea that typically stems from someone's need right need that someone has identified for me it happened to be coding interviews suck or rather well they definitely suck but preparing for them sucks and it shouldn't suck it should be better there should be a better way to do so and that's how it came to be right now you might have an idea first you might have like something that is problematic in your life and you might have an idea for how to solve it and that might be that little seed at the beginning that you need to just plant to turn into a really you know awesome business but so the Pitching the idea first thing that I did was pick up the phone or you know open Google Hangouts and I pitched the idea to two of my close friends because I knew that if I was gonna try to solve this problem that I had to identified and try to turn it into an actual business I wasn't gonna do so alone I knew that I was gonna need to have a co-founder and of course this also served as a nice way to sort of like vet the idea by somebody else because both of the people that I contacted happened to be in software engineering or in the computer science space and I was kind of able to tell them like hey I have this idea do you think that coding preparing for coding interviews sucks yes you do okay great what do you think of having a website a platform with curated questions an actual online editor where you can code them out yada yada yada you know video explanations I basically pics to algo expert to them to see if they would say it would resonate with them and what do you know it did it resonated with both of them and so we said okay let's partner up all three of us and try to do this I just grabbed my laptop here because I want to show you the exact day that we actually created algo expert beyond just you know the idea of phase and so if you go to my github here by the way I need to I need to change I need to update my profile picture if you're watching this at this point and you go to stock my github profile you will likely see a new profile picture but anyway if you look at my contributions over the last few years 20 19 20 18 look at all this yummy green here as you go to 2017 you will see that right here anything before 2017 2016 here is when I was at my coding bootcamp when I started to code and if you go to 2017 starting on February 24th we can even click it there created one reap repository algo expert that is when algo expert was was born that is when we like created algo expert I still remember like pushing that very first commit this one created one commit and a legume expert and that's that yeah we we just said let's you know we were all three on board and we said let's just do this let's try to create something here Creating a Minimum Viable Product so a few days after we created that github repository for algo expert one of my two close friends whom I mentioned before I decided that you know it wasn't really the right time for him to work on such a project so he kind of you know backed out and so at that point it was really just me and Antoine my co-founder whom you can see on the meet the team page on algo expert and so we decided okay we have to build a sort of MVP you know a Minimum Viable Product because we had pitched the idea you know in the lat in a couple days we had pitched the idea to a few other of our friends and a few other people like some of my classmates at the coding bootcamp that I went to and they were all sort of nodding in agreement like yes coding interviews suck or preparing for them sucks and the idea sounds cool but you know it was really just an idea and a github repository at that point with maybe you know like a couple commits and you know an idea for what a webpage would look like we hadn't we didn't really have anything tangible so we said let's actually test this out so The Alpha Version then we spent the next two months building out the very first version of algo expert we called it the alpha version and I think on April 1st 2017 it was not an April Fool's joke we want the alpha version so it was basically the website that you know today - a ton of content - a ton of features with far less sort of functionality I think that we had I believe 20 questions and we had three languages that we supported Python JavaScript and going those were basically the only three languages that we felt comfortable sort of writing in and yeah we gave the web site for free we gave access to the product for free - The Free Version one of the classes at the coding bootcamp that I attended so basically I think it was one or two classes after the one that I was in we went to them I think I gave like a talk where I was sort of you know helping people were sharing my experience with the job search with other students and then we sort of pitched Alto expert to them and said hey we built this try it out it's free tell us what you think we were really at that point trying to see like is this something that we should spend the next couple of years working on or is this something that we should just like stop right now because you know it's a nice idea that actually people don't really like it now of course as you can imagine the product did very much resonate with the people to whom we gave it for free people basically told us yes this is exactly what we've been looking for this is great we just want more content now 20 questions isn't enough we want more and so that gave us that really that motivation of let's keep going let's keep building this out because clearly we have proof that people want this so then I think in July 2017 we decided to actually make this a company legally speaking so we formed an LLC I'll go expert LLC in July 2017 just two years ago now we spent the next few months after that further building out the platform we basically added tenth added more questions and added functionality to our sort of online workspace and I believe that on September 9th 2017 if my memory is not failing me it was definitely a September 2017 we made our first real sale meaning we we actually sold algo expert I remember who bought it first someone who actually like paid us money to purchase the product and that was a big sort of turning point for us of course I probably think that's where I would put you know the the chapter one of the book ends there and chapter two starts we...