The eesier Playbook
How I got to 600+ paying users as a solo founder with no money
Eesier will do the things that you've always wished you had someone to do for you.
Intro
I'm Rodrigo, founder and CEO of eesier.
In the 14 years I've been building software, I've ran two successful companies as a solo founder.
It is not impossible, but it is very hard.
So to make it easier for those running a business without a partner, I've created one; with a name to match: eesier — the AI cofounder for solo entrepreneurs.
Today, I'm gonna share with you the step-by-step process of how I got more than 600 paying users on my first startup, all without spending a single dollar.
I'm going to break down exactly what I did, so you can copy and adapt it for your own business.
By the end of this video, you'll know exactly what to do, in order to get your next few hundred paying users.
Context
Before we get to the steps, let me give you a little context on my first startup: iBlackbelt.
The year is 2018 and I had just signed up for a membership at a local MMA gym.
I'm the type of person that always pays their bills on time.
However in this gym, almost every month I'm missing my payments.
Why? Because I was never reminded when they were due.
Every month I was expected to remind myself to bring money to the gym and give it to their secretary.
And every month, I saw their secretary open up the same old paper notebook, to write a little note with my name on it, followed by the word “paid”.
She did that for everyone else at the gym.
So one day, I approach the gym owner — who was also my brazilian jiu-jitsu teacher — and I offer to build him a simple app.
It would do the very simple thing of texting a reminder to each student whenever a payment was due.
Two months later? His revenue tripled.
Word got out and other gyms started asking for the app that made customers always pay on time.
I quit school, quit my job, and went all in.
Making sure the pain is real
When startups struggle to find product-market fit — which most do — it's usually because they haven't found an actual pain to solve.
Me? I was lucky enough to have a very obvious pain, staring me in the face, right from the start.
And this is the first step: you gotta make sure your product is solving a real pain.
You must also make sure that this pain is big enough, so the people that suffer from it, will want to pay money to make it go away.
In the case of iBlackbelt, the gym owner had two specific pains.
Pain number one was the fact that most of his students never paid on time.
This is obvious financial pain; he was literally losing money every month.
Pain number two was actually worse.
When people had completely forgotten about it, the only way for him to get paid for overdue memberships was to chase down these customers, sometimes in person, and ask them to give him money.
He never did that.
In martial arts culture, teachers and students are very close.
You probably know the feeling of when a friend forgets that they owe you money, and you have to ask them for it.
Most people would rather forfeit the money just to avoid that awkward conversation.
So, you have to be crystal clear: what pain are you solving, and for whom exactly?
Because there is no hack, no strategy, and no sales script that will convince someone to pay for a solution to a problem they don't have.
It's better to have a shitty product that solves a real pain, than a “great” product that solves a problem no one cares about.
It's better to have a shitty product that solves a real pain, than a “great” product that solves a problem no one cares about.
Get over yourself
In my first year working full-time on iBlackbelt, I was educated enough about startups to know that my product was just good enough.
I did not need to improve it any further before it reached the hands of my next 100 or 200 users.
So everybody around me would say the same thing: I had to put my product out there.
And for a startup without any funding? That equals cold outreach.
But that meant I had to do the scary thing of reaching out to people who never heard about me, and ask them for their money in exchange for this thing that I had built.
And I couldn't bring myself to do it.
In fact, I'd make up every excuse to do anything other than that.
I'd write a new business plan, I'd work on my logo, I'd create the manual for my brand, I'd record a video for Instagram even though I never did it and had zero followers.
I'd do anything other than what I should be doing.
Y Combinator calls that fake work.
Things that make you feel like you're making progress, when in fact you're not.
The reality? I was afraid.
I was afraid of rejection and I was afraid that once I actually put my product out there, people wouldn't want it.
I feared it would be deemed worthless, and if my product was worthless, and I was the one who built it, that would mean that I myself must be worthless too.
And I'm not alone in this crazy.
This is the unconscious reasoning of almost every first-time entrepreneur.
We just tend to wrap our identities around our products.
I saw this constantly at my previous software company.
I worked with tons of new founders, and this was so big that I actually had to start offering “free consulting” sessions on how to be an entrepreneur, just to help them get over this mental block and have a chance to succeed with their startup.
Because every time they didn't it was the same story.
If they failed, it's because the product wasn't good enough.
And who built the product?
You know how that goes.
Here is the truth you need to accept: reaching out to people to offer them your product shouldn't be about validating yourself and your self-worth.
And you cannot possibly know how to do that if you don't talk to them.
So you gotta accept that at the beginning, your product won't be perfect, and it won't be good enough for everyone.
I think the first superpower you get as you evolve as an entrepreneur is the ability to stop running away from criticism and start chasing it instead.
Criticism isn't rejection; it's a set of instructions.
If someone says your product is shit, ask them why.
They will tell you.
Now you have a roadmap to make it not shit.
Do that enough times, and eventually, you have a product that's actually good.
So, the biblical advice to “talk to users” isn't about finding out if they like you or your product.
It's about getting the instructions on how to build something they will buy.
Criticism isn't rejection; it's a set of instructions.
Understand the actual goal of reaching out to potential customers
Before you try to sell anything, you need to shift your goal.
Your goal as an early-stage founder isn't to make money. It is to learn how to make money.
At the start, you have two variables:
- What the product does.
- Who the product is for.
When someone says “No,” it means one of those variables is wrong.
Let's look at iBlackbelt.
- What: Payment reminders.
- Who: Martial Arts Gyms.
I'd reach out to a gym owner—let's call him Joe. Joe would look at it, try it, and say, “No thanks.”
I was confused. My other customers loved it. Why didn't Joe?
So I asked him. Joe said, “I've only been open for two months. I only have 10 students.”
Aha. When you have 10 students, you don't have a payment management problem. You know exactly who paid.
The product wasn't broken. I was just selling it to the wrong person.
So I updated my “Who.” My target wasn't “Martial Arts Gyms.” It was “Martial Arts Gyms with at least 30 students.” That's the threshold where the pain becomes real.
If I was only focused on “making a sale,” I might have forced Joe to buy. And he would have been a miserable customer—like a runner wearing shoes that are too small.
But because I was focused on learning, I refined my targeting.
The other scenario is when you have the Right “Who” but the Wrong “What.”
I'd call guys who fit the profile perfectly (30+ students). They'd try it, but still say no.
When I dug deeper, I found the pattern.
Back in 2018, B2B software was mostly for desktops. But these gym owners didn't have desktops at the gym. They were trying to run my app on their phones, and the experience was terrible.
The “Who” was right. The “What” was missing a feature.
So I made the app responsive for mobile. I went back to those same owners, and they became customers immediately.
That is the power of treating sales as research. You stop guessing, and you start fixing the specific variables that are blocking your growth.
Your goal as an early-stage founder isn't to make money. It is to learn how to make money.
Rejection
When someone says no to your product, it's either one of two things: you're offering to the wrong person, or your product isn't good enough.
Both of those are incredibly valuable pieces of information.
eesier learns from every rejection to not only improve its own targeting and offer, but also to help you understand ways in which you can improve your business.
So eesier brings you either a booked meeting, or the information that's gonna make your business better.
Either way, you win.
When someone says no to your product, it's either one of two things: you're offering to the wrong person, or your product isn't good enough.
What is sales?
Sales is about finding people that suffer from a pain that you can solve.
The Offer
[Alex Hormozi's offer equation]
Common Misconceptions
[Common beliefs that are wrong about sales and outreach, e.g. sending the link on the first message]
Sales is like a marriage proposal
[If you do it too fast, the answer will be no]