Sold His Alternative to a Popular App for $100,000+

Abzal Assembekov is from Kazakhstan 🇰🇿 and the founder of ContactInBio.

It’s basically an alternative to Linktree, a tool people use to link from their social profiles and it lands you on a page with all their info and links 🔗

In a recent Reddit post, Anzal shares…

I sold my link in bio tool for 6 figures.

🚀 Origin story…

My story begins in 2015 when, as a second-year university student… I raised around $65,000 in Dubai and opened a product- and service-based company. We built multiple iOS apps…

Although we broke even, we couldn’t sustain it further, and the venture failed by 2017.

After that, Abzal went the bootstrapping route…

I asked myself what tool did I pay for while being a business owner?

And the answer was an Instagram automation tool, so I bought a ready code online and published such a site, within weeks users started to pour in reaching $700 MRR, until Instagram blocked it.

When he says he “bought a ready code online,” I suspect he’s referring to scripts you can buy on sites like CodeCanyon. You can buy ready-made software, host it somewhere, and sell it to your customers 😀

I’m guessing Instagram blocked Abzal’s software because it didn’t align with their policies in some way 😔

But he didn’t let that deter him for long…

I analysed what customers were using besides my tool and it was LinkIn.Bio and Linktree. I went ahead and built ContactInBio and by 2021 it grew to over 100,000 users as a side project while I was working full time.

How he got traction…

I launched an Instagram/Fb ad, then answered lots of related questions on Quora. Quora was big back then on Google, always on top of many search results. Then published on ProductHunt, BetaList.

🗓️ In 2021…

I finally left my full time job as income has been more than my salary for many months and within a month got connected to Taplink founder, it is a leading link in bio tool in CIS region.

(CIS = Commonwealth of Independent States. More or less the former Soviet Union.)

Abzal ended up selling ContactInBio for 6 figures ($100K+) though the exact price is undisclosed 💰

His advice for other founders…

Find startup ideas based on what you or someone you know is paying to use.

In other words, it doesn’t matter if there’s competition out there already.

In fact, that’s a good thing: it proves there’s a market 👍

Ideally though you’d enter a different segment of the market, or put your own spin on an existing product somehow.

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