His User-Friendly Wrapper Made $8000 in 3 Months

(This one’s a bit technical but has a non-techy takeaway.)

Hieu Dinh recently shared how he built CompressX, a macOS app that helps you compress images and videos locally on your machine 🤓

He explains…

FFmpeg is a powerful tool for converting, streaming, and recording audio and video content. I created a user-friendly wrapper for macOS that simplifies the process and adds some extra features for users.

FFmpeg is a command line tool which does not have an graphical user interface and can only be used via Terminal (the coding black box you see in movies).

Hieu basically put the whole code thing behind a nice app that anyone can use 😎

He adds…

I started CompressX as a weekend project to serve my 9-5 jobs, primarily to compress demo videos for uploading to GitLab or sending to my colleagues. It took me 2 weeks to make the first working version. I shared the demo on Twitter and the reaction was extraordinary…

Three months later, I hit the $8,000 mark in revenue. I never expected to make a dime from this project, let alone eight thousand dollars. It’s been a surreal experience, but it’s also been incredibly rewarding.

Not an uncommon approach: building a software business on top of other software.

For example, Jasper.ai got to a $1.5B valuation and all they really did in the beginning was help people get better results from openAI and other AI models 🤖

Another approach here is to find some complex software that lots of people use, become a certified expert, then start a consulting business.

Two examples of that 👇

• $225k a Year Salesforce Consultant
• $200K in 3 Years Helping People With Notion

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