The Story
Angus Chang built Bank Statement Converter, a website that does just one thing - converts PDF bank statements to Excel. He launched it in 2021 and today it makes $40,000/month as a completely solo operation.
As Angus explains: "I built a website that literally does one thing. I bootstrapped this entire business by myself."
The Origin Story
"I had just quit my job and I knew I was going to build some sort of product. On the side, I was thinking, I've got X amount of money in the bank. I want to know how long I can continue living the way I'm living."
"To do that, I wanted multiple years of bank data. I wanted it all in a nice Excel spreadsheet. And that was a lot harder than I thought it would be because my bank only provided PDF bank statements."
"So, I wrote some code to get the transaction data out of the bank statements and that was also really hard. So, I figured it must be a real problem."
The Validation Approach
"Often I like to just make an MVP as quickly as possible, get it into production and then get it in front of real users. Me and a friend worked on it for about a week. We got a domain, we launched it, and then we bought Google ads to get people to start clicking into the domain."
"Immediately people started uploading bank statements, which kind of validated the problem."
Finding Simple Ideas
"I think a good way is if you encounter the problem yourself or a pain point yourself. Another way is your colleagues or friends complain about stuff at work."
"But sometimes I just get ideas and I just think of the smallest possible way to implement that idea. Get it out there and see if people will use it. If it takes you like one or two weeks to make an MVP, it's not that much of a risk anyway. So, you might as well just build it."
The Marketing Journey
"At first, I bought Google search ads. These were good for getting the initial users, but I was never able to run an ad campaign profitably. I would spend maybe $1,000 on ads and bring in about $300 in sales."
"I tried blogging and building in public. That gets quite a lot of attention. However, I don't think I get many users from doing that because my users don't seem to be using Twitter or reading my blog."
"I also tried sending out cold emails and in 3 months of doing that, I got one sale and I also annoyed a lot of people."
The Turning Point
"After about 6 months of running Google search ads, I decided I'm just not going to do this anymore. I cut the ads and I thought maybe go back to work."
"Interestingly, I stopped paying for ads. So, I knew everyone who was clicking on the website was an organic user. And I noticed I started getting new users. I'd get like two or three new signups a day."
"From that point on, I kind of focused on improving the product. When customers complained about things, I would fix them. I just basically focused on doing what the customers wanted."
Business Numbers
- •2021: Launched
- •2022: $6,000 MRR
- •2023: $14,000 MRR
- •2024: $27,000 MRR
- •Today: $40,000 MRR
- •75,000 total users
- •~1,000 paying customers
- •40,000 monthly traffic
- •~$39,000 profit (out of $40K revenue)
Tech Stack
- •Kotlin (core engine, JVM language)
- •Next.js (frontend)
- •Brevo (transactional emails)
- •AWS EC2 (backend hosting)
- •Netlify (frontend hosting)
- •Stripe (payments)
The Solopreneur Reality
"When you work for a company, you kind of spend a lot of time playing, refactoring code, trying out databases you think are cool. But when you work for yourself, you quickly realize these things don't make any money and potentially are a waste of time."
"Being a solopreneur can be pretty depressing. When you go from making maybe like $10,000 a month to $200 a month and you're basically hanging out with no one."
"In the first two years, I was working extremely hard on the business and making basically no money. What I realized was that those first two years of hard work, you don't get paid much, but you kind of get the money for that hard work in like years four and onwards."
Key Advice
"SaaS is an excellent business model. Make sure you save enough money to survive multiple years of no income. If you only have enough money for a few months of runway, you're probably not going to make it. It took me two or three years before I could pay rent with the revenue I was getting in."
"Ignore social media. A lot of people think they need to build a following on social media before building a business. I think it's a waste of time. Just focus on the business. Focus on the product. Get some real users. Improve the product."
"Don't make a Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter page for your business. I see a lot of people do this, and I think it's a waste of time as well."
Resources
- •Bank Statement Converter: https://bankstatementconverter.com/
- •Follow Angus Chang on Twitter