John Rush - Unicorn Platform + Portfolio ($250K/month ($3M ARR)) | Founder Story

The Story

John Rush runs 26 startups simultaneously doing $3M ARR combined. After 10 years building VC-backed startups, he switched to bootstrapping and bought Unicorn Platform for almost $1M. The seller mentored him for a year on how to be an indie maker.

As John explains: "My name is John Rush and I'm running 26 startups at the same time after quitting the VC world and joining the bootstrap movement. All my businesses have combined around 1 million users in B2B and combined 3 million ARR where seven products bring most of the revenue and the other products are bringing the audience and they channel to the paid products."

The Origin Story

"It all started when I was little. My father was entrepreneur. He would involve me into everything he was doing just for fun. And by 2020 I was 10 years into building VC-backed startups and that's when I kind of felt that it was something against my nature."

"I was so obsessed with users. I was so obsessed with the products and the love from the users for my products. But in the VC-backed world, I felt like the whole obsession was kind of different."

Buying Unicorn Platform

"In 2022, I decided to enter the bootstrap scene. I found the one tool that I like the most called Unicorn Platform. And I reached out to the founder and I said, 'Do you want to sell this product to me, the whole startup, and also when you sell it you will join me for a year and you will teach me how to be a bootstrapper and how to be an Indie maker?' And he said yes."

"So I paid almost a million dollars for that startup and then he guided me on everything. So he was my mentor for a year. I went from being VC-backed founder who knows nothing about bootstrapping to becoming a pretty prominent bootstrapper in the scene."

The Validation Process

"I use the same process over and over again for all my 20+ products. It all starts with my own pain at work that I want to solve and then I look for solutions for that pain. And if I don't find the solutions on the market, then I go and talk about this pain on the internet."

"And if I see other people resonate with my pain and they say, 'Yeah, I have the same pain and I wish there was a solution,' then that's kind of a grand signal for me to go to the next step."

The Pre-Sale Strategy

"I launch a waitlist and I see whether I am able to generate 100 signups. I email them all and I offer them 90% discount on a pre-sale before I build anything. And then if I get five sales, I build the first MVP."

"I don't even build a product. I actually deliver the solution manually. At this stage, I don't care about the margins yet. I just care about the solution being delivered to the customers and whether they actually satisfied with that."

"It's easier to iterate when there is no product, when there's no code. It's much easier because I just have to change my own routine and my own service. And once I find a sweet spot where it satisfies the users, I go and find a co-maker."

The Co-Maker Strategy

"Finding a co-maker is really hard, same as finding a co-founder. So I usually talk to other makers and I become friends with them and that runs for years or months and then eventually when I'm looking for a co-maker it's not that difficult for me to figure out who to reach out to."

"We share the ownership 50/50. It's just regular co-ownership where I take care of all the operation, legal parts, accounting and the co-maker takes care of the coding and support."

"If you want to be the co-maker people want to work with, the best thing to do is to build things in public because that makes it so easy for anyone else to evaluate you and to just see whether you have things in common."

Growth Strategy

"I think that the key essence of good marketing is good product. The ideal marketing is where the product just drives the sales and drives the word of mouth. But it's difficult to build a great product right away."

"So usually you start with an average product and you have to do the boring marketing methods to bring first users and then use those users to improve your product and make it great."

Marketing Channels

"Before my product is great, I usually go for SEO. And then the second most popular method I have is social media marketing. So I run that on X, on LinkedIn, on Substack, on Facebook, everywhere. I repurpose the same content on all platforms and I do that every day. So I share at least 30 tweets a month and sometimes more."

"Then the third one is the listings on directories. This is very very good way to grow your product if your product is hot and interesting."

Cross-Promotion

"Every user that tries one of my products ends up trying at least one more product and often I have people who try all of my products. The cross promo works really really well because people trust you already and they know you deliver."

"I have over 20 tools where some tools are premium tools I make money on and some tools are just to bring traffic in and channel it to my premium tools."

"For example, in SEO bot, I have a button called 'boost my domain rating.' And if you click that, then it brings you to my other tool called listing bot that helps you to boost your domain rating. I have these integrations across all the products. So users natively float from product to product and end up using my entire ecosystem."

VC vs Bootstrap

"In the VC world, I think people have to understand the game. And I did not understand the game. I was all about building great products, making happy users. But the game was about exits. So everything has to be optimized for an exit."

"In a bootstrap world, it's totally different. You optimize for profits rather than for the next funding round. In a VC world, you pay for growth. In a bootstrap world, you want to have product-led growth."

"In a VC world, you have many people working for you and you want to grow the headcount as much as possible because that increases your valuation. And in a bootstrap world, you want to cut the headcount as much as possible. Ideally, you want to be solo because then there are no costs at all."

Tech Stack

•JavaScript and Tailwind (AI is perfect for these)
•Grok for learning (real-time Twitter access)
•Discord for chats and project management
•Apple Notes for writing
•Claude, Gemini, OpenAI APIs

Business Numbers

•$3M ARR combined
•1M+ users across products
•90% margins on non-AI tools
•70% margins on AI tools (API costs)

Day in the Life

"I live in a forest and I have no social life. I have family and children and animals. So, I wake up in the morning. I go outside. I take care of animals. I change their water. I bring them food. I cut some grass. I do some exercise outside and after 1 hour I come back and I work for 5 hours."

"Then my kids come from studying and then we spend time together for 2-3 hours. Then they go to sleep. Then I go back to work for another 5 hours. Then I go to sleep at 4:00 a.m. and I wake up at 10:00 a.m. So I sleep 6 hours a day."

Key Lessons

"The first time when I seen build in public, I thought it's all about marketing. So people do that to get more eyeballs on their products and that's free marketing. And that's true. But I realized that even the bigger value of building in public is that you build up a direct channel with the audience and the users that helps you to build great products."

"Before building in public, my failure rate was really high. 90% of the things I've done failed. And when I start building in public, it flipped. So now only 10% of my products fail and 90% don't fail because I adjust them before I ship them just because I build in public."

Key Advice

"The most important thing when you build a startup is the idea and the founder idea fit. People start looking for random ideas in random spaces and I think that's wrong. I think people should try to build something they understand."

"In my case, I went into the extreme and I built things for my own work. And that's something I understand really really well. But I think people should build for their own work. They should solve their own problems. And I'm sure at any job in the world, there are hundreds of things you can solve with software."

"Don't go too far. Don't look for random things. Just look around you and see what are the pain points in your job."

Resources

•Unicorn Platform: https://unicornplatform.com/
•Follow John Rush on Twitter

I Make $250K/Month From 20 Apps