Bank Statement Converter

Angus built an MVP in about one week with a friend — a local Kotlin console app he'd written to solve his own PDF bank statement problem, generalized to work with other banks, paired with a Next.js front end deployed on Netlify and a backend on AWS EC2. Once live, he immediately bought Google Search Ads to drive traffic to the domain. People started uploading bank statements right away, which validated the problem. This was the primary mechanism for the first users — paid search bringing in people actively searching for a solution to the exact problem he'd solved. After roughly 6 months of running Google Ads unprofitably (spending ~$1,000 to generate ~$300 in sales), he cut ads entirely. At that point he noticed he was still getting 2–3 organic signups per day from users finding the site naturally — almost certainly via Google organic search. These organic users became his real first sustainable user base, and he shifted all focus to product improvement based on their feedback rather than paid acquisition.

Prior developer experience across multiple domains (gaming, fintech, crypto) meant Angus could build and ship the entire product himself in ~1 week at near-zero cost. He also personally experienced the exact problem, giving him strong product intuition. No audience or network advantage — this was replicable by any solo developer.

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Google Search Ads: spent ~$1,000 to generate ~$300 in sales, never profitable despite months of optimization attempts. Cold email: 3 months of outreach resulted in 1 sale and many angry replies. Blogging and building in public (Twitter): got attention but Angus explicitly says his target users don't use Twitter or read blogs, so it drove minimal actual signups. Social media pages: explicitly called a waste of time.