- Alec, a 22-year-old immigrant, started an online business with no money and a co-founder.
- The business, A4i, helps researchers manage citations and conduct literature reviews using AI.
- Alec and his co-founder launched the company in college and quickly gained traction, with almost half of their school signing up to use the product.
- Alec faced challenges as an international student trying to find a job in the US, leading him to start his own business.
- The company gained attention and funding, landing a $100,000 investment from a venture capital firm.

- The speaker talks about their experience in an accelerator program and receiving their first investment of $100,000
- They discuss the challenges and perks of working in the program's office
- The speaker mentions three impactful books they have read on building companies and marketing tactics
- They highlight the importance of customer feedback in product development and the success of their partnership with AppSumo
- The focus on building the best product and customer satisfaction led to unexpected revenue growth
- The speaker emphasizes the importance of creating value for customers and solving real problems as a startup.

Here's how Alec Nguyen launched his first business with no money and did $700k in just three months with no marketing budget. 

Timestamps
0:00 Intro
1:47 Solving a problem 
2:21 Student project turned into the top product on AppSumo & Product Hunt
4:51 The initial startup idea(s)
7:09 The 48-hour product launch 
8:04 Interest from a VC 
10:14 Office tour 
10:47 Highest impact book recommendations 
13:12 The nap room 
13:35 Cofounder
13:53 Launching on AppSumo to get customers & feedback

Alec and links mentioned
Afforai https://afforai.com/ 
Alec https://www.linkedin.com/in/alec-nguyen-about/ 
Sputnik ATX https://www.sputnikatx.com/ 
AppSumo https://social.appsumo.com/yt24-brand-alec
Product Hunt https://www.producthunt.com/ 
The Mom Test https://a.co/d/aKmFP9x 
Digital Marketing for Dummies https://a.co/d/dTnKQtj 
Get Backed https://a.co/d/3n0EEJT

Alec was a 22 year old immigrant who launched his very first online business that did $700,000 in just 3 months.

The wildest part is he started the company back in college with a co-founder and 0 money.

We launched it in March and by the end of March we had almost nearly half of our school signed up to use our product.

And so that was our first kind of like, whoa.

I tracked down Alec in 1 of the coolest offices to dive into his entrepreneurial story and learn about the many bumps he had along

Every time I wake up, like my neck sores so much, I end up just like putting these 2 bean bags together and just gonna lie down and sleep.

For example, in school, he couldn't even land a job despite interviewing with hundreds of different companies.

And as international students, we face immigration, visas, and legal issues.

So to avoid getting kicked out of the U.S.

He decided to start his own business with a college friend.

They spotted a gap and built a quick solution which landed them as a top 4 product on Product Hunt and with interest from a venture capital firm.

In this video, Alec breaks down exactly how they went from 0 to $700,000 in just 3 months, all the specific tools, resources, and websites they used and recommend for other startups, and scrappy ways to use a tiny marketing budget, but still blow up and get tons of customers.

We're about to see 1 of the coolest offices in all of downtown Austin.

We're going to meet Alec and tell us more about how he started

I started the company a year ago when I was 22.

And what problem does your company solve?

A4i is a research workflow platform that helps researchers manage all of their citations, references, research papers, and conduct very easily literature reviews using AI.

At the core group of customers we want to serve is academia researcher, phd candidates, student student masters, or even professors and post-doctorates.

You were a top product on product hunt, a top product on app sumo, and now you just got venture capital backing.

I want to say it started as a student project.

I just graduated but it started out as a student project for a pitch competition me and my co-founder that we started to attend in January, January 2023 and the grand prize was 10000 dollars and that pitch was in April so I had 4 months to come up with the product, bring that to fruition to prove that to get traction, pitch it, and win.

So the idea started when I think at that point, OpenNI, GPT-3 became a very big thing around like January of last year.

So we kind of just sat down for 2 months just okay let's just learn the technology, let's create multiple different variations of product in different aspects.

So the first shape of the product, it was actually called Code Assist AI.

I wanna leverage AI technology, in this case, OpenAI, to help students have a easier way to write code, to help them with their economics and data science projects.

And then moving forward, okay, let's expand this further.

And so 1 of the biggest problems that we stumbled across was students and researchers spent a lot of time having to read through the research materials, read through the essays, the research papers for professional serious researchers that's the terminology is called doing literature reviews.

We finished that MVP, the minimum viable product in the end of February.

So we spent a month, me and my co-founder just kind of code through it away and by a month later by the end of March we have almost nearly half of our school signed up to use our product and so that was our first kind of like whoa we didn't expect that at all we set a goal okay like we want 100 users to sign up and use it.

At the end of the month, we have like over 500.

And that was like around half of our school, because we had a very small school, keep that in mind.

And so at that point, we're like, holy crap.

This should have been just a student project.

It triggers something in you that kind of like you're bringing real value to users, students, and researchers in that moment in time.

you first come to the US and get the idea that you wanted to do a startup?

I first arrived in the US in 2019 to come study in the US at Lawrence University.

It's a very small liberal arts college based in Appleton Wisconsin and as international students we face immigration visas and legal issues like to be able to maintain, to continue staying in the U.S.

Had to get a sponsor or like an employer.

Probably like 3, 4 jobs all at the same time.

1 of the biggest jobs I take pride in is a student tutor.

And so we won our university's competition.

What happened at the pitch competition and then what?

At that point, I was actually very ambitious.

We somehow made it through and I got both ideas to the pitch competition.

Like 4 months of hard work, where both ideas lost out the window.

So I couldn't get a job to be able to continue to be in the US and I lost this student competition the student pitch competition that would give me like a little bit more money to kind of live a couple of my expenses.

So I came to the conclusion there's an option.

Second is incorporate this idea, this company, or to incorporate a 4i, this current product, into a company.

So we're kind of like, you know what, we came this far.

We spent 4 months of blood and sweat, but 4 months think of like no sleep just grind.

And how long how much money did you put into it how long did you

how long did it take to come up with the idea?

When we decided that we want to build this company full-time we kind of chip in what we had and we had around 10,000 less than $10,000 to sustain ourselves and finance the company once we graduated.

In graduation up until July we wanted to launch on product hunt because I think that's a very popular way to get immediate traction and to validate the product further, reiterate.

We literally just, our full energy was in product launch.

Reply to every single comment, to reply to every single feedback, record all of those feedback, to iterate, to watch the servers or whether it crashes, if it crashes, what are the bugs that we need to fix.

All of that within the span of 48 hours, I crashed afterwards by the way, but that intention, that energy and that focus ultimately got us ranked fourth product of the day.

Little no marketing dollars, little no bigger backings.

Getting that fourth product was like, it was worth it, like wow.

That's when a VC Sputnik ATX Their early stage 1 based on what Austin, Texas here we are now They took notice they message us and this landed in my junk box a junk email by the way as as a customer asking like hey this product is really cool how did you guys build it we replied further and that engagement further and further on and at some point they says hey I'm a associate at this BC I have a little more questions on how you guys build this product like can you like answer the questions and do you guys mind like answering it.

I replied back hey I'm having to nerd out on our journey on how we build this product with you But let's just do it over a call, rather than like us like going back and forth on email.

I think that would be a better use of both of our time.

But then 2 days later, I got this call on my phone from this unknown number message, a text message right afterwards.

We wanna tell you guys that you guys are it.

Please call us back when it's convenient.

And I showed it to my co-founder and we were like, what the heck?

And we just called the number back and it was the managing partner of Sputnik ATX.

He just gave us like a quick congratulations and a rundown.

We love to accept you guys into our Accelerator program and write us our very first investment of $100,000 and we're like keeping our cool like oh like this is great news thank you so much we look forward to starting the program and be in coming back to you guys office and work with you guys to grow the company like thank you for giving us opportunity we closed and we screamed yeah like that was like we made it moment yeah but at the same time like now it's not a made it moment right Because getting that funding is the turning point.

Honestly, we were laughed at, we were made fun of, people doubted it.

They kind of gave us an office to work out of.

They give you the meaty funding, but they keep you on a ramen diet.

We have like, if We continue down, we have a bunch of meeting rooms, where we kind of have if we're on an investor call or just meeting clients.

A big bookshelf where we're gonna store all of our books that we read as founders.

A lot of teachings on how to build companies and

Can you pick your 3 favorite books or the 3 books that have impacted you the most?

Honestly, it taught me how to properly interview all of our users and it taught me like the number 1 rule actually is to never talk about your product and actually just start with tell me about your day-to-day in your work and what do you do and then from there you can kind of pinpoint into the problems and guide them into the areas that you want to talk about.

Right, make it about the user in their in their day not about you and your product.

I think the next one's gonna be digital marketing.

It gave me a very comprehensive list and instructions and explanations on all different types of marketing tactics.

And actually gave me the, helped me choose the first 5 marketing strategies that I put my first $5,000 in.

I think I'm just going to go with get back.

Get back what gave me the exact recipe, how to build a pitch deck that helped me raise over half a million dollars in venture capital funding.

Yep, so gotta read this to build a really awesome deck that attracts VCs attention.

I haven't been through as much compared to this guy.

I work, I don't know, 100 hours a week as much as I can.

And then here is where we do our daily, no, weekly meetup.

You guys are right there and then there are other startups in the same program that are here as well Or you guys are just the only ones in

here until right now It's just us but sometimes like we have other portfolio companies do drop by they work here right but since it's a Friday night Friday evening everybody's gonna

it's just me and his co-founder over there Ryan did out here we love to see

yeah yeah okay cool can we maybe see the where you where you take your naps

sure sure sure let's go on So it's actually right back over there.

Alright, so act as if it's a long day, You're just going to go grab a quick nap.

Which 1 do you, you go on the floor or where do you go?

But every time I wake up, like my neck sores so much.

I end up just like putting these 2 bean bags together and just gonna lie down and sleep.

I think he's wired in as Mark Zuckerberg said it.

When you're first hearing about AppSumo and this deal with Alex is telling you about what are you thinking and what's going through your head.

I do run out of leads or potential customers that is willing to spend 5 minutes of their time to talk with us.

And so AppSumo came out a very good timing of us running out of people to talk to.

It's AppSumo and the users on AppSumo called SumoLinks, right, Is that how you guys call it?

Sumo-links are notoriously known for being very active and engaging to the products that they like.

And so we're like, That's what we wanted.

And we chatted with I think Alex from AppSumo about how we can do a partnership together.

We came to, we finalized a partnership that to launch on AppSumo, put us in front of all these users, and that's how we started the feedback loop.

So let's say when a user buy a product, after like a week, a month, and 6 months, like the 1 month mark, 6 month mark, we would send out like an email to ask them for feedback.

To ask them about, hey, how's the product's been working for you?

Like, is there any way that we can improve it?

And we ask the right questions to get that feedback.

So there's a lot of mechanisms in place that make it very easy for a user to give us feedback and I don't find that many companies that does that so I think like that's 1 of our advantage to be able to continue that reiteration cycle.

It blew up more successful than we ever thought and dreamed of.

And yeah, so the revenue side, like top 10 hottest selling products, $700,000 in revenue, that was a subsidiary goal.

But I think like that, kind of like, I think there's another lesson right there.

Like when you don't focus on revenue and focus on building the best product and customers, the revenue actually comes to you.

And yeah, I didn't realize at that point.

How do you think about the importance of getting customers and then incorporating their feedback into the product.

Well, I think at the end of the day, right, any company that offers anything, whether that's a product or a service, has to bring value.

We need to find an idea that brings enough value or create enough value and solve a real problem for them to pay us.

And so for us as a young startup starting out we are in the process of exploration to build a solution that's worth offering to all of our customers.


Speaker 0: Alec was a 22 year old immigrant who launched his very first online business that did $700,000 in just 3 months. The wildest part is he started the company back in college with a co-founder and 0 money.

Speaker 1: We launched it in March and by the end of March we had almost nearly half of our school signed up to use our product. And so that was our first kind of like, whoa. At that

Speaker 0: point, we're like, holy crap. I tracked down Alec in 1 of the coolest offices to dive into his entrepreneurial story and learn about the many bumps he had along

Speaker 1: the way. Every time I wake up, like my neck sores so much, I end up just like putting these 2 bean bags together and just gonna lie down and sleep.

Speaker 0: For example, in school, he couldn't even land a job despite interviewing with hundreds of different companies.

Speaker 1: And as international students, we face immigration, visas, and legal issues.

Speaker 0: How many did you apply to

Speaker 1: you think? I applied to over 500.

Speaker 0: So to avoid getting kicked out of the U.S. He decided to start his own business with a college friend. They spotted a gap and built a quick solution which landed them as a top 4 product on Product Hunt and with interest from a venture capital firm. In this video, Alec breaks down exactly how they went from 0 to $700,000 in just 3 months, all the specific tools, resources, and websites they used and recommend for other startups, and scrappy ways to use a tiny marketing budget, but still blow up and get tons of customers.

Speaker 1: We close and we scream. Yeah! We made it.

Speaker 0: Okay, we're downtown. We're about to see 1 of the coolest offices in all of downtown Austin. We're going to meet Alec and tell us more about how he started

Speaker 1: it. Mitchell. There he is. How are you doing? What's up, boss?

Good to see you. Dude. Thanks for making the time. Dude, this is cool. I like the office.

Welcome. And let's explore the office. I'm Alec. I'm the co-founder of A4i. I turned 23 this year.

I started the company a year ago when I was 22. And what problem does your company solve? A4i is a research workflow platform that helps researchers manage all of their citations, references, research papers, and conduct very easily literature reviews using AI.

Speaker 0: Is this academic research? Is this business research? Like what type of research?

Speaker 1: At the core group of customers we want to serve is academia researcher, phd candidates, student student masters, or even professors and post-doctorates.

Speaker 0: You were a top product on product hunt, a top product on app sumo, and now you just got venture capital backing. How did this all start?

Speaker 1: I want to say it started as a student project. I was still in school last year. I just graduated but it started out as a student project for a pitch competition me and my co-founder that we started to attend in January, January 2023 and the grand prize was 10000 dollars and that pitch was in April so I had 4 months to come up with the product, bring that to fruition to prove that to get traction, pitch it, and win. That was the roadmap. So the idea started when I think at that point, OpenNI, GPT-3 became a very big thing around like January of last year.

So we kind of just sat down for 2 months just okay let's just learn the technology, let's create multiple different variations of product in different aspects. So the first shape of the product, it was actually called Code Assist AI. I wanna leverage AI technology, in this case, OpenAI, to help students have a easier way to write code, to help them with their economics and data science projects. And then moving forward, okay, let's expand this further. What else can we do?

And so 1 of the biggest problems that we stumbled across was students and researchers spent a lot of time having to read through the research materials, read through the essays, the research papers for professional serious researchers that's the terminology is called doing literature reviews. We finished that MVP, the minimum viable product in the end of February. So we spent a month, me and my co-founder just kind of code through it away and by a month later by the end of March we have almost nearly half of our school signed up to use our product and so that was our first kind of like whoa we didn't expect that at all we set a goal okay like we want 100 users to sign up and use it. At the end of the month, we have like over 500. And that was like around half of our school, because we had a very small school, keep that in mind.

And so at that point, we're like, holy crap. What was it supposed to be like? I don't know. This should have been just a student project. It triggers something in you that kind of like you're bringing real value to users, students, and researchers in that moment in time.

I was like, wow, okay, let's keep going. Let's give them momentum up. When did

Speaker 0: you first come to the US and get the idea that you wanted to do a startup?

Speaker 1: I first arrived in the US in 2019 to come study in the US at Lawrence University. It's a very small liberal arts college based in Appleton Wisconsin and as international students we face immigration visas and legal issues like to be able to maintain, to continue staying in the U.S. Had to get a sponsor or like an employer. I continued applying to jobs. I couldn't.

I couldn't even land an interview.

Speaker 0: How many did you apply to, you think?

Speaker 1: I applied to over 500. I think a lot more. Probably in the thousands. I lost count. The way I did it was just hustle.

I worked multiple jobs. Probably like 3, 4 jobs all at the same time. And I also did some summer internship. 1 of the biggest jobs I take pride in is a student tutor. And so we won our university's competition.

What happened at the pitch competition and then what? At that point, I was actually very ambitious. I had 2 startup ideas. We somehow made it through and I got both ideas to the pitch competition. And so the pitch happened.

We lost. Both ideas. Oh no. Like 4 months of hard work, where both ideas lost out the window. Devastating.

Sure. So I couldn't get a job to be able to continue to be in the US and I lost this student competition the student pitch competition that would give me like a little bit more money to kind of live a couple of my expenses.

Speaker 0: Yeah I

Speaker 1: was like this fucking sucks man. So I came to the conclusion there's an option. 1, go back to Vietnam. Second is incorporate this idea, this company, or to incorporate a 4i, this current product, into a company. So we have these 2 options, which 1?

So we're kind of like, you know what, we came this far. We spent 4 months of blood and sweat, but 4 months think of like no sleep just grind. And how long how much money did you put into it how long did you

Speaker 0: how long did it take to come up with the idea?

Speaker 1: When we decided that we want to build this company full-time we kind of chip in what we had and we had around 10,000 less than $10,000 to sustain ourselves and finance the company once we graduated. In graduation up until July we wanted to launch on product hunt because I think that's a very popular way to get immediate traction and to validate the product further, reiterate. We didn't sleep for 48 hours. We literally just, our full energy was in product launch. Reply to every single comment, to reply to every single feedback, record all of those feedback, to iterate, to watch the servers or whether it crashes, if it crashes, what are the bugs that we need to fix.

All of that within the span of 48 hours, I crashed afterwards by the way, but that intention, that energy and that focus ultimately got us ranked fourth product of the day. Little no marketing dollars, little no bigger backings. Getting that fourth product was like, it was worth it, like wow. We did it with sheer will

Speaker 0: right

Speaker 1: and just like hard work. That's when a VC Sputnik ATX Their early stage 1 based on what Austin, Texas here we are now They took notice they message us and this landed in my junk box a junk email by the way as as a customer asking like hey this product is really cool how did you guys build it we replied further and that engagement further and further on and at some point they says hey I'm a associate at this BC I have a little more questions on how you guys build this product like can you like answer the questions and do you guys mind like answering it. I replied back hey I'm having to nerd out on our journey on how we build this product with you But let's just do it over a call, rather than like us like going back and forth on email. I think that would be a better use of both of our time. Let's just hop on a quick call.

But then 2 days later, I got this call on my phone from this unknown number message, a text message right afterwards. And it says, hey Alec, this is Sputnik. We wanna tell you guys that you guys are it. Please call us back when it's convenient. Nice.

I was stunned, right? And I showed it to my co-founder and we were like, what the heck? And we just called the number back and it was the managing partner of Sputnik ATX. He just gave us like a quick congratulations and a rundown. Hey, you guys are in.

We love to accept you guys into our Accelerator program and write us our very first investment of $100,000 and we're like keeping our cool like oh like this is great news thank you so much we look forward to starting the program and be in coming back to you guys office and work with you guys to grow the company like thank you for giving us opportunity we closed and we screamed yeah like that was like we made it moment yeah but at the same time like now it's not a made it moment right Because getting that funding is the turning point. Okay, we're getting serious. Honestly, we were laughed at, we were made fun of, people doubted it. They kind of gave us an office to work out of. Little mecho.

This is our kitchen. We have a bunch of snacks over there. All as a perk. We have a bunch of ramen. Nice.

Speaker 0: They give you the meaty funding, but they keep you on a ramen diet.

Speaker 1: We have like, if We continue down, we have a bunch of meeting rooms, where we kind of have if we're on an investor call or just meeting clients. And this is where our office is. A big bookshelf where we're gonna store all of our books that we read as founders. A lot of teachings on how to build companies and

Speaker 0: all that. Can you pick your 3 favorite books or the 3 books that have impacted you the most?

Speaker 1: The first 1 is The Montage. Honestly, it taught me how to properly interview all of our users and it taught me like the number 1 rule actually is to never talk about your product and actually just start with tell me about your day-to-day in your work and what do you do and then from there you can kind of pinpoint into the problems and guide them into the areas that you want to talk about.

Speaker 0: Right, make it about the user in their in their day not about you and your product.

Speaker 1: Never pitch, never pitch your product.

Speaker 0: Okay, mom test.

Speaker 1: I think the next one's gonna be digital marketing. It gave me a very comprehensive list and instructions and explanations on all different types of marketing tactics. And actually gave me the, helped me choose the first 5 marketing strategies that I put my first $5,000 in. Yeah. Last 1.

I think I'm just going to go with get back. Get

Speaker 0: back. Okay.

Speaker 1: What'd you learn here? Get back what gave me the exact recipe, how to build a pitch deck that helped me raise over half a million dollars in venture capital funding. Yep, so gotta read this to build a really awesome deck that attracts VCs attention. ShoeDoc, Phil Knight, gotta read it. This guy went through so much struggle.

I haven't been through as much compared to this guy. I can still keep going. This is where I work over there. That's where I sit. I work, I don't know, 100 hours a week as much as I can.

And then here is where we do our daily, no, weekly meetup. This is cool. Between us and our investors. Yeah, So the view is always fantastic. We can see the river right down there

Speaker 0: You guys are right there and then there are other startups in the same program that are here as well Or you guys are just the only ones in

Speaker 1: here until right now It's just us but sometimes like we have other portfolio companies do drop by they work here right but since it's a Friday night Friday evening everybody's gonna

Speaker 0: it's just me and his co-founder over there Ryan did out here we love to see

Speaker 1: it that's what you got to do

Speaker 0: yeah yeah okay cool can we maybe see the where you where you take your naps

Speaker 1: sure sure sure let's go on So it's actually right back over there. Right. So let's go ahead. Yup. So this is the room.

Look at this.

Speaker 0: Yeah. Alright, so act as if it's a long day, You're just going to go grab a quick nap. Which 1 do you, you go on the floor or where do you go?

Speaker 1: Oh, okay. So at first I usually use the hammock. Yeah. But every time I wake up, like my neck sores so much. Yeah.

I end up just like putting these 2 bean bags together and just gonna lie down and sleep. Okay, sweet.

Speaker 0: I think we have what we need. Do you want to give your co-founder a

Speaker 1: shout out? Yep. So that's my co-founder right there. He's just working. Working coding away as usual.

Nice. I think he's wired in as Mark Zuckerberg said it.

Speaker 0: When you're first hearing about AppSumo and this deal with Alex is telling you about what are you thinking and what's going through your head.

Speaker 1: At some point we reach a plateau. I do run out of leads or potential customers that is willing to spend 5 minutes of their time to talk with us. And so AppSumo came out a very good timing of us running out of people to talk to. It's AppSumo and the users on AppSumo called SumoLinks, right, Is that how you guys call it? Yeah.

Sumo-links are notoriously known for being very active and engaging to the products that they like. And so we're like, That's what we wanted. And we chatted with I think Alex from AppSumo about how we can do a partnership together. Like, hey, can we partner? Like we have this product.

And I think we came to a conclusion. We came to, we finalized a partnership that to launch on AppSumo, put us in front of all these users, and that's how we started the feedback loop. So let's say when a user buy a product, after like a week, a month, and 6 months, like the 1 month mark, 6 month mark, we would send out like an email to ask them for feedback. To ask them about, hey, how's the product's been working for you? Like, is there any way that we can improve it?

And we ask the right questions to get that feedback. So there's a lot of mechanisms in place that make it very easy for a user to give us feedback and I don't find that many companies that does that so I think like that's 1 of our advantage to be able to continue that reiteration cycle. It blew up more successful than we ever thought and dreamed of. And yeah, so the revenue side, like top 10 hottest selling products, $700,000 in revenue, that was a subsidiary goal. But I think like that, kind of like, I think there's another lesson right there.

Like when you don't focus on revenue and focus on building the best product and customers, the revenue actually comes to you. Yeah. And yeah, I didn't realize at that point.

Speaker 0: How do you think about the importance of getting customers and then incorporating their feedback into the product.

Speaker 1: Well, I think at the end of the day, right, any company that offers anything, whether that's a product or a service, has to bring value. And as a startup, that's the mission. We need to find an idea that brings enough value or create enough value and solve a real problem for them to pay us. And so for us as a young startup starting out we are in the process of exploration to build a solution that's worth offering to all of our customers.

See all AppSumo transcripts on Youtube

22-Year-Old Immigrant Made $700K in 3 Months with AI