Turning The Idea Of Reusable Micro-Apps Into A $1.2M Business

John Rush

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Published: October 24th, 2022

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About
Business

John Rush

Founder, MarsX

$100K

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

MarsX

marsx.dev

from İstanbul, Стамбул, Турция

started February 2020

$100,000

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

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Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?

Alright, first and foremost I’m an entrepreneur. I’ve been building startups for 15 years. Mostly, the tech side of them. 3 of my startups became successful and 1 is now at the top of its niche globally.

And, of course, I’m a CEO and a co-founder of MarsX Inc. Mars is a low-code development platform with micro-apps that saves founders about 90% of the time because most features can simply be reused from the Micro-App store. There are exactly 261 projects on the platform at the moment.

Mars is an open-source platform for making web and mobile apps. It gives you flexibility on demand. You get access to the custom code only when you need to implement a specific feature. As for the regular functionalities, such as login page, payments, cart, dropdown menu, footer, photo galleries, and profile page, you can plug them into your startup with little-to-zero coding knowledge.

This makes Mars the perfect tool for making MVP: you are building fast most of the time, and you go to custom code only to make unique changes.

What's the backstory and how did you come up with the idea of Mars?

The idea came to me quite naturally out of my own pain that I was experiencing building my startups. Every time I’d start something I’d find myself basically redoing the same routine things over and over again. Whenever I tried to reuse pieces of code from previous projects, I’d end up with a Frankenstein which was neither working nor looking good. Traditional development is not built to be convenient, it’s built to crash your soul and keep you in your parents’ garage. I honestly wanted to get out of my “garage” and make things simpler for others on the way.

On average, every project takes about 12 months to launch. And of those 12 months, 90% of the developer's time goes towards building simple routine things, and only 10% of what is going to make a difference.

I tried to work out a no-code solution but it didn’t sustain me because I’d eventually hit a ceiling on each one of those frameworks and would have to scratch my work and start over with custom code. The next logical thing was to build something on my own. I didn’t really want to build anything for the market, at first. I needed a tool to make my own work more effective and efficient. But since there were other people working with me, it was inevitable that I would show them this tool. And that was the birth of Mars.

It would allow us to reuse what we called micro-apps from project to project. We’ve been doing it for 2 years and more and more people would join and bring their projects to the platform, as well.

It’s hard to define success but it’s not difficult to define progress.

Take us through the process of building the product.

Sleep and startups are not working well together. I wasn’t getting any for pretty much 3 months straight while I was building the first version of Mars. Not the healthiest approach, really. It paid out in the end and gave me a great perspective of what I wanted to achieve and how. Would I recommend it to anybody? Absolutely not.

It wasn’t even close to what Mars is now, though. Very simple solution, yet feasible to validate my idea. And I was absolutely sure it wouldn’t work. Hell, everyone around was convinced it wouldn’t. I started in September and finished the first version in December. The first project was built on Mars in early January. And, surprisingly, it looked very, very promising. It was simple and fast. Obviously, a lot of things were missing and even more, could be improved. So, I got more people on the team and we went on building the second version of Mars. It was our community-shared pet project. This is also when the idea of a community-based platform was born. It took us an additional 9 months to build Mars 2.0. The next iteration took about a year and involved about 15 people. Now the team is still growing with a dedicated product, marketing, and growing team in place.

Describe the process of launching the business.

Getting users was quite a difficult job, not surprisingly. We worked with many developers but they immediately rejected learning a new tool. There were lots of concerns regarding the security of the platform, and the uptime, and they were simply content with the tools they had. I had to go to each one of my friends individually and bug them until they caved and tried. Obviously, they had projects to work on and those were the first projects brought to the platform.

First, we onboarded friends then it was a matter of them telling everyone else. They were very skeptical at the beginning but once they had a chance to change it and add to it, Mars became theirs too, naturally, they wanted to make it great. It was the network that played a crucial role and helped us get amazing minds to work on Mars and contribute to it.

Since we had users pretty much from day one, we had to push hard. As I said before, the users were the driving force of Mars and there was no way to lay back and think and access. It pushed us forward all the time and, honestly, it’s quite hard to remember the point when it stopped being a pet project and became a company.

Once we tried to put a label on it, we’d always get one more project in. It was a pretty common establishment where developers would just build constantly, heads down. So, the first couple of years is kind of a blur. The first outside customer came later when we tried to push the whole thing out into the world for the first time.

We introduced a grant system and a few startups were adventurous enough to go with a no-name solution. Of course, we’ve offered an outrageously low price for what we were doing, especially compared to the prices of outsourcing companies in Norway. But yet again, it gave us an understanding that it works and people ended up pretty happy with the finished product.

Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?

As I mentioned before, word of mouth sustained us for a pretty long run. It works now, as well. I honestly think that for dev companies retention is not usually a problem. Founders spend tons of time and money on the dev solutions and leaving it all behind and going someplace else is soul-crushing. It’s difficult and very expensive and basically means that you have to start everything from the beginning.

In our experience, no customer has left and they are bringing more customers, and more projects, I guess it’s a good thing. Our main advantage was transparency, users that have come to build stayed to contribute, one project would pass it on to two more and the growth was organic yet pretty fast.

The business model behind all that was fairly simple, too. Mars is JavaScript based, yet it’s different and requires pretty great skills, the learning curve is not an easy one. The founders don’t usually have months to learn new technology and would rather ask somebody else to use it for them. There’s a dev market on Mars where you can find dedicated developers who know the platform inside out and can build virtually any project. Our profit comes from the commission on the service they provide.

Same happens with micro-apps. You have a developer and you need him to build a login page, feed, dropdown menu, etc. Would it be wise to waste his time on some basic features? Probably, now. There’re micro-apps that can cover your needs. Micro-apps are built and priced by the developers that built them, much like Wordpress plugins. Once they sell a micro-app to your project, we also get a commission. As simple as that.

We’ve tried paid advertising on social media and realized that we were there too early. No one is going to click on an unknown brand. So, now we focus on brand recognition and building credibility, doing podcasts and conferences, and other public appearances. It ultimately takes way longer but since we can’t really explain Mars in one sentence, we think it’s better to establish ourselves as experts, as disruptors, as those with exceptional experience and care for the future of innovation.

How are you doing today and what does the future look like?

I’d say it’s going pretty great. We have hundreds of projects on the platform, we’ve raised a seed round, and assembled an outstanding team of people with a great experience.

The next step here is to scale. We obviously need to narrow down our target market. So far it’s quite broad and it’s extremely difficult to target everyone even though we honestly think it’s going to be beneficial to pretty much anybody.

I think once our message is clear and tailored to the needs of one target group, it’ll be easier to go from there. When you manage to convince a few people that your product is what they were craving, they are going to spread it. We are working hard on it at this very moment and we are planning to double down on all our efforts toward this group once we figure it out. So, moving from the building mode to the growth mode.

Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

Absolutely! The life of a founder is a life of constant learning.

First and foremost, I learned to be brave. It is in people’s nature to critique, so there will be a lot of people trying to question you, judge you, and discourage you. Over the years I became pretty good at handling that but for someone who is just starting it can be difficult. So, you have to toughen up and not give up. If there weren’t people trying to change the world or even something small around them, we’d still live in caves. Being brave and moving past the critics is important. Don’t stop talking to people, though, God forbid. But try to attract more people like yourself, who are hungry for change, open-minded, and ready to join you eventually. Try to attract the right people early on, too. Because people then become more invested and treat your business like their own. This, of course, is if you are ready to share the equity. You give people the power of ownership and belonging, and that motivates way more than cash.

Another thing I’ve learned is to move fast. Iterating, testing, firing. Especially that last one. If you feel something is off, you’re probably right, and dragging it out for months is not going to do justice to anybody. Letting go is hard no matter what. I’m not a robot and this is a very emotional part of the job. But losing time and not getting the work done is worse.

What tools do you use for the business?

Other than Mars? I love Notion. Big fan! I think every B2B business should use it and compare oneself to it. It’s so sleek and simple.

There is also Discord, I like the way you can combine your channels and threads. And for the calls, we use Google Meet or Zoom, nothing too exciting there.

What would be the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?

For the podcasts, I love Peter Thiel. I remember one thing he said that blew my mind - “build something as if you're building a monopoly”. Monopolies are bad in many ways but they’re also good from the point of integration. Everything is integrated and working beautifully together like a well-oiled engine. And since everything is connected, it’s way easier to use, too.

Look at the iPhone, it’s much faster than the Android (I’ll get some haters at this point). This is because Apple has everything inside, it doesn’t have to talk to 100 vendors to agree on something. I recommend Peter Thiel’s book “Zero to one” to every founder.

Then, of course, there’s Gary Vaynerchuk. He’s really good at explaining how to get attention on the internet with simple actions. How to create an attractive persona, because as a founder that is what you need to do. People want to buy from people, not companies.

And one more is Paul Graham, he’s got a lot of great articles. When you read those you understand why YC startups are so successful. Since he’s gone, it’s not the same anymore. I believe it was his show.

What’s your advice for the other entrepreneurs who want to start or are just starting?

Disconnect yourself from the fear of failure. It’s like an extreme sport. Like skiing. You’re probably going to hit a tree on your way. So, stop thinking about it and focus on the way. It’s hard to define success but it’s not difficult to define progress. Start moving and set milestones: come up with an idea, talk to potential customers, build an MVP, etc. It will also help with your motivation because in the startup world you may not see success for a while and acknowledging the progress you’re making is important.

Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?

Yes, we are always on the lookout for developers. We need people who know Javascript, who have an eye for design, and an entrepreneurial mind. We are now looking for a designer who will help us create a world-class experience for developers.

You should join our Discord channel to see the open positions and find out the news: