What's your personal background? What motivated you to start your own company? 

I’m a 19-years-old guy from Buenos Aires, Argentina.

I study Business Economics at university and work on Failory as a side-project. 

I started it +3 years ago along with a partner, who stepped aside from the project +1 year ago.

At the time of starting it, I was 15 years old. I really enjoyed reading stuff about startups and businesses, particularly the bootstrapped ones. I’d spend hours reading Indie Hackers’ interviews and Reddit communities. 

Inspired by Indie Hackers’ business model and after realizing there was a lack of information about failed startups, I decided to build the Indie Hackers for failures.

‍

‍

What no code tools did you use to build Failory and what purpose did each play in the final product?

I used Webflow to build the site. I didn’t have any knowledge of the tool and, at that time, there weren't a lot of articles and tutorials about it. However, I somehow managed to get it done in one or two weeks.

Without Webflow, Failory wouldn’t have existed. I had (and still have) 0 coding knowledge. I hated WordPress. I have had bad experiences with Wix and Squarespace. Webflow, therefore, played a key role in Failory’s origin. 

Nowadays, I’m using other no-code tools, including Jetboost, to build dynamic filters and search bars within Webflow, Placid, to automatically generate social sharing images, Zapier, to automate some repetitive work, and Airtable, for some specific projects.

What were the initial costs to get Failory off the ground? 

Something like $40, which were:

• Hosting
• Domain
• Freelance writer

And maybe something else which I don’t remember. 

Webflow was free for the first 3 months. The team generously gave us that discount.

Then costs stayed at around $16/mo, which were Webflow’s CMS hosting. We didn’t use any other tool for a long time.

What was the process of building your product from idea to launching?

It was amazing. Despite knowing little about Webflow (I wrote about that here) and having 0 programming knowledge, I was able to learn the tool and build the website pretty fast.

The design of Failory’s first version was really similar to Indie Hackers’ one. The site contained a homepage with the interviews with failed startup founders, a simple blog with 5-10 articles, and a FAQ page.

Getting the interviews was the most difficult part. It was hard to convince 9 strangers to answer some questions in a Gdoc about their failed businesses to be published on a completely new website with 0 traffic. 

But after reaching out to many people, we made it and launched on Product Hunt, Hacker News, etc, with 9 interviews and an ugly design.

Despite this, the project had a successful launch, receiving +10k users in the first week and ending up in the #1 position of the day in Product Hunt.

How do you attract users?

Nowadays, it’s mostly through SEO. +80% of the traffic comes from Google, as many of our articles and interviews are ranking well for high-volume keywords.

Another big part of the traffic comes from communities and social networks. Finally, some people come directly to Failory (I guess by searching failory.com).

60,000+ users visit Failory every month, viewing +180,000 pages. Many of these people convert into email subscribers, so we have a newsletter list of +7,800 subscribers.

What are the biggest challenges you've overcome building Failory? 

If you mean the technical side, building the dynamic filters for Failory’s interviews and articles was incredibly frustrating. I followed a tutorial that was hard to understand and the filters would work and soon break.

I’m currently going through the process of creating the filters again, but this time I’ve used Jetboost. Completely recommend it.

How much money is Failory making per month?

It varies a lot, but between $1,700 and $3,000. Through three sources of income:

• Sponsorships: We have ads on our website and newsletter.
• Affiliate commissions: We recommend tools and get a commission from their sales.
• Digital products: We’ve launched an eBook which has brought +$3k in sales.

What's your advice for non-technical people who want to start a company? 

Forget about your “non-technical” tag.

Nowadays, you can build almost anything with no-code tools and creativity. Being non-technical is no longer a limit.

My advice for all founders is to focus on achieving product-market fit. I used to hate this concept, until I started researching and reading about it. Then, writing the eBook on the topic made me realize it was the main priority for every founder.

No growth efforts matter if you don’t have a solid product that people in a specific market are willing to pay for. Focus on building that product, no matter how many pivots are required.

What are your future plans for Failory?

I’ve recently written about my goals and projects in 2021.

In summary, I have two goals:

• Grow Failory’s income to $10k/mo.
• Grow Failory’s organic traffic to 150k users/mo.

To do so, I’ll be working on 5 projects:

• Re-building and re-designing the website.
• Publishing a ton of (programmatic) SEO articles on our blog.
• Building Cemeteries for Amazon, Google, etc (their failed products and startups).
• Keep building new digital products.
• Move on to ConvertKit and improve the newsletter.

How do you think the rise of no code tools will impact entrepreneurship? 

No-code is still really little compared to what I think it’ll be in some years. Many people still believe you need to code to build a website or an app. 

As long as no-code tools become mainstream, I think there’ll be many more non-technical people getting into entrepreneurship and launching their own digital businesses. 

No-code, in some way, democratizes (online) entrepreneurship.

Is there anything else you'd like to add?

Enjoyed writing this a lot! Let me know if I’m missing anything or if there’s any specific topic you’d like me to write further about.