From Dreams to Reality With Typedream: Sveta Bay & Dan Kulkov

Sveta Bay is the co-founder of MakerBox.club and Founderpal.ai. She is an indie entrepreneur and digital nomad. She has a newsletter that features weekly marketing case studies from profitable Indie Founders. She has launched a new product called Marketing Mega-Prompts which is a collection of 40 incredible ChatGPT prompts for solopreneurs. She has grown her Twitter followers from 0 to 13K in 10 months. She has deconstructed her Twitter growth from Day 1 in a huge Notion file. She has tips to be consistent, secrets to go viral, and lessons from mistakes.

About Sveta

It’s funny that I’m writing it during the flight from Kuala Lumpur to Chiang Mai. That quite accurately describes what being a digital nomad is. Me and my husband Dan (co-Founder of Makerbox) are traveling the world and building products for Indie Founders.

We don’t have a usual 9-5 schedule, an office, or calls with clients & team. There are only two of us building cool marketing things for Indie Founders.

A year ago, we learned about the Indie Entrepreneurship movement. The idea of working on yourself and making money online sounded too good to be true. So, we decided to make at least $1 online while working 9-5.

We both have a marketing background, so it didn’t take long to analyze the market, target audience & their problems, and brainstorm product ideas. The target was to launch a product that Indie Founders need in just 1 month.

We launched our first product - MakerBox Tools - in just one month and earned around $2K. That was a sign that we can go all-in into Indie Entrepreneurship.

I love this question! Usually, wannabe Indie Founders ask me about finding good ideas. But the key is not to start with ideas, solutions, or even problems.

The key is to start from choosing your niche, and especially choosing your target audience. With this approach, there’s no way to waste time. Even if your first product fails, you’ll get knowledge about the niche and audience. And it’ll take less time to launch a new product.

I recommend choosing a target audience that you’re already a part of. Researching and building something that you are already familiar with is much easier.

About MakerBox

MakerBox is a collection of marketing tools, resources, and services for Indie Founders. We have frameworks, courses, checklists, and guides that help to build a product that people need and then grow it to profitability.

Indie Founders usually have a tech background. They are good at building, but not good at marketing. As a result, there’re a lot of cases when they spend time building products, but then it appears that they can’t make money with it.

Our products are made especially for this audience. We focus on choosing the right product idea, and then growing it with zero and low-budget marketing tactics.

I can talk forever about it. But in short, the target of most Indie Founders is to become “Ramen Profitable” with their products. If you can make it happen, then you can quit your 9-5 job and focus on your product. So, the final target is freedom.

If you don’t focus on monetization and marketing, then there’s no way to reach it.

Also, if you don’t tell about your product, then you don’t have users. Why build something that nobody uses?

Marketing solves all these problems. Moreover, you don’t need to become a marketing expert or hire a marketer. You just need to understand the basics of research, positioning, and distribution. That is what our products help with.

I absolutely love this product. It’s made especially for busy Founders who don’t have time for interviews, big research, or brainstorming.

ChatGPT can easily be your marketing co-pilot if you use the prompts right. There’re too many bad prompts nowadays on Twitter & Google. It’s usually a non-personalized 2-sentence prompt that gives you some generic advice.

Our prompts are based on marketing frameworks and focus on giving personalized advice. Here’s one of our prompts to try and see the difference.

This prompt makes ChatGPT your personal CMO. It will help you find problems, generate possible solutions, and plan the execution.

CONTEXT:
You are CMO GPT, a professional digital marketer that helps Solopreneurs with growing their businesses.  You are a world-class expert in solving marketing problems for SaaS, content products, agencies, etc.

GOAL:
You will become my virtual CMO today. You need to help me solve my marketing problems. You will be responsible for problem-solving, prioritization, planning, and supporting my execution.

CRITERIA OF THE BEST CMO:
- You are specific and actionable. You don't use platitudes and wordy sentences.
- You prioritize quick wins and cost-effective campaigns. You know that I don't have a lot of time or budget.
- You always include unconventional and often overlooked marketing tactics for Solopreneurs. You are creative.
- You make the execution as easy for me as possible because you know I am bad at marketing. You help me with overlooked pieces of advice and holistic checklists.

STRUCTURE OF TODAY'S BRAINSTORMING
1. I will set the context of the brainstorming (done)
2. You will return a list of 20 possible marketing problems in my business
3. I will pick one marketing problem to focus on
4. You will generate 10 high-level marketing tactics to solve it
5. I will pick 1-3 tactics to proceed
6. You will give me an actionable execution plan with key steps
7. You will share 5 best practices and 5 common mistakes to help me with the execution
8. You will share a holistic checklist so I can review my work 

FORMAT OF OUR INTERACTION
- I will let you know when we can proceed to the next step. Don't go there without my command
- You will rely on the context of this brainstorming session at every step 

INFORMATION ABOUT ME:
- My business: I create actionable marketing resources for Solopreneurs (video courses, checklists, guides, templates, etc.)
- My value proposition: Solopreneurs gain clarity on how to their marketing better -> they achieve profitability sooner
- My target audience: Solopreneurs that build micro-saas, productized services, content products (courses, newsletters, etc.), mobile apps
- My product portfolio: My products range from $69 to $199. Most of them are self-paced, but we have some human-touch products (for example, send your landing page and get a video review in 24 hours)
- My current stage: I earn $5000 monthly. There are 2 people on my team (my wife and I)

We have 40 prompts like that to cover all the marketing aspects: marketing funnel, strategy, audience building, marketing operations, and content marketing.

About Typedream

I love Typedream! The simplicity helps not to overcomplicate landing pages and ship them fast. You don’t need to spend time thinking about color pallets or sections. There’re hundreds of good templates that you can start using right away.

Also, you can experiment fast. It takes minutes to change text, add buttons, or change the hero block.

I’m a Product Hunt fan and active user. Typedream was a Golden Kitty finalist, so it was a no-brainer decision to try it.

• Synced containers save a lot of time. We have around 10 products, and it would be painful to change the same blocks on every page.
• A lot of built-in free templates. You don’t need to search the internet to find something you need.

• Don’t overuse gradients. For sure, they are beautiful. But if there’re too many of them, it becomes a mess.
• Use templates. You can find a template for every use case.
• All problems can be solved with specifications. They are really good and detailed.

Good question. It feels like I had only small ideas that I sent to the team right away (the color of the divider, navbar, etc). Talking about big updates, I’d love to get tips on how to make a landing page faster (images format, and other tips).