#10: A side hustle that got acquired for 6-figures in less than three months

Most great startups are a product of experimentation of crazy ideas. If you have startup aspirations, a side hustle can be a great way to experiment. And with good traction and potential, you can sell your side hustle like our hustlers today. 

Bradley Vangelder and Dries Augustyns built a side hustle while in college and got it acquired for six figures, all in less than three months!🤯

🤩Built the product in 1 month

👟Identified the niche of Sneaker sellers to maximize ROI

💰Sold the product when it had good traction

A side hustle that got acquired for 6-figures in less than three months

Bradley Vangeldar hails from Belgium with a background in graphic design. As a high school student, he aspired to be an entrepreneur and build things. To follow his dreams, he decided to take up Computer Science at his University. And in the four years of college, he got skilled in coding, worked part-time in the food industry, built two side projects and got one of them acquired! 

One side project sparked the idea for another

Bradley built various projects during his first two years of college to improve his skills. In the third year, he had his first startup idea. It was named Kwotet. It was an online social platform where everyone could share quotes from their favourite books. 

Before going all in, he wanted to validate his idea. He wanted to build a process where users sign up for a waitlist. When he opens the waitlist, users should get invite codes, and once the codes are verified, they get access to the app.

Sounds simple? Well, it took him around 60 hours to develop it. No service could do it faster. He thought it was too much work for something so simple. He spoke to a few friends who built similar projects or were working on startups. They all had the same use case and spent around 70-120 hours building it.

And that's when he decided to build Lancerno, a "waitlist as a service" product.

Launching a product to acquisition, all in 3 months

Bradley’s idea had much potential, but he felt he needed a partner. Any builder or startup founder would take only 15 seconds to set up a page with a waitlist, configure automatic emails from their email ids and do code validation upon launch. It was an idea that solved his problem as well as other people he knew.

That's when Dries Augustyns joined him. Dries was an acquaintance from school with a strong entrepreneurial mindset and had built a strong portfolio of products. Both found a synergy and started building Lancerno.

"We came together during school hours to brainstorm our idea. We came up with features that would put us at number one. We worked on the development till 3 AM; we were just so excited to get this product launched."

In a month, the product was launched. Their go-to-market strategy was not very elaborate but effective. They reached out to many communities of builders & founders and got good initial traction. But soon, they realized that the product had an inbuilt churn. While they had paid users, the churn rate was very high. A waitlist is not something users would always need.

They decided to look for a niche target market where the churn rate could be lesser. They found it with Limited edition sneaker sellers. Such sneakers are always sold via waitlists, and these sellers always found it difficult to set it up. So they started targeting the community of high-end sneakers. It became a hit, and soon they had 100+ customers sending 20,000 codes per month.

This was all happening during their final year of college. As they had picked challenging companies for their internship, they were getting very little time to work on Lancerno and eventually they lost the momentum.

But the users were still there. They decided to find someone with the same spark by selling their project. And Microacquire came to their rescue. Within a few days of listing the product, they started getting offers. Soon they sold the project for 6-figures🤑 (Any monetary numbers cannot be shared due to the non-disclosure agreement clause in the acquisition).

"Sell before your product dies. Make sure to profit from all the gains."

In three months, the two boys went from building to getting their project acquired. An experience that taught them a lot and will be very beneficial in their future entrepreneurial endeavours.

Hustlers Insights of the Week

Bradley is now working in consulting while he continues to build ​side projects. He wants to get some financial stability before venturing into a startup full-time. The side projects are helping him to keep exploring ideas and ventures that could potentially become startups. He is thinking of reviving Kwotet too. Dries has gone on to start an email marketing automation company called Plunk.

👀Observe your daily life to get ideas: If you ever feel that you are not able to get ideas to pursue a side hustle, you should start observing the problems you face. The chances of other people facing similar problems are very high. You are also more motivated to solve the problem and have a sustainable side hustle. 

🔍Find a niche audience: When you build a side hustle, getting users is the most critical and daunting task, especially when you don't have an audience or are building in public. But you can always find a way. 

💫It is ok to lose spark: Sometimes you may start a side hustle with lots of enthusiasm but lose interest in it eventually. Side Hustles are low commitment and low risk, you can stop them anytime you want and go on to start another. Or you can find a new home for your side hustle where its potential can be realized by getting acquired

Did you learn something new about side hustles reading this? If yes, share it with a friend to increase the surface area of knowledge so that more people can know how to make money.

Also, know anyone (who is making money from their side hustle while having a full-time job) we should feature? Let us know by replying, and we will get chatting!

Want to get started with your side hustle? Check out our initiatives.

Build: A 4 weeks cohort to build and launch a side project.

BuildOnChain: Learn, build & launch a Web3 side hustle in 5 Weeks

BuildCamp Goa: Build a side project while vacationing with like-minded individuals and seasoned hustlers.