Constantin is making a living creating market-ready MVPs

Meet Constantin.

Constantin is 22 years old and originally from Moldova (you might have to look it up).

When he finished high school, he moved to Denmark to study software engineering. After graduating he got his first tech job at a startup in his second semester.

While working at the startup Constantin was active on X and build some products on the side.

Currently he is running Refined - a development agency.

The story told by Constantin

The startup I worked for in Denmark went bankrupt in November 2023 and I got laid off. I decided it was the perfect time to pursue my entrepreneurial ambitions full-time. Refined was born.

The idea came from my own interests. I always loved to work on new ideas and build products from scratch. So, I started a development agency that helps other founders turn their ideas into an MVP (Minimum Viable Product).

I began writing my vision for it all through November to December 2023. This included a marketing plan, my offer, ICP (Ideal Customer Profile), workflow, etc. Looking back, I probably spent too much time in the planning phase, but it did help me get a better idea of what I wanted to do. It was basically what I ended up doing.

Around December 2023, I started contacting people I’ve worked with before. I contaced maybe a handful through DM’s on X and Discord server. I went straight to the point:

“Hey - I’m planning to start a development agency, focused on delivering MVPs. Do you know anyone that might be interested?”

I only reached out to people I had talked to before. If I was doing cold outreach, I would have done it differently.

That’s how I got my first customer. Although I charged a low price, I put in extra effort to deliver great results. I charged my very first customer $1000 for an MVP. It was a directory of tools. Check it out at handpickedtools.com.

After finishing this job I posted my first offer on X to attract new clients:

So basically I would offer to build an MVP (including eg. web app, landingpage, blog, and various integrations) for $1k.

It went kind of viral, and ended up sending two more customers my way. Note that at this point I didn’t have a website yet or even figured out the agency brand.

During this time, I was also documenting my journey of building Refined on my personal blog. I haven’t updated it in a while though (got busy 😅).

Around February 2024, the refined.so website went live. With that, I increased the price to $2k. Recently I have complete a few projects at $3k and planning to increase the price again soon. That’s where I’m at today!

Overall, I’m working with only a few customers each month. I don’t have a team yet, so I’m very limited by the number of hours in a day. I do have some developers I trust that help out occasionally though.

Most of, if not all of my customers come from X. I’m starting to put some effort into SEO (Search Engine Optimization), so I don’t rely on only one channel. I plan on publishing more articles and SEO-optimized pages for low KGR keywords. I already have a few pages up on refined.so/blog and refined.so/glossary.

The number of visitors to my website varies a lot based on how much I talk/write about it. When I’m fully booked with clients, I tend to mention it less. For the last three months, the traffic was around 2k visitors in total.