Daniel: co-founder of Tolt, affiliation for founders

Daniel is the co-founder of a service I love: Tolt  (an affiliate service to reward users). And I met him in a funny way: through his support service. I wanted to try Tolt but I had questions about it. He was super reactive and answered back quickly (the super power of use services from indie hackers). We discussed for a while and as I liked his service I wanted to tell you more about his story.

Hi Daniel! Thank you for your participation to AboutStartup! Can you introduce yourself?

👋 Thank you for giving me the opportunity to share my story!
I’m Daniel, a 24 year old living in Macedonia and I’ve been working on the internet since I was 15, launching all kinds of ventures.

So, because I don’t have a full-time job, I can proudly say that I’m a full-time indiehacker! But of course, somehow I need to fund my indiehacker journey, so occasionally I work as a freelance Shopify developer.

You launched Tolt a few months ago, an affiliation service, can you tell us the story behind?

Correct, we launched Tolt just a few days after new year!

Tolt makes it easy for tech startups to launch their own affiliate program. For almost all of my previous ventures we needed an affiliate program, but every provider was either complicated, had bad UI/UX or even lacked some main features. And because of that, Tolt was born! We saw an opportunity in this space and we wanted to build something better that even we would use.

Is it your first SaaS?

This is my second SaaS. Before Tolt I co-founded Harvel.io, a copyright protection tool for creators, which was acquired in 2022. And after that with my Tolt partner, we launched a Shopify App that grew to $2000 in MRR.

Can you share some stats?

After 3 months we managed to grow to $400 in MRR. And we have over 66 users, both free and paid.

What is your strategy to reach customers?

We started by being active in the startup communities, including Twitter and IndieHackers.com. We would engage with every potential user. This worked to give us a kickstart, but then we started running some Twitter ads which brought us a lot of free users.

After all that, our most promising strategy is SEO. From the beginning we made sure our landing page is SEO optimized, plus we created pages specifically for SEO.

This helped us rank higher on some keywords which then brought the most paid users.

You built it with someone, how are you organized?

I run Tolt with my technical partner, Valentin.

To stay organized we use ClickUp for literally everything. From tracking development tasks to marketing and operations.

Other than tasks, with ClickUp we can create internal docs, forms and so on!

What are your tips for people who want to create a SaaS too?

Start charging from day one. This way you’ll know immediately if you’ve built something good!

Final words, do you have a fun fact that happened to you?

Always send that cold email, DM or anything! You have nothing to lose and a lot to gain.

When we were working on Harvel, we sent an email to Envato and for our surprise they replied were really interested in doing a partnership with us, to copyright protect their sellers!

Keep in mind that the email we sent was for something completely different.

Daniel's links
@gjdaniel99
Tolt

Interviewer's links
@Pauline_Cx
Portfolio's website