Dan Novaes
speaker
169 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2025
last heard Jun 2025
Dan Novaes’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
But then I got into software after that, and there was a whole long story of how we did that. But I think that's where the foundation of entrepreneurship went. And what was going through my head at the time was...
you know uh that this was like for me you know i didn't know uh i didn't want to work a regular job you know and i really came to that realization probably like my sophomore junior year of college where it confirmed after like two internships that it just wasn't made uh for me i guess
Honestly, dude, the way that happened, it was like, I don't know. Oftentimes, the worst things in your life are usually the best things for you, I guess. So at the time, I did a bunch of different businesses in college while running this company. I had a screen printing business. I had started a college music website before Spotify.
And you're getting about a million people a month listening to my music playlist. I wasn't making a ton of money, though, but right around this time, I remember I was sleeping. It was fine. My warehouse, I get an email from our worker there and the warehouse was robbed. I didn't have any insurance on it or anything. I didn't have credit or anything. So this is all my money.
I mean, it wasn't all my money, but I'm saying it's probably like 70% of my money. And apparently there was... a FedEx guy that then, you know, and then this warehouse got robbed in the UK and he was so apologetic, but really there was no recourse. Right. And I remember thinking to myself, man, I just like wiped out like 70% of everything I've ever worked for.
At the time I'm now living in Chicago, I'm 22 years old. I just have graduated. And I was like, how do I prevent this from happening? I was like, what a hassle. Cause like, you know, the thing with electronics is you might do a lot of revenue, but your margins, like maybe 10%, you know, 10, 15%, you're not making a lot of money on the stuff. Um, and so that was a huge hit to me.
And so I was like, well, if I do software, not thinking about hackers, right. But I was just like, if I do software, that would not be possible. Right. And so at the time it was kind of like, um, the iPhone was starting to get really big app store was getting really big. We, a lot of the traffic that we were having on our site was on desktop. So I was like, Oh, I should make an iPhone app.
Um, and you know, I actually, uh, went on Fiverr. Uh, if you, you know, if you know the website where you can get anything for five bucks, um, found someone that had posted a listing that was like, Hey, I'll make an app for five bucks. Uh, so it sounds very promising, you know, definitely. Uh, but I hit him, hit him up and was like, Hey, this is what I want.
And then he was like, you know, I can't make that for five bucks, but I'll make it for 85 bucks. I'm like, you know what? That's a great deal. Let's do it. Um, was like, you know, didn't really have any expectation for it. Six weeks later, you know, we're Skype friends at this point in time. I get an app and the app actually works. Not the best app I've ever seen.
I post them on the app store and we send it out to the audience. And I made like 10 grand, right? In like three days. I was like, this is insane. We're turned on investment.
Um, so initially it was supposed to play music as like a music streaming app, but he didn't know how to do that. So what it did is it preloaded 10 songs and then it was like, um, you know, that game that you would play on, um, you know, you're kind of like Microsoft where it's like, it's like a little puzzle and you've got to clean up the puzzle. So it's like a picture that's all broken. Right.
It's like early PC days. Anyways, that's all it did. And it had like, you know, 20 of the favorite songs of the songs that people liked. And they were just kind of like, you know, kind of like a stupid game that was in there that was kind of like a hybrid of the music and game. Very simple. And but honestly, you know, had made that 10k very quickly and was every day making a couple hundred bucks.
I'm like, dude, I'm making more money on this. And I did this with a guy from Fiverr, who I turns out, you know, is my co founder still to this day. It turns out it was a 17-year-old kid in high school that was about to graduate high school in the UK. And he was on Fiverr because it was his first ever project.
He had just learned a code, didn't really believe in his skills, and just wanted to work on a project. And then I was like, hey, listen, I just graduated. You're about to go to college. Why don't you take a gap year? Come move to Chicago. I was living in Chicago at the time. And I had this idea. We're going to create apps without coding for people. And he did it. Took a gap year and came.
His parents allowed him. And we then started this company. We proceeded to struggle for a year. It's not like that story of like, oh, and then everything happened and it was great. But we started making a little bit of money towards the end. But at the end, he was like, oh, I can't take another gap year, and we're not making enough for me to be sustainable.
So I'm willing to work on this part-time, but I got to go back to college. So after that year, that's what happened.
On Fiverr?
Okay, there we go. All right, keep going. Sorry.
Um, yeah, no. So, so it was, it was a crazy time, you know, we became friends and then, um, he like goes back to have his freshman year, you know, you know, like freshman week, like it's like super fun, whatever. And he's like, but I'm, I'm down this one week to kind of build this app. And I was like, listen, I have this other idea for an app. Um, I think we can knock it out in one week.
Let's, let's try it out. And he's like, okay, I'm down. So we launched this app and it was basically Instagram had, I think, had just gotten acquired by Facebook, right? It was like that billion dollar acquisition at the time, but it's still relatively small compared to what it is today.
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