How to build a startup in 2025 without raising any capital, staytuned for the end when I talk about a secret hack that shortcuts the hardest part of the whole process. With my first startup, I did not have a brand or content, so it was really painful doing everything cold and outbound. Having an engaged warm audience makes everything so much easier, especially the most important part, the beginning when you need to iterate closely with a group of users until you nail product market fit. By the way, I don’t believe I’m at product market fit yet with blue potato, but I know I’m on my way there as I iterate on user feedback every single day. Some people asked me if I knew I would build potato when I started creating content. Absolutely not! I built blotato initially for myself, to scale myself as an AI educator. If I wanted to build something with direct alignment with my audience, I probably would’ve built some kind of AI learning tool or academy. #a#ais#startupe#entrepreneurw#womenownedbusinessb#bossladyw#womenpowers#sabrinaramonovs#solopreneuri#indiehackerb#buildinpublicb#blotato#greenscreen

How to build a startup in 2025 without funding. If you don't know me, my name is Sabrina Romanov. I've previously built and sold an AI startup for millions of dollars doing things the hard way. And now I have a new product called Bloatato. It's already hugely profitable and really rewarding for me to work on. And here's the exact playbook I used to launch it. Number one, I started by building a brand and community around something I'm actually passionate about, which is AI education for non-technical audiences. I scaled from zero to half a million followers in six months and experienced a ton of pain points around content creation. I then asked my community if they've experienced these pain points as well. Then I used Cursor AI to build the MVP of my product. I documented my entire journey. It's on YouTube. Then I launched the product to my community, which sounds fancy, but it really consisted of two TikTok videos and one newsletter. To continue promoting the product, I pretty much get a spike in signups every time I make a TikTok video. I also add a link to the product at the bottom of my newsletters. I signed up for a self-service SaaS app to manage my affiliate program, AI Systems to Automate Flows. For example, I've built out a completely automated AI system to produce high quality AI clone videos with faceless videos dynamically playing behind my avatar. And the last step, which is optional, is if you really want to scale up faster, hiring a remote team and spending as much money as you're making, putting it back into marketing. One hack I want to point out is the first five steps here can be shortcutted by partnering with an existing influencer who already has a brand, who already has a community, who'll be able to promote the product instantly to the community when it's ready.