From Nothing to $140/Month in 2 Months

The story of the Closet Assistant and slow-growth success.

March 16, 2018

Hey! 👋 It’s been a while. I wanted to show you what I have been working on for the last two months.

My latest project is the Closet Assistant. It falls under my new company, Closet Tools. The Closet Assistant is a tool that helps Poshmark users share their items and follow people automatically.

Let’s Start From The Beginning

When was the beginning? A few years ago. Long before the Closet Assistant, or even the idea of the assistant existed.

My wife’s friend was introducing my wife to Poshmark. It was an exciting new venture. A way to make some side income. A way to exchange old clothes and purses for new ones.

At the time I had just started getting into web development.

When I was listening to how the Poshmark platform operated, I overheard and observed the process of sharing your items. It seemed really lame. I immediately told them I could automate it.

Lo and behold, I did just that. A few lines of code and voilà. A simple way to share all of the items on your page to your followers.

They were delighted and used it often. Both of them generated more sales, and both of them increased their followings by thousands. My wife was able to amass 20000 followers in a year and become a Poshmark Ambassador shortly after a year.

I’m into blogging, so I had blogged about my code and provided it freely — thinking nothing of it.

Then, about a year or so in, I started getting emails from random people that wanted more info on this ‘share button’ I had made. I was getting about one email a week. I helped them all out and gave it all a way for free. After all, it was just a few lines of code.

My wife and her friends all told me I should sell it. I brushed it off because it was very simple at the time.

Fast Forward

A couple of months ago, I wanted a way to test some of my new skills and I also wanted to build an internet based business (who doesn’t?).

I decided to put the original ‘button’ out there as a beta test. I posted it on Reddit in the r/Poshmark subreddit and got 50 beta testers in the first day. I sent them all the button in exchange for feedback and ideas.

The response was overwhelming. From those that I heard back from, they all loved it. And they had awesome ideas to extend it for more use cases.

This is where I got the idea for the Closet Assistant. I compiled all of their ideas, put my nose to the grindstone and started working. Instead of just being a ‘button’, I was going to make a suite of tools to help people hyper-grow on Poshmark.

I made the interface, wrote all of the code, and tested the application in about a month. Surprisingly, the hardest thing to figure out was the payments portion through Stripe since I had never done it before.

Right Now

Right now, I am just beginning to start marketing the Closet Assistant and push it into the public. The assistant is done, and the website is just about done. I don’t really love the design, but it works and it’s fast. I’ve made several efforts to market on Poshmark, all of which have been blocked for one reason or another.

I have been able to grow the monthly revenue to $140 a month with 6 paying customers (and 9 still on a 7-day free trial). Most of these customers came from Reddit and my previous email list from the beta button.

I haven’t used a lot of my growth expertise and tactics yet. For now, I’m mostly trying to build a stable product and website. Soon, I’ll be implementing all of the automation that helps the product sell itself.

If you want to check out the tool, go here: https://closet.tools.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSVG0Dx5AMM