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A scraped directory of TikTok influencers, built when no tool existed for the platform — sold for $55K cash seven months after launch, on purpose
MRR grew about $500/mo consistently · LinkedIn outreach alone added roughly $1K MRR at a 5% paid conversion rate · ~1,000 organic visitors a day by the time he sold
Fewer bars = easier, cheaper, or faster for an AI-assisted solo builder. Editorial judgments based on the case details.
Andy Cloke started working as a developer in 2017 and built side projects alongside contract work. The first was a football quiz site — build a better Sporcle, figure out money and marketing later. People used it and did not come back. His entire marketing plan was spamming subreddits, and as he puts it, once you get banned from all the subreddits the marketing plan is over. It carried banner ads that took up most of the interface and nobody clicked. It made nothing. Then in November 2019 he went looking for a project the deliberate way: through Exploding Topics, a site that surfaces trends on the way up. He found nano influencers — people with one to ten thousand followers — and while researching them noticed the much bigger trend underneath, TikTok. This was pre-lockdown, before TikTok was a household word. There were plenty of influencer tools for Instagram, because Instagram had run a friendly API for years. For TikTok there was nothing. He spent about a month working out how to scrape TikTok and a couple of weeks building a front end over the database, with two phones propped up in his bedroom playing TikTok all day — his brother christened them Tick and Tock. Influence Grid launched in December 2019 as a searchable directory of TikTok influencers for marketing agencies, priced by how many influencers you could access. MRR grew about $500 a month, pretty consistently, through cold email, then LinkedIn outreach, then programmatic SEO. By mid-2020, seven months after launch, he sold it to an American company for $55,000 in cash. He sold not because it was failing but because the whole thing sat on a scrape, and TikTok could switch it off any day it liked.
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Join the Unicorn Club — $5/moCancel in one click · first payment refundable for 7 daysData credibility: Podcast interview with the founder on Indie Bites; every figure is self-reported and unaudited. The $55,000 sale price, the seven-month timeline, the roughly $500/mo MRR growth, the 5% LinkedIn conversion rate, the additional ~$1K MRR from that channel and the ~1,000 organic visitors a day at sale all come from Andy Cloke alone, with no dashboard shown or third-party data cited. He is explicitly approximate in several places (“another grand or something in MRR”, “a couple of those would convert”). The episode is titled “Bootstrapping two $3k MRR projects, selling one for $55k”, which implies Influence Grid was around $3K MRR at exit, but he never states an exit MRR in the conversation itself, so we have not carried that number into the revenue line. The valuation guidance (three to five times annual revenue for a non-strategic buyer) is secondhand from Flippa and FE International as he recalls it. The same episode also covers Data Fetcher, his next business, which is already in the index under a separate entry.