"I built a simple website that makes $40K a month"

Angus Chang lives in Hong Kong. In 2021, he quit his job and built a website that does exactly one thing: it converts PDF bank statements into Excel spreadsheets. Today, that single-purpose site makes $40,000 per month in revenue. He runs it entirely alone — solo founder, zero employees, 100% bootstrapped.

The idea came from a personal pain point

After quitting his job, Chang wanted to understand his burn rate. He needed multiple years of bank data in a spreadsheet to figure out how long he could live on his savings. His bank only provided PDF statements. So he wrote code to extract the transaction data — and found it was surprisingly difficult.

"That was also really hard," he says. "So I figured it must be a real problem."

He and a friend spent about a week building an MVP. They bought a domain, launched it, and ran Google ads to get people clicking. "Immediately people started uploading bank statements, which kind of validated the problem."

Chang's approach to finding ideas is straightforward: encounter the problem yourself, or hear colleagues and friends complain about something at work. Then implement the smallest possible version and put it in front of real users. "If it takes you like one or two weeks to make an MVP, it's not that much of a risk anyway. So you might as well just build it."