Bram Kanstein: From the Startup Stash Directory to the No-Code MVP Course

From Organizing Startup Tools to Building an Educational Product

Bram Kanstein is a Dutch internet founder who turned the tools he researched and the knowledge he accumulated into products: a directory, a newsletter, and an online course. With Startup Stash he experienced advertising revenue and a sale, and with No-Code MVP he sold a method for validating startup ideas. What his ventures had in common was that he took material he had researched and organized himself and made it something others could put to use right away.

Turning Bookmarks into a Public Directory

The raw material for Startup Stash was a set of bookmarks he had collected while working at an investment firm. Kanstein saved tools and resources worth showing to startup teams in his browser, and the list grew to about 700 items. He routinely browsed Product Hunt for new products and wrote about them, and he began to want to build and launch one himself.

The first product was a directory of 400 items, with 10 tools in each of 40 categories. He sorted them by the tasks a startup needs to do, from naming and buying a domain to marketing and investor relations. The screen displayed 40 orange squares representing the categories, and entering each category revealed the curated tools. The value it offered users lay in saving them the trouble of wandering across sites to find candidates.

The site was built by modifying an existing WordPress theme. He had first envisioned 50 categories, but after gathering material for about five months he decided to launch with 40 filled. Checking product names, links, and images took another three weeks, and he got help from friends with design, front-end, and hosting issues. Behind the simple screen lay a considerable amount of research and editing work.

While building it, he posted a landing page on BetaList and StartupList and gained about 600 email subscribers. He sent them part of the material and a screen mockup, gathered their feedback, and refined the product. He also reached out in advance to companies that would appear in the directory, and about 70% of those he contacted agreed to help spread word of the launch. Along with a product to release, he had prepared the relationships that would bring in the first visitors.

After it went live on Product Hunt on February 25, 2015, it recorded about 35,000 unique visitors and 230,000 page views in the first 48 hours. Newsletter subscribers grew by 1,140 over the same period. Early traffic came through several routes, centered on Product Hunt plus Business Insider, Facebook, and Reddit, and on March 5 of that year it became the most-upvoted product in Product Hunt's history up to that time.

Building Ad Revenue and Handing It to the Next Owner

Startup Stash's revenue came from featuring products for a fee on the homepage and in the newsletter. In a 2021 interview, Kanstein recalled that revenue during the period he ran it averaged about $4,000–$5,000 a month. He handled operations himself and hired freelancers when work was needed.

In 2017 he sold Startup Stash. While on a call with someone at a media agency in Tel Aviv, he mentioned he was willing to sell, and the deal went ahead when the other party agreed to the price he proposed. Kanstein especially enjoyed researching an idea, turning it into a product, and checking the response, and the sale was a choice that let him spend time on his next product.

Afterward he repeated the curation in various formats. StartupWatching, which he ran in 2017–2018, was a newsletter that selected and sent startup knowledge and case studies, and it gathered about 11,000 subscribers. He ran it with Carrd and Revue, announced in the newsletter that he was willing to sell, and handed it to someone who wanted to start a newsletter business.

Road to Scale, built in 2019, was a resource library that organized more than 300 pieces of content to consult at each stage of starting a company. He combined Carrd, Airtable, and Zapier, and sold it to a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that wanted to build a similar library. In a 2023 interview, the products he said he had sold numbered five: Startup Stash, these two, My Pitch Deck, and Start with Magic. It shows that even for a small library or newsletter, the work of accumulating content and gathering readers retained its value.

Turning Repeated Advice into an Online Course

No-Code MVP began with an explanation he kept repeating in consulting work. Kanstein took the 25–30 mental models and practical frameworks he pulled out whenever he met a startup team, organized them into an online course, and combined them with ways to use no-code tools. The idea was to let more people learn the same explanation at their own pace.

Early on he set a bar: he would build the course once he posted a landing page on BetaList and secured 500 people who registered interest. By the time of launch the email list had grown to about 2,800. Before finishing the content, he had gathered potential customers who showed interest in the topic.

The production schedule was adjusted around family life. Around the time his son was born in 2018, his fiancée got the job she wanted, and Kanstein took on childcare at home. For the first six months he had no room to build the course, and afterward he used the days his child went to daycare to organize the content and produce the videos.

The chance to test the course material came from corporate training. At the request of a Dutch bank, he sold a two-day workshop for $5,000, and the roughly 400 slides he made while preparing it became the foundation of the online course. While earning about $15,000 in revenue from several corporate trainings, he was able to validate the order of the explanation and the exercises.

The online course launched in December 2019. It consisted of 42 videos totaling about 5 hours 30 minutes, and a pre-sale held just before completion brought in $8,000 over three weeks.

The course started with analyzing an idea, defining the potential customer and the problem, and explaining the value to be delivered to the customer. It then had learners set the assumptions to test and combine no-code tools to build something they could actually test. By attaching real build examples to the tool instructions, it let even people with little startup experience carry out research and building together.

This approach was also embodied in the MVP Experiment Canvas, a separate resource he published in 2020. The question Kanstein kept running into was how to get people to use a product once it was built. He had people first work out who the party is whose problem the product solves, where they can be found, and how to explain the value of the solution. Nailing down the customer and the validation process before building held an important place in his teaching.

Even with Monthly Revenue, the Selling Had to Continue

A February 2020 Starter Story interview described No-Code MVP as a business with monthly revenue on the order of $6,000. On June 3 of the same year, Kanstein disclosed that cumulative revenue over roughly six months since launch was about $33,000, averaging about $5,500 a month. At the time there were 200 students and two refunds.

In June 2020 the price he considered appropriate for the course was $159. The $5,500 monthly average is the course sales over that period divided out; it should be distinguished from subscription revenue billed to the same customers every month. Even afterward, sustaining revenue required conveying the course's necessity and value to new students.

Operating costs were relatively small. The fixed costs he disclosed in a 2020 interview — Podia, Zapier, Carrd, and others — were about $150 a month, and he bought filming equipment separately. This figure is the fixed cost centered on tool fees; the production labor and time he put in must be considered separately.

In selling, he used free previews and student testimonials. He made eight course videos available to preview and kept collecting students' experiences and recommendations. Kanstein said appearing on the Indie Hackers podcast was also effective in introducing the course to new people.

Even so, the problem of converting visitors into buyers remained. Even when monthly visits were around 3,000–5,000, he named the purchase conversion rate, the right price, and expanding the pool of potential customers as his main challenges. Even for an already well-known founder, selling and adjusting the price after building the course remained ongoing work.

Over time the way the course was offered changed as well. As of September 2026 his personal website presents No-Code MVP as free course material, and it also offers the MVP Experiment Canvas and several startup templates for free. The same site also presents consulting services for founders and companies.

What stands out in Kanstein's case is that research and organization fed into several businesses. The directory he built by selecting tools became an advertising medium; the list and newsletter he assembled of startup material drew a buyer; and the explanation he repeated in the field was sold as a paid course. At each stage, reaching the people who needed it and confirming actual use and purchases turned a personal interest into a product that could be traded.