10 Unknown SaaS Making $50K+ MRR (Copy Them)

0:00If you've ever wanted to build a SaaS that pays your bills, today's episode is for you. I brought on my friend Rob, who has a portfolio of bootstrap profitable SaaS businesses. And together, we go through a bunch of apps that do anywhere between 20 ,000 MRR and$300 ,000 MRR. And we basically reverse engineer how you can copy what they're doing and get customers to whatever SaaS you want to build in 2026. And there's a bunch of alpha, there's a bunch of sauce that's in this episode that no one shares. They don't share it because they don't want competition. I don't care. I want you to go build something that ends up changing your life.

0:45And today's episode, there is a ton of sauce that I think that if you stick through the end, you will have that unfair advantage. All I ask is one little thing. Stop the video, like, comment, and subscribe so that this gets seen to other people. I want to make sure that people are enjoying this content, so please let me know. Enjoy the episode.

1:14I brought on my friend Rob Hoffman. You might not know Rob, but he's built a few businesses, Bootstrap, SaaS businesses, contact SO$300 ,000 a month, mentions SO$20 ,000 a month, and Clio.so, his new one,$61 ,000 a month. And in this episode, what I asked him to do is prepare all the most interesting SaaS businesses, tell us how we can copy what they're doing, bring them to new niches. And this episode, what I hope it's going to be is basically the de facto, so you vibe-coded a SaaS, now what? So Rob, welcome to the show. and in your words, by the end of this episode, what are people going to get out of it?

1:55Thank you, Greg. Stoked to be here. And here is my goal for the episode. I literally wrote it down because I am dead set on providing as much value and sauce to your audience as possible. So this is what I'm thinking. By the end of this episode, you will learn how to get customers for your SaaS. And so my goal is to provide the most tactical and actionable guide for you to get customers for your SaaS. And here's why. I see everyone on X. You probably do too. They're vibe coding, micro SaaS, tools, apps. And the real problem is nobody knows how to get customers. So everyone kind of sucks at marketing.

2:39And so I've broken down six proven playbooks, one of which we used ourselves. and I'm going to walk you through it. And so if you don't know who I am, because you probably don't, I am a real person. This is me on X. I'm Rob. I'm in three profitable bootstrap companies, contact, mentions, and Clio. We clearly love the.so domain. And so two are software companies. One is an SEO agency. And so, yeah, I'm ready to dive in. Let's do it. I've broken it down in terms of six playbooks and I actually have a bonus one at the end as well. And the reason why I've given six playbooks and I'm going to give you examples of companies, real companies, including one of ours, that have used these playbooks to get customers.

3:30So you're basically, just so the audience knows, those examples that you're going to give on the left-hand side, if you scroll to the left, so you're going to go through Clio, TrustMRR, teacher teaches the tally.so local rank male scale ai you're going to tell them how much money they've made they made what is the playbook they've used you're going to break down the playbook and and what else are you going to do yeah so i'm going to take you through six different sass tools how much money they make their playbook for getting customers and how you can steal this playbook for your own SaaS. Great let's get into it.

4:15Hell yeah let's do it. So I'm going to just start over here with the six different playbooks and then I'm going to go and show you the real examples and the reason why I've given six playbooks is because everyone's going to have their own preference of how they want to acquire customers based on your skill set based on your level of interest in these different strategies. So I'm going to start right here with number one, which is the waitlist strategy. And this is actually a strategy that we used for our own SaaS tool, Clio. And in fact, we also used it for our other SaaS tool, Mentions. So we know that it works because we ran it twice.

4:54And in both cases, we were able to grow to 60k MRR for Clio and 20k of MRR with mentions in like a month or two. Okay, so we're going to start here with Clio. So first of all, what is Clio? Clio is an AI tool that helps you create content for platforms like LinkedIn and X that is optimized to go viral, build an audience, and get you customers. So that's what it does. In terms of MRR, we're at 61, 62K of MRR. Sam Altman, the co-founder of OpenAI, I just said that it is the era of the idea guy and he is not wrong. I think that right now is an incredible time to be building a startup. And if you listen to this podcast, chances are you think so too.

5:40Now, I think that you can look at trends to basically figure out what are the startup ideas you should be building. So that's exactly why I built idea browser dot com. Every single day, you're going to get a free startup idea in your inbox, and it's all backed by high quality data trends. How we do it, people always ask. We use AI agents to go and search what are people looking for and what are they screaming for in terms of products that you should be building. And then we hand it on a silver platter for you to go check out. we do have a few paid plans that you know take it to the next level give you more ideas give you more ai agents and more almost like a chat gbt for ideas with it but you can start for free ideabrowser.com and if you're listening to this i highly recommend it so which is crazy by the way because when i hear that pitch i feel like there's like like a hundred companies doing the same thing What gave you the kahunas, I think is the word, or the chutzpah to build something in such a crowded niche and still hit almost a million dollars of ARR?

6:55I think a lot of people wonder, why don't I just use ChatGPT or Claude to do this? Or maybe there's a few other players in the space. we know this space really well because we use linkedin to get customers for all of our businesses so we actually just built this tool for ourselves originally and it worked so well we basically use the tool to continue building an audience acquiring customers and so we knew that what we had would work because it worked for us so we're just dog fooding um other than that i don't know we're just Cool. So I think the lesson here is just because it's a crowded space, there still could be an opportunity if you use one of these playbooks.

7:39Let's continue. 100%. Okay, cool. So step number one for the waitlist strategy. This strategy, it's basically three steps. You're going to do content to email to webinar. So step number one is you have to create content. and this is where most people go wrong already is they don't know how to create content. So the type of content that you create that's going to allow you to acquire customers for your SaaS, we call it edu-sales and the way that it works is that you have to subtly tease your product. It's the art of the subtle sale. What most people do is they hop on these platforms and they're just plugging their product very overtly and so we do the exact opposite.

8:24I'm going to show you an example of a post that drove signups to our waitlist. So this is my co-founder, Lara, and you can see that this post, it doesn't lead with talking about our tool. It just talks about something that our audience wants to learn that our tool can help with. The thing I want to draw attention to is that we plugged our tool so subtly in this post. so it's not like at the top of the post we don't have a crazy CTA it's just one of the bullet points and that is what's going to get trust with your audience because they don't feel like you're trying to sell to them they get their guard up so you have to create posts that lead with value this is one example of it and then subtly sell your product I know LinkedIn suppresses links do you post it and then after a few hours edit the post and then put the link sometimes we do that depending on the post.

9:24For this post, we just put it in right away. People have all sorts of ideas about LinkedIn, like you have to post at a certain time, whatever. If it's good content, it will get reach. I'll give you a few other examples just so you can see, because sometimes what we will do is we'll just put the CTA in the comments. We won't even put it in the actual main post. Sometimes we'll go back and edit the main post an hour later, but you can see here, like join the waitlist in the comments. So you can see this is the post. It's kind of just a post that's meant to go viral, get a lot of attention. And then we plug it in the comments.

9:58Here's the other thing, Greg, is that one thing I learned while working with my co-founder Jake is that the more subtly you sell your product, the better. So oftentimes for our other companies, he would just create posts and there would be no CTA. And you would almost have to like go to his account and try to figure out what he's selling. And I was doing the complete opposite when I met him. I was like really hard selling our stuff and he was driving like all the revenue for our businesses. And I was like, what's going on here? And so that's when I learned it's really about the art of the subtle cell.

10:31You have to get trust and then people, the less you tell people about your product, the more people want it. Another quick tip on that post, if you go back to that post, here you see Jake is leveraging the credibility of someone else you have a picture of Matthew McConaughey so you're basically attracting people who know Matthew McConaughey a lot of his fans and then you're also like if you go scroll up to the content you're saying something a bit spicy that is going to get common so this needs to exist for writing LinkedIn posts so half the people might agree, half the people might not agree but you've attracted with beautiful Matthew McConaughey, you've created a spicy post and then you've driven a call to action in the comment section, which I think is a great format.

11:27Absolutely, you got it. So these are real examples of content. The reason I'm showing these as well is because then people can screenshot these or go and find them themselves and create their own versions of these posts because this is it. This is how we drove signups for our waitlist. These are some examples. Again, I'm just showing it on the screen so you can really see what we did. Screenshot it, whatever, copy it. Cool. Step number two. First things first is you create content, EduSales content, and then you drive people to a waitlist. We built waitlists for both of our SaaS before we launched.

12:09You're getting validation. You're also creating scarcity. And so step number two is that you want to launch the beta version of your product to your email waitlist and offer an early bird lifetime discount. We did it for the first 500 users. Okay, so what this does is it, again, it's like you want people to, it's like the more you push people away, the more they pull. and so you want to create that scarcity and kind of artificially constrain the supply so that the demand is higher than the supply. And the thing is, it actually is honest though. It's not like we're totally just bullshitting it.

12:54We also wanted to get our first 500 users in there so that we could do the beta testing, we could do the bug bashing, we could test the features and talk to customers. So this is step number two. Clio's pricing is$99 normally. we actually haven't even launched to the public yet funny enough so we hit 61k without even launching publicly but it will be$99 and our first 500 users get lifetime access for$59 so they really want access because they're like I'm going to get a lifetime discount and there's only 500 people so yeah and the thing I want to show you here Greg is the exact emails we use because again I really want to make this specific and actionable so that people can literally screenshot this, they can create their own versions of this content, these emails, and get customers for their own SaaS.

13:45The only thing I'll add to this is a lot of people listening are building AI startups. So they're buying open AI tokens and stuff like that. So you want to be careful if you're selling lifetime access for X amount of dollars if you don't understand how much the costs are going to be. Lifetime access could work for whatever it is you're doing, but for the AI startups listening to this or people who want to create AI startups, just be careful with lifetime access there because you might be put in a situation where you're spending hundreds of dollars a month on customers and you sold it for$59. Just be careful.

14:34I want to see these emails though. Yeah, let's check that out. And by the way, we use AI tokens and stuff and so we just did the math. So I absolutely agree, do the math. Okay, cool. So here are some emails. So this is literally leading up to our beta launch. 23rd of December, we launched, I think, like the 2nd of October or something. And so this is nine days away from launch. so we get people onto our wait list and now we're going to nurture them and send emails that get them stoked so we got the headline uh we have a nice post here which i won't read through but you can take a look in your own time and then at the bottom it's it's saying that clio is launching october 1st to 500 beta users if you want to be one of those 500 users stay tuned number two so this is sent like two days later uh seven days from launch okay so and we're kind of using different approaches with all of these emails so again it's it's still it's either education or inspiration or curiosity you still have to use those copywriting frameworks but again we are using uh scarcity and urgency so that people want to sign up and we're just kind of teasing the launch of our tool?

15:56What I'm noticing just like going through these emails is it's super easy to skim. They feel like stories. It feels like a narrative and it doesn't feel like a sales pitch. So you kind of want to, I love this format. I think it works a lot. I wouldn't say rip this, but just use this concept of narrative, clear storytelling and throw that maybe into a chat GPT to help you write some of this stuff. Yeah, absolutely. And the other thing I'll say is that I talked about webinars at the beginning. This one is promoting a webinar. We didn't get all of our sales from a webinar but promoting a webinar helps you just get the extra juice of your audience out.

16:48A lot of our sales just came from us launching to our list and being like, we're live, there's 500 slots. But then we also did a two-hour long webinar just to get the extra people who are maybe on the fence. Cool. This is basically two days away from launch and then this is one day away from launch. Here is the CTA to join the live event. again you can kind of skim this you can steal this you can use this format for your own launch and so that is step number two of the waitlist playbook you ready for step number three let's do it hell yeah okay sick so step number three is that you want to use your first 500 users or however many users it is it'll depend on how big your waitlist is we had i think like whatever 10 or 12 ,000 people.

17:46So we kind of just again did the math and figured we can probably get 500 people into our beta. And then what you do is you use those first 500 users to iterate. And the way that you do that is you talk to a ton of customers. And everyone says this, but I want to be like very specific here. This is what our calendars look like. me and my co-founders were literally stacking our calendars all day long and we we each talk to at least 50 customers so why this is important is because you're gearing up for your second beta launch and you want to determine what are the most useful features that people are loving where are the bugs and what do you want to ship for your next beta launch and prepare for your public launch so that's kind of that that's step number three and then step number four is pretty easy.

18:36It's just repeating that same process with a second beta cohort. And so our second beta cohort was$79. So again, we went from$59 lifetime access to$79 lifetime access, and then$99 will be when we publicly launch. And you're just trying to improve your tool. And this is basically the result of this launch strategy. And we used it for two different SaaS tools, Mentions and Clio. We did both within the span of six months. Mentions hit 20K of MRR in 30 days. Clio hit 61K in 53 days, I believe it was. Love it. Makes sense. Waitlist strategy. Edge of sales. Build demand before launch. Create edge of sales content.

19:25Launch unlimited early bird beta with the email waitlist. Sell discounted lifetime access. Number three, iterate with early users. Do customer calls. And then you relaunch. The last step is to relaunch a second cohort by repeating the same content. Email, webinar launch flow, and then you do the full public access. Makes sense to me. Absolutely. You ready for number two? Let's do it. Okay, so number two, this is a really fun one. And I think that this one is fun because anyone can do it, especially if you're a vibe coder, where you're riding a wave. So I call it the wave surfer strategy. and the best example of this right now is this SaaS called Trust MRR.

20:11It's by a guy named Mark Liu. You may know him from X and what it is is it's basically a database of verified startup revenues because everyone like myself as an example will share MRR screenshots on X and you have all the people being like, oh, this is fake, you're a scammer, whatever And so Mark created TrustMRR so that people can verify their MRR and be able to share that on platforms like X. And then it also has a marketplace to buy and sell micro SaaS businesses. And so this one, it's a little bit lower of MRR. It's 24K of MRR. But it's like 24K in like 30 days, you know? You know what I mean?

20:57Like it's a crazy number. Although he does have like 233 ,000 followers on X, right? So he does have an audience. That's probably going to be the biggest objection. However, he has other SaaS tools that have not scaled as quickly as this or that have failed. So despite having an audience, he's launched other tools that have not worked. But this one worked and there's a specific reason why and I believe that anybody can do this. And the reason why is because, well, I'll get into it with the next few steps here. So step number one is that you want to quickly ship a tool that rides the wave of a trending topic.

21:41So rather than trying to manufacture demand and you have like a cool idea and you're like, how do I get people interested in this? You start by finding the attention and the demand and you just piggyback on it. so step number one is basically like find a trending topic step number two is actually the coolest so why I think this is cool is because you have to ship extremely fast and I talked to Mark and he gave me a really good quote which is quit as fast as you ship so ship fast but also quit fast if it's not working but here's why this worked is because basically so Peter Levels who is, you know, one of the most, probably like the most famous indie hacker on X, he went viral with this post right here.

22:35And so Mark actually piggybacked on Peter's virality. It wasn't even his own audience. And what Mark did is he shipped TrustMRR within 48 hours of this tweet going live from Peter Lovells. And so the tweet is basically Peter Lovells complaining about how many fake MRR screenshots are on X and that nobody can prove it and that a lot of these people are scammers and they're just trying to sell a course. And so Mark was like, okay, cool, I'm going to solve that problem by basically creating a database where we can verify people's MRR so that you know who are the real builders and who are the fakers.

23:16Basically trend jacking. You're finding a trend and you're finding a viral post The other piece of this is on X specifically. Here's a piece of alpha. Quote retweets are really outperforming right now. So find a tweet that's going viral, quote retweet it, vibe code something, and you never know what's going to happen. What's step three? I'm so sad that the quote retweet, by the way, everyone's catching on to that because I've caught on to that recently and I'm ripping videos of me responding to other tweets and it's getting like a million impressions and I'm like, oh my God, I've found the secret.

23:56But I think people are catching on. But obviously this is all about providing the sauce to the audience. Exactly, no holding back. No holding back, no holding back. So step number three is to build virality into the product itself. So in an ideal world, your product has virality built into it, meaning that it is highly shareable. so trust mrr is very shareable because the product is verified mrr screenshots everyone wants to share their screenshots on x and so now they can do so with you know it being verified and so yeah you create basically something that is um the idea itself is like uh or the the product itself is kind of native to social.

24:50Step number four. Okay. So this one is actually really interesting because this is how Mark monetizes the app. And there's other great examples of this, which is because this is an attention play where you're leveraging attention, you are creating a product that is inherently viral and shareable. What's going to happen is that the amount of attention that you get for this tool is going to far outweigh the people who are willing to pay for it. So you get a ton of attention, but there's not a lot of intent. So what that means is that it's hard to sell subscriptions. People just think that the tool is interesting and cool.

25:29So how do you monetize a SaaS like this? You sell advertising. So you lean into advertising revenue rather than subscription revenue. And so what Mark is doing here is, yeah, he actually, there's no subscription. I think it's all, I think it's free, his tool. And so instead, he just gets a ton of attention to the website. And then you have companies that are paying to get in front of the people going to this website. Obviously, it's like a high value audience because everyone going to the site are going to be entrepreneurs or business owners. And another great example of this actually comes from Peter Lovells himself.

26:09Do you remember when Peter created that flying game that went super viral on it? For sure, yeah. He vibe-coded a flying game and then he sold advertising in it, right? And he was making at one point, I don't know, 100k a month. Yeah, I think he hit 100k a month in his first month or something crazy like that. And this is a model that nobody thinks of with SaaS. Yeah. The other piece of this is Mark, similar to what you had in the first framework, he actually made the first, I think the first advertisers paid$1 ,000 a month and the second was$1 ,400. There were some FOMO built in in terms of advertising.

26:59like the fast the early birds got basically the cheaper thing and also there is scarcity in the sense that he only has X amount of spots or eight amount of spots on his website so I think this is brilliant you have the scarcity play certain number of spots you have the early bird there's incentive for the early bird to spend money and you're hopping on a trend. So I like this. Is there a step five to this one? Is there a step five? There's no step five. Step five is profit. Yeah, step five is profit. Cool. So that's basically it. That's the wave surfer strategy. I'll leave this up again so people can see.

27:46These are the concise kind of four steps. Cool. You ready for the next one? Number three? Let's do it. All right, let's move to number three. so this one I think is really cool and this is the language arbitrage strategy and the company that I saw doing this is Teach Easy is I think how you pronounce this yeah I think so and so they're basically what is it like Teachable or Thinkific that's basically what this is do you know what the only difference is? This is en français. It's en français. So it's just in French. And I love, we got French-Canadian brother on here. I'm learning French right now.

28:33It's very difficult trying to get the accent right. Not really going well. That's okay. So you can actually see here that their main value prop, and I'm going to get into this later, is that it's in French. Like on their landing page, it says 100 % in French. So they're really leaning into this. Let me start going through the steps here. They are at 65K of MRR.

29:00Here's what the playbook is. Have you heard of these businesses where basically they'll take an idea that works in Latin America and bring it to the US or something that works in the US and bring it to Brazil or whatever, take something in Brazil and bring it to Europe? Yeah, so Rocket Internet is the most famous venture studio that did this. and I should probably do a whole episode on Rocket Internet, comment on YouTube if people want that. But basically what they would do is they would take Airbnb and then they would do Airbnb for Germany and it would rip. The craziest part is then they'd sell the business to Airbnb.

29:44So yes, I do know about it. It rips. And so an easier way of doing this rather than bringing it to like an entire other country is just bringing it to a different language. Because you can do that from anywhere. Obviously, the caveat here is probably easier if you're bilingual. So I will say there is that little caveat. However, I think it's really interesting that they're taking the SaaS that already works. Again, there's billion dollar companies like Kajabi that already do this and they're just making it French language native. I think the language is one piece of it. I also think that geography is the other piece of it.

30:25I think that if you have, for example, a German startup, you're more likely, yes, it's in German, but you can also on the website just put a German flag and have German jokes on it. People probably from Germany are more likely to buy a German product than they are, say, an American product because they're German, right? Identity is a big deal. I think that the playbook isn't just take a proven English language SAS and convert it to another language. I think it's take a proven English language SAS or slash American SaaS and convert it to another language or geo. That's true. People really care about that these days.