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- [00:00]
A
If 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. And 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.
- [01:15]
I brought on my friend Rob Hoffman. You might not know Rob, but he's built a few businesses. Bootstrap SaaS, businesses, contact, contact. So $300,000 a month. Mentions. So 20,000amonth. 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?
- [01:55]
B
Thank you, Greg. Stoked to be here. And here is my goal for the episode. Okay, 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, okay? 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. And 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 own 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.
- [03:10]
A
Let's do it.
- [03:11]
B
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.
- [03:32]
A
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, Trust, mrr, teacha, Teach, a Z tally, so local rank, mail scale, AI. You're going to tell them how much money they've made, what is the playbook they've used. You're going to break down the Playbook and.
- [03:59]
What else are you going to do?
- [04:01]
B
Yeah, so I'm going to take you through six different SaaS tools, how much money they make, their playbook for getting customers, and how you can steal this playbook for your own SaaS.
- [04:14]
A
Great, let's get into it.
- [04:15]
B
Hell 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 and based on your skill set, based on your level of interest.
- [04:36]
In these different strategies. So I'm going to start right here with number one, which is the wait list 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 and in both cases we were able to grow to 60k mrr for Clio and and 20k of mrr with mentions in like a month or two. Okay, so here 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 are at 61 62K of MRR.
- [05:26]
A
Sam Altman, the co founder of OpenAI 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. Now 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 ideabowser.com and 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 ChatGPT for ideas with it. But you can start for free idea browser.com. and if you're listening to this, I highly recommend it.
- [06:33]
So. Which is crazy, by the way, because when I hear that pitch, I feel like there's like, like 100 companies doing the same thing. Like 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? ARR.
- [06:56]
B
I 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 used 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 were just dogfooding. Other than that, I don't know, we're just cool.
- [07:33]
A
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, let's continue 100%.
- [07:42]
B
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 edgy 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 onto these platforms and they're just plugging their product very overtly. And so we do the exact opposite. I'm going to show you an example of a post that drove signups to our wait list.
- [08:31]
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.
- [08:46]
The thing I want to draw attention to is that we plugged our tool. So subtly post 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.
- [09:13]
A
I know LinkedIn suppresses links. Do you post it and then after a few hours edit the post and then put the link?
- [09:23]
B
Sometimes we do that depending on the post. For this post, we just put it in right away. People have all sorts of ideas about LinkedIn. 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, 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. Here'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 post and there would be no cta and you would almost have to 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 really hard selling our stuff, and he was driving 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 sell. You have to get trust. And then people. The less you tell people about your product, the more people want it.
- [10:40]
A
Another quick tip on that post. If you go back to that post, like here, you see Jake is leveraging the credibility of someone else. Like, you have a picture of Matthew McConaughey. So you're basically, like, 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. Yeah. 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.
- [11:27]
B
Absolutely. 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 wait list. And so 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. So step number two. So first things first, is you create content, Edu sales content, and then you drive people to a wait list. And so we built wait lists for both of our SaaS before we launched. You'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 wait list and offer an early bird lifetime discount. We did it for the first 500 users. So what this does is it again, it's like you want people to.
- [12:37]
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. We 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, like 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.
- [13:30]
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.
- [13:46]
A
The only thing I'll add to this is if you're a lot of people listening are building AI startups. So they're building something that, you know, they're, 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, like, how much the costs are going to be. So just be, you know, 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.
- [14:20]
With lifetime access there because you might be, you know, you might be put in a situation where you're, you're spending hundreds of dollars a month on, on customers and you sold it for $59. Just be careful. I want to see these emails, though. Yeah, let's check that out.
- [14:38]
B
And by the way, we use AI tokens and stuff. And so we just did the math, so. I absolutely agree. Do the math.
- [14:43]
A
Do the math.
- [14:44]
B
Yeah. Okay, cool. So here are some emails. So this is literally leading up to our beta launch.
- [14:53]
A
Okay.
- [14:53]
B
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. 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 saying that Clio is launching October 1st to 500 beta users. If you want to be one of those 500 users, stay tuned.
- [15:26]
Number two. So this is sent like two days later, seven days from launch. Okay. And we're kind of using different approaches with all of these emails. So again, it's still. It's either education or inspiration or curiosity. You still have to use those copywriting frameworks. But again, we are using scarcity and urgency so that people want to sign up. And we're just kind of teasing the launch of our tool.
- [15:56]
A
What 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 know, you kind of want to. I love this format. I think it works a lot. Like you can, I wouldn't say rip this, but just use this concept of like narrative clear storytelling and throw that, you know, maybe into, you know, a chatgpt to help you write some of this stuff.
- [16:32]
B
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, kind of. It helps you just get the extra juice of your audience out. So a 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 kind of get the extra people who are maybe on the fence.
- [17:03]
A
Cool.
- [17:04]
B
All right, so this is basically, what is this? Two days away from launch. And then this is one day away from launch. And so 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.
- [17:24]
And so that is step number two of the waitlist playbook. You ready for step number three?
- [17:31]
A
Let's do it.
- [17:32]
B
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 wait list is. We had, I think like whatever 10 or 12,000 people. So 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 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 each talked to at least 50 customers.
- [18:18]
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. It'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, like, 6 months. Mentions hit 20k of MRR in 30 days. Clio hit 61k in 53 days. I believe it was love it.
- [19:16]
A
So.
- [19:18]
Makes sense. Wait list strategy, edge of sales. So here, build demand before launch, create edge of sales content launch unlimited early bird beta with the email wait list 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.
- [19:46]
B
Absolutely. You ready for number two?
- [19:48]
A
Let's do it.
- [19:49]
B
Hell, yeah. 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 called it, like, the wave surfer strategy. And the best example of this right now is this SaaS called Trust Mrr. It'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 TrustMr 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.
- [20:47]
And so this one, it's a little bit lower of mrr. It's 24k of mrr, but it's like.
- [20:53]
A
24K in, like 30 days. You know, some insane. You know what I mean? Like, it's a.
- [21:00]
Crazy number. Although he does have, like, 233,000 followers on X. Right. So he does have an audience.
- [21:10]
B
That's probably going to be the biggest objection. However, this, 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.
- [21:27]
A
Okay.
- [21:27]
B
And the reason why is because we. 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. So rather than trying to manufacture demand and you have 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 find a trending topic. Step number two is actually the coolest. So.
- [22:06]
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 Lovells, who is one of the most, probably the most famous indie hacker on X, he went viral with this post right here. And so Mark actually piggybacked on Peter's virality. It wasn't even his own audience. And what Mark did is he shipped Trust MRR within 48 hours of the 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.
- [23:17]
A
Basically trend jacking. Like you're finding a trend and you're finding like a viral post and you're the other piece of this is on X specifically, like here's a piece of alpha quote retweets are like really outperforming right now. So like find a tweet that's going viral, quote, retweet it, vibe code something and you never know what's going to happen.
- [23:42]
B
What. Step three, I'm so sad that the quote retweet by the way, like everyone's catching onto that because I've caught onto that recently and I'm like ripping videos of me like responding to other tweets and it's getting like a million impressions and I'm like, oh my God, like I've found the secret. But I think people are catching on. But obviously this is all about providing the sauce to the audience.
- [24:01]
A
Exactly. No holding back.
- [24:04]
B
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.
- [24:44]
The idea itself is like or the product itself is kind of native to social. Step 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. So 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, 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. Do you remember when Peter created that flying game that went super viral on that?
- [26:14]
A
Sure, yeah. He vibe coded a flying game and then he sold advertising in it. Right. He was making like at one point, like, I don't know, 100k a month.
- [26:25]
B
Yeah, I think he hit like 100k a month in his first month or something crazy like that. And this is a model that nobody thinks of with SaaS.
- [26:35]
A
The other piece of this.
- [26:38]
Is Mark, similar to what you had in the first framework. He actually made the first. I think the first advertisers paid like, I don't know, $1,000 a month, and the second was like 1400. And, you know, so he had like, there were some FOMO built in in terms of advertising.
- [27:00]
Like the, the fast, you know, the. The early birds got. Got basically the cheaper thing. And also there is scarcity in the sense that he only has X amount of spots or 8amount of spots right on his website. So I think this is brilliant. You have the scarcity play.
- [27:17]
Certain number of spots you have. You know, the early bird gets. There's incentive for the early bird to spend money.
- [27:28]
And you're hopping on a trend. So I like this. Is there a step five to this one?
- [27:34]
B
Is there step five? There is no step five.
- [27:36]
A
Step five is profit.
- [27:37]
B
Yes, that 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. These are the concise kind of four steps.
- [27:49]
A
Cool.
- [27:50]
B
You ready for the next one?
- [27:51]
A
Number three. Let's do it.
- [27:53]
B
All right, let's move to number three. So this one, 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.
- [28:10]
A
Yeah, I think so.
- [28:12]
B
And so they're basically, do you know, like, what is it? Like teachable or thinkific or kajabi? Yep, that's basically what this is. Do you know what the only difference is?
- [28:22]
A
This is en Francais.
- [28:23]
B
It's En francais. So, like, it's just in French.
- [28:28]
And I love, you know, we got French Canadian brother on here. I'm learning French right now. It's very difficult trying to get the accent right. Not really going well. That's okay.
- [28:39]
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. And so let me start going through the steps. Here they are at 65k of MRR.
- [28:59]
And here's what the playbook is. So 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.
- [29:15]
A
Yeah. So Rocket Internet is like the most famous venture studio that did this. Like so. And I should probably do a whole episode on Rocket Internet. Comment if people want. Comment on YouTube if people want that. But basically what they would do is they would take Airbnb and then they do like Airbnb for Germany and it would rip.
- [29:39]
And then they'd. The craziest part is then they'd like sell the business to Airbnb, you know. So, yes, I do know about it, dude, it rips.
- [29:48]
B
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 are just making it French language native.
- [30:20]
A
I think the language is one piece of it. I also think that geography is the other piece of it. Like, I think that, you know, if you have a, for example, a German startup, you're more likely, yes, it's in German, but you can also, you know, on the website just put a German flag and you know, have German jokes on it. And like people probably from Germany are more likely to buy a German product than they are say an American product because they're German. Right. And identity is a big deal. So I think that the playbook, I think that the playbook isn't just take a proven English language sass and convert it to another language. I think it's take a proven English language sass or slash American sas and convert it to another language or geo.
- [31:11]
B
That's true. People really care about that these days. As a Canadian, we've never really been too nationalistic. And the US is always like made in America and people love that. They eat it up these days. Obviously there's like a little bit of a rivalry. And so leaning into the Canadian first thing probably has more pull. But I would say that most countries, if you do appeal to those kind of like nationalistic impulses, there is a lot of value to that or a lot of it's compelling to a lot of people who are proud of their country and where they come from and their language.
- [31:45]
A
Cool.
- [31:46]
B
So that's step number one is just basically take something that's working and put it into another country or language and lean into it so they everywhere on Their website. You're actually right. They have Made in France, and they're constantly leaning into the fact that it's French and made in France.
- [32:05]
Step number two is do SEO in this other language. So, Greg, I think you know a decent bit about SEO, correct?
- [32:15]
A
Yeah, a decent amount.
- [32:17]
B
Decent amount. So SEO, as I'm sure you know, in any other language, instead of besides English, is kind of like marketing on easy mode. Or like SEO on easy mode. Okay, so let me show you why this works so well when you're doing SEO in another language. It's kind of like doing SEO in English, but back in the early 2000s. And so when I look at the keywords that teach easy a ranking for. What do you notice about this keyword difficulty section here?
- [32:48]
A
It's a dream, dude. It's a lot of green.
- [32:51]
B
Yeah, Like, I'm always looking for a sea of green.
- [32:55]
If you want to find a good SEO opportunity, you pull up a tool like Semrush or Ahrefs and you look for this sea of green where. Where you have a lot of volume over here. And the keyword difficulty, meaning how difficult it is to rank for these keywords, is very. Is very low. It's very easy.
- [33:12]
A
You don't see this that often like a sea of, you know, anymore. At least, you know. So I think that this is. This is dope.
- [33:21]
B
Absolutely. And so they clearly saw this was the case. They took advantage of it. And I reached out to the founder and he said, surprise, surprise, that SEO is their number one source of acquisition, customer acquisition. And you can see it here just in terms of their constant growth over the years via SEO in the French language.
- [33:45]
A
Cool.
- [33:46]
B
So that's kind of it. That's a really simple playbook. So that's number three again. Language arbitrage strategy. Ready to get into number four?
- [33:55]
A
Let's do it.
- [33:57]
B
Okay, so number four is the AI search strategy. So we talked about SEO in the last one. This one's really exciting. Everybody wants to show up in AI search. They want to be recommended by ChatGPT and perplexity and Claude, or Claude, as you say. I never know which is the right1.
- [34:20]
So AI search strategy, the company that leveraged this the most is, or a really great example of a company that leaned into AI search is called Tally. And so Tally is a no code form builder. It's kind of like Typeform, I think. I don't really know what the difference is, but they let you create customizable forms just by typing.
- [34:44]
They're pretty big. They are at 338k mrr. And by the way, the founder of this company builds in public on their website and it's one of the coolest websites in terms of build in public content. Just as a shout out. I love when people build in public and so there's some really great information on their site.
- [35:07]
So here's the playbook. You ready?
- [35:10]
A
Yep.
- [35:11]
B
So there's always going to be one op marketing channel. And when I say op, this is like did you ever play World of Warcraft when you were a kid?
- [35:19]
A
I actually played Warcraft 3.
- [35:21]
B
Oh damn. I don't even know what that is.
- [35:23]
A
Yeah, that's pre World of Warcraft. So all right, yeah, shout out to.
- [35:30]
B
All the nerds out there. Wrath of the lich King was my jam. And people refer to things as overpowered. Op means overpowered. And so let's say that we're going back to 2007. The op marketing channel was what it was Facebook.
- [35:48]
2017, it's gotta be TikTok. Now the op marketing channel is AI search. And probably the next six months are going to be the biggest window of opportunity to take advantage of this marketing channel. And this is what I'd argue that help to scale tally so big. And so number one is you find that op marketing channel step number two. And again, this one's pretty simple is you're investing into the 8020 of SEO. I'm a big believer in the Pareto power law, which is the 20% of actions always creates the 80% of results. And so by the way, if you have a SaaS, you need to do this regardless. I've seen many playbooks of other companies where this is just the playbook that they run where you create SEO pages but you focus on the really bottom of funnel pages. And what I mean is alternatives pages versus pages and then bottom of funnel blogs. And so let me show you a few quick examples of this.
- [36:59]
A
Okay.
- [37:01]
B
The key here is it has to be a really comprehensive page. So you really have to invest a lot of time into building just a few pages. And they on their website they're basically highlighting these four. So they clearly spend a lot of time just on these four. Another one, by the way, is this so like best, I don't know, I guess that's not a clickable link, but it's basically an article that is the best free online form builders in 2025. This is exactly what tally does. And so they have a super comprehensive article. They're going to probably list themselves first and then their competitors below it so that's kind of number two.
- [37:39]
That's basically it. The takeaway is that every company should have these comprehensive alternatives and versus pages on their site. It is a proven strategy. And what else can I say about this? I mean. Oh, I guess here's the other thing. Okay, so I'm going to show you some really interesting data. So AI search became their biggest acquisition channel. They got 2,000 new users in a very short period of time, like mainly in 2025. And I want to show you kind of how this works. So you can see here that they are getting a ton of data from AI search. And if we zoom in a little bit further, you can see that, that these are the search terms that they are showing up for. So when people type things into ChatGPT like what is an alternative to Typeform, what is the best free form builder? So really bottom of funnel, high intent searches, they are getting a ton of visibility. They have really high positions here. And as we know ChatGPT people use it as their personal therapist. They're talking to it as if it's a friend. The level of trust that people have in ChatGPT and other LLMs is far beyond what they have with Google. And so there are companies that have released. There was a company, I forget who it was, but they said that they tracked their conversion rate from Traffic coming from ChatGPT compared to Google it's like 4 to 5x. Dude, in this case it was 17x.
- [39:17]
A
Yeah, it's crazy.
- [39:18]
B
Yeah, it's wild. I think it was webflow if I'm not mistaken.
- [39:23]
A
Point. Yeah, I mean I think you can expect at least 4 to 5x.
- [39:28]
Multiple, you know, on conversion, which is, which is crazy. But it makes sense if you think about it because you're.
- [39:36]
When you Google something you have, you know, a thousand blue links that you can go and click. But when you chat GPT or perplexity, something you've got like two, three, four recommendations. Right? So.
- [39:50]
It makes sense, it's curious.
- [39:52]
B
And let me show you. This is literally what people are seeing. So if somebody searches top free form builders right now, look, you got tally coming right up here.
- [40:03]
And last thing I'll show is we can see the sources that are getting cited the most frequently from Tally and guess what pages are getting cited the most frequently.
- [40:17]
It's these ones right here.
- [40:20]
So that's it. That's very, very simple. One is like you find an op marketing channel, right now it's AI search. That is the AI search strategy.
- [40:29]
A
I like it.
- [40:30]
B
All right, next one Is cool. It is the signal search strategy. You ready to rip it?
- [40:37]
A
Let's rip it.
- [40:38]
B
All right, let's rip it. So this one is.
- [40:43]
Local Rank. And so Local Rank is an all in one local SEO tool. And I think it's mainly geared for SEO agencies and they are doing 47,000 of MRR.
- [41:02]
And here's the playbook. So step number one is that you have to choose one feature to test the market with. And let me say something, this one is actually very similar to Trust mrr. But the difference is rather than riding a viral wave and kind of shipping fast and testing that way, you are shipping features fast to see what hits, what gets the most attention. You might try to ship five or 10 different features and one is going to rise above the crowd, rise above the rest of the features in terms of the attention that it gets online. So step number one is that you choose a feature, you ship it fast. Local Rank has a ton of features, but launched with just one feature, which was a heat map.
- [41:52]
Okay, so step number two is add distribution to test the response of the feature. And so this right here is a really interesting data point which is Local Ranks shipped using a thread on X, a YouTube video, and they sent it to their email list and they ended up making $5,000 of MRR on day one, which is pretty unheard of. And the wild thing is that YouTube was actually the channel that drove the most amount of value. So this is what I want to get across to the audience is that I think a lot of people sleep on YouTube and they want to be on X because that's where all their favorite creators are. And it's really hard to make a YouTube video. But I have seen a lot of people upload loom videos that are kind of crappy quality and maybe they get like a thousand views or a low number of views, but the trust that you build in the conversion rate is really high. I actually have a funny story about this, by the way. I have a friend who has a super small YouTube channel and it's very niche. It's in the crowdfunding niche. And recently he was trying to get a green card for his wife. And when they went into the office to talk to the green card officer, they were like, oh, you're Mark. I know you're from YouTube. And they ended up talking the entire time just about his YouTube channel, rather than even interviewing the wife to get the green card. And she got a green card. So if you want a green card or if you want to grow SaaS, basically start a YouTube channel.
- [43:27]
A
It works totally. I mean, I'll add a little color here because I know Jackie, you know, he has now, I think like 20,000 YouTube subscribers, but when he launched Local Rank, he had maybe 10,000.
- [43:41]
So you don't need, you know, the thing with the way to think about it is, you know, be the Mr. Beast of your niche. Meaning like you don't need Mr. Beast hundred million subscribers or hundreds of millions of subscribers, but if you carve some niche and even if you have 10,000 subs, 8,000 subs, 5,000 subs, whatever, it is the best way to get 0 to 5,000 MRR in your SaaS.
- [44:13]
Now, it's hard to create content and, and, but I do think that, you know, I tweeted the other day about Linus Tech Tips, and Linus Tech Tips has created $280 million of revenue, $28 million of YouTube ads in his niche. Tech reviews. You know, you can just start by, like you said, loom videos, sharing stuff, you know, once every few weeks and just see where it goes. So I do like this one. What's step three? Cap early.
- [44:49]
B
Yeah, so step three is kind of similar to the waitlist strategy where again, you need to artificially constrain the supply relative to the demand. So Jackie did the same thing where he capped the early users and that allowed him to raise his prices. He raised them four times. And so that's a really interesting takeaway.
- [45:12]
Step number four. So this one, I think is very actionable. And we've seen this ourselves. Not a lot of people do this, which is that you test enterprise packages. And the reason this works is because there's often going to be a small number of customers who just have way more money than your other customers. And so when Local Rank rolled out, I think they're charging, I don't know, like 20, 30 or $40 a month, something like that. And then they tested this scale plan, which was $400. So that's 10 times more roughly than their lowest plan. They have another plan that's $1,600, and that's like 33 times higher than their smallest plan. So the main thing is that if you offer one of these big plans, you can get a lot of revenue for little amount of work. And they 4x the revenue from 5k to 20k just by introducing this enterprise plan. And here are where the sales come from. So I just want to focus on this for a second because I think a lot of people, they do want to create content. They don't know what channels to start on. And so here is an example of the channels that are working for this particular product. The other thing I want to address just for a second is there is obviously the objection of oh, he's got 20,000 YouTube subscribers, he has an audience.
- [46:35]
Here's the thing is that he also created, I think kind of copying maybe what you guys did. He created a Faceless X account, started that at zero, doesn't have a ton of subscribers or followers, but was able to generate revenue from that. And the other thing I will say is that it's not really about the followers, it is about the content. And what I mean is that us for example, we have had specific pieces of content where just that one piece of content drove hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue for one of our businesses. And so part of obviously you grow an audience. Everyone has to start somewhere by creating content. And part of what you need to do is just take a lot of shots on net and then by taking a lot of shots on net you learn the strategies of virality and slowly but surely you can learn how to create content that you're pretty sure is going to go viral or more importantly get you leads for your business. So there is an art to it. We actually also started by the way for one of our SaaS tools, a faceless LinkedIn account. And that's actually where we got, I think the majority of our waitlist subscribers was this account that we started from zero. And so it's all about the content. It's not about the pre existing, it is a little bit about the pre existing audience but, but that all comes from learning how to create content.
- [48:00]
A
The, from what I've, I've seen his, his Faceless X account on my timeline. The piece of sauce here is.
- [48:10]
He is doing a lot of like reply local SEO to get the playbook. So you know, he's getting a lot of replies and then he's DMing you the playbook and then he's probably trying to upsell you to the product because in there, right? So it might not be something that you want to do on your personal account because it feels kind of spammy. But when you're doing it at a faceless account, doing those, you know, I don't think you can hook up manychat to x manychat.com but like I'm sure there's the equivalent of a manychat. Do you know like how people are doing that or he's just doing it like he has someone managing it and he's like literally reaching out.
- [48:51]
B
I've never heard many chat. I think people use like Hype Fury or something or like, I don't know.
- [48:56]
A
Yeah, Hype Fury maybe. Yeah. But yeah, there's. That's. The other piece of this is it's just like DMing people and upselling them.
- [49:05]
B
On X. Yeah, the classic reply auto DM strategy. Definitely, definitely works.
- [49:13]
Okay, other interesting insight. Last thing I will, I will say here is that they did try paid ads and when they paused them for Black Friday, sales didn't drop. So ads were not essential here. And again, the surprising part is YouTube has been 80 to 90% of sales and the YouTube launch video has a tenth of the views as the X post, but drove 80% of the sales. So again, just rip some loom videos, put them on YouTube. You don't have to be super polished. I have seen YouTube channels that have. Literally it's like a loom video with a crappy thumbnail and they're getting tons of customers from it. So just ship it. Don't worry about being polished. That can come later.
- [49:58]
A
Cool.
- [50:00]
B
So that is the signal search strategy. And we're going to move on to number six, which is the high ticket ad strategy, which is our final strategy here. Okay, so this is a company called mailscale. Mailscale. They do something that I've seen a lot of companies do, which is they help B2B firms scale their email outreach with inboxes optimized not to land in the spam. So I think it basically helps people do cold email.
- [50:33]
And so yeah, their revenue is at 100k of MRR.
- [50:39]
And here's the playbook is if you are like, I want to just rip ads, I don't want to create content, I don't know how to do that. I don't want to put my face out there. Whatever. This strategy is probably for you.
- [50:54]
What they did. And so here's the key insight, okay. Is that if you want to use ads to scale your SaaS, you can't do it with a low ticket offer. And when I say low ticket, I basically mean anything that is below $1,000 per month. If your SaaS is $50 a month, $100 a month, this probably will not work because you will not be able to acquire customers profitably. So you have to have some sort of enterprise plan. And so they have like Mailscale Unlimited.
- [51:23]
A
That's interesting. So you're saying that if you have a low ticket offer, you can't successfully acquire customers with meta, LinkedIn or YouTube ads.
- [51:34]
B
Yes, I have tried this. This has been my experience. This is their experience. I've talked to many founders and the problem is you end up spending so much money just to acquire the customers that you go into the red. So if you have a $50 product and maybe it cost you 50 or even $100 or even $300 to acquire a customer, you're losing money from day one. And that doesn't even count the software, like the cost to develop the software and any other, any other expenses that you have. So you need to have an offer or a price point that is high enough where you can spend money on meta and you can have basically like a positive cost to acquire customer.
- [52:18]
A
Not sure I agree with it personally because I think that there's an opportunity for people to do like you know, they call, I think a self liquidating funnel, meaning I think that.
- [52:34]
You, let's just say you're selling something that's $50 a month or $20 a month, your lifetime value of a customer is $200. And even if it does cost you $150 or $200 to get a customer, it works there. And also what you could do is just say going back to your webinar funnel, it's, it's like, okay, you know.
- [53:01]
You do ads, like maybe this is your funnel. You do ads, it cost you $5 to get someone to show up at a webinar. But the way it works is you give away a playbook for free that you know and then.
- [53:19]
In that playbook you have like some affiliate ads so you're making some money back. Like maybe you partner with local rank and you recommend it. Right. So you get some money back and then you have them in the webinar. So you know, that's what, that's what a self liquidating funnel is. Or maybe you do a paid webinar, paid event, so you get some revenue back. So I agree with you that a high ticket offer is easier.
- [53:46]
To profitably scale. But I do think that there's.
- [53:52]
Always an opportunity to do paid ads, to do self liquidating funnels.
- [53:58]
B
Yeah. So what I will say is I have heard of people who do self liquidating funnels the way that I, I've never done it myself, but this is what I hear works is you have a revenue ladder where you maybe have like you said, a webinar or a lead magnet or maybe it's like a $20 educational product that is kind of like a lower barrier to entry or that people are more willing to Buy right off the bat. Because getting people to sign up for monthly recurring SaaS may be a big ask when they're coming in cold and they've just met you for the first time. So what I've heard that people do is it's like you basically it's baby steps where first you're going to get them just to sign up for a lead magnet. They get value from that or they hop on a webinar, they get to know you, you build trust and then you slowly move them up the revenue ladder. So maybe it goes from the $20 info product to a $50 subscription to your SaaS and then you upsell them into the thousand dollar enterprise plan or whatever it is. I have heard that, I have heard that that works. Never tried it myself, but yeah, I have heard that you can do that strategy. It's just a little bit complex where you have to build out these different offers.
- [55:13]
A
Yeah, that's the Russell Brunson strategy. I think if you check, you know, on idea browser every single idea has the revenue ladder. So you can see like what is your front end offer, back end offer, lead magnet, that sort of thing. It's a different type of strategy. So yeah, let's continue with this. I just had to say that.
- [55:33]
B
All right, awesome. I love the shout out. Perfect. Gotta keep it honest. Gotta gotta make sure that any caveats are shouted out here. So step number two is creating a VSL that pre sells. VSL stands for a video sales letter. So what this is is something that looks like this where it's basically just you on ideally a high quality video and a nice landing page where you're able to again kind of warm up the audience and they get to know the founder. You can explain your value prop and it's almost like what you would do, almost what you would tell them on a call. But asking them to get on a call is a big ask. Getting people to watch a video is much lower barrier to entry. So they basically do this VSL which is a high quality video with a great script and they just put it on like a simple clickfunnels page. We just talked about Russell Brunson. So yeah, that's what they do here.
- [56:33]
A
I think the only thing I'll say here is like when I look at those VSLs like that VSL, it just looks so spammy and.
- [56:42]
I want people to know that some of the biggest companies in the world use VSLs. So it might not look like that, it might not look like a clickfunnels like tons of copy and someone in their bedroom kind of recording. It could look like that, but it could look from that all the way to a highly produced, you know, beautiful enterprise looking website.
- [57:05]
B
Yeah, I agree. And the funny thing is I kind of have an aversion to click funnels and all these spammy looking tactics because it just looks like when I see this as a buyer I'm like, this just looks spammy. And it's interesting because I hear a lot of people being like, man, that's just.
- [57:23]
A
It worked. Yeah.
- [57:25]
B
Who's the guy who comes on your pod a lot? Jayicecream.
- [57:29]
A
Yeah.
- [57:29]
B
And doesn't he say it's like the worse the landing page looks, the more revenue it drives?
- [57:33]
A
Totally. And he's a designer, right? Like he's a, you know, he does beautiful design. So when he, he's always like bummed out when his like ugliest design performs the best.
- [57:46]
But sometimes you, it's not about pure performance, you know, Like I think like ultimately, you know, people listening to this like you want to create a brand, right? You want to create an impact and it's about a long term play. It's not always about optimizing every single dollar. So that's my only caveat with that.
- [58:05]
B
Agreed. I am a big fan of branding, so I do agree with that caveat for sure. So step number three is to create image and video ads. So I talked to the founder of this company and they said that they are using ChatGPT image generation, which I love because it's so low barrier to entry and they basically just follow the ADA framework which if you don't know this is a copywriting framework where it's attention, interest, desire and action. So they Basically just ask ChatGPT to. I guess now you'd probably use Nano Banana because I heard that's way better.
- [58:43]
A
Yeah, exactly. Or you'd use like.
- [58:48]
You know, there's.
- [58:51]
Like freepik or genspark or one of these other tools that have multiple image generation enhancer, AI like ARC ads, like all these other ones, you know, you can that kind of like ping.
- [59:07]
Multiple models at the same time. But yeah, I do think that, yeah, the ADA framework is still somehow like underrated.
- [59:18]
B
Absolutely. It's just like the classic psychological principles that will never change because that's human psychology.
- [59:25]
Then you can take a look at their ad library here again including this just so you can go through if you're watching this and take a look at how simple some of these ads are. And here's the tip is that the longer an ad has been running, you can guess that that ad is performing well for them.
- [59:46]
A
Yeah.
- [59:47]
B
So go to companies Meta Ad Library, take a look at what they're doing, copy it and specifically look for the ads that have been running for a long period of time. The only reason they're keeping them running for so long is because they're. They're profitable.
- [60:00]
A
Yep, agreed.
- [60:02]
B
So that's basically it. And they said it took 5 to 10 ads until they were able to book calls reliably for $300. They spent $10,000 to get to this point. So you do need to have that. $10,000 is the only thing I will say. But you can see it's like they're acquiring customers basically for less than $1,000. So they're able to do it profitably. And then from there I think they basically just scale out a sales team. So they saw that things worked and they hired closers. And yeah, that's basically what they did.
- [60:34]
A
And that's it. Right?
- [60:36]
B
That is it. That is the high ticket ad strategy. I have another one on here, but I'll just leave it as like a little bit of a secret in case you want to share this document with the viewers so that they can go through. I'll make sure that all the links are clickable because again, I really want people to be able to take these resources and take the frameworks and copy it for their own business.
- [60:59]
A
Yeah. We'll include the links in the show notes for people to download and also for you to follow Rob on his journey building his bootstrap empire. Thank you, Rob for coming on the show, sharing the sauce. And this has truly been a masterclass of SaaS frameworks, how to build with highest probability of success. So thank you very much, Rob.
- [61:25]
B
Thanks for having me, Greg. That was a lot of fun.
- [61:28]
A
Later.
- [61:29]
B
Bye.