The Startup Ideas Podcast - 10 Unknown SaaS Making $50K+ MRR (Copy Them)

Episode Date: December 8, 2025

On this episode I sit down with Rob Hoffman, who runs a portfolio of profitable SaaS businesses (Contact, Mentions, Kleo). Rob breaks down six proven customer acquisition playbooks using real examples doing between ~$20K and $300K MRR. The episode walks through concrete strategies like waitlist launches, trend-jacking, language arbitrage, AI search, signal-search, and high-ticket ads. You will learn how to go beyond “vibe coding” and use structured marketing systems to get their first customers, raise prices, and scale more predictably. Timestamps 00:00 – Intro 04:16 – 1) Waitlist Strategy: Kleo & Mentions Case Study 19:45 – 2) Wave Surfer Strategy: TrustMRR Case Study 27:54 –3) Language Arbitrage Strategy: Teachizy Case Study 33:53 – 4) AI Search Strategy: Tally Case Study 40:30 – 5) Signal Search Strategy: LocalRank Case Study 50:04 – 6) High Ticket Ad Strategy: MailScale Case Study Key Points Most indie builders can ship products but struggle to get customers; Rob packages his experience into six repeatable acquisition playbooks. The Waitlist Strategy pairs “edgy sales” content with email nurturing, scarcity, and beta cohorts to quickly reach tens of thousands in MRR. Riding an existing wave (like fake-MRR discourse on X) plus product-led virality can generate huge attention, which is better monetized with ads than subscriptions. Language and geo arbitrage—cloning a winning SaaS into another language/market—combined with non-English SEO is “marketing on easy mode.” AI search (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude) is an overpowered channel right now; deep “alternatives/versus/best of” pages are heavily cited and convert far better than Google traffic. Feature-first launches, faceless accounts, and enterprise plans let products like LocalRank and MailScale stack MRR with small audiences, YouTube demos, and high-ticket sales. The #1 tool to find startup ideas/trends - https://www.ideabrowser.com LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/ The Vibe Marketer - Resources for people into vibe marketing/marketing with AI: thevibemarketer.com Startup Empire - get your free builders toolkit to build cashflowing business - https://startup-ideas-pod.link/startup-empire-toolkit Become a member - https://startup-ideas-pod.link/startup-empire FIND ME ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/ FIND ROB ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://x.com/RobHoffman_ Kleo: https://kleo.so

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, comments, 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.

I brought on my friend Rob Hoffman. You might not know Rob, but he's built a few businesses, bootstrap, SaaS businesses, contact S.O. $300,000 a month, mentions S.O. 20,000 a month. And Cleo.s.o.S.O.S.O. is 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? Thank you, Greg. Stoke 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, 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 to their vibe coding microsas, 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'm in three profitable bootstrap companies, contact mentions in Clio.

We clearly love the .S.O. 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. So you're going to, so just 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 Cleo, trust MRR, teach a tachy, tally.S.O, local rank, mail scale AI. You're going to tell them how much money they've made and 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 SaaS 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. 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 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 waitless strategy. And this is actually a strategy that we used for our own SaaS tool, Cleo. 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 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 6,000. 61, 62K of MRR. Sam Maltman, 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 ideabrowser.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 take it to the next level, give you more ideas, give you more AI agents and more almost like a chatGVT 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 a hundred companies doing the same thing. Like what gave you, you know, the kuhunas, 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. I think a lot of people wonder, why don't I just use Chad GBT 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 were just dog fooding.

Other than that, I don't know. We're just, uh, cool. So I think, 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%. Okay, cool.

So step number one for the wait list 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 on 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

sign-ups to our wait list. So this is my co-founder, Laura. 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 plug 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 post, the 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

to edit the post and then put the link? 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, 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 wait list 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 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 sell. You 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 that if you go back to that post,

Like here you see Jake is leveraging the credibility of someone else. 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 know, 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. 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 themselves and create their own versions of these posts because this is it. Like 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, eddu 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. 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. 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. Cleo's pricing is $99 normally. We actually haven't even launched the podcast. 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. The only thing I'll add to this is if you're, a lot of people listening are building AI startup. So they're building something that, you know, 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 what, 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 with lifetime access there because you might be, you know, 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.

I want to see these emails, though. Yeah, let's check that up. And by the way, we use AI tokens and stuff. And so we just did the math. So I absolutely agree. Do the math. Do the math. Yeah.

Okay, cool. So here are some emails. So this is literally leading up to our beta launch. Okay. 23rd of December, we launched, I think, like the second 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 Cleo 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, seven days from launch, okay? So, 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. What I'm noticing just like going through these emails is it's super easy to scam. 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 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. Yeah. 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 like a two hour long webinar just to kind of get the extra people who are maybe on the fence. Cool.

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.

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 bigger 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, like, very specific here. This is what our calendars look like. Me and my co-founders, we're literally stacking our calendars all day long, and 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. 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 in Clio. We did both within the span of like six months. months. Mentions hit 20K of MRR in 30 days. Cleo hit 61K in 53 days, I believe it was. Love it. So make sense. Waitlist 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.

I'll discount the 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. Make sense to me. Absolutely. You ready for number two? Let's do it. 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 like the wave surfer strategy. And the best example, example of this right now is this SaaS called TrustMRR. 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 trust MRRR. 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 Microsoft 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?

Like it's a crazy, crazy number. Although he does have like 230,000, 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. Okay. 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.

So 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 one of the most, probably like 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 this tweet going live from Peter Lovells. And so the tweet is basically Peter Lovell is 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.

Basically trend jacking. Like you're finding a trend and you're finding like a viral post and 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.

What's step three? I'm so sad that the quote retweet, by the way, like everyone's catching on to 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. Exactly. No holding back.

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 it being verified.

And so, yeah, you create basically something that is, 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 away 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 how, 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, 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 levels himself. Do you remember when Peter created that flying game that went super viral on that? Sure. Yeah. He vibe coded a flying game and then he sold advertising in it, right? And he was making like at one

point like a, I don't know, 100K a month. Yeah, I think he hit like 100K a month in like 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, you know, similar to what you had in the first framework. He actually made, you know, the first, I think the first advertisers paid like, I don't know, $1,000 a month.

Then the second was like 1,400. And, you know, so he had like, there were some FOMO built in in terms of advertising. Like the fast, you know, 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, right, on his website. So I think this is brilliant. You have the scarcity play, certain number of spots. You have, you know, the, the, the, you. early bird, you know, gets, there's incentive for the early bird to spend money.

And you're hopping on a trend. So I like this. Is there step five to this one? Is there step five? There is no step five. Step five is profit. Yeah, set 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. Cool. You ready for the next? Number three. Let's do it. 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? Yeah, I think so. And so they're basically, do you know, like, what is it, like teachable or think ethic or Jabi? Yep. That's basically what this is. Do you know what the only difference is?

this is en Francaire. It's en Francaise. So like, it's just in French. 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. 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. 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 U.S. or something that works in the U.S. and bring it to Brazil or whatever. It takes something in Brazil and bring it to Europe? Yeah. So Rocket Internet is like 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 like Airbnb for Germany and it would rip. 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. 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 Qajabi 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. I think that 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, my, you know, I think that the playbook isn't just take a proven English language SaaS and convert it to another language. I think it's take a proven English language SaaS or slash American SaaS and convert it to another language or geo. That's true. People really

care about that these days. As a Canadian, we've never really been too nationalistic. Yeah. And, And the U.S. is always like made in America and people love that. They eat it up. These days, obviously, there's like a little bit of like a rivalry. And so the leaning into the Canadian first thing probably has more poll. 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. Cool. So that's 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 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. Step number two is do SEO in this other language. So Greg, I think you know a decent bit about SEO, correct? A decent amount. Yeah, a decent amount. Decent amount. So SEO, as I'm sure you know, in any other language, 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 back in like the early 2000s. And so when I look at the keywords that teach Easy are ranking for, what do you notice about this keyword difficulty section? here. It's a dream, dude. It's a lot of green. Yeah, like I'm always looking for a sea of green. If you want to, if you want to find a good SEO opportunity, you pull up a tool like Samrash or Ahrefs and you look for this sea of green 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 low. It's very easy. You don't see this that often, like a sea of, you know, any more at least, you know?

So I think that this is dope. 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, the 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.

Cool. 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? Let's do it. 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 chat GPT and perplexity and Claude or Claude, as you say. I never know which is the right one. 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 type form, I think. I don't really know what the difference is, but they let you create customizable forms just by typing. 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. So here's the playbook. You ready?

Yep. So there's always going to be one O.P marketing channel. And when I say OP, this is like, did you ever play World of Warcraft when you're a kid? I actually played Warcraft 3. Oh, damn. I don't even know what that is. Yeah.

That's pre-World of Warcraft, so. All right. Yeah. Shout out to all the nerds out there. Yeah. Rapp of the Litch King was my jam. And people refer to things as overpowered. O.P.

It means overpowered. And so let's say that we're going back to 2007. The O.P. Marketing Channel, was what? It was Facebook. Okay, 2017. It's got to 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, helped 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 80, 20 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.

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. is. 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 Talley does. So they have a super comprehensive article. They're going to probably list themselves first, and then they're competitors below it. So that's kind of number two. 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.

at a time, like mainly in 2025. And I want to show you kind of how this works. So you can see here that they're getting a ton of data from AI search. And if we zoom in a little bit further, you can see that these are the search terms that they are showing up for. So when people type things into chat, GPT, like what is an alternative to type form? What is the best free form builder? So really bottom of funnel, high intense searches, they are getting a ton of visibility. They have really high positions here. And as we know, chat GPT, people use it as the personal therapist. They're talking to it as if it's a friend.

The level of trust that people have in chat GPT 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 chat GPT compared to Google. It's like 4 to 5x. Dude, in this case it was 17x. Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah, it's why.

I think it was web flow, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, I mean, I think you can expect at least 4 to 5x, you know, on conversion, which is crazy. But it makes sense if you think about it because you're. when you Google something, you have 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 it's, it makes sense. It's curious. It does.

And let me show you, like, this is literally what people are seeing. So if somebody searches top free form builders right now, look, you have a tally coming right up here. Yeah. And last thing I'll show. is we can see the sources that are getting cited the most frequently from Talley. And guess what pages are getting cited the most frequently? It's these ones right here. So that's it.

That's a very, very simple one. It's like you find an OP marketing channel. Right now it's AI Search. That is the AI search strategy. I like it. All right. Next one is cool. It is the signal search.

strategy. You ready to rip it? Let's rip it. All right, let's rip it. So this one is 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. 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 ten different features and one is going to rise above the crowd or 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 it launched with just one feature, which was a heat map. 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 rank 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 and the conversion rate is really high. I actually have a funny story about this, by the way. I have a friend who is 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 to into like the office to talk to the green card officer, they were like, oh, you're Mark.

I know you from YouTube. And they ended up talking like 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 a SaaS, basically start a YouTube channel. It works. Totally. I mean, I'll add a little color here because I know Jackie.

he has now, I think, like, 20,000 YouTube subscribers, but when he launched Local Rank, he had maybe 10,000. 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 100 million subscribers or hundreds of millions of subscribers, but if, you know, 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 zero to 5,000 MRR in your SaaS. Now, it's hard to create content. 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. Yeah, so step three is kind of similar to the weightless 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. 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 dollars a month, something like that. And then they tested the scale plan, which was $400. So that's 10 times more roughly than their lowest plan. And they have another plan that's $1,600. And that's like 33 times higher than their smallest plan. So the main thing is, is that you, if you offer one of these big plans, you can get a lot of revenue for little amount of work, and they 4x their 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. 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 viral 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 your 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 waitless subscribers was this account that we started from zero. And so it's all about the content. It's not about the preexisting audience. It is a little bit about the preexisting audience. But, that all comes from learning how to create content. From what I've seen his faceless X account on my timeline, the piece of sauce here is

he is doing a lot of 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 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. I've never heard ManyChat. I think people use like Hype Fury or something or like Right 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 on X Yeah the classic reply Auto DM strategy

Totally definitely works Okay other interesting insight Last thing I will say here Is that they did try paid ads And when they pause 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 ex 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. Cool. 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. Mail Scale, they do something that I've seen a lot of companies do, which is they help BDB firms scale their email outreach with inboxes optimized not to land in the spam. So I think it basically helps people do cold email. And so, yeah, their revenue is at 100K of MRR.

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. 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 mail scale unlimited. 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. 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 dollar profit, and maybe it costs 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, 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. 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 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, like it works. there. And also, what you could do is just say, like, going back to your, like, webinar funnel, it's like, okay, you know, you do ads, like, maybe this is your funnel. You do ads. It costs 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, um, in, in, in, in, in, in, the, in, in, in, the, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, that playbook you have like some affiliate ads so you're making some money back like maybe you like partner with local rank and you recommend it right um 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 some you get some revenue back so i agree i i agree with you that a high ticket offer is easier to to to to profitably scale but i do think that there's always an opportunity to do paid ads to do self-liquidating funnels? Yeah. So what I will say is I have heard of people who do self-liquidating funnels, the way that I've never done to 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 a monthly recurring SaaS may be a big ask when they're coming in cold and it's 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 $1,000 enterprise plan or whatever it is. 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. Yeah, that's the Russell Brinson strategy, I think. If you check on idea browser, every single idea has the revenue ladder. So you can see like what is your front end off or back end off or 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. All right. Awesome. I love the shout out. Perfect. Got to keep it honest. Got to 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, 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 in a call as 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 click funnels page. We just talked about Russell Brunson. So yeah, that's what they do here. I think the only thing I'll say

here is like when I look at those Vs, like that VSL, it just looks so spammy. And 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 click funnels, like tons of copy and like someone in their bedroom kind of recording. It could look like that, but it could look from that all the way to like a highly produced, you know, beautiful enterprise looking website. 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 look spammy. and it's interesting because I hear a lot of people being like, man, it's just...

It works. Yeah. Who's the guy who comes on your pot a lot, Jay Ice Cream? Yeah. And doesn't he say it's like the worst the landing page looks, the more revenue to try? Totally. And he's a designer, right? Like he does beautiful design.

So when he's always like bummed out when his like ugliest design performs the best. 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 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're using chat GPT 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 chat chivete to, I guess now you'd probably use nanobanana because I heard that's way better. Yeah, exactly. Or you'd use like, you know, there's like free pick or Gen Spark or one of these other tools that have multiple image generation enhancer. dot AI, like arc ads, like all these other ones, you know, you can, that kind of like ping multiple, multiple models at the same time. But yeah, I do think that, yeah, the ADF framework is still somehow like underrated. Absolutely. It's just like the classic psychological principles that will never change because it's human psychology. So, and 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. Yeah. So go to company's meta ad library, take a look at what they're doing, copy it, and specifically look for 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 profitable. Yep. Agreed. So that's basically it. And they said it took five to ten 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. That's it, right? 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 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. Yeah, 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 master class of SaaS frameworks, how to build. with highest probably success.

So thank you very much, Rob. Thanks for having me, Greg. That was a lot of fun. Later. Bye.