How I Built It: $12K/Month Micro SaaS

two years ago I quit my job I started building trying uh experimenting and uh just recently I reached the Milestone of thinkk Mr how does this guy make over $10,000 a month with screenshots well it's because he works within the niche he knows best I knew how to build like it was kind of my super skill you know before becoming an indie hacker demitro started his journey as an employee I was working most of my life as a developer writing quote in startups and companies building products but one day he finally had enough and decided

to take the leap and go all in on his dream even having the best job in the world huge salary still I felt that something pushed me into another Direction it was kind of my childhood dream now demitro is a solopreneur making a great living coding and building his own products and all of his success comes down to one thing you need to be persistent enough to try anything to just get to this $ in this video demitro shares exactly how he went from 9 to5 to solopreneur and how anybody watching this could do something

similar and spoiler alert he shares a lot of good stuff including his framework for building ideas faster some unconventional marketing channels he uses to get lots of paying customers and his unique strategy to keep those customers for longer now let's Jump Right In I'm Pat walls and this is starter story hey man welcome tell us a little bit about who you are and what you built let's TR let's TR hi I am mro I'm building uh screenshot one it's my main focus and this is a product that helps uh companies from small to big to

automate uh screenshots So currently I am at 280 customers making around $12,000 mon recovering Revenue this is subscription model you subscribe to a product and pay for example $17 a months and if you need extra screenshots extra features and so on you pay extra nice tell us the story about how you got started out with screenshot one of course I had like millions of ideas but when I was into this journey I realized I need to you know to reduce my space of ideas to something that I can really build it should be a quality

product and as since I was a backend developer server side developer I knew how to build apis like it was kind of my super skill I reduced my list of areas only to API products one of the ideas was and I built it it was email validation API somehow it it looked super boring for me so I just focused on screenshot one I went to Google and I saw so many competitors it means there are people paying also that was good aristic to evaluate denish you know so you realized that there were similar tools to

what you wanted to build and people were already paying for these tools but isn't having competitors bad how should others think about this when they're choosing their business idea having some Niche with competitors is good you can probably also find some numbers you can see how many customers they have almost every area you want to build it's not unique it's really hard to invent something unique and even if you invent this thing who said people need it you know the only thing you need to check there is enough of this us users that will satisfy

your goal for example you want to have 10K Mr you probably need to check if there is enough of companies for example which need screenshot uh software and they will pay you like this amount of money all right so you validated the niche but how did you go about validating the actual product did you ask for people's opinions the problem is people are really nice some of the people can just pay you you know even for non-existing product but you still don't know will they use it or not will it help them or not till

you build it until you see this kind of companies that don't know you using your product yes but once you have at least 10 paying customers from outside Network and you didn't know them they just came and bought your product and use it that's for me like an ultimate validation okay so to validate the product we got to build it but we also got to make sure people want to pay for it tell us how this happened with screenshot one it took me 5 month to build it and launch it it was my first time

I was launch I wanted to be everything perfect and so on it's mistake because uh you anyway your first version will be anyway not good let's say today I launch much much faster like I tried to launch in in one months or less I quickly build uh something really small in one feature I don't build unification I don't build payments anything and then I share it with my close friends for clicking and testing that it just works like nothing is breaking you know then I launch it on Twitter and so on yes and um if

I can get access to my potential paying customers Direct I would just go to them just reach out to people and then probably it will be payments and then it will be notification and then I will start itating getting feedback and so on demitro is the perfect example of how a software engineer can turn his coding skills in a simple idea into a side project that makes thousands of dollars a month but that comes with working on the right idea and knowing the best methods to get those first paying users this is why I created

starter story Academy a place that helps you find an idea validate that idea with real feedback and help you execute on that idea so you can turn it into a profitable side project that might just change your life so if you're curious about building a profitable side project like demitro and hundreds of other Founders just like him head to the first link in the description to learn a bit more about the academy and see if it's a fit for you now let's get back to our interview with demitro okay now we have a working product

but how do we get customers which marketing channels work for you the best okay okay so when I started it was like I was trying almost everything and then I saw for me Twitter worked Google worked these are currently major channels for me then you have uh a lot of unobvious channels like zapier make a lot of people are using these tools for their businesses automating and if you can put your products onto these platforms you know people will find you also of course it was product hunt launch it helped me with the awareness and

it helped me with the bo in my SEO some an obvious channel for me I probably will invest more in it is YouTube Somebody posted tutorial how to send cold emails with my product and I saw like pain customer coming from YouTube and I thought wow I can also publish tutorials on YouTube for this kind of technical product and people still can find me in SEO in Google it's pretty hard to get to the first position but for some keywords Google also shows videos you know like YouTube videos so you can post YouTube video and

you can be run pretty high you know it's kind of HW I would say you know okay cool you got customers but how about keeping them how do you deal with churn of course I'm asking customers when they cancel subscription they have popup and they can choose reason and write their reason Buton didn't help because somebody answers we don't need this product anymore something like that you know so I started reaching out through emails I was checking their profile their company what was their use case what was the reason they specified and then I was

like trying to guess why they CH and then I was like saying you know one yes no question did you CH because of let's say pricing and people started to answer you know like yes yes I did it because of that and so on and I almost got 100% the success rate of getting these answers it's a lot of manal work but it's good because it was building mental model in me why how people use my product why they CH and what happens you need to talk in support to people you need to talk after

CH because sometimes you just realize somebody came and they're not your customer and one of the ways to fix this is to change your marketing you know to change your copy for example I was getting some people who were expecting my product to be like no code so I emphasized that it's for developers you know it's like you need to write code to integrate my product for me it was like let's 11% per month now it's uh close to 7 I want to get it down um less than 5% of customers be earning you know

per month all right so talking to customers and testing your assumption is how you've reduceed turn let's talk about monetization now tell us how you made your first dollar with screenshot one I was promoting for one month my product everywhere like on every possible platform Twitter redit into hackers everywhere yes and uh just one person saw it found it valuable they paid $7 per month for for my product but for me it was a huge feeling it felt like a million dollar you know you need to be persistent enough to try anything to just get

to this first dollar that's awesome tell us now how you decided on the pricing for your product at the beginning it was pretty simple $5 fell super cheap seven okay it's the simplest but my margins were almost zero so I decided to reduce the free plan and uh I rais prices for next Plant when you raise prices it really helps it's much stronger signal to get people who really want to use your product my current pricing is kind of an intuition like how much customers still can pay and it will be valuable for them and

it will be good profit margin for me and we can still grow something like that you know it's like kind of an intuition cool now let's talk tchack what are the different tools software and languages you use to run this $100,000 per year SAS product I use typescript for managing headless browsers and Puppeteer Library I use uh go language for rate limiting managing API keys and so on I use cloud flare for storing screenshots as an API get to my product from the business perspective I use Google search console for analyzing Google yes keywords CTR

and positions I use Google Keyword Planner for predicting volumes for keywords when I want to write some content I use uh post hul analytics for product like you know for building funnels and if I see somebody paid for for the product I want to know from which marketing channel they came yes I use POS hog for that and then I use crisp chat for live chat support and answering uh quick question questions to customers I have like my phone attached to it and if I see a message I try to answer immediately to it and

if I can solve it I also try to solve it immediately I think that's probably most of the tools I use daily all right and if you don't mind me asking what do the profit margins look like for your product it's around from 40 to 60 person profit margins uh most of my costs are servers it's pretty expensive currently I render around let's say 2 million screenshots and I pay from 3 to 4,000 per month for servers total expenses should be around $4,500 I think like in total that's awesome so we already kind of talked

about how having competitors is a good sign that you're building something lucrative but once we're in business how do we actually deal with those competitors and how do you go about it I think the moment you have um 10 paying customers like real customers who are not from your network not just for supporting you and using your product for their business and they extract value from it you just can focus on them and deploy feature for them optimize all your marketing for these kind of people and search for them for most solo Founders who want

to build a simple business and to just cover their current life expenses and to leave of that business you probably don't need to be harsh enough and to be bad and you can be just nice kind build relationship with people and uh still uh get enough customers to pay your bills you know got it okay you've given us some great insights into what it takes to build a SAS business but now let's get a little bit more personal what does a day in a life look like for you it's it's pretty simple I wake up

I help my wife to send kids to school to kindergarten then I just uh go home and drink a cup of coffee or I just go to some local cafe and drink a cup of coffee and I always always every morning I read at least one hour of some book so then I work till the evening when till kids uh come home and uh for example today I will go to play football soccer with friends yes on weekends I do some fun stuff traveling uh having time with my friends with my wife kids and so

on if you're a solopreneur especially you need to take care of your mental health because it's like it's your only tool that you use every day and if you feel bad your quality of decisions are also much much worse you know you having clear mind and uh thinking is one of the most leveraged things you can do in your business I think okay cool now the last question that we ask all founders that we interview what would be your advice for entrepreneurs just starting out I want to say like don't listen to anybody including me

and like any advice consume everything guys everything you can like try to find the most quality content you can but at the end of the day don't Outsource your decision to anybody you need to own it you need to have intuition like with the what are you going to build to Market to do with your business what kind of Journey you want to have yes try to act from your own mind like if you base your decisions don't out sort them don't ask people let's say tell me what to do or I want to quit

my job what do you think should I quit it or not no you decide if you want to quit it quit it if not then not it's pretty hard to generalize any lessons for example I had good runaway but somebody quitting their job they don't have good runaway and it makes a huge difference some people treat money seriously and some people don't care like for example I was poor so for me losing all money it's not a big deal you know like I feel I can be destroyed and start again but for somebody for example

who was growing in a good family it can be pretty scary so it's pretty hard to give advice for example just quit your job burn all the bridges you know and so on like it's it's pretty contextual thing to do yes all right thank you demitro for coming on I love the business that you built good luck with everything and have a great day thank you yo guys I really hope you enjoyed the video and got some actionable advice that you can take from demitro but I want to say something real quick at the end

of the day the point of these videos is to teach you guys how to find ideas how to build them so hopefully you can start a profitable project on your own while learning is important action is the thing that's going to get you that dream outcome and if you're still struggling to to take action no matter what then I highly recommend you check out the academy it's the community I wish that I had when I first started and it's got a bunch of resources to help you get those first users with your idea just head

to the first link in the description if you're ready to commit and you're ready to take action much love and I'll see you guys in the next one peace [Music]