Blueprint to Build a $1M SaaS From Scratch

If you've ever wanted to build a SAS that pays your bills, today's episode is for you. I brought on my friend Rob, who has a portfolio of bootstrap profitable SAS businesses, and together we go through a bunch of apps that do anywhere between 20,000 MR and $300,000 MR. And we basically reverse engineer how you can copy what they're doing and get customers to whatever SAS 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. >> >> I brought on my friend Rob Hoffman. You might not know Rob, but he's built a few businesses. Bootstrap SAS businesses contact Contact Sesso $300,000 a month. Mentions $20,000 a month and Cleo.so his new one $61,000 a month. And in this episode, what I asked them to do is prepare all the most interesting SAS 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 vibecoded a SAS. 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. 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 SAS. And so, my goal is to provide the most tactical and actionable guide for you to get customers for your SAS. And here's why. I see everyone on X. You probably do too. They're vibe coding microsass 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. Um, and I'm going to walk you through it. And so, if you don't know who I am, cuz you probably don't. I am a real person. This is me uh on X. Uh, I'm Rob. We own three profitable bootstrap companies, Contact, Mentions, and Cleo. We clearly love theso domain. Uh, and so two are software companies, one is uh 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 uh you're basically so the the just so the audience knows those examples that you're going to give on the lefth hand side. >> Mhm. >> If you scroll to the left so you're going to go through cleo trust mr teach tally.so So, local rank male sca scale AI. You're going to tell them how much money they've make 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 SAS tools, how much money they make, their playbook for getting customers, and how you can steal this playbook for your own SAS. >> 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 um in these different strategies. So, I'm going to start right here with number one, which is the weightless strategy. And this is actually a strategy that we used for our own SAS tool, Cleo. And in fact, we also used it for our other SAS tool, mentions. So, we know that it works because we ran it twice. And in both cases, we were able to grow to 60K MR for Cleo and 20K of MR with mentions in like a month or two. Okay, so here we're going to start here with Cleo. So, first of all, what is Cleo? Cleo 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 MR, we are at 61 62K of MR. Sam Alman, 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 uh to basically figure out what are the startup ideas you should be building. So, that's exactly why I built ideabser.com. Every single day, you're going to get a free startup idea in your inbox and it's all backed by highquality 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 you know silver platter for you to go check out. Um, we do have a few paid plans that, you know, take it to the next level. Uh, give you more ideas, give you more AI agents and more almost like a chat GBT for ideas with it. But you can start for free ideabrowser.com. And if you're listening to this, I highly recommend it. So, which is crazy by the way because when I hear that pitch, I feel like there's like a like a hundred companies doing the same thing. Like what gave you, you know, the kahunas? I think is the word or the hutbah to build something in such a crowded niche and and still hit you know almost a million dollars arrh why don't I just use chat 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 used the tool to continue building an audience acquiring customers and so we knew that what we had would work cuz it worked for us so we were just dog fooding um other than that I don't know we're just uh >> cool >> we just >> 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 weight 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 SAS, 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 uh very overtly. And so we do the exact opposite. I'm going to show you an an example of a post that drove signups to our weight list. So this is my co my co-founder Lara. And you can see that this post it doesn't lead with talking about our tool. It just talks about something that our audience wants to learn that our tool can help with. The the thing I want to draw attention to is that we plugged our tool so subtly in this post. So, it's not like at the top of the post. We don't have a crazy CTA. It's just one of the bullet points. And that is what's going to get trust with your audience because they don't feel like you're trying to sell to them. They get their guard up. So, you have to create posts that lead with value. uh this is one example of it and then subtly sell your product. >> I know LinkedIn suppresses links. Do you post it and then after a few hours edit the post and then put the link? >> Sometimes we do that depending on the post. 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 weight list in the comments. So you can see uh 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 often times 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 the complete opposite when I met him. I was like really hard selling our stuff and he was driving like all the revenue for our businesses. And I was like, what's going on here? And so that's when I learned it's really about the art of the subtle cell. You have to get trust. And then people the the less you tell people about your product, the more people want it. >> Another quick tip on on that post that if you go back to that post like uh here you see Jake is leveraging the credibility of someone else. Like you have a picture of Matthew Matthew McConna. So you're basically like attracting people who know Matthew McConna 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 you've attracted with beautiful Matthew McConna. You've created a spicy post and then you've driven a call to action in in the in the comment section, which I think is a great format. >> Absolutely. You got it. So So these are real examples of content. And 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. Like this is how we drove signups for our weight 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. edgy sales content and then you drive people to a weight list. And so we built weight lists for both of our SAS before we launched. You're getting validation. Uh 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 um 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 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 to the public yet, funny enough. Uh so we hit 61k like without even launching publicly. Uh 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 and the thing I want to show you here, Greg, is the exact emails we use cuz 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 for their own SAS. >> The only thing I'll 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 AAI 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 uh with lifetime access there. Um 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. >> And by the way, we use AI tokens and stuff and so we just did the math. So, absolutely agree. Do the math. >> Yeah. >> Um, 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 2nd of October or something. And so, this is 9 days away from launch. So, we get people onto our wait list and now we're going to nurture them and send emails that get them stoked. So, we got the headline. Uh, we have a nice post here, which I won't read through, but you can take a look in your own time. And then at the bottom, it's it's saying that 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 2 days later. uh seven days from launch. Okay. So, and we're kind of using different approaches with all of these emails. So, again, it's it's still it's either education or inspiration or curiosity. You still have to use those copyrightiting frameworks, but again, we are using uh scarcity and urgency so that people want to sign up. And we're just kind of teasing the launch of our tool. 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, >> yes, >> you know, you kind of want to I 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. >> This one is promoting a webinar. We didn't get all of our sales from a webinar, but >> okay, >> promoting a webinar kind of it helps you just get the extra juice of your 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." Uh, but then we also did like a 2-hour long webinar. Um, just to kind of get the extra people who are maybe on the fence. >> Cool. >> All right. So this is uh basically what is this 2 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 weight list playbook. You ready for step number three? >> Let's do it. >> Hell yeah. Okay. Sick. So step number three is that you want to use your first 500 users or however many users it is. It'll depend on how big your weight 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 looked like. Uh me and my co-founders were literally stacking our calendars all day long and we we each talked 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 SAS tools, Mentions and Cleo. We did both within the span of like 6 months. Mentions hit 20K of MR in three and sorry in 30 days. Cleo hit 61K in 53 days, I believe it was. Love it. So, makes sense. Weightless strategy. Edge of sales. So, here build demand before launch. Create edge of sales content. Launch unlimited early bird beta with the email weight list. Sell discounted lifetime access. Number three, iterate with early users. Do customer calls. And then you relaunch. The last step is to relaunch to a second cohort by repeating the same content. Email webinar launch flow. And then you do the full public access. Makes sense to me. >> Absolutely. You ready for number two? >> Let's do it. >> 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 call it like the wave surfer strategy. And the best example of this right now is this SAS called TrustMr. It's by a guy named Mark Lou. Uh 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 MR screenshots on X and you have all the people being like, "Oh, this is fake. Um you're a scammer, whatever." And so Mark created trust MR so that people can verify their MR and be able to share that on platforms like X. And then it also has a marketplace to buy and sell microsass businesses. And so this one it's a little bit lower of MR. It's 24K of MR, but it's >> but it's like 24K in like 30 days, you know, some ins, you know what I mean? Like it's a crazy uh crazy number. Although he does have like 233,000 followers on X, right? >> So he does have an audience. That's probably going to be the biggest objection. However, >> this he has other SAS 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 I'll get into it with the 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 uh 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 is why this worked is because basically so Peter Levelvels who is you know one of the most probably like the most famous indie hacker on X he went viral with this post right here. And so Mark actually piggybacked on Peter's virality. It wasn't even his own audience. And what Mark did is he shipped trust MR within 48 hours of this tweet going live from Peter Levelvels. And so the tweet is basically Peter Levelvels complaining about how many fake MR 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 uh by basically creating a database where we can verify people's MR so that you know who are the real uh builders and who are the fakers. >> Basically trendjacking 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. >> Step three, >> I'm I'm so sad that the quote retweet, by the way, like everyone's catching on to that cuz >> I've caught on to 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. Uh, but obviously this is all about providing the sauce to the audience. >> Exactly. So 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's it is highly sharable. So trust MR is very sharable because the product is verified MR screenshots. everyone wants to share their screenshots on X and so now they can do so with you know it being verified and so yeah you create basically something that is um the idea itself is like uh or or the 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 sharable. 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 the tool is interesting and cool. So how do you monetize a SAS like this? You sell advertising. So you lean into advertising revenue rather than subscription revenue. And so what Mark is doing here is uh yeah he 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 Levelvels himself. Do you remember when Peter created that um flying game that went super viral on it? >> Sure. Yeah. He vod 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. >> 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 SAS. >> Yeah. The other piece, the other piece of this uh is Mark, you know, similar to what you had in in in uh 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 and the second was like 1,400 and the, you know, so he had like there was some FOMO built in in terms of advertising. um like the the fast you know the the early birds got got basically the cheaper thing uh 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. Um certain number of spots you have, you know, the the early bird, you know, gets there's incentive for the early bird to spend money. Um and you're hopping on a trend. So, I like this. Is there a step five to to this one? >> Is there a step five? There is no step five. That >> step five is profit. >> Yeah, step five is profit. >> Cool. >> So, that's basically it. That's the wave surfer strategy. I'll leave this up again so people can see. >> These are the concise kind of four steps. >> Cool. >> You ready for uh the next one? >> 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 uh what is it like Teachable or Thinkic or Pajjabi? >> Yep. >> That's basically what this is. Do you know what the only difference is? >> This is on France. >> It's on France. So like it's just in French. Um and and I love, you know, we got French Canadian brother on here. Uh I'm learning French right now. It's very difficult trying to get the accent right. Not really going well. That's okay. Um, 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 let me start going through the steps here. Uh, they are at 65K of MR. 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. 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 if people want that. But basically what they would do is they would take Airbnb and then they'd do like Airbnb for Germany and it would rent and and then they'd the craziest part is then they'd like sell the business to Airbnb, you know. Um so yes, I I I do know about it, >> dude. It rips. And so an easier way of doing this rather than bringing it to like an entire uh 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 this SAS that already works. Again, there's billion dollar companies like Kajjabi that already do this and they are just making it French language native. >> I think 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 my you know I think that the playbook isn't just take a proven English language SAS and convert it to another language. I think it's take a proven English language SAS or slash American SAS 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 >> and the US is always like made in America and people love that. They 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 pull. But I would say that most most countries if you do appeal to those kind of like nationalistic impulses, there is a lot of uh value to that or a lot of um 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 they everywhere on their website, you're actually right, they have made in France and like they're they're constantly leaning into the fact that it's French and and uh 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 am. Yeah, a decent amount. A >> 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 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 Seamrush or Ahfs 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 is very low. It's very easy. >> 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. >> 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 uh acquisition, customer acquisition. And you can see it here just in terms of their 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. Uh 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 excited exciting. Everybody wants to show up in AI search. They want to be recommended by chat GBT and perplexity and claude or clude as you say. I never know which is the right one. Um, 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 noode form builder. It's kind of like Type Form, I think. Um, I don't really know what the difference is, but they let you create custom customizable forms just by typing. They're pretty big. uh they are at 338k MR. And by the way, this the founder of this company builds in public on their website and it's one of the coolest websites in terms of build and public content. Just as a shout out, I love when people build in public. Uh 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 OP marketing channel. Uh, and when I say OP, this is like, did you ever play World of Warcraft when you were a kid? I >> actually played Warcraft 3. >> Oh, damn. I don't even know what that is. >> Yeah, that's that's pre-W World of Warcraft. So, >> all right. >> Yeah. >> Shout out to 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. Okay. 2017. It's got to be Tik Tok. Now the OP marketing channel is AI search. And probably the next 6 months are going to be the biggest window of opportunity to take advantage of this marketing channel. And this is what I would argue helped to scale tally so big. And so number one is you find that OP marketing channel. Step number two and and again this one's pretty simple is you're investing into the 8020 of SEO. I'm a big believer in the Pareetto power law which is the 20% of actions always creates the 80% of results. And so, by the way, if you have a SAS, 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 offunnel pages. And what I mean is alternatives pages versus pages and then bottom offunnel blogs. And so, let me show you a few quick examples of this. Okay, >> 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 um 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. So, they have a super comprehensive article. They're going to probably list themselves first and then their competitors below it. So, that's that's kind of number two. Um, 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 uh, what else can I say about this? I mean, oh, I guess here 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 these are the search terms that they are showing up for. So when people type things into chat GBT like what is an alternative to type form, what is the best free form builder? So really bottom offunnel high intent searches. They are getting a ton of visibility. They have really high positions here. And as we know, chat GBT, 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 chat GBT and other LLMs is far beyond what they have with Google. And so there are companies that have released there was a company uh I forget who it was, but they said that they tracked their conversion rate from traffic coming from chat GBT compared to Google. It's like four to 5x, >> dude. In this case, it was 17x. >> Yeah, it's crazy. >> Yeah, it's wild. I think it was uh Web Flow if I'm not mistaken. point. Yeah, I mean I think you can expect at least four to 5x multip you know on conversion which is which is crazy but it makes sense if you think about it because your when you Google something you have you know a thousand blue links that you can go and click but when you chat GBT or Plexity something you've got like two three four recommendations right so it's it's it makes sense it's curated 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 got tally coming right up here. >> Yeah. >> And last thing I'll show is we can see the the sources that are getting cited the most frequently from tally. 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 is like you find an OP marketing channel. Right now it's AI search. Uh that is the AI search strategy. >> I like it. >> All right. Next one is uh 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 MR 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 MR. 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 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. Uh 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 MR on day one which is pretty unheard of. And the wild thing is that uh 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,000 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 uh 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're from YouTube." And they ended up talking like the entire time just about his YouTube channel rather than even interviewing the wife to get a green card. And she got a green card. So, if you want a green card or if you want to grow a SAS, basically start a YouTube channel. Uh, it works. >> Totally. I mean, I'll add a little color here cuz 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. Um, 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 0 to 5,000 MR in your SAS. Um, now it's hard to create content and and but I I do think that, you know, I I tweeted the other day about Lionus Tech Tips and Linus Tech Tips has created $280 million of revenue, $28 million of YouTube ads um in his niche, tech reviews. Um, you know, you can just start by, like you said, Loom videos, sharing stuff, you know, once every few weeks and and just see where it goes. Um, so I do like this one. What's step three? Cap early. >> Yeah. So, step three is is kind of similar to the weight list 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. >> Mhm. >> 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 were 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 uh 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 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 uh 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. Uh 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. Uh we actually also started by the way for one of our SAS tools a faceless LinkedIn account and that's actually where we got I think the majority of our weightless 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 that all comes from learning how to create content. >> The from what I've I've seen his his Faceless X account on my timeline. The piece of sauce here is 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 in there, right? So, um, it might not be something that you want to do on your personal account cuz it feels kind of spammy, but when you're doing it at a face faceless account doing those, you know, I don't think you can hook up ManyHat to X manyhat.com. Um, but like I'm sure there's the equivalent of a ManyHat. Do you know like how people are are doing that? Or he's just doing it like he he has someone managing it and he's like literally reaching out. >> I've never heard many chat. I think do people use like Hype Fury or something or like I don't know. >> Yeah, Hype Fury maybe. Yeah. But yeah, there's that's the other piece of this is is just like DMing people and upselling them on X. >> Yeah, the classic reply uh autodm strategy >> definitely definitely works. >> 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 expost, 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 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 Mailcale. Mailcale, they do something that I've seen um 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. Um and so yeah, their revenue is at 100K of MR. 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 SAS, 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 SAS 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 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, any other um 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 EDA on meta and uh 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-quidating 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 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 uh the way it works is you give away a playbook for free that you know and then um 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 selfquidating funnel is or maybe you do a paid webinar paid event so some you get some revenue back So I ag I 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-lquidating funnels. >> Yeah. So what I will say is I have heard of people who do uh self-quidating 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 a monthly recurring SAS may be a big ask when they're coming in cold and they just met you for the first Totally. >> 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 SAS and then you upsell them into the $1,000 uh enterprise plan or whatever it is. I have heard that. I have heard that that works. Never tried it myself, but uh 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 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, backend offer, lead magnet, that sort of thing. Um 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. Um, >> perfect. Got to keep it honest. Got to got to make sure that any caveats are shouted shouted out here. So, step number two is creating a VSSL that pre-sells. VSSL stands for a video sales letter. So, what this is uh 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 on a call is a big ask. getting people to watch a video is much lower barrier to entry. So, they basically do this VSSL, 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, uh yeah, that's that's what they do here. >> I think the only thing I'll say here is like when I look at those VSSLs, like that VSSL, it just looks so spammy. And I want people to know that some of the biggest companies in the world use VSSLs. >> Um, so, uh, it might not look like that. It might not look like a ClickFunnels, 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 enterprising website. >> Yeah, I agree. And the funny thing is I kind of have an aversion to Clickfunnels and all these spammy looking tactics cuz 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 >> it worked. >> Yeah. Who's who's the guy who comes on uh your pot a lot? J Ice Cream. >> Yeah. >> And doesn't he say it's like the worse the landing page looks the more revenue it drives? Totally like that. 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. Um, 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 are using chat GPT image generation which I love because it's so low barrier to entry and uh 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 GBT to I guess now you'd probably use nanobanana because I heard that that's way better. >> Yeah, exactly. Or you'd use like um you know there's like like free pick 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 multiple uh multiple models at the same time. But yeah, the the the I I I do think that uh yeah, the ADA 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 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. >> Yep. Agreed. >> So that's basically it. and they said it took 5 to 10 ads until they were able to book calls reliably for $300. Uh 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 like scale out a sales team. So, they saw that things worked and they hired closers and um and yeah, that's that's basically uh what they did. >> And 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 uh as like a little bit of a secret in case you want to share this document with the viewers uh so that they can go through. I'll make sure that all the links are clickable. Uh cuz 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 uh in in the show notes for people to download and also for you to follow Rob on his journey building his bootstrap empire. Uh thank you Rob for coming on the show sharing the sauce and uh this has truly been a master class of SAS frameworks uh how to build with highest probability of success. So thank you very much Rob. >> Thanks for having me Greg that was a lot of fun. later.