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

If you've ever wanted to build a SaaS that pays your bills, today's episode is for you. But 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've basically reversed 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 SaaS 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 SaaS 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 concept. 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 with $300,000 a month, mentions S/O, $20,000 a month, and Clio.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 two. They're vibe coding, micro SaaS, tools, apps. And the real problem is nobody knows how to get customers. So everyone kind of sucks at marketing. And so I've broken down six proven playbooks, one of which we used ourselves. And I'm going to walk you through it. And so if you don't know who I am because you probably don't, I am a real person. This is me on X. I'm robbing three profitable boot strap companies, contact mentions and Clio. We clearly love the S O domain. And so two or softer 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. And you're going to, so just, you're basically, so the, just so the audience knows those examples that you're going to give on the left hand side, if you scroll to the left. So you're going to go through Clio, trust him or our teacher, teaches the tally.so local rank, male scale AI, you're going to tell them how much money they've made, they made. What is the playbook they've used? You're going to break down the playbook. And, and what else are you going to do? Yeah. So I'm going to take you through six different sass tools, how much money they make, their playbook for getting customers, and how you can steal this playbook for your own sass. 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 weightless strategy. And this is actually a strategy that we used for our own sass tool Clio. And in fact, we also used it for other sass 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're at 61, 62K MRR. Sam Altman, the co-founder of OpenAI, just said that it is the era of the idea guy and he is not wrong. I think that right now is an incredible time to be building a startup. And if you listen to this podcast, chances are you think so too. Now, I think that you can look at trends to basically figure out what are the startup ideas you should be building. So that's exactly why I built 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 chat GVT 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 100 companies doing the same thing. Like what gave you the cajunus, I think is the word, or the chutzpah to build something in such a crowd in niche and still hit, you know, almost a million dollars a hour. I think a lot of people wonder why don't I just use chat GVT or claw 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 as a work for us. So, we're just dog fooding. Other than that, I don't know, we're just the, cool. So, I think the lesson here is just because it's a crowded space, there still could be an opportunity if you use one of these playbooks. 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 signups 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 plugged our tool so subtly in this post. So, it's not like at the top of the post, we don't have a crazy CTA, it's just one of the bullet points. And that is what's going to get trust with your audience because they don't feel like you're trying to sell to them, they get their guard up. So, you have to create posts that lead with value. This is one example of it and then subtly sell your product. I know LinkedIn suppresses links. Do you post it and then after a few hours edit the post and then put the link? Sometimes we do that, depending on the post. 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 reached. 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 the post that's meant to go viral, get a lot of attention and then we plug it in the comments. Here's the other thing Greg is that one thing I learned while working with my co-founder Jake is that the more subtly you sell your product, the better. So, oftentimes for our other companies, he would just create post and there would be no CTA. And you would almost have to go to his account and try to figure out what he's selling. And I was doing the complete opposite when I met him. I was 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 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, edge your 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. Clio's pricing is $99 normally. We actually haven't even launched the public yet funny enough. So we hit 61k without even launching publicly. But it will be $99. And our first 500 users get lifetime access for $59. So they really want access because they're like I'm going to get lifetime discount and there's only 500 people. So yeah. And the thing I want to share 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 for their own sass. 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 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 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. Oh yeah, let's check that out. And by the way, we use AI tokens and stuff. And so we just did the math. So I absolutely agree. Do the math. 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 it's saying that Clio is launching October 1st to 500 beta users. If you want to be one of those 500 users, stay tuned. Number two. So this is sent like two days later, 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 this cooperating 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 that feels like an 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 through 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 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 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. Alright, 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 wait 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 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 were 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 and Clio. We did both within this span of like six months. Mentions hit 20k of MRR 3 and sorry in 30 days. Clio hit 61k in 53 days, I believe it was. Love it. So make sense. Wait list strategy. Edgesale. So here are build demand before launch. Create Edgesale's content. Launch eliminated early bird beta with the email wait list. I'll discount 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 writing a wave. So I called it like the wave surfer strategy. And the best example of this right now is this sass called trust MRR. It's by 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 MRR so that people can verify their MRR and be able to share that on platforms like X. And then it also has a marketplace to buy and sell micro sass 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 what I mean? Like it's a crazy, 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 sass 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, 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 MRR within 48 hours of this tweet going live from Peter levels. And so the tweet is basically Peter levels 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 fakeers. 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 retweeted vibe code something and you never know what's going to happen. I'm so sad that the quote retweet by the way. Like everyone's catching on to that because 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. 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 shareable. So trust MRR is very shareable because the product is verified MRR screenshots. Everyone wants to share their screenshots on X. And so now they can do so with you know it being verified. And so yeah, you create basically something that is the idea itself is like or the product itself is kind of native to social. Step number four. Okay. So this one is actually really interesting because this is how Mark monetizes the app. And there's other great examples of this, which is because this is an attention play where you're leveraging attention. You are creating a product that is inherently viral and shareable. What's going to happen is that the amount of attention that you get for this tool is going to far outweigh the people who are willing to pay for it. So you get a ton of attention. But there's not a lot of intent. So what that means is that it's hard to sell subscriptions. People just think that the 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 vodka to the flying game. And then he sold advertising in it, right? He was making like at one point, like I don't know, a hundred K a month. Yeah. I think you hit like a hundred K 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, a thousand dollars a month. And the second was like 1400. And that, 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 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 a step five to this one? Is there a step five? There's no step five. That five is profit. Yeah. So that's basically it. That's the wave surface 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 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 pronounced this? Yeah, I think so. And so they're basically, do you know like what is it like teachable or think if they're going to job you? Yeah. That's basically what this is. Do you know what the only difference is? This is all for say. It's all for say. 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 let me start going through the steps here. They are at 65K of MRR. And here's the playbook is. So have you heard of these businesses? We're 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 it takes 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 on YouTube if people want that. But basically what they would do is they would take Airbnb and then they do like Airbnb for Germany. And it would rent. And and then the craziest part is then they'd like sell the business to Airbnb. 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. So 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 is a billion other companies like Kajabi that already do this. And they're just making it French language native. I think the language is one piece of it. I also think that geography is the other piece of it. 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 identities are a big deal. So I think that the playbook, my, you know, I think that the playbook isn't just take a proven English like 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. And the US is always like made in America. And people love that. They eat it up. These days, obviously, there's like a little bit of 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 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 in their language. Yeah. 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 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, yeah, 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 key words that teach easy or 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 summarize your age refs 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, it's 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 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 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 again, the 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. Exciting. Everybody wants to show up in AI search. They want to be recommended by ChatGPT and perplexity and Claude or Claude. As you say, I never know which is the right one. So AI search strategy. The company that leveraged this the most is or a really good 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 custom customizable forms just by typing. They're pretty big. They are at 338 kmr. 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 building 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 OP marketing channel. When I say OP, this is like, did you ever play World of Warcraft in your kid? I actually played Warcraft 3. Oh, damn. I don't know who that is. Yeah. That's pre-World of Warcraft. All right. Yeah. Shout out to all the nerds out there. Yeah. Wrap of the lich thing 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 at 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 alternative pages versus pages and then bottom of funnel 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, I guess that's not a clickable link, but it's basically an article that is the best free online formbuilders 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. That's basically it. The takeaway is that every company should have these comprehensive alternatives and versus pages on their site. It is a proven strategy. And what else can I say about this? I mean, oh, I guess here's the other thing. Okay. So I'm going to show you some really interesting data. So AI search became their biggest acquisition channel. They got 2,000 new users in a very short period of time, like mainly in 2025. And I want to show you kind of how this works. So you can see here that they'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 formbuilder? 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 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 5 X. Dude, in this case, it was 17 X. Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah, I think it was a web flow if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, I mean, I think you can expect at least 4 to 5 X on conversion, which is crazy. But it makes sense if you think about it because 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. So it makes sense. It's curious. And let me show you, this is literally what people are seeing. So if somebody searches top free form builders right now, look at 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 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. It's like you find it up here, 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 writing a viral wave and kind of shipping fast and testing that way, you are shipping features fast to see what hits, what gets the most attention. You might try to ship five or 10 different features. And one is going to rise above the crowd, rise above the rest of the features in terms of the attention that it gets online. So step number one is that you choose a feature. You ship it fast. Local rank has a ton of features, but launched with just one feature which was a heat map. 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 five thousand dollars 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 the favorite creators are, and it's really hard to make a YouTube video. But I have seen a lot of people upload loom videos that are kind of crappy quality. And maybe they get like a thousand views or a low number of views, but the trust that you build in the conversion rate is really high. I actually have a funny story about this by the way. I have a friend who 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 a mark. I know you from YouTube." And then it ended up talking like the entire time just of 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, you know, 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, and, but I do think that, you know, I tweeted the other day about Linus Tech Tips, and Linus Tech Tips has created $280 million of revenue, $28 million of YouTube ads, in his niche tech reviews. You know, you can just start by, like you said, moon 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. We're 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. 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 if you offer one of these big plans, you can get a lot of revenue for a little amount of work, and they forex the revenue from $5K to $20K just by introducing this enterprise plan. And here are where the sales come from. So I just want to focus on this for a second, because I think a lot of people, they do want to create content, they don't know what channels to start on. And so here is an example of the channels that are working for this particular product. The other thing I want to address, just for a second, is there is obviously the objection of, "Oh, he's got 20,000 YouTube subscribers, he has an audience." Here's the thing is that he also created, I think kind of copying maybe what you guys did. He created a faceless ex-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 your leads for your business. So, there isn't 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 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. >>From what I've seen his faceless ex 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, 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 many chat to X, manychat.com, but like, I'm sure there's the equivalent of a many chat, 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 many chat. I think people use, like, height fury or something, or like, I don't know, height fury, maybe. Yeah. But yeah, there's, that's the other piece of this is just like, DMing people and upselling them on X. >>Yeah, the classic reply auto DM strategy 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 X post, but drove 80% of the sales. So again, just rip some loom videos, put them on YouTube. You don't have to be super polished. I have seen YouTube channels that have literally, it's like a loom video with a crappy thumbnail, and they're getting tons of customers from it, so just ship it. Don't worry about being polished. I 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. MailScale, 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 product 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 a customer. Not sure I agree with it personally, because I think that there's an opportunity for people to do like, you know, the 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 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? So you get some money back, and then you have them in the webinar. So you know, that's what a self-liquidating funnel is, or maybe you do a paid webinar, paid event, so you get some revenue back. So I agree with you that a high ticket offer is easier 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'm never done to myself, but this is what a here 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 gets me for the first time. So what I've heard the 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 dollar subscription to your SaaS, and then you upsell them into the $1,000 enterprise plan or whatever it is. I have heard that I have heard that that works, never tried it myself, but yeah, I have heard that you can do that strategy. It's just a little bit complex where you have to build out these different offers. Yeah, that's the Russell Brunson strategy, I think. If you check, you know, on idea browser, every single idea has the revenue ladder, so you can see like what is your front end offer, back end offer, lead magnet, that sort of thing. It's a different type of strategy, so yeah, let's continue with this. I just had to say that. All right, awesome. I love the shout out. Perfect. Gotta keep it honest. Gotta make sure that any caveat or shout out here. So step number two is creating a VSL, that pre-sales. VSL stands for a video sales letter. So what this is, something that looks like this, where it's basically just you on ideally a high quality video in 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 VSL, which is a high quality video with a great script, and they just put it on like a simple clickfunnels page. We just talked about Russell Brunson, so yeah, that's what they do here. I think the only thing I'll say here is like when I look at those VSLs, like that VSL, it just looks so spammy, and 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 looks spammy, and it's interesting because I hear a lot of people being like, "Man, that's just. " It works. Yeah. Who's the guy who comes on your pot-a-lot J.I. screen? Yeah. And doesn't he say it's like the worst landing-phase looks, the more revenue it gets. Totally. And he's a designer, right? Like, he's a, you know, he does beautiful design, so when he, he's always like bummed out when his like ugliest design performs the best. 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 GPT to, I guess now you'd probably use nano-banana, because I've heard that's way better. Yeah, exactly. Or you'd use like, you know, there's like free pick, or Jen Spark, or one of these other tools that have multiple image generation, enhancer.ai, like ARCA ads, like all these other ones, you know, you can that kind of like ping multiple models at the same time. But yeah, I do think that, yeah, the ADA framework is still somehow like underrated. Absolutely. It's just like the classic psychological principles that will never change, because that'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 companies meta ad library, take a look at what they're doing, copy it, and specifically look for the ads that have been running for a long period of time. The only reason they're keeping them running for so long is because they're they're profitable. Yep. Agreed. 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 like scale out a SL 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 a little bit of a secret in case you want to share this document with the viewers. 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 masterclass of SaaS frameworks. How to build with highest probability of success. So thank you very much, Rob. Thanks, Rob Meagreg. That was a lot of fun. Later. Bye.