Speaker 1I run a portfolio of bootstrapped SaaS companies that generate about $32,000 in MRR today.
Speaker 2This is Rashid, and he's a guy who's built three websites that make him over $30,000 every month. The reason why they work is because... But here's the interesting part. These websites are not complicated. They're actually quite simple, and they all kind of do the same thing.
Speaker 1To build a successful database product, I think it's possible in 2026. And the way you can approach it is...
Speaker 2So I asked Rashid to come onto the channel to break all this down. In this episode, we're going to dive into the exact three websites that he's built and that make him over $30,000 a month, the non-obvious secret to why these websites work and how they make thousands of dollars every month. And we're going to go over his advice for anyone who wants to build websites like these right now in 2026. All right, let's dive in. I'm Pat Walls, and this is Starter Story. All right, Rashid, I am pumped to have you onto the channel. Tell me about who you are, what websites you built, and what's your story.
Speaker 1Hey, my name is Rashid, and I run a portfolio of bootstrap SaaS companies that generate about $32,000 in MRR today. And the main product is AngelMatch. It's an all-in-one solution that helps startup founders find investors to raise capital. And today, I'm excited to share with you what lessons I learned along the way. Yeah. Excited to be here.
Speaker 2Awesome. Well, I'm excited to talk all about these sites you built. I think they're super cool. Explain your three different websites in just a few sentences, how they work, and how they make money.
Speaker 1Let's start with AngelMatch. It's a database of like 125,000 angels and VCs. We primarily focus on helping early-stage startups who are raising capital. The other one is InvestorHunt. It's just an investor database product. And the third one is JournalistHunt. It's a database of 200,000 journalists. Which helps small businesses and media companies find journalists to get press coverage.
Speaker 2I love these kind of websites. Get all this data, put it in one place, make it useful for people that need to raise money or whatever it is. There's so many cool ideas around this. We're going to get into it. But first, show me this is legit. Show me how much money these businesses are making. Could you do that?
Speaker 1Yeah, absolutely. This one is AngelMatch. We are at 29,000 MRR as of today. Active subscribers is 360 users. Our trial content. Conversion rate is 33%. And as of now, AngelMatch is bringing about 800 to 1,000 clicks per day across organic, referral, direct, and a little bit of paid Facebook ads. The prices for AngelMatch starts at $59 per month. And we have few thousand dollar prices as well. So it depends on how many investors you want to reach out per month. And this is InvestorHunt. It's making 2,800 as of today for InvestorHunt. We don't do. Any marketing is just an SEO. Also for InvestorHunt, it's basically $57, $97, and $297. And this is JournalistHunt. It's making $260. For JournalistHunt, we don't have that many users, but we see that people buy the basic and the middle tier, which ranges between $49 to $99 per month.
Speaker 2I personally love Rashid's approach to building, and specifically these businesses that he's built. Why? Because these business ideas don't chase some crazy AI trend or something like that. They are just simple websites that actually work and have made money over the course of years. Because I think the real lesson behind this story and these businesses is that these businesses solve a painful problem. And in my opinion, that is the most important thing you can do when you come up with a business idea and you want to make money online. So you might be wondering, well, how do I find a painful problem to solve? How do I find my idea? And where should I even look for it? Well, we've got something for you. We've been working with a team at HubSpot to put together a free database of over 90 painful problems that are worth solving right now in 2026. Each of these problems and pain points can be turned into real businesses and will even show you real businesses that are making money solving these problems right now. We're going to map out all the data you might need, customers, cost to start, days to launch, everything. So if you've been searching for business ideas and thinking about this idea of solving problems, then head to the link in the description. Download the database and you can get started. Oh, yeah. And it's 100% free. All right. Let's get back to the episode. I think these sites are super cool. So how do you get to this point where you have these three different websites that are crushing it, making over $30,000 a month?
Speaker 1So I'm not a technical founder. I always relied on finding developers to build the websites. I studied finance in college. And in my last year of college, me and my college friend decided to build a fintech investment app. We raised $100,000 from family and friends. I maxed out my credit cards, got some personal loans. So that money was not enough. So we had to raise capital from like professional investors, so-called angels and VCs. We decided to manually search through the Internet and build like a list of investors to reach out to. And that list actually helped us get into calls with some of the big VC names at that time and big angels. That made me realize that first, cold emailing works. But second, finding the list of investors. It's such a tedious and time-consuming process.
Speaker 2So, yeah, yeah, I mean, this is like super common. I see this with a lot of founders as they go to build a business, they experience some sort of problem while they're building this business. And then that problem that they experienced was really painful and annoying, like this, trying to find investors that you end up building another business on top of that. So what did you do next? How did you build it? How did you take the next step after you saw this problem?
Speaker 1That time we were like early stage founders ourselves. So we thought if. It takes so much time and effort finding investors, maybe there are other founders out there who face the same problem. So we decided to test this theory that we had by launching a product and seeing if we can get any traction. So we built like 40,000 investors with a few people and then we launched on Product Hunt. That month we made like $4,000 and we saw that a lot of founders actually had that kind of issue that we had. So this idea basically happened accidentally, like trying to solve our own problem.
Speaker 2Nice. Obviously, you launched this on Product Hunt, it was a cool new idea, made $4,000. But how did you actually grow this into a business that now makes over $30,000 a month and has been, you know, a full time income? What was your marketing strategy for these sites?
Speaker 1So one day I was sitting in front of my computer and I was looking at Google Analytics and I saw that we are getting like 60 clicks per day on Angel Match and the idea hit me. So I was like thinking, what if I like 10x this traffic? Would that translate into like. 10x in my MRR. And that's how I came across SEO. We hired six content writers. We started publishing blogs consistently. At the same time with the tech team, we were building and launching like free tools and all types of valuable content for our users. By doing that for like six months or eight months, our traffic started to grow. And then basically from $3,000 MRR to $20,000 MRR, we grew through SEO and added. Like meta ads at highest point, we reached $43K in MRR.
Speaker 2Okay, cool. Well, thank you for sharing that. As someone who's been successful in this space, you built three successful sites. What is the secret behind a successful directory database product that you've been so successful with?
Speaker 1The reason why they work is because they all solve a problem for our target audience. We were targeting from the beginning, like early stage startups that are raising capital because we were ourselves early stage startup founders. So I think that positioning also worked for us. And also like there are tons of different database products. You can build like a real estate investor database, you can build like stock traders or something. I think finding a niche is also important.
Speaker 2So on that point, I'd be curious if you have any ideas, if you were to start another one, you have any ideas on like where would be a good opportunity to start in 2026 based on everything you've seen and you're in the space?
Speaker 1I think there are lots of ideas you can work on. You could build like a database of. Influencers that are categorized by maybe locations, audience size, what they post about and put a paywall behind it. I'm pretty sure people will be willing to pay for it. And another idea would be a newsletter database. You know, like there are lots of like sponsored content happening on newsletters and doing it manually takes time, right? So if you just can curate and build a database of that, that could work.
Speaker 2Okay. I mean, yeah, those are two great ideas. Influencer database. I've been seeing a lot of these pop up on that note. I'm curious because you built multiple of these database sasses. If you had to start over right now, what would be your actual steps that you would take if you had to start over in 2026?
Speaker 1To build a successful database product, the way you can approach it is through getting three things, right? So first, actually coming up with a database product or directory product idea. You don't want to just start any kind of database or directory. You need to start those that solves a particular problem, right? Once you're building a database that solves a problem. The next step is start. Collecting the data and to get the data, you can manually build it. Like I did at the beginning. If you're like tech savvy, maybe you can like build some automated systems and collect that data. And the third step would be get as much eyeballs as you can launch it and get the first like feedback. If you see that someone is willing to pay for it, some people are signing up. You have a good signal. And I believe for directory and database products, SEO works very, very well. So I would focus on programmatic SEO for us. It. brings half of our revenues and if do it consistently you will get there if you are watching this far into the video rashid just gave
Speaker 2up his sauce which is programmatic seo do a google on that one we also have some other videos on that let's switch topics a little bit and talk about tech stack how specifically do you build a database
Speaker 1sas in 2026 and what do you recommend tools to use on the front end we use next.js on the back end we use nest.js we use postgre sql for database and we use hrefs for seo for hosting we use digital ocean and we also use nilis which powers our email outreach inside of angel match cloud fair to prevent bots from signing ups and for security and we use clavio for email flows and marketing and finally we use like jsu for emails it's not expensive it's like 62 dollars per month on ola
Speaker 2awesome well sounds like a pretty profitable business love that last question we ask all founders who come on starter story if you go back in time before you had these successful apps what would be your advice to yourself or for anyone watching this that is looking for
Speaker 1that first right idea to build i would say like you should be patient put in the work and never give up because there were like founders who were starting with me at that time and they were like making a lot a lot more than what we are making right now but they gave up and i don't see them anymore so
Speaker 2i would say never give up don't give up that's great advice what i love about this business rasheed is you know we interview a lot of people who build apps that grow really really fast right but what i love about this business is that it's not an ai trendy business it's just a really really solid business that will continue to grow and compound when a lot of people are building businesses that go like this and then go to zero so thanks for coming on and sharing i think it's going to inspire a lot of people i'm sure there's gonna be a lot of database products getting spun up after this video gets released so thanks for coming on thank you so much for having me appreciate it all right gus producer of starter story what do you think of rasheed and these three businesses he
Speaker 3built well one of the reasons i wanted to bring them on the channel is because it's super different than some of the other stuff we've been recently covering i love that it was just like i don't want to say old school business because it's not like it's a brick and mortar or anything like that but it feels like a little bit of a quote older type of business database information that's still successful and i thought that was the most interesting thing about it i think the question people are going to ask naturally is okay does this still work you know can i still do this obviously rashid gave some ideas on what someone can go build things like that but what's kind of
Speaker 2your opinion on something like this yeah no i think he made a good point that i might elaborate a little bit on which is like these work because they solve a painful problem when you're starting a startup you need to find investors or else everything's over your startup's going to go to zero and you're not going to make payroll there's a very painful problem finding investors and businesses are willing to pay for that and i think generally speaking i don't think you're going to be successful with a directory or sas if it's not b2b so if you're building a b2c i don't know here's a directory of dog trainers or something like that that might be a little bit harder because he can charge 97 a month or whatever i can't remember exactly what his pricing was but it was something like that so b2b i think is really
Speaker 3important yeah a while back we tweeted this thing it was like book a magician.com do you remember that case study yep but that's a good example maybe of like a b2c thing that kind of didn't work versus something like this i did or there's i know there's a lot of these popping up right now like influencer databases i've heard of like one called side shift that does kind of manages everything maybe that's like an example of something that doesn't work anymore versus something that is so anyway yeah
Speaker 2what i was thinking about yeah the influencer databases are actually really smart i mean influences are sort of hard to find hard to reach and there are businesses that are booking those so i think that is probably one of the reasons those work really when it comes down to it businesses like these specifically his three successful database products they solve a painful problem and that is the best thing that you can do if you want to find a business idea find a painful problem and solve it so we're going to put in our description down there our list of million dollar painful problems you can check out a bunch of painful problems and you can see examples of businesses that solve those painful problems that database is down there in the description i think you'll find some interesting ideas from there maybe plug that into chat gpt or claude start playing around and find your database idea all right guys we'll see you in the next one peace
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