Speaker 1Most startups don't die because the ideas are bad. They die because founders skip this one thing that I'm about to show you today.
Speaker 2My co-founder Jock and I have done around 20 calls a week every week, so we've done 2,000 customer calls since we started Customer Discovery.
Speaker 1Meet Gaurav. He launched his SaaS just this year, and two months later, it's already doing $69,000 a month. So how did he do it so fast, and what's the secret? Well, that's what we're gonna be getting into in this episode right now. I asked Gaurav to come onto the channel and break down his system for building a SaaS in 2026. In this episode, we're gonna dive into exactly how he found his now $69,000 MRR SaaS idea, the reason why it grew so fast, and how anybody can replicate this if you're willing to switch how you think about building a startup in 2026. All right, guys, this is one that you cannot miss. I'm Pat Walls, and this is Starter Story. All right, Gaurav, welcome to the show. I'm pumped to have you on here. But first, tell me who you are, what you built, and what's your story. Hey, Pat, so good to be here.
Speaker 2My name is Gaurav. I built Fastlane. We're an AI short-form marketing tool for solo builders. We do around $69,000 a month in recurring revenue just for our software product. We officially launched just over two months ago, and we scaled from around $16,000 ARR just from some paid beta users to over 1,000 paid users now, and over a million ARR across the entire business. Today, I'm really excited to share more about everything we did to get here. Okay, two things.
Speaker 1First of all, you only launched it two months ago, and you're doing $69,000 a month in revenue, which is insane, so congratulations on that. The second thing, you have a little secret, which I think is amazing. It's one of the reasons why I wanted to bring you onto the channel, and we're gonna talk about it. But before we do, we gotta understand, what's the business model, what's the business, and if you could pull up some of your Stripe screenshots or dashboards so we can prove to the audience that this is legit.
Speaker 2Sure, so Fastlane creates viral short-form content for your product in seconds. You literally just enter your website, and we learn exactly what's trending in your niche, and then we create thousands of pieces of content all tailored to your business. And then you can schedule it straight to TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, all inside of Fastlane. Our main users primarily are solopreneurs building mobile apps or SaaS. So this is what our Stripe dashboard looks like right now. As you can see, there's a bit of a hockey stick from when we kind of went viral in launch. This is literally in the spans of a couple of days. You can just see the era growing like insane. We just crossed over 1,000 paid users a week ago, I think, so that's really exciting. You can see just that growth, that hockey stick.
Speaker 1Well, thanks for sharing that. I'm really impressed. How did you actually come up with the idea for this? How did you find the idea for this million-dollar SaaS?
Speaker 2Yeah, so the best part about all of this is I actually started getting into software just by watching Starter Story videos. It was probably around this time last year, I came across the video about PuffCount, that app made by Steven, and I was genuinely immediately hooked, and I just started building my own apps the moment I watched that video. After building a few apps, I realized how stuck I was when it actually came to marketing them. I didn't really want to drop a huge budget on ads, and at the same time I started doing this, I met my co-founder, Jop. He was in a very similar situation with his own SaaS project, and we all faced the same problem, which is building something and then realizing how hard it was
Speaker 1to actually get people to see it. And that's something that I noticed with a lot of founders that I talk to here. They're building something, and then they notice an even bigger problem while they're building it. A lot of people just ask the question, is, okay, I want to do TikTok, I want to do UGC, but I don't know what videos to create. So it sounds like your tool is great for that. Let's switch topics a little bit and talk about how you actually built this. I know you didn't have a crazy technical background. What did the timeline look like from idea to live app and first customer?
Speaker 2Yeah, for sure. Timeline-wise, like I said previously, we wanted to solve marketing. And so our first product, we built a very horizontal tool. We called it Cassius AI because we thought the name sounded cool. And we said, okay, we're going to build an AI. You can do SEO, LLMEO. You can engage with people on Reddit. You can make short-haul content. Again, we were very early. We really felt passionate about this problem. So we thought, surely the best solution is just to do all of it in one. We spun up a few V1s, which we started in July. We shipped those in around August and kept shipping throughout September. After kind of interacting with customers, we realized the final product that we wanted to build was short-form content. So we went all in on the short-form content part. That development started around in October. And by the time we got to December, we had shipped a beta of this vertical solution to around 2,000 person waitlists. After lots and lots of feedback and iteration, we officially launched what we know as Fastlane today publicly to the world on March.
Speaker 1March 23rd. Kind of what you said there is you just wanted to get started potentially solving that problem, but you probably solved it a little bit too wide. And then the classic advice is to niche down. Let's switch topics a little bit and talk about what's the tech stack behind this nearly million-dollar SaaS in 2026. So we use Convex
Speaker 2for our backend and database. We use Vercel for hosting the frontend. We use Railway to host our microservice that actually builds the content. We use Clerk, very simple authentication. We use Resend for all our transactional and mailing listings. We use Axiom for logs and observability. We use OpenAI and Claude models just to generate the copy and generate the captions. We use FileAI for all our image and video generation. And we use Claude code on the 20X Max plan, which is an absolute must for the speed that we ship at.
Speaker 1Personally, I love everything that Gaurav is breaking down right now, especially this system that he built and runs to track over 2,000 customer calls. This is just insane and it's super cool. This system is awesome. But again, building a startup comes from solving painful problems for customers. When you really break it down, the reason why his startup is doing $69,000 MRR is because of this. Solving painful problems. We think this is so important that we put together this free database of over 90 painful problems that are worth solving right now. And every idea in this database comes with real numbers. Monthly revenue potential, cost to start, actual businesses solving this problem, everything. If you're ready to not just build stuff, but actually solve painful problems for customers that turn into million dollars startup ideas, just head to the link in the description and you can download this database 100% for free. I think this data is so cool and I'm certain when you download it, you will get inspired. All right, let's get back to the episode. The number one reason why I wanted to bring you on this channel is we had chatted before and you were telling me all about this SaaS that you built and I was looking at the numbers and it had gone from zero to almost a million dollars a year within two months. That's not typical for SaaS, right? SaaS is this usually like slow, long grind. And I was asking you, what is your secret? And you told me, that I almost couldn't believe a lot of people watching this are probably going to roll their eyes when they hear it. But you said it was talking to customers and you had a crazy stat around the number of customers you talked to. So tell me about that. What did you guys do? So it's weird that this is
Speaker 2kind of atypical advice. I think it must be just because with cloud code and stuff, you just want to build in isolation. But biggest driver of how we ended up building Fastlane was literally just talking to as many customers as we possibly could. And obviously we're very inspired by figures like Paul Graham and the early wife who really advocated for this style of building. So I think since August, my co-founder Jock and I have done around 20 calls a week every week. It was really simple. We just had a button in our UI with a rainbow border that said book a call with the team if you want seven days of extra access. And so people incentivized because they wanted extra access and it gave us a massive leg up because now people are booking calls and we could interview them and ask them all the questions we had ready. So we just used Calendly, opened up our calendar and let users click that button. It took them, straight to the calendar and they just booked the time. So we've done 2,000 customer calls since we started customer discovery back then. So we spent all of our time basically sitting in a room, just really harassing people
Speaker 1with questions that we had. Okay, cool. Well, I mean, that's an insane amount of calls. Honestly, I'm really impressed. Obviously you can talk to customers, but in this AI world where anything can be transcribed, you had a really cool system that you had put together where you have all your customer calls. Think of it almost like a knowledge web of your customer, which is pretty cool. Would you, would you be able to show me what you built and show me these 2,000 calls that you did?
Speaker 2Okay, so essentially what we did is we kind of ran customer calls in batches. We had an AI note taker in there the whole time and we had a bit of a framework to make sure to ask certain questions and we just jotted them all down into Notion. And so we literally have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of customer call notes. And so essentially we built this huge database of customer calls. And then what we did was we kind of plugged it all into Clore. And so we call this Fastlane Customer Intelligence. It's essentially a dashboard that sends you and centralizes everything about the customer. We're very data focused. For example, I can literally click here and go choose a field and why they signed up. And so we can see, for example, people that signed up just because they were curious. We realized that their retention and the customer love wasn't actually as high as someone who selected I need marketing now, for example. We have a section here for all our customers. This is literally every paying customer that we have. We can segment them in terms of what business type, how long have they subscribed for, what's their company name. And we have this customer love score, which is essentially an algorithm that combines a few things to determine who loves our product the most. And we kind of index most of our product roadmap decisions on, hey, who loves our product? What are they asking for? Customer success is really important. Who's actually getting the most value? Who's getting a million views on TikTok? Who's getting 200,000 views on TikTok? Surprisingly enough, it actually wasn't too tricky to build. It was our non-technical founder, Jock, who built it. All we did was use Claude code and interact with certain MCPs that had our data, gave Claude access to it and told Claude what we wanted and let it build it. It was all done in natural language, all done from a
Speaker 1non-technical founder. Well, thanks for sharing that. This, I think, is one of the coolest things. And I know for the people that are watching this right now, they're rolling their eyes. They're going, what's the marketing strategy? What's the marketing secret? But the reality, and you haven't really said this, but I know that you believe this, is that actually talking to your customers helped you find what the marketing secrets were because you talk to them, you see where they found you, you find out where they hang out, you find out what features they need. This is the feedback that I give to anyone. If I ask them, oh, who is your customer? who likes your product? Who doesn't? They can't answer these questions, right? because they haven't talked to enough customers and they haven't built in the AI world. Talking to customers isn't the solution, but it is the mechanism to figuring out where to market. So let's dive in a little deeper. Let's talk about the process of doing a customer call. How are you talking to these customers? How do you convince them to get on the phone with you? And then once you get on the phone with them, what are you trying to get? Could you walk me through what a great customer call looks like? We were very scientific with it and we had three
Speaker 2main phases of customer calls. And so early in our build phase, when we were trying to figure out what to build, we went through a very strong customer discovery phase. And if you're still in the customer discovery phase, here's exactly what I just do. Assuming you know the problem space that you're working in and have a rough idea of who the customer is, just try reach out to your personal network. Try DM people on Twitter and get on a call with them, even if you have to pay them and just ask them a few questions. We use the principles from this book called The Mum Test. So the principle of The Mum Test is essentially never asking questions like, hey, would you use this? Or do you like my idea? Instead, you should shift the frame of your questions to how are you going to solve this problem? And what would happen if you did nothing about it? And once you feel you've heard a shared common painful problem, that's how you know it's time to build the solution. And so phase two was actually usability test. So once we had run enough customer discovery calls, we obviously realized there was a real pain for solopreneurs. And so we made the leap and we built an MVP that we thought would solve the problem according to what they told us. And then we had to actually acquire customers. So we like to call this fighting for customers one-to-one. So we'd be crawling Reddit threads, posting lead magnets all across social media. And the moment they signed up to our waitlist, we sent them an email, invited them to a call. And once they jumped on the call, we just sent them a link to our platform, asked them to share their screen. And we just sat there quietly and watched them use the platform. The key here is to speak as little as possible. For example, if I see someone kind of trying to log in and they're not pressing the right button, I could jump in and say, hey, just press this. But that's not helpful because I want to understand what's going on behind the scenes. This really, really helped shape our MVP. Because as we sat there and we just watched users navigate our UI, we realized there was so much friction. Now that we've run enough usability tests, we need to make the product actually usable and intuitive. And phase three was customer success. This is all about understanding, is the platform actually helping them? And so customer calls, of course, are really helpful. And so we had post-hoc tracking almost everything. And we found everyone that was using the platform the most, the power users. And then we jumped on a call with them and we asked them, again, kind of mom test questions. But we're mostly trying to find out how was the platform helping them? And we realized, okay, short form content was the thing. Getting views, getting conversions, getting app installs was the thing. And so we doubled down entirely on that.
Speaker 1Okay, cool. Well, that's a great example of, okay, when I talk to my customers, what's going to happen? Well, you realize that your UI wasn't good enough because you had talked to enough customers. It was confusing. And you came to this UI pivot essentially. And that's the reason why it's successful now. So I'd love if you could demo this feature change or UI change that led to your nearly $70,000 a month. For sure. So this is our platform's UI. As you can see, it looks like
Speaker 2Tinder. In the middle, you have the video that Fastlane has made for you. On the left, we show you a trending piece of content in your niche. This one has nearly 3 million views and it's just a slideshow. If you go through it, you can see what the slideshow looks like. And we've created a slideshow for you using the same format. Now, just like Tinder, if you want to say no, you say no. If you want to say yes, you just swipe right. And you can just press schedule. I have a TikTok account linked to this account. You can choose Instagram, TikTok. With videos, you can choose YouTube as well. You press next. We have an AI that does all the caption for you. So you hit next and I press post. And within five minutes, that's live on TikTok. And now you see you can do this in multiple formats. So this is a hook demo. And so let me say no to this one. Here again, we have a hook demo, a lady with a shock, three years in the gym. Again, we use that same thing in that central video, but applied to your product.
Speaker 1Well, I mean, that product looks amazing. And I just think it's so cool that obviously, hindsight, we could look back and say like, oh, that makes so much sense for Tinder UI to make sense. But would you have come up with that without talking to so many customers? And would you have had the confidence to make that UI decision? That is the thing that I think is super cool. Anyways, last question that we ask all founders who come on to start a story. You know, a lot of people who watch our channel, a lot of people who build stuff, they love to build stuff. Maybe they're even a little bit more introverted and talking to customers is a little bit scary. What advice would you give to anyone who's watching this right now who wants to crush
Speaker 2it with a SaaS like you? Firstly, thank you so much for having me. This has been the craziest, full circle moment ever. We never would have built Fastlane if it wasn't for Starter Story. So in that theme, I felt this really strongly myself. My heart would be beating so fast. I'd be so nervous. But ultimately, you just have to do it. You need to make something people want. And the best way to know this is to actually talk to them. I'd say just don't be afraid of going against the norm. I was raised in Australia, and we have this thing called tall poppy syndrome. And so going off and doing your own thing, kind of look down upon it in society. So what I would say is just back yourself and go all in. Well, that's great advice.
Speaker 1For anyone who's watching this who's from Australia, I'm sure you can relate. Thank you for coming on and sharing and going against the norm. And thanks for coming on to Starter
Speaker 2Story. It's awesome. Thanks for having me. Thanks for birthing Fastlane.
Speaker 1All right, Gus, producer of Starter Story. What did you think of Gaurav and Fastlane doing nearly a million dollars a year in two months?
Speaker 3I mean, that's awesome, right? Cool guy. Loved his energy and vibe. The most compelling thing was the whole talking to customers part. But it really made me think about how much I wouldn't want to do that. Yeah.
Speaker 1No, I think one of the reasons why people don't want to talk to customers is that there's a fear of rejection. What would they say about my app? Well, they think it's bad. Well, they already think it's bad. You just don't know. That is very relatable. And I agree with that. And then obviously the whole system was cool. Yeah, that's one of the things I noticed with founders. They typically find good systems. He mentioned a couple books that he sort of found. Take those, learn, go on YouTube, read books, learn about frameworks, watch Starter Story, understand certain marketing distribution. And then implement it. Even at Starter Story, which is just a media company, YouTube channel, I would still talk to customers, right? I would still get on the phone with them and understand what their pain points are, what their desires were. I don't want to toot my own horn, but I do feel that I have a great understanding of our customer. It has really been insanely helpful for everything. Every decision that I've made, videos we decide to do, features that we build, everything. And I know people are going to watch this and roll their eyes. Oh, well, what's the strategy? What's the secret? What's the marketing thing? And this is it. This is the secret. It's not sexy. It's not fancy, but the best founders know their customers well. Okay. Well, before you run customer calls, you still need to be solving a painful problem. I think that's one of the reasons why Gaurav's business has done so well, a problem that our audience experiences a lot too. So if you are looking for your business to build and you want to solve a painful problem, check out the link we put in the description. That is our million dollar problems database. In there, you can find real problems solved by real businesses and you can see how much money they make. So if you're looking for a million dollar problems, these businesses are making, and it may give you some ideas on what you could build. That link will be in the description. It's a hundred percent free. All right, guys, we'll see you in the next one. Peace.
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