# I Quit My Job at Meta to Build a $30K/Month SaaS

Channel: Starter Story
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_lpZ503ZGg
Duration: 15 min
Language: English
Words: 3373
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/2_lpZ503ZGg

---

[0:00] Okay, I'm here at the Vista Valencia Golf Course in Los Angeles, California. And we are going to meet someone who built a successful app yet still has a full-time job. It all started when he sent me a DM. He said, "Hey Pat, my app is making $30,000 a month, and I have a software engineering job at Meta. Should I keep my Meta job or should I go allin on my business and take it to the next level?" Let's find out. In this video, you're going to learn about the $30,000 per month golf app that he built. some really good advice on how to build a successful business while you have a

[0:32] full-time job. And at the end, we will decide if he should quit his job or not. I'm Pat [music] Walls and this is Starter Story. All right, we are driving out to meet this guy who makes $30,000 a month from his SAS and he works at Meta. There's geese, bro. move.

[1:02] Okay, starter story, fam. We are here at Vista Valencia Golf Course. We are about to meet the golf app owner who's making 30 $40,000 a month with his golf app. Let's go meet him. He's right there. You can see his golf swing. It is beautiful. What's up, buddy? What's up, man? Good to meet you.

[1:18] How you doing? How you doing? So, you are the owner of Live Turney Golf SAS, making $30,000 a month. Tell me more about that. It's SAS tool for golf courses. It helps golf courses like this uh run their tournaments. We've got about 150 golf courses that have uh started using our product. We're at about 350K [music] of ARR and based on how we've been doing the start of the year, about a $800,000

[1:40] run rate. Nice. And tell me a little bit more about your career. I know that you're you've been building this for some time, but you still have a full-time job. What's going on there? I'm a senior software engineer at Meta. I work on the AI team. It's definitely been a hard thing to balance doing two things at once. But it's getting to a point where now I have to kind of make a decision on

[1:58] is this going to be a full-time thing. It's not really going to be sustainable for me to do both any longer. Yeah. Often we do our interviews over remote, but I really wanted to improve my golf swing. I'm wondering if you could help me out a little bit on that. Yeah, let's do it.

[2:11] Let's do it. Awesome. Okay. What is this? It's a pitching wedge. pitching wedge. Okay. I was a baseball pitcher. Is the same thing as that? Yeah, exactly. [laughter] The first thing I would do is your grip. I like to do what's called the interlock where you put your right pinky uh left forefinger. Okay. Like that. Like that.

[2:30] Yep. Exactly. I don't even have gloves. You want a glove? No, I'm good. And what about my stance? Stance looks good. Okay. How far did that one go? Still going. Oh, wow. Your app [music] is making over $30,000 a month. Tell me how you even found the idea for this and how you decided this

[2:53] was even something worth building. I had played in some tournaments at my local course. We weren't using anything for scoring. I knew there was a product on the market that I'd used before called Golf Genius. And I asked our pro why we weren't using it. And he told me it was just too complicated and too expensive to me. That's an opportunity to go build something. And so I built it

[3:10] for our first event about 4 years ago. It was nights and weekends. I'd wake up and the first thing I'd want to do in the morning was go build or the last thing I want to do before I went to bed tonight was go build. And it was just kind of became like this obsession of like how do I keep making this thing

[3:21] better every day. Let's talk about how you built it. What's the tech stack on this? It's a web app. I use Next.js for the rendering side of things and then we use Google Firebase as our back end. I'm not a golfer and uh probably a lot of people watching this don't know anything about golf. Could you just like

[3:36] show me the app and like what it does? Essentially, what will happen is when players show up to the the golf course, they'll get handed a scorecard. They'll scan a QR code on their scorecard and they land right here on the leaderboard. And then they go to scorecard, they can enter the code on their card or they can just select their group and then they just start scoring. So they say, you know, four, let's say, I made a birdie

[3:56] on that hole. This guy made par and par. [music] But now when they go back to leaderboard, obviously as other people are putting in their scores, it's updating in real time and they can see how they're doing throughout the round. This is kind of the main leaderboard component for the event. Nice. Is this going to be B-roll or can I ask

[4:13] you real questions? Yeah, you can answer real questions. At the beginning, you ask like you're on the AI team. Why did you leave your job? Or you're like, this guy's making a dumb decision. I was just curious cuz one of my buddies works at Google and he made like, I [snorts] don't know, tens of millions or something like that just cuz he was

[4:28] working on the AI teams. Yeah. If it was purely financial, it seems like staying is probably the right call. But at the same time, I I could lose my job at any point. It's just such a hard decision. Yeah. Hey guys, it's Pat here from the future. I'm just finishing up the edit on this video right now. But this video, it got me thinking about something. [music] So

[4:48] Matt has been facing this huge decision. Should he stay at his job with all the job security and everything, or should he quit and go all in on his dream to build [music] his own SAS? The thing here is that there's no right or wrong answer. But it's important to note that Matt would not be here if he never made this one decision to go out and actually build something. And if you're watching this, you might be wondering, how do I find an awesome SAS idea like Matt's

[5:13] found that's making $30,000 a month? Well, we worked with HubSpot to put together a free database of over 100 proven micro SAS ideas just like his. In that database, we break down revenue numbers, pricing models, how much it costs to start, and everything else you might need to find and validate your idea. So, if you've been looking for your next idea to build, the beginnings of that might be hiding right here in this database. If you want to grab it, you can just head to that link in the

[5:39] description and get it 100% for free. All right, let's get back to the video. So, what are your plans? My plan had always been to do both as long as I can because it lets me build at a pace that I can keep sustainable to grow the business, but also I don't have to take the risk of not having a salary, not

[5:55] having benefits or anything like that. But it's getting to the point now where two of them at the same time with two young kids is no longer sustainable. Walk me through your thought process of essentially quitting that career, your emotions around that. The first one is fear. just like walking away from this steady great job. You know, I can work 9 to5 at Meta and have a pretty great life. But on the pro side, it's like being able to chase my dream and go after what I built and being able to show my kids you can just do what you want to do. Like you don't

[6:22] have to wait. You don't have to let someone tell you what to do. Like you can go build things. I started this to kind of give myself the freedom to be my own boss and and build my own thing. But that also means now I'm waking up at 6:00 in the morning and fixing bugs or I'm up late at on a Sunday night at midnight trying to get the next feature out. And so it's definitely a battle of

[6:38] those two things. And let's talk about job security for a second. How you think about that? I've been at Meta for 6 years. There's probably been six plus layoffs in that time. I've been lucky not to be affected by them, but it's feeling more so that it's not necessarily like a guarantee that I can be here as long as I wanted. One of the reasons why I wanted to meet you and and talk to you is because you have this inflection point coming up where you're going to decide to quit your job or just keep going. Are you nervous about it? Yeah, I think I'm definitely nervous like what the day

[7:08] after when I wake up and I don't have the real job and and the real income like what does that look like? I'm definitely [music] like fearful of you know if this doesn't work or if something happens and I lose all my customers like then I have nothing what are you thinking you're going to

[7:24] do? My heart tells me to go all in on this thing. It's still small obviously right now but I I do see a path forward to this being a really really legitimate great business. And when I think about the energy that I get in the morning and what I want to spend [music] my time on,

[7:38] it's live journey. I think there's something there. I had a full-time job. I was working in tech and I decided to quit my job and go all in. And there's something about having your back against the wall. Like when I quit my job to start, I had $12,000 in my bank account. That was really motivating to push me to go all in. But a lot of people just go start a business and then they don't even know how to prioritize their time

[8:04] or anything like that. You already know how to do that. You prove you can generate revenue and get customers. You did all the hard part already. Now, once you have your full day to dedicate to this and you know how to be productive, you're going to crush it. There's one thing more that I want to get from you, which is advice for people who are building while they have a full-time job. But before we do that,

[8:24] let's go back to the clubhouse. Okay. Let's talk about building while you have a full-time job. A lot of people watching this probably have a tech job. They might be software engineers. What would be your advice on like how to actually ship get customers in balance full-time job without getting fired for that performance? What's your advice?

[8:43] Yeah, I think time management is key. Set aside time in the day. For me, it was the morning like 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. and just wake up early and get it done. A lot of people watching this channel are looking for idea. Oh, this golf app is really cool. What would be your advice for people who are trying to figure out what that thing is that could

[8:57] make $30,000 a month like you're at? It's hard to say because I found this by doing the things that I was passionate about. But I think that's what made it successful because I can do this and it doesn't feel like I'm working. So my advice would be find something you care about, figure out where you could make

[9:12] it better and go. Yeah, it's cool. Nowadays you could build software that pretty much does anything. If you like pickle ball, go build pickle ball tournament software or whatever it is I see a lot of people try to build stuff like you said for dentists [music] but they're not a dentist they don't know anything about dentists and then going gets tough you're 3 months into that you eventually give up but if you do something you love doing you're in for me that was entrepreneurship people starting businesses I love that would have done it for free to talk to founders like you and people who built cool stuff so I think that's

[9:41] great advice tell me what it's like now like you're making money you're about to hopefully quit your job one day your app could be worth a lot tell me about that it's really fulfilling I back to the first customer we got and when the first internet dollars came in, it is like a complete brain shift and it's really rewarding especially coming on site to a place that is a customer of ours to like see how what I've built affects random people that I've never met and we'll

[10:05] never meet. Exactly. There's something really special for software engineers like us. I was also a developer to actually build something and see somebody who doesn't even know who you are potentially and they use it. They get value out of it. I think that's like one of the coolest things to actually build something. Yeah. Cool, man. We're going to talk in like two or three weeks and you're going to let me know if you quit your job or

[10:25] you didn't. Yeah. So, thank you. Thank you. Just wrapped up with Matt here. I'm at the golf course right now. And should he quit his job? What do you guys think? It's a big decision. On paper, it may look like the right thing to do to stay at your job. And we've interviewed people on the channel who stayed at their job until they're making $80,000 a month. At some point, though, something has got to give. The main takeaway that I have is at the end of the day, starting your own business comes down to

[10:54] how much risk are you willing to take? Because when you quit your job, usually it's in a time when you're not really sure about if your business is going to be legit. What are people going to think about you? What if it's not successful? This is way more important than what business idea you have. It's more about a belief in yourself. And it was really cool to talk to Matt to see like him develop that belief over time. So I'm

[11:19] excited to give him a call in 3 weeks. So I'll see you in 3 weeks.

[11:31] Matt, thanks for giving me a call. We were sitting on the decision of you keeping your job or going allin on your business. I have no idea what you're about to say right now. Give us the update. everyone watching is excited to hear what you decided to do. I mean, it's a hard decision for sure, but after thinking about it and and kind of deciding where I want to be going forward, uh, I got to go all in on my journey. It's what I've wanted to do from the start. It's just kind of been a matter of whether the business is ready for it, and I think now it's ready for

[11:58] me to be in it full-time. Nice. So, congratulations. That's a big decision. I'm sure a lot of people watching this are excited for you. So, let's get into it a little bit. So, you quit your job. How did that go down and how did you decide? The layoffs were last week. I did not get laid off, which would have made the decision a lot easier. So, leaving that has been

[12:18] something that's hard to process. [music] But what it really came down to, I had a one-on-one with my boss yesterday, and it kind of felt like a breakup cuz I've not really left a lot of jobs before, but super supportive. And my boss is actually a golfer, so he was pretty pumped on on that. But it's a day I've been looking forward to, not because I'm like excited to leave Meta, but because I'm excited to go out and do my own thing full-time. And so I'm

[12:42] excited. For some people, it's quite easy to just quit their job because they're single and they're 20. And you have a family, you have two kids, you have a wife. This is a bigger decision than just you. How is the kind of security around it felt? Yeah. Well, it definitely wasn't a decision I made individually. My wife pushed me on this as well and kind of knew that this is what I wanted and was super supportive in that. But it also gives me the freedom to like choose my own times and I can be a dad for a couple hours in the day if my wife needs

[13:11] a hand or you know take my kids to the park in the middle of the day. So always helpful to have support of spouse and [music] that's for sure. Last question I have for you is what's next and what are you looking forward to working on? I'm excited to kind of be a little bit more outward with what I'm building. Like I've never been able to talk about it on like LinkedIn or any social media or anything like that. So kind of doing more of that and then obviously just like having the whole day

[13:34] to do work [music] from start to finish. So excited to jump in and figure out like how I can every day be the most effective to to grow the company. Awesome. Yeah. I remember when I quit my job and it was the first couple weeks, first couple days. It felt amazing to have a full day that I could dedicate to all the growth things or things I wanted to try in my business and to know that I already had some income. Similar to you, you're not feeling like you're super back against the wall. You got to like validate a startup idea. That's the beauty of building while you have a

[14:04] full-time job. So, thank you for coming on and sharing your whole story. In the comments for everyone that's watching this, let us know what you think. Do you think it was the right move for Matt to quit his job and go allin or should he kept going until his business was making more or just never quit his job? I'm curious what you guys thought in the comments and also give him some words of advice or encouragement on uh the next couple years and hopefully we can have you back on when you're doing 100k per month with your SAS and this thing has

[14:29] grown like a rocket ship. Awesome, man. Appreciate your advice as well, Pat. It's been awesome to uh learn from you and follow along. All right, good luck. I think this is going to become really big and I don't think you're going to regret this decision. As long as you keep going, we'll do it. All right, guys. That wraps up our conversation with Matt. Let us know what you thought about this video where we went to the golf course, talked to him about his successful business. Let us

[14:50] know what you thought in the comments. Otherwise, we'll see you in the next one. Peace.

---

About this transcript
Read from YouTube's own caption track and laid out by ViewRank AI (https://viewrankai.com).
ViewRank AI finds the videos already beating a creator's own average on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube Shorts, transcribes them from the audio itself in more than 60 languages, and turns what worked into new ideas and scripts.
Free transcript tools, no account needed: https://viewrankai.com/tools
How to read any video this way: https://viewrankai.com/llms.txt