# I make $3.5M/year with a LinkedIn AI Agent

Channel: Florian Darroman
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oi0Iks0Ats
Duration: 27 min
Language: English
Words: 4368
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/4oi0Iks0Ats

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[0:00] Six months ago, I got Roman on the podcast. Back then, he went from zero to 50k MRR in 180 days. Today, he just hit 300k MRR with his SaaS GojiBerry. So, I invited him back to understand how he did it. In this episode, Roman shares the distribution channel that multiplied his revenue by six, what he learned going through Y Combinator, and how you can apply his blueprint to your SaaS. By the way, if you missed the last episode when he explained how he went from zero to 50k MRR, I will link it in the

[0:28] description below.

[0:34] So, Roman, last time you came on the podcast, you were making 50k MRR with GojiBerry. Right now, you just hit 300k MRR. So, I want you today to explain us what happened in between. Yes, sure. So, thank you so much for having me. The thing is, at every different stage of your SaaS, you need a different

[0:56] revenue channel, I think. So, the philosophy we have is always to go to another channel once we have mastered one or once we feel that we cannot do more on one channel. So, for example, to give a bit of context, from zero to 6k, it was only outbound. From 10 to 25, it was only

[1:20] Reddit almost. And then, from 25 to 75, it was content plus some blueprints. So, now we're going to talk about what happened after the 75k. So, it was a mix of a lot of things. We got into Y Combinator, which gave us a lot of exposure and also credibility. Because every time you post, if you put the YC logo or if you say that you are in YC, you get a ton of exposure from

[1:49] the start startup world. So, that's something great. And so, what we did from 75k to, let's say, 150k was focusing on partnerships and X. So, we added Twitter. We opened three accounts for the three founders, and we and I started posting on them. I'm I'm managing content for the all the founders account. We did some B2B influencers. So, we paid influencers to basically post for us, post some lead

[2:21] magnet for us. And what we were doing before was posting on our own account. So, we expanded the reach by um just getting influencers on board. Then, what we did as well is a lifetime affiliate program that helped like crazy get affiliates and bring us some some some subscriptions. And so, if you add all of these, B2B influencers, Twitter, sponsored newsletter, lifetime affiliate program, this helped us go to 100k 150k in in

[2:55] monthly recurring revenue, sorry. And then what we did Yeah, sorry. you say sorry, but you say that everything that you did before, so Reddit, outbound outreach, that's something that you kept doing, right? And you were just adding. We we were adding. And now we started cutting. So, for example, after reaching, let's say, 250k of MRR, we started we cut Reddit. We are not

[3:22] posting on Reddit anymore. Um just because uh there are several things. So, first one is we spam too much. So, there there's a lot of hate towards people promoting their tools because I think we went a bit too hard, but that's that's fine. And also because the opportunity opportunity cost is not that high. So, to get a few K of monthly recurring revenue, it takes us a lot of time. And if we take that time and put it into B2B influencers, UGCs, any other channel, we get way more. So, if I had unlimited employees, of course I could put one on Reddit, but I feel like Reddit

[4:05] is not something we want to do. And what we've seen happen is people talk about Goji Berry on Reddit about their experience with Goji Berry without us having to post. So, some other people are doing the work for us. Um but you are right. We kept adding some channel and the only one we we we removed is is

[4:23] Reddit for now. Okay. And that's something I want to know because when you have winner, let's say cold outreach or pure like outbound. Mhm. Um how do you delegate that and how do you keep actually doing it on the background while you're working on your distribution channel? Um that's a great question. So, I use

[4:45] agencies. I have agencies working for me. So, on cold outreach, I manage it myself, but for B2B influencers, I have agencies helping me. For SEO, I have an agency. For UGC, I have an agency. For content, I have an agency helping me. So, the bet is um we did not hire so much on the growth marketing side. I'm handling everything, but I have the best agencies in each

[5:12] domain helping me. Um and so, every time I want to add a channel, I test it myself and then I delegate to an agency. And I think moving forward, we'll have someone in-house doing growth. Um that's going to take my spot and manage some agencies while I test other channels. Okay. But I cannot do everything myself, and so of course, we have agencies. This has a cost,

[5:38] um but we know exactly what we want. So, you try first yourself, for example, LinkedIn outreach, and then when you manage that, when you know exactly what are the winner and what is the template that works, you find an agency that take the relay. So, for the outreach, it's a bit different. We have someone in-house, so we have an intern in-house ending that. But for UGCs, yes, for ads, meta ads, yes, for content as well. So, I have my own blueprint and I know exactly what I want and I delegate it to an agency and they have to follow the

[6:16] blueprint. Yeah. Okay. Let's go back to the partnership and X. Like, how did you actually found the good person to hire? Did you use an agency straight away for that or did you find yourself the good B2B influencer on X? So, I did on X, I did pretty much everything myself and now I have an agency that's suggesting some post. Most of them I reject, but from time to time, so most of them I reject. From time to time I can copy and paste the the post they give me because it's good. Most of the time they give me ideas or angles that I don't have the time to to to

[6:59] to find or I I don't have time to think about it. So, I see the the post they've made. They are not exactly what I want, but the hook or the body of the tweet makes me think, "Okay, this is great content. I can repackage it and create a great tweet." Okay. Because it is founder-led content, it's very hard for an agency to know what's

[7:22] happening inside the brain of a founder. So, you will always have to rework a bit the content. And now I see that you do that's the last stage, I think you do paid. So, you say that you hire an agency and you also do UGC that you turn into paid content. Can you explain me like what did you learn in this field which was something

[7:46] new for you? Yes, so I'm following the blueprint from XField, Arcades, Lovable, and there's another one that I don't remember, which is B2B creators. So, um What what you The blueprint is quite simple. You create content on on TikTok and Instagram. Once a piece of content is viral, you put it in ads. So, you boost it in Meta ads,

[8:15] Instagram ads. Um On LinkedIn, you pay B2B influencers to give lead magnets about your brand. And what you do as well, the last thing is Let me think. So, UGC ads. Uh on X, you do viral launches on X. So, you pay people to quote retweet you. If you look at the biggest launch from XField or or even anything which is a a SaaS, you can look at who is quote retweeting the tweet. You DM those people. You pay them and they'll retweet your your tweet. So, I just started yesterday doing that and I'll do another bigger

[8:58] test today. Um and it works. It works for 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 dollars. You can get a viral video on X, which is going to bring you a lot of revenue. So, the the moving forward, the playbook is really focusing on these three channels and increasing the volume. More UGCs, more B2B creators, more quote retweets, and try to go to 500K, 1 million per month, and so on. Um and there's also a challenge to that. This kind of content attracts mainly individual small sales teams, small agencies. So, So you want to go up

[9:35] market, um it's harder. But that's opportunity cost, I guess. What's the problem for that? Is that churn? Is that Is not the good ICP for you? It's like you just Retention. anyone. Okay, retention. Retention um retention, yeah. Um so Retention, you don't really care about it if you are lovable or XField. They have so many users Oh, Claude, for example. Claude doesn't care I mean, they care, but they have 1 billion

[10:07] people using using their subscription. So I mean, of course there's going to be a ton of churn. But if you are doing this kind of marketing and you are not going all in, then you'll have the the the churn aspect. If you are everywhere, you'll get crazy growth. And from that growth, even if you don't have a lot of teams, you'll get the teams you need to consolidate and so on. So

[10:31] the bet is really to go all in on this. And um we also have some plans to bring bigger teams, um but I have to I have to work on that. I want to go back on something you said. Uh you were accepted into YC. A lot of uh founder wants to get accepted. It's pretty hard to get accepted. You did it. You went to San Francisco. You went through all the

[10:52] process. I really want to know more about that. Like, what is actually the process? Like, when you get accepted from the day you get accepted, what do you get? And what do you do after that? And what kind of feedback do you get uh from all these people around you? Sure. So, once you are accepted, um

[11:12] you book your flight to San Francisco. You book uh an Airbnb. Um and you go there for 3 months. Um then you have to create a US company if you don't have one um to get the the money from from YC. Um and the day you get in, you get perks from a lot of companies, a lot of famous companies. So, we got I think something like almost 1 million dollars in in tokens from OpenAI. So, we got a bit from Token AI, a bit from AWS Azure. We got some other um tools. We got 300k from Gemini, 300k from Claude. So, you get all these

[11:52] tokens, which is very valuable because if you are an AI tool, that's cost that you don't have to um to to to pay. So, um then you get to San Francisco, you get to the YC headquarters. You have something like one conference per week. You get um one meeting with your partner, so the the person in charge of you per

[12:20] week. And every 2 weeks, sorry, and every 2 weeks you get a group talk. So, you are with other founders and you discuss um how it's going, what's hard, what's what's going well. Um and during those 3 months, you are basically in a room with your co-founders, you work. You only go out of the room to um

[12:43] go to to the gym. Um and go to those YC events. You also have a lot of events in the city happening while you are invited, where you meet people. So, the the main value from this is really the network, the quality of the people you meet. And also it unlocks some parts of your brain because um I arrived there thinking, "Okay, I'm going to make a few

[13:10] millions and and and sell my company." But from what I saw there, um there are people we talk to people, we engage with people who sold their company for 300 million, 600 million, and so on. And so, these levels of success I didn't know were possible. Um and so, it unlocks your your brain. It

[13:28] unlocks a lot of things. And um, networks bring you business. YC brings you business. And uh, you want to work more. You are even more motivated. And so you you you you want your company to succeed. So, at the end of YC you have something called the demo day where you present your uh, company to investors. We raised money uh, that day. We we had quite a high

[13:52] valuation. We diluted very um, little. And so right now we own about 85% of the company. We don't plan to raise more. And we have ton of money in the bank to go all in once we find the the right channel. So, we found the right channel. We don't know how to scale them yet. But the day we find how to scale, we can go all in, still be a profitable company. Um, and grow the company like like crazy. And so I think it's a faster path to um, make 10 or 20 million than staying bootstrap while losing very little of of

[14:27] the of the company. That's crazy actually. I didn't know that you would get so much from them. I really thought like the money was really small and then, you know, you had like all the network, but I didn't know that you would get so much token and everything which is So many so many things. Yes. And uh, talking about like the kind of feedback that you got. So, you are in this group, uh, this kind of mastermind like this little batch where you

[14:51] exchange uh, daily with other founder. Uh, but you also have kind of a mentor like some people who are like way above you as you say like 3 million, 500 million exit. And if you ask them, what did they tell you? What are the shift um, that you got from talking to them for example? Yeah. So, the partner we had um,

[15:16] is called Andrew Miklas. Uh, brilliant guy. Really, he he his company did an IPO. So, that gives you the scale of of success he had. Um And so, these people, they have been seeing companies and advising company for the last 10 years, maybe. And so, they know everything about how to make the company right, how what what what what you have to do to succeed. Of course, they give advice. They don't tell you do this. They won't do it for

[15:47] you. Uh but they give crazy advice about how to how to succeed. Uh they are available anytime. Um and these people are all in with you. Um they really help you. If you have any question about anything, they are here for you. Um and YC is is a large group of people. So, they are, I don't know, maybe 5,000

[16:13] founders, maybe a bit more. Um and you can DM any founder from any company and ask for help, and they'll help you just because you did Y Combinator. Um which is which is pretty pretty insane when when you when you think about it. So, you can DM the the founder of Airbnb if if you have a good reason to.

[16:33] That's crazy. And well, you teased us. You said that they know how to be successful. What did they tell you? What is the biggest thing that you learned in So, I mean I mean, it's not one thing. It's um listening to customers. Um talking to customers a lot, not developing features before talking to them, um not spend money if it's not profitable, um there's so so many things. Not hire too fast, fire fast if it's not going

[17:02] well. Um You have to be all in also. Um life balance is something that if you I mean, depends the level of success you want to have, right? Um but if you want to be IPO successful, which is not my case actually. But if you want to be like very very successful, it comes with costs. Uh and these people, they've paid

[17:26] the cost. So, they know what it takes. They know um the struggle to to to get there. And so, when you talk to them, they understand every step you are taking to to to to to to get there. So, I mean, they're not going to tell you, "Okay, you have to develop this feature." But when you ask them, um they say, "Maybe you should prioritize this because that company did that. But talk to the founder to talk to your

[17:52] users and see what they say." Um it's small things like this. Yeah, interesting. So, it's pretty much the basics. Like if you if you read the Paul Graham essays, you have everything in it. But You have like someone for real explaining you you in front of you and tailored for your tools, right? Yes. And also, the partner assigned to you um I've I've had a similar business in the same niche. So, they know everything about um acquisition,

[18:23] how to talk to these users, and so on. That's amazing, actually. And now that you have like kind of all this knowledge, so last time we talked, um I will put the link in the description from our last conversation, you're making 50k MRR, you went pretty fast to 50k MRR. Now you're at 300k MRR, you went to YC, you met all these people. If you look back at all the steps that you took, from 0 to 6k MRR pure outbound, from 10k to 25k

[18:53] MRR Reddit, etc. Is there anything that you would have changed? Even if you are like crazy successful right now, like is there anything that you have you would have changed to go faster or To to to be fair, I don't really feel successful. I'm I'm just working a lot, and Uh, I'll see what happens later. We The company is making a lot of money, but from 50 to 300k, not much change, and we are very far

[19:19] from the objective we have. What I would have changed, I don't know. It's hard to It's hard to tell. Uh, right now No, I I not much, I think, for now. Even if we did 1/3 of what we are doing today, I would be super happy about the results. So, no, I I wouldn't change a thing. The company is 1 year old since 4 days. So, so, yeah, it's

[19:49] it's it's it's going well. I like that you say that you're not successful, but the truth is that you probably compare yourself to the people you met, but like what you accomplished is pretty insane until now. Yes, of course. You you That's something we have difficulties with is taking a step back, looking at what's there, and be in be But, I think Like we we we we told ourselves that we would celebrate at 1 million annual recurring revenue. We didn't do anything. 3 million, we said the same thing, we didn't do anything. So, I think The The team is uh pretty crazy, and doesn't know how to how to celebrate

[20:31] much. So, everyone is shipping all the time, and we'll see in 2 years, 3 years where where we want to go. And also, when when I I got into YC, I was thinking, "Okay, I make a few millions. I sell the company." But right now, I don't even want to sell the company because I'm having so much fun building everything, testing the

[20:49] channels. It's like uh It's like an addiction right now. Going in the office, I'm in the office from 8 to 1 1:00 a.m., and just doing it over and over and over. So, this is the fun part, I think. The fun part is um s- seeing that it's successful, but also being in the office, like being in in doing the operation, talking to people, booking some inferences. That's where

[21:17] the fun part is, I I think. And you tried a lot of different distribution channel. You are in a a B2B SaaS. I have a B2B SaaS, so I want to ask you this question. What was for you the most profitable one? Like for Would you do again content plus free free blueprint, for example? Do you

[21:38] think that's still the thing to to do? Yeah, I think the biggest growth leverage was doing um blueprints, yeah. And can Tell me more about that, actually. Um So, what we do basically is um So, there there's a few things. Um well, I think what makes Goji Berry super viral and um the distribution super viral is something you guys are doing really well as well. I see the content your co-founder is putting out is thinking, okay, um let let's say you are doing SEO, for example. Um and you are thinking, okay, I want to reach people that do SEO, which is

[22:26] obvious, okay? But that's a mistake because reaching people that do SEO is a niche that everyone is targeting. How to improve your SEO thanks to AI is a new niche that happened. Um and this niche is pushed by Claude putting out crazy budget, by all these creators that know they get more reach talking about AI than SEO. So, what we did is instead of saying how to get more leads, we are we we we we put some content about how Claude, how LLMs, how ChatGPT can get you

[23:03] better leads. And so, when you do this, your niche, your target niche, is way higher. You have a lot more reach. You have people that are interested that were not. You have people from AI. You have people from outreach. You bring a lot more people. Um So, in terms of distribution, you are going to grow way faster. If you do blueprints about AI, um the distribution is going to 10x. Like, it's it's

[23:27] absolutely insane. The problem is, of course, since the niche is a bit broader, the churn is higher, and so on and so on. That's we we already talked about. So, I think what what I wouldn't change is really targeting the AI niche and putting out some content for those people, creating specific blueprint about how AI helps you improve your

[23:50] business um with outreach. Um And so, I think that's the biggest play right now. Target the AI niche instead of uh And within the AI niche, your future user will will find you. I love that because there is a Neville who came on the channel. We talked about that. He used that blueprint on X. Uh he was doing also um influencer marketing

[24:15] on um partnership on X. Yes. Same thing that you're doing now. And he also changed his landing page, same thing that you did, to target really like AI agent. So, now you are you changed the message, right? On your landing page that you're targeting uh I don't remember exactly what is the the headline, but it's really

[24:36] uh your AI agent doing this, right? Yeah. How much did the conversion rate um yeah, the conversion rate change when you actually did that? Did the changes on the um on the homepage, change the ICP, and just started to push that. It's too hard to tell because there are too many parameters. Like, um at every stage, the the traffic doesn't come from the same places. We know some places have traffic that converts more. So, if you change the headline, but in the same time you change the distribution channel, you cannot track. And we don't have the tools right now in place. That's my fault. To track everything. So, I cannot

[25:20] respond to your question. I don't know. To to be honest. Um What we What we do know is we have a landing page that's converting well. That's for sure. Interesting. So, you if someone starts right now because we talked about the next step, but if someone starts today, you will tell him to follow the same blueprint. Mhm. Mhm. Not I mean, it really depends on the product. And also, um I don't like to tell people, um you should do this because it doesn't apply to all SaaS. Um if you take, for example, Thibault with Outrank or with Revive, he has some other blueprints that are working like crazy that might

[26:04] work better for some people than my blueprint. Um so, I'm I'm not telling people, um you should do this. I'm telling them, "This is what I do. It works for me." Um check it out. If If you feel like you can reproduce some stuff, do it. Uh but do not do everything I do because

[26:24] that's not going to work. Amazing. Well, this one, Roman, was supposed to be short because I really wanted to take, uh just some news from you because last time we talked, you did 50k MRR. Now, you are 300k MRR with Goji Berry, amazing tool. And we'll do another one when you will reach 10 million MRR.

[26:47] 10 million? Okay. want you I want you to celebrate before. And we'll do it. to. Awesome. Thank you so much, Florian.

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