# AI SaaS making $26k/month in less than 6 months

Channel: AI Bites
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXQQb5wUZ3o
Duration: 30 min
Language: English
Words: 5081
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/aXQQb5wUZ3o

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[0:00] This is Celine. She built a simple AI SaaS that's making over $26,000 MRR in less than 5 months since launching. Through that process, we got our first paying customer within 48 hours of launching. Now, in this competitive AI world, how did she manage to get [music] a first customer in 48 hours? I didn't see any successful products where founders themselves are not

[0:26] [music] using their own products. Are you facing any problems right now in your everyday life? Maybe there's an [music] AI SaaS solution worth millions hidden beneath the problem. Since we're building it for them, we could why not do it for ourselves, build something that we want. And if you already have the technical skills, all you have to do is build for yourself and launch something of your

[0:48] own. But just last month in August, we closed with $26,000. [music] And the sky's the limit. Who knows what your product can achieve in 6 months' time. And we built about four different SaaS [music] AI platforms, and those four didn't really work out. Not to forget that you need to persevere in order to achieve anything that you

[1:11] want in this AI landscape. I made a mistake of like being too trapped in my own mind. So, why do most founders get trapped in their minds? So, how did she come out of that mental trap and build a successful AI company? [music] What exactly was the approach? What is the process that Celine followed to scale the SaaS in such a short period of time? In this podcast, let's dive into all the details, including a list of subreddits that are useful for SaaS founders. She has also been generous enough to share her playbook to promote any SaaS product on Reddit without getting banned. So, [music]

[1:49] let's dive in. So, Celine, thanks so much for taking your time off uh for our podcast. Uh why don't you introduce yourself to the audience and tell us a bit about what you've built? Well, I'm Celine and I'm a co-founder of Social Crawl. Social Crawl is a It's a unified API that gives um devs and new agents access to social media and web data. So, right now, current problem in the market is that the social media data, they're really fragmented, organized, unreliable, and they come in different like inconsistent

[2:22] shapes and structures. So, our current solutions, right now, I think you might have heard like Bright Data and IP 5. And it takes a lot of like DIY maintenance on the infrastructure side. But, what Social Crawl does, we try to offload a lot of maintenance work from the devs and we provide the social media data in a single API. Provide all the data in a unified schema, so they come in very consistent format. [music] Just plug it into whatever you agent you're using, called Code or CodeX, and kind of immediately start working, scraping data right away. And [music] um a lot of cases come from Indie

[3:03] Hackers, actually, working on their own products. Well, there's one Indie Hacker who's trying to build a viral finder. So, they're trying to pick up Instagram Reels or TikTok posts that are starting to go viral, but not viral at the moment. So, they could take advantage of that kind of early um stage of that

[3:22] virality. That's quite interesting, you know, you want to catch data that actually is going to go viral. Tell us a bit about bit about your background and how you got into building a SaaS product. So, I have a quite non-linear and um dual background. I don't have a technical or any engineering background. I actually have never built a SaaS before, like prior to Social Crawl and other failed projects. So, I come from a academic I studied neuroscience in my PhD at Oxford and I was researching dementia, specifically Parkinson's disease. I worked with a lot of patients and their clinical data. So, I was really confident in handling different

[3:59] types of data at that point. During my PhD, I also, and he's my partner in real life, as well. We live together and we work together. Okay. So, Oscar also did a PhD in neurocomputing. He's more skilled in engineering, so he's a CTO of the team. And first did a company called Radio. And he worked on Radio for about a year, and then I joined later. Radio, in its life cycle, had many pivots. So, it started off as like a coding native for Replit, and then it shifted to like called social platform for indie hackers. And in the end, it became a more of a dev agency. And we properly

[4:43] started to build SaaS products. [music] But, for other founders. Used to build these like SaaS AI platforms for [music] other people, and we'd see these people go off and get funding for their products. Thought that's very cool, and building it for them, we could, why not, do it for ourselves? Build something that we want. By building different SaaS for other people, we developed a really solid in-house [music] engineering skill. So, we were really ready

[5:13] to really build something ourselves. That's when we officially started to building SaaS our own projects. We built about four different SaaS AI platforms, but didn't really work out. Didn't really get much traction, didn't make much revenue, but we did learn a lot from our failures. And after failed four products, we got Social Crawl on our fifth try,

[5:37] which is now really taking off. It definitely does taking off, no doubt about that. So, did you validate the idea when you initially decided, okay, Social Crawl is the one that we need to bet totally on, like go all in. I was listening to this podcast and there was a founder there talking about

[5:53] how got his SaaS to making 30-40k MRR. [music] And he said got an idea that people are already paying for [music] and make something similar but with like um develop something you can do yourself just to add a bit of USP so it can differentiate from other competitors. How I validated the idea of Social Crawl because I found some competitor companies similar to Social Crawl that were already making like um like 50k maximum MRR. And I used to like hunt and stalk different companies on Trust and Moral to see how much they're making and [music] with social media data guy because um I was already very familiar with like

[6:41] social media data. So in my PhD I was playing my social media platforms on like threads, X, Reddit and Instagram. So I was getting like 2 million views a month and I was confident that social media data is something I'm very familiar with and coming from this academic background handling data was all my career and Oscar as well having the data engineering skills we thought we could build something along the lines of social media data and we could add a bit of a Frenchie thing factors into it using our skill sets. So [music] that's how we chose to go with Social

[7:21] Crawl. So take an existing product and then add your own twist so that you have your own unique product and you know that sells because that's already some other companies that are actually selling for 40-50k MRR. That's brilliant. How did you get your initial customers? So did you have to do you do B2B or B2C and did you have to reach out one by one or go about it. The very first customers [music] actually came from WhatsApp groups. This is interesting because in I was a part of these different Indie Hacker WhatsApp groups. I was building Social Crow. And in that WhatsApp group, I tried to be as active as possible and

[7:59] supportive to other Indie Hackers. If they post something about their work, I would like go and try it out, give feedback. And when it was time for me to kind of release Social Crow, I you know, shared the product on these WhatsApp groups. And since I have provided so much value in the past, the other Indie Hackers were really supportive of Social

[8:23] Crow as well. So, we had a lot of like influx and initial traffic from these Indie Hackers from WhatsApp groups. [music] And because of that, we made a sale within like 48 hours of launching. Okay, interesting. Yeah, I think that's a good tactic that's not really obvious. And the one I suggest to other Indie Hackers. Yeah, I've heard of Reddit, I've heard of TikTok, I've heard of Instagram, I've never heard of WhatsApp kind of like, you know. Uh so, did you have to, you know, apply for any membership or how did you get into these groups in

[9:00] WhatsApp? So, there are some public WhatsApp groups. It doesn't have to be WhatsApp, it could be Discord as well. And all of those you could just join by asking if you could join. There was a point where I used to go to these a lot of networking events, like in-person events. And these events would like host their own WhatsApp groups. So, I would more effective because you've seen these people face-to-face in person, and they know who you are. But these I think the people I've met in person, they were

[9:32] tend to be more supportive. Usually like people do a lot of Reddit Reddit tricks and they post a lot on ready. So did you not explore that channel at all? Actually Reddit is platform where we get most of customers. Just traffic but paid customers and especially big ticket [music] enterprise customers. Okay. I didn't expect to enterprise customers from Reddit cuz Reddit seems [music] it seems more like a B2C

[9:59] distribution channel. But couple of weeks I've talked to potential enterprise customers and four out of five they all found us through Reddit which is really surprising. Definitely Reddit is a great channel. It's difficult to get started with because Reddit famous for being brutal and if you try to promote something that can they can smell you from miles away if you're trying to promote something and they'll [laughter] they'll be brutal in the in the comments but if you go through that process of building a thicker skin on Reddit and

[10:35] keep like posting on Reddit as well. I think it's very worth it [music] and what's important on Reddit is try to provide value more than just um being straight up salesy or too pushy. Cuz if you provide value first um people will kind of appreciate that. Are there any subreddits that you would recommend for people to [music]

[10:55] do this kind of posts? I have this subreddit library in my notes [music] so I can just go through them. Oh that's really good. I can share with the audience. A lot of subreddits where you can explicitly promote your products so that would be this one was is the SaaS channel. And on the SaaS subreddit so I

[11:15] can't post there anymore. But SaaS you can promote so that's why you always have to read the guidelines. Exactly of the subreddit isn't it? There's yeah there's also subreddits like building public [music] side projects, entrepreneur ride along. Uh so if I ask you like share your playbook or the framework for building a SaaS business today, uh, in today's world, in today's AI

[11:38] world, so, what would that be? Put it into different like steps. [music] First step would be to grow an audience. So, pick one social media channel, try to grow it, post every single day consistently for at least a month. Because this audience that you're growing, they don't have to be completely aligned with what you're building. I think it's more about the practice of being consistent, showing up every day, posting consistently even though no one engages with your post,

[12:11] and the practice of growing an audience. The ability, having that experience of growing an account, it helped me to kind of distribute Social Crawl. All social media platforms, and the ability an audience, there's a specific pattern. So, you have to, before posting or be before thinking about your work, you first have to engage. Engagement is the most important bit, and having conversation, genuine conversations with

[12:36] others. So, it there it follows a pattern. So, if you get hold of that, I think uh, that's a really useful asset when you're trying to distribute. Second, I would say is which what people are already paying for, and this continues from like my point of how I chose to build Social Crawl. Research uh, the type of industry, what type of [music] like specific audience or our ICP that you want to build for, and [music] I had this rule of thumb with Social Crawl is

[13:09] not to build something completely new. Mhm. There are plenty of uh, SaaS that's already doing well, [music] and you can use them as a reference, and add a twist [music] and what you only you can do from your own background. So, just doing this, um, unless you got an original the original idea and and you've got people like signing up for this and the demand is there. It's original and you're 100% sure you are going to use it. If it solves your own problem and it you if you know you're going to be your own [music] best user, I think that's a great place to start. I don't see any

[13:46] successful software founders themselves are not using their own products. Yeah, so yeah, plenty of research and [music] starting from your own problems. I think that's a good place to start as well. Mention two steps. The first step is to build an audience. The second step is to kind of do plenty of research to make sure that they actually there's a demand for that kind of a SaaS. What is the third step? So, when do you start building and when do you go about First the naturally building part, the

[14:12] most exciting part of the SaaS journey. Yeah, building has become so much easier. So, I ability to build fast and launch execute fast [music] is another moat. And we built Social Crawl I think in 3 weeks. Try to get something just out there and even if it's not perfect, that you get as much feedback as possible initially. Try to, you know, evolve itself. [music] While you're building, I'd suggest also doing building in public. X is a great place to build in public. You find so many supportive community on X. So, I would definitely

[14:48] suggest. There's a group on X say building public, but do you just keep posting as you progress or how do you go about building in public? As you mentioned, um, document your process. [music] For example, what you added today and that didn't work out, [music] you can also always post about that as well. People don't really post about what's not going well. More people should and I try to work on that as well. Log log your journey. Also try to

[15:15] communicate with other builders as well. It doesn't have to always be about your progress. You can please [music] ask to your community for advice. Or Once kind of asked, give them like my landing page. And I asked I don't know I asked how ways to like improve my landing page. I make this look less like Claude [music] made it. And I actually got really

[15:37] useful replies. As the next step, you build it and then you start posting on X. And when did you actually start getting customers in the process? [music] Um process, we first paying customer 48 [music] hours of launching. Okay. Cuz we already had that audience to begin with. That was possible. And three main ways that we picked up our customers. And first is um social media posting. Already doing building in public on X. And on top of X, I started to post more on Threads where I already had like 5,000

[16:17] followers. And I also posted on Reddit. So [music] I focused on um X, Threads, and Reddit. I actually haven't tried other platforms like LinkedIn, Gram, or TikTok. I think that's because you really have to be mindful of where your ICPs hang around. That's another important point. Case with the Social Crawl, uh the most ICPs [music] mainly devs. You see a lot of devs on X. And it's and also on Reddit. Focus [music] on these three first. And the next uh channel we get

[16:48] most customers from is SEO and GEO. Actually SEO and GEO, they take time to kick in. I would suggest uh starting SEO as soon as you launch or even like before you launch if that's possible. And third is something I don't recommend if you're in your journey, but these are paid ads. Now since we are making revenue, we try to reinvest in paid ads. But if you're early, you're not making any revenue, you're really tight on budget. So I don't recommend using paid ads, but if you have the capacity, uh test out paid ads. [music] I started with Google search ads, and Google search ads I think it helped with

[17:27] the SEO as well. Just bring us some significant traffic. Once you started these kind of ads, so did you see exponential growth or was it also gradual like SEO? Paid ads, it was gradual cuz we didn't have that much budget for ads. [laughter] I think ads, it really depends on your budget. Okay. So if you spend more, of course you'll get more traffic, and they might convert to more paying users. Still, we don't have that much budget for paid ads, but

[17:57] still ads, they need time to optimize. Took us around a month. Right after you kind of launch your ad, expect like waves of people coming in, but it really took us time to fall like people to start coming in. So we need to optimize our ad, and we need to figure out what the keywords we need to go for. We need to find [music]

[18:15] out. Okay. The key Yeah, the keywords left up our up, but yeah, keywords [music] are really important as well. Okay. Yeah, so talking of keywords and stuff, um so um can you tell us the uh tech stack that you use and any other tools that you use for identifying these keywords and all those? Social cool, it's built mainly on TypeScript. [music]

[18:35] And website, we built it with Next.js. And we use Vercel for hosting, and I think if you're just starting out, Vercel is it's perfect, but we're starting to grow. The cost for Vercel is becoming very um burdening. Yeah. Yeah, and for the database, we use Neon, [music] and uh other tools we use, we use Resend to send out emails [music]

[19:03] for email marketing. for analytics, we like to use Data Fast from Mark Lo. For AIs, our main we use is Claude, Claude code. I mean Claude has become [music] so expensive. And just AI, yeah, it just AI in overall, the costs it's just um easy to let it go up. Try to just assess how we could our workflow

[19:29] more like token efficient. Mhm. So we've been trying to test out um [music] Codex, Grok, DeepSeek AI models and how we could waste much tokens as possible. At the same time keeping like the quality of our work. Sure, yeah. [music] And which one do you find recently is more effective those? So for brainstorming, planning, [music] uh research, any of work that requires extensive [music] thinking or proactive

[19:57] work, let's go for Claude Fable or Opus. Recently we tried testing like Codex Astra, there it's been performing well. And more execution, writing code itself, using Grok. It's fantastic at just following instructions. You have very clear instructions in place. It's a bit of caveat but as long as you have very clear instructions, Grok will is fantastic at just writing code. So it's been a more token efficient choice for

[20:26] us to just write code. to explore Grok as well. You're the first team kind of telling me that you use Grok for coding. I I usually explore Claude. You you should try it out. But Grok's got much more expensive now. I see, yeah. Everyone's going to trade. Yeah, yeah. You'll be trade. Walk us through your cost like what what sort of MRR is happening and like how the business is going and So so talking numbers, we in April this year. Just in April, I think we made about like $300 that month. Just last

[21:00] month in August, we closed with $6,000. It was a big exponential growth from when we started in April. And [music] twice, the costs are mostly the data providers where we get our data from and hosting databases and [music] AI usage. That's a big one. We take into all of that into consideration, the margin profit margin is around 50% it drops down to 40% because we enterprise customers and for enterprise deals we tend to be more generous with the credits. So there's a tighter profit

[21:37] margin there. When you say enterprise customers, like what sort of what's the what's the size of the companies you're working with currently? There is a lot. So the biggest company that we're working with thing I can disclose I work with Kony. They're one of the largest consulting companies. Kony they're building on internal social intelligence agent. They are using SocialCrawl as a main data source to train their agent [music] and to connect their agents to our social crawl to get access to all this social media data. For example, I think what they're trying to do is if they get a client like Nike they want to trying

[22:17] to find what people consumers are saying about like Nike Air Force shoes will use that social intelligence agent connected to SocialCrawl to scrap information what people are talking about Nike Air Force shoes on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, every single social media platform you can think of. So they're working with a lot of data. Yeah, and you provide all the data. Very good. Right, do you want to share your screen and show the product give a walk through of the product so that the

[22:45] audience can see how it works. Sounds good. Amazing. So the proprietary search engine called Unified Social Search. So what it does is and search engine [music] in a natural language. So what are people saying about Nike Air Force shoes? Search engine would go off by itself and do a search, parallel funnel search across up to 14 different platforms. It will rank the answers and it will give you a ranked clustered or for your query. It's a really easy way to do global search across different platforms at once and

[23:21] it's just a single API call. That I think that'll be very useful especially given that it will be conversational. Yeah, definitely that's a interesting product. How much of AI is going on this? This search engine has some AI built shows you here. So AI is used to plan its search. It prunes thing that's topic or unrelated. Example, if you are searching for like the my car called Mustang drop off any tense related to like the horse itself, the Mustang horse and only kind of keep the ones related to the car. After that, AI is also used to kind of rank the answers based on and see

[24:00] lots of AI's involved in this workflow. That sounds quite exciting. Um just switch to Reddit maybe whatever you wanted to show about Reddit just can you share with the audience? I won't share this with anyone. [laughter] Oh, okay. It's the first time. This is my it's my subreddit library for social growth. I just kept a record of different [music] subreddits that I uploaded to and subreddits that I

[24:28] could upload in the future as well. We're constantly building this list so it could get longer. These are some really good subreddits where you've listed here and it's by it's also organized by your weekly visits. I keep track of where I last uploaded a post and the status of the subreddit. As you can see my last

[24:51] one I got banned. [clears throat] So that one is marked. So I listed so that I could see if subreddits allow like promotion. It says level of pro promo. Some uh subreddits like social media, they don't allow promo. They're strict with that. [music] And they as an indie hacker, good subreddits to go and post would be the SaaS this one, startup ideas, you know, write along, my products, building public, and promote

[25:18] my app one. And the weekly traffic that you have mentioned next to the different subreddits? [music] Yes, but I think some of them are just number of in that subreddit. Okay. I thought it was wrong. Yeah, I think there are two ways of [music] posting in subreddit. So, first is going on to these indie hacker or building in public related subreddits. Those would be like promote my SaaS, the building public, micro SaaS, these type of subreddits. The second way is to like find subreddits subreddits where your ICPs are at. So, for me that was like social media marketing, the agents of AI, and the social media

[25:59] subreddits. And they allow some promotional posts? Like do you have some template or how do you go about it? Or do you just customize based on the subreddit? That's a good point. Do is if I want to promote my SaaS on r/build Mhm. do is tricky. Reddits Yeah, cuz you always feel like being

[26:17] banned, you know. Yeah, yeah. Just ban you, like no mercy. So, if I want to something on r/SaaSbuild what I would do usually I sort the post by top. Mhm. And for this month, and I see try to look for posts that have done really well, like this one. Just click on it. Let's see. This is a good post, got over 100 upvotes. So, what I would do, I would use this post as a reference to kind of [music] make my post. Unless it's relevant to what you want to post. That you have to take that into

[26:51] consideration. But I would copy the style of the use like a time frame and money they made. So I would copy that as well. I kind of built something 4 months ago and I now makes this amount a month. I didn't know green shot and also try to follow the structure of the writing. That's my

[27:10] trick with Reddit. [laughter] Okay, yeah, this really good knowing because so each subreddit has a different way of getting a message across and you just find out what is going viral on that subreddit and then just pick that template. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think it's [music] least risk and it just get you higher probability to

[27:33] kind of get as much engagement. Yeah, makes sense. You can always tell them, "Bro, you banned me but then you have just promoted this post which is going viral." [laughter] Yeah, okay. Thanks so much for sharing that with us. That's definitely something of value. And [music] so now that we're getting to the end of the podcast, I want to hear from you like what's the biggest lesson you have learned in your journey? You have done three failed SaaS and then you have now done a successful SaaS. So what's the

[27:59] biggest lesson here? I have so many lessons share but the biggest one is something I would have to tell my self in the past. They don't get too obsessed with building. Building is very addictive. So much easier now with AI and I feel like it's a trap. So key here is not building but distribution.

[28:21] Yeah. And I think you'll hear this a lot from other Indie Hackers. Try to work on tasks with distribution in mind. Always and try to kind of think perspective of your audience, your ICPs, who you are building it for. A mistake of like being too trapped in my own mind. Well, I want to kind of this type of message or I think my audience would really like this feature, but in the end it was didn't really kind of work out and what was more important is kind of listening to your audience pain points they have and keywords they respond to. So, try to kind of communicate more with your users

[29:02] or your potential users and what try to work on [music] the distribution. I think distribution is the new moat. Distribution is the biggest challenge. Building is something now anybody can do. That's where we are at in 2026. So, one piece of advice that you want to give to the give to the audience if they

[29:19] want to be, you know, SaaS founders. Uh if you want to be a SaaS founder, this advice I want to give is at some point have to post cringe stuff online. [laughter] I think that's the biggest advice and don't be afraid cringe to start with, but if you really want to crack distribution, you will at some point you will have to start more present online and communicate online [music] and it's be cringe to start, but you

[29:48] start, it just gets easier. Okay. Yeah. That's quite valuable there. So, distribution is the biggest moat and for distribution we have to cringe on social media and we have to get that message across in social media. Fantastic. Yeah, thank you so much for taking the time, Celine. So, it was really nice talking to you. Wonderful points there. A lot of inputs about Reddit. I really loved

[30:07] talking to you. all this opportunity. Had a lovely discussion. It was great uh meeting you and talking to you as well, Shreni.

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