| Readwise URL | https://read.readwise.io/read/01kt2ksjz67n4666mc4w0s3jtj |
|---|---|
| Readwise ID | 01kt2ksjz67n4666mc4w0s3jtj |
| Date | 2026-01-21 |
| Author | youtube.com |
| Category | video |
\n\nSource: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4BS_UiTBPw
Every SaaS founder should grow their applike this.This is Aayush, a guy from India whobuilt an app that makes over $150,000 ayear, and he grew it using one formula:the Reddit and SEO playbook.If I was starting over, I would run thisplaybook again.He started on Reddit, then he moved toSEO, and within a few months, his app wentfrom no users to thousands.Reddit worked first, but then we scaledwith SEO.
I was curious about how he actually didthis, so I asked Aayush to come on to thechannel and break down his entireplaybook. In this video, we’ll diveinto his exact Reddit strategy thathelped him make his first 10K, the SEOplaybook that scaled him to his next100K, and why he believes this playbookstill works in 2026.
This one is goingto be fun. Let’s dive into it. I’m PatWalls, and this is Starter Story.
All right, real quick before we get into theinterview, you’re about to get twoplaybooks for growing a SaaS: Reddit andSEO. This is a really awesome story, andif you really like it, I have somethingI’ll be sharing a deeper playbook on howto get your first 100 users.
from Reddit. I’ll be talking about that alittle bit later, but click the firstlink in the description if you want itnow. All right, let’s get intothe interview. All right, Aush, welcometo the channel. Tell me about who youare, what you built, and what’s yourstory.>> Hey, my name is Aayush. I’m theco-founder of LFS. It’s a simple AIMac app that has gone from 0 to 150K RRover the last three years. We grew it to150K per year through Reddit and SEO,and that’s what I’m excited to talk to youabout today.
Okay, before we get into all that andhow you grew this app, I just want tounderstand. Can you explain what thisapp does? What’s the business model?What did you build?>> So, yeah. LFS is a Mac AIassistant. It’s a place where you canindex all of your local fileslike PDFs, Apple notes, and all sorts oflocal knowledge that you have. Youcan create your own superb brain orknowledge bases out of them, thenchat with them, and then create content.
We have three standard plans.We sell subscriptions monthly, annual, and we also sell lifetime deals.When you’re selling downloadable apps, especially Mac apps, customers expect a lifetime deal.They expect a one-time payment. It’s a mindset they have. So, we’ve stuck with a lifetime deal since the beginning.We’ve gradually raised prices.
I’d love if you could show me some of your dashboards.I just want to see where this revenue is coming from.Could you pull up some of your Gumroad dashboard and kind of show us some of this?
So, we have four revenue channels: our own website, Setapp, the Mac App Store, and the iOS App Store.We use Gumroad for selling licenses.This year’s data shows around 110K from here.We’re also on Setapp, so this is over the last couple of years.We’ve generated some revenue there. I can pull up the Mac App Store data, around 12,000.
This is our website traffic.This is a plausible dashboard.
Getting around 180k visits per year.I want to understand how do you even getinto this? What’s your background? Howdo you learn about making money onlineand building apps? Can you go a littlebit into that?
Yeah. So, my businesspartner, Cumber, was the one who startedElephant22and he hired me as a consultant. Right at the time I had just quit my corporate job of 11 years. Iwas part-time consulting with some earlystartups, helping them with productand marketing. That’s when I startedworking on LFS. I got some good results in the first five or six months andeventually we reached the stage where heinvited me to join him as the co-founderand as the marketing guy. He asked me to go all in on LFS;he is, of course, the development guy, the coder, and I became themarketing person. Since then, we’vegrown the product as a two-personteam.
Okay, cool. So you’re the marketing guy.I love it. That’s why I wanted to bringyou onto the channel to really talkabout this really cool way of thinking.
Let’s talk about marketing your product, which isReddit and then SEO. So before we getinto all that, I’d just like tounderstand a high-level overview of howyou took Elephas from zero to over$10,000 a month. What was this playbook?So the playbook that really worked forus was the Reddit and then SEO playbook.
Reddit is essentially a goldmine of high-intent niche audiences.It’s a great place to get feedbackinitially when you’re starting out. It’s alsoa great place to get traffic andeventually conversions. In the earlydays, we posted a lot on nichesubreddits, asking for feedback,showcasing the product, and giving demos,which led to initial revenuefrom customers. Feedback from those customers,along with insights from them,eventually ended up shaping the productover time. We essentially used Reddit togo from 0 to $3,000 in monthly revenue within aperiod of 6 months.
Reddit is great initially, right? Buteventually, Reddit stops working, orthere are diminishing returns toinvesting more of your time oreffort in Reddit. So SEO islike the best organic marketing channel.
Out there, especially if you’rebootstrapping like us, right?This was back in 2023. ChatGPT was justlaunched. Google was still the primaryway people searched for information.Right? We actually started gettingsome organic traffic on one of our helparticles. We wrote supportarticles for our initial customers tohelp them out with using the product, andthose articles started getting tractionfrom Google. We accidentallydiscovered SEO as a channelthat we could leverage, and over a 12month period in 2023 we ended up makingaround $70,000 purely from Googleonly. SEO essentially took us from 3K to where we are now, and weare at around 12K per month.
So, I think all of this worksperfectly in harmony because when you’restarting out, you need feedback, youneed traction, you need niche audiencesand you need fast feedback. Reddit isvery good for that. But eventually, youwant a sustainable, scalableway of getting high intent traffic,and if you’re bootstrapping, you don’t havea lot of ad dollars to spend; then SEO isThe best way to go forward.
Building is getting easier and easierthanks to AI. So now I have a lot ofpeople DMing me and asking me, “Pat, Ican build stuff, but how the heck do Igrow and how the hell do I get users anddistribution?” So I decided to putsomething together for free that willhelp you with that. We’ve put together aguide on how to get your first 100 userson Reddit as I’ve talked to dozens offounders who have used Reddit to growtheir business, and this is the stuffthat actually works. [music] This is apart of Starter Story Mo, which is ourcomplete framework for finding yourdistribution channel in 2026. So, if youwant to use Reddit to grow your product,then head to the first link in thedescription to grab it and check it out
for free. All right, let’s get back tothe interview. Okay, so the Reddit thenSEO playbook. I love this. It reminds meof what I did when I started StarterStory, which is just go out on Reddit toget early feedback, early traction, andthen kind of build SEO behind thescenes because it takes a little bitlonger. I want to dive a little bit intothe Reddit piece because I think a lotMany people watching this might bewondering how they can get their first usersfrom Reddit. I’d love it if you could diveinto an example of a Redditpost that crushed it for you anddrove customers to your product. Couldyou do that?
Yeah. So, this is an examplepost that did well for us. Youknow, the focus of the post is a videodemo of the product, but you also wantto wrap it around a use case ora problem-solution framing ora story framing, right? So,something like, "My friend wasfacing this problem, so I built thisfeature to solve it. This is how itworks. If you want to try, you cantest it for 30 days for free. I’m justlooking for feedback. If Ishould improve this feature in any way,please provide your input. I believe thisworks because this isn’t blatantself-promotion. You’re explaining thereasoning behind the feature you’vebuilt. Reddit has a very discerningaudience. They hate marketers. They hatebeing sold to, but they do appreciateit if you can explain the logicto them and talk to them like adults.
Something like, “Hey, I built this. Thisis why I built it. What do you think?Can I improve anything here?” In general, I think video demos do welllike show-don’t-tell marketing. Don’t go out there and say how good yourproduct is. Just show people whatit can do, right? So for this post,we had just launched the super brainfeature at the time and we had no ideawhether this was even useful.Are people even interested? Thisgot us a lot of positive feedback and alot of feature requests, which eventuallybecame our main primary feature,the super brain feature that thousands of people usetoday to index their documents and chat with themto create content with them.
After a while, moderators started cracking down on them andremoving the posts, but the good thing is that westill get some traffic from these posts.However, a lot of the engagement is now gone.Yeah, that is how you see it.And that’s the thing that I always hearfrom people who want to figure out Reddit.They’ll post on Reddit andthen, you know, the moderation rules areStrict, that’s part of the game, right?
Could you walk me through the exactplaybook if you had to start over todayto replicate what you did?So, yeah, if I was starting out, firstI’ll make a list of all the subredditswhere my ICP is hanging out. Every okay,at least 15 subreddits. Use somethinglike the map of Reddit, which isessentially like a free, open-sourceproject. It’s there on GitHub. You canenter your subredditand you get to see essentially the mapof Reddit. Here you can get a lot ofideas and a lot of new niche subredditsthat you can go to and where your potential
ICP might be hanging out. Any subredditthat has more than 5,000 members isacceptable. You don’t have to go after reallybig subreddits. Actually, smallersubreddits are sometimes betterbecause they have niche audiences,simpler rules, and the mods are moreforgiving. In fact, the mods want morecontent on the subreddit itself. So,that is step one. Make a list ofall the subreddits, and then pick onefeature or pain point that your productis solving. Right? So that is step two.Make a short video demo about it.
Explain why you built it in as simpleterms as possible. Share this in asubreddit and at the bottom add a linkto your product. Say you can try it outfor free for 30 days. We added UTM linksto all the links that we posted insubreddits to track exactly whichfeature we are talking about and thedate it is and what subreddit it is. So youpost this on one subreddit, analyzeits performance. Step three is basicallytweaking the copy a bit and then repeatingthe same post on another subreddit. Every dayyou’re posting on at least onesubreddit. Never post on all subredditsin one day; people can see that becausethere will be a lot of overlappingaudiences. So posting once a day on one subredditis good enough.
I love that playbook, especially doingit every day for 14 or 15 days. Not onlywill it prevent people from thinkingyou’re spamming, but also you may makea little tweak to the copy, perhaps youimprove it. One thing that I want tohear from you is about the negativityaround Reddit. I hear this a lot; peopleshare their content and thereare mean comments, and the moderators banned me.
These really bad things happen. Was thatyour experience, that you got hate fromsome of your posts or was that not? Andhow did you handle it, if so?>> Yes, we got hate, but that’s okay. Ithink you will get hate. You willget banned, and it’s okay. Maybeyou can create multipleaccounts if one of your accounts getsbanned, and you can have backups andburner accounts. But eventually, learn todeal with negativity; this isbusiness we’re doing here. Develop athick skin, I would say.
Okay, and then the other question that Ihave is, what defines success on Reddit?Like, when you see a post, how many upvotes, how much engagement are youlooking for to go viral? What does asuccessful post or marketing on Redditlook like?>> So, there’s no benchmark. Like,we’ve had posts that have like zeroupvotes; standard posts would get 30, 40, 50upvotes. We had gone viral with 300, 400upvotes as well. But you are looking attraffic and conversions. But I thinkwhat Reddit really gives you is thequalitative data that comes from all thecomments and the engagement that you get.
And then how people are responding. Whatis the mood? What is the vibe thatyou’re getting about the product, right?Especially when the product is very new,you really want to know what realauthentic people think about you andthat is something that only Reddit cangive you. No other platform canprovide raw, honest thoughts frompeople the way Reddit can.And just for that, I think Reddit isworth it. At least posting on Reddit isworth it.
Okay, cool. So, the Reddit part isamazing. I love Reddit, and thanks forsharing all that. Let’s jump to the nextpart of the playbook, which is SEO. AndSEO is kind of a buzzword. What did SEOmean for you and what did that look likeespecially in the early days?
I think we happened to accidentallydiscover SEO. We were just, you know,getting initial customers. Wewere writing helpful articles,support articles based on the questionsthat customers were asking, right? Sowe wrote an article onhow to create OpenAI API keys. Thiswas a very simple article that justhad a bunch of screenshots and some links.
We didn’t realize we ranked number one on Google for this word for 6 to 8 months.We were getting a lot of traffic for itand we accidentally realized Googleis actually a genuine inbound trafficchannel. Of course, this was not avery high intent audience from thesekind of articles. But we got a lot oftraffic and we gained insights onwhat future topics we couldwrite about to attract more high intentaudiences. That’s when wediscovered that we could actually conductkeyword research and findnew keywords to write more articleson and start getting organictraffic in.
So you kind of created this article, eventhough it doesn’t really have much to dowith creating API keys. It wassort of an accident when you createdthis, but then I’m guessing you saw thatand you were like, "Whoa, this is getting alot of traffic. Let’s do this for morearticles that have a little bitmore product intent, right? So you getsignups. Is that right? Could you showme maybe one of those articles that youWhat do you know really drives customer signups?
So, what we did is we wentback and did more keyword research. Wefigured out that there are underserved nichesor underserved queries on Google that have lowcompetition but high demand. For example, thisis an article we wrote titled "18 Best Chat GPT Mac Apps, Free and Paid."Essentially, it is a listicle where wehighlight all the best apps being built at the time around chatGPT. We were ranked number one there,and we received a lot of high intent trafficand conversions from thisarticle itself. We are getting a lot ofAI traffic as well from here. Chat GPTclarity and all the AI answer enginesare referencing many of our articles, and that audience is evenmore high intent because they’ve alreadymade up their minds about buying, sothey’re coming in and directlybuying very quickly.
Okay, cool. Thanks for sharingthat. I want to dive a little deeperinto the SEO topic because, again,it is kind of a buzzword. There’s a lotof different approaches to SEO. I wouldlove to hear from you, someone who’sI actually implemented it and have been very successful with it as a small bootstrap business. What would be your playbook if you had to start over with SEO today? What would be the steps that you would take right now to crush it with SEO?
I think the very first thing is to know your exact positioning in the market. Where do you lie? How does the customer look at the market and where do you fit in?For us, that was like chat GPT Mac apps. There are a bunch of chat GPT apps, but a smaller market of chat GPT Mac apps, and within those, there were a small niche of products that people could buy.So know your positioning. Once you know that, it becomes easier to do keyword research because now you’re thinking as the customer and you’re trying to imagine what your ideal customer profile would search on Google or what they would type into chat GPT.You can use something like AHFS to get more data and figure out the keywords that your customer is searching for and also the keywords that your competition is already ranking for.
Love is inside AHFS; it has a filter.You know, anything with a keyworddifficulty of less than 20 and a searchvolume of greater than 500 is avery good combination of parameters.Especially if you are like a new websiteand you don’t have a lot of domainauthority, then you should not go aftera lot of high volume keywords and highcompetition keywords. You should try tofocus on low volume, high intentand low competition keywords. This iswhat I used to do. I used to buy HS;it was $129, which was a lot of money for us.
I used the 500 credits to do keywordresearch, make a list of keywords around30 to 50 topics, and then go back andwrite out those blog posts. If you’restarting out, you can just start withtwo or three blog posts a week andeventually you can scale upto six or seven. Even for the actual writing,you can use a lot of AI tools,but it is better to use AI in SEO formore as a research assistant. What youwant to figure out with AI is whatsort of content is already working welland make a scaffold or anoutline or a structure of that kind ofarticle and then add your own spin to it.
Add your own flavor and style or tone to humanize it more. Aslong as you can add net new informationto the internet, you will win with SEO.I think that is a good frame tolook at SEO: how can you bring yourpersonal insights, your user data, your market intelligence that youhave and you’re adding new informationto the internet? You’re not justregurgitating what the internetalready has. I think as long as youcan do that, you will win withSEO.
Okay, cool. Well, thanks for sharingthat SEO playbook. Want to switch topicsfor a second and go over the actual app thatyou built. We didn’t really go over itin depth. Would you be able to show me aquick demo of Elephos and how it works?
Essentially, it’s like a knowledge-basedapp where if you have a lot ofdocuments and files locally onyour computer, you can create your ownpersonal GPTs out of them. We also havean offline version. So you can turn off the Wi-Fi, downloadoffline open source models and usethose for your use. But I’ll just give a brief demo. I created a brainWe call them super brains, essentiallyknowledge bases. You can add allsorts of files and folders. I’ve justadded one file here, which is likethe deep work. I like to refer to itoften. Basically, you can askit something like, "What is deep work,
according to Cal Newport?" The value isthat it will go through only thedocuments that already exist onyour file or the documents that youhave added here in this particular brainand come up with an answer based onjust that. So that way it’s nothallucinating; it’s essentially AIgrounding. People love itbecause they get answers that they cantrust. They know that somethinglike ChatGPT or Claude might hallucinateor come up with new content, but it alwayscomes with answers from your own data.
You can add all types ofintegrations: files, YouTube videos, webpages. We even have an Apple Notesintegration, so we have a lot of peoplewho use Apple Notes as a second brain.They just hook it upwith LFS and then get to chat with it,and then use it to understand their own.
Notes and then use it for their work.Thanks for showing that. That’sawesome. Looks like a super cool app.How did you build it? Could you walkthrough your tech stack? How much did youspend on different tools and languages,hosting, and those sorts of thingsand walk through all that.
I think Cloud Code is probably thenumber one AI tool that everyoneshould be using right now. It does somuch for just 129 a month, but it’s so worthit because you get so much data from it.If you can’t afford it, just get it fora month and do keywordresearch for a quarter or four months.
We use Neuron Writer to do pre-publish checkson our blog posts. It’s a toolwhere you can enter a blog post and seehow it compares before publishing.That’s very useful. We use the map of Reddit to researchReddit and find new subreddits to goafter. Use Nitn. If someone mentionsLFS on Reddit or on other social platforms, we know, and we can go and comment and reply there.
We use ClickUp inside the team to manage all our work.We use Discord for team communication, as well as have a very thriving community of our users.So that community lives on our Discord channel, and we get feedback and feature requests every day there.We use Superb Block for hosting, MailerLite for email marketing,Plausible for website analytics, and of course, Google Search Console is a free tool from Google for SEO.
Last question that we ask everyone who comes on the channel: if you could stand on young Aush’s shoulders before you started this, before you quit your job, what would be your advice for anyone watching this who wants to build stuff like you?Put more buy buttons on the internet.Right. I think lots of people build something in silence for six months, have a waitlist on a free signup, and they think that if they build it, people will come, but nobody buys.I think people are too afraid to charge.
Don’t be afraid to put up a real buy button. Butthe learning and growth that canhappen from a buy button is unlikeanything else. You’ll not learn from amarketing book or a course, right? Because whenyou publish something online, like yourproduct or your work, that’s when youlearn. When people look at it, dothey flinch? Do they ignoreyou, or do they swipe their card and payfor what you’ve built? To getto that place, you have to fail a lot.So both Ken, my businesspartner and I have had over 30failed projects before this. Myadvice for anyone is to get thatfailure out of the way as soon aspossible. Put more buy buttons onthe internet. Test a lot of ideas, shortsprints, fail fast, and learn fast. You shouldsee which few ideas are working, which aregaining the most traction, and which aregenerating the most revenue. Then doubledown on the ones that work.
Well, that’s great advice. Thanks, Aush.That was super awesome. The Reddit SEOplaybook and all that was amazing. So,thanks for coming on and sharingeverything. If you enjoyed this,Please put a comment down belowand Aish will be able to answersome of your questions. Thanks forcoming on.
Happy to. Thanks a lot for having me,Pat. This is amazing. All right, Gus,our producer, what did you think of thisone? What did you think of theinterview?>> Yeah, I thought it was awesome. It wasreally fun to see the two differentplaybooks. My biggest takeaway is thatthis is a playbook that still workstoday. And during the interview, yousaid, “Oh, I used this to growstart a story even long beforewhat Aush was talking about.” So, it wasreally cool to see that he only did it afew years ago and it’s still somethingthat anyone who built something can try and do.It’s almost free, right? That’s probably anotherthing I was thinking about is like thisis free. It’s just effort to post onReddit. It’s just effort to write thoseblogs.
I agree. And I think one thing that hementioned, he didn’t go too deep intoit, which I think is really important.The qualitative data you get fromReddit. Posting on Reddit is notnecessarily about how much traffic I gotand how much revenue I got and how manypaid customers signed up. It’s about theengagement and the comments [music] andthe feedback you get from real people.
He mentioned this, which is that Reddit is oneof the last places where there are fewerbots, and people will be honest with youand they’ll have long discussions.There are so many interviews that we’vedone with people that they’ll show methat first Reddit post they did, and ithad like 50 upvotes. It’s not aboutthis scalable strategy. I think alot of people go in thinking, “Okay, I’mgoing to make $10,000 from a Reddit postthat I do.” That’s not what it’s about.
It’s about getting feedback from usersand talking to users and just getting afeel for whether this product could be validatedand then taking that feedback to improvethe product. We didn’t talk a whole lotabout that, but I really think that ifyou go into Reddit thinking that I’mgoing to have a million dollars overnight,that’s the wrong way of thinking.
Yeah, that’s a really good way of sayingit, and I think as you know someone like meWho’s more in the early stages ofbuilding stuff and sharing online?
It feels kind of scary, right? Toput it out there. But at some pointin the interview, he said, “I thinkyou asked him a question about that, andhe was just like, basically you have todevelop thick skin, you know, whenyou post on those kinds of forums.Just know that you’re going toget a little bit of hate, but in thelong run he learned a lot from that, andit helped him, like you said.
Yeah. So, I’d recommend just what you said: if youquestion putting yourself outthere, Reddit is a great, somewhatanonymous place for you to go and experience what it’s likefor someone to be pessimisticabout your product or say it sucks orwhatever. Even if it doesn’t work as achannel, I’d recommendanybody watching this to just go and tryit to experience what it’s like to getnegative feedback on something that youcreated. Even if nothing else happens,that’s a really important step in beinga founder and [music] building stuff.
Okay, so that was a great interview. II think hopefully a lot of you guys likedit. If you are looking to build your appin 2026, whether it’s an iOS app or a SaaS,whatever it is, you should definitelycheck out Starter Story Build. It’s ourplatform where, within a couple of weeks, youwill find an idea, you will build itwith AI tools, and you will launch a realproduct to the real world that is readyto take payments and make money. Socheck that out. I’ll put the link in thedescription for that. Otherwise, thankyou for watching, and we’ll see you inthe next one. Peace.