| Readwise URL | https://read.readwise.io/read/01kt2ktdfe2d1a9b9gxkjdfatt |
|---|---|
| Readwise ID | 01kt2ktdfe2d1a9b9gxkjdfatt |
| Date | 2025-07-09 |
| Author | youtube.com |
| Category | video |
\n\nSource: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaWUPamqWlA
I built a 17K MRR SaaS with less than 100followers on X. A few weeks back, I gota cold DM from a guy named Diego. Hesaid, “Hey, I got a story for you.” Hetold me about his successful app and howfast it grew. But when I checked hisaccount, he only had 70 followers.I think anyone can build a successfulbusiness without an audience.I couldn’t find him on YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram. So, I asked, “Hey, howdid you do it?” and what he shared blewme away.I call it the Reddit marketing playbook,and I just had to know more. So, today Ibrought him onto the channel to breakdown how you can use Reddit to validate,market, and make money from any idea.All right, let’s dive in. I’m Pat Walls,and this is Starter Story.
All right, Diego, welcome to thechannel. Tell me about what you builtand what’s your story.My name is Diego, and I built an AI SaaSthat makes me around 17K per month. Istarted it 4 months ago and just byusing Reddit alone, I’ve been able toget over 1 million eyes on my productwhile spending $0 in marketing.All right. Amazing. I’m really excited.
I want to talk about the Reddit stuff. Butfirst, let’s talk a little bit moreabout the app that you built. Whatexactly is the app and what does it do?My app is called App Alchemi and itallows you to build mobile app designsvery fast using AI. It’s like cursor butfor designing mobile apps.Okay, cool. So, we’re doing stuffin AI. How did you come up with the ideafor this? A few months ago, I actually wanted tobuild my own mobile app and I paid adesigner on Upwork for a decent design.It was hundreds of dollars, and everytime I wanted to make a littlechange, I had to pay him extra. Ithought that if I could build an AI toolaround this, I could save people a lotof time and money. Sick. I love it.
So once you had kind offound the idea for this, you startedbuilding it. How did you validate thatthis was something that you wanted to,you know, take all the way and actuallylaunch? So it was a problem I myself hadexperienced. So I knew there wassomething there. I built the simplestMVP.
About two weeks, and I started marketingright away on Reddit. I got my first KMRand even more purely off Reddit.
All right, two weeks to build this isinsane. Would you have any tips forpeople watching on how to build appsquickly with AI?Yeah. So, I don’t use the newestlibraries or frameworks because AI isalways going to be a lot better at thelibraries that are the most used on theweb. And something else that I do isthat I use a lot of UI componentlibraries like Chakra UI or Antesign.And this allows you to prototype a lotfaster and to make your website looknicer, too.
Okay, before we finish Diego’s story, Idid want to point something out. Diegobuilds really fast. He doesn’t wastetime overthinking. He just goes for it.I talked to a lot of successfulfounders, and this is one of the mostcommon themes I see. Build fast so youcan validate faster. And that’s exactlywhy I want to put Teneb on your radar.
Tenweb is an AI-powered platform thatgenerates complete, ready-to-launchwebsites just from a single prompt. Andwhat’s even cooler is Teneb justThey launched their brand new AI websitebuilder API. With just one API call, itcan generate a fully functional hostedWordPress website from just a singletext prompt. Tenweb is way more thanjust a typical template builder. Ithelps you build a real production-readysite fast. With Tenweb, your users get awebsite that is SEO optimized and mobilefriendly, drag-and-drop editable, fullye-commerce ready with Woo Commerce, andbuilt on WordPress, but completely whitelabeled under your brand. This tool canliterally save months of work. AndTenweb handles everything so you canfocus on what makes your product unique.
Just click the first link in thedescription to book a strategy call andsee how it works. Thanks to Tenweb forsponsoring the channel. Now, back toDiego’s story. Okay, cool. So let’sgo into the numbers a little biton the business. Uh, can you just sharesome of the numbers behind what youbuilt? Right now, there are more than 1K payingcustomers. I’ve got it around 20K ormore signups on my product purely fromReddit, and the traffic per month isabout 20K.
Okay. So one of the reasons why I wantedto bring you on the channel and what Ilove about your story is that you didthis with basically zero audience. Atthe time of recording this, you haveless than 100 followers on X, no YouTubechannel, and just friends and family onyour Instagram. But my big question andwhy I wanted to bring you on the channelis how did you do it?
So, a lot of people think that you needa big audience to grow a SaaS nowadays. Igot my first KMR and even more purelyoff Reddit. I would say that Reddit isprobably the most underrated marketingchannel for two different reasons. One,you can get a lot of reach for no cost.The other reason is that compared to allthe other platforms, you can get veryprecise targeting. In Reddit, there is asubreddit or think a community forpretty much everything. So, you canchoose a lot of different communities orsubreddits that are related to theproduct you’re selling and target theactual users that are interested in whatyou’re building. All right, so we knowthe power of Reddit. Let’s actually diveinto the specifics of this wholeReddit marketing playbook. Can you giveLet me share my playbook for getting users andmaking money from Reddit.
Absolutely. So, the first step isactually becoming an active Reddit user.If you’re not using Reddit already,start using it daily. This has twodifferent purposes. The first one isbecoming familiar with the platform andseeing what kind of posts do well. Thesecond one is warming up your accountbecause any posts that come from a newlycreated account will be automaticallyfiltered out by Reddit.
So, step two iscreating a list of subreddits. Thisone is very important because you needvolume for this to work. The more, thebetter, and you can go broad and narrow.There are a lot of different ways tofind subreddits related to your product,but the one I recommend the most isusing a Reddit ads tool, and you don’tneed to pay for any ads for this. Youjust go to the Reddit ads page.
Create a new campaign here. When you goto the targeting section, you can lookfor communities. If I look for, forexample, “no code,” which is related to myown product, I’ll get a lot of differentcommunities that are related to this one, and I can keep adding more.
Keep getting more recommendations. So,the third step is creating a killerorganic post. The reason that mostpeople fail on Reddit is that theirposts don’t feel natural; they feel verypushy, and they revolve completely aroundtheir own product. What you want to doinstead is provide a little bit of valuein your niche, and then you can block orlink your product in the middle of thepost. The good thing about Reddit isthat most successful posts have actuallythe same structure. Here, I have a postof mine that did very well for AppAlchemi. And as you can see here, everysuccessful post starts with a catchyattention-grabbing headline. What mostpeople do here instead is mentiontheir new product or announce it as ifthey’re launching it. This is not what youwant to do.
After the catchy headline, you stilldon’t want to mention the productimmediately. You want to provide somevalue in your niche first. In thisspecific post, I did a case study on avery successful mobile app. This one, Iactually found on Twitter, and Isummarized it, and then I plugged myproduct at the end.
If you promote your product directly, you’re going to get alot more traffic to your website insteadof just mentioning it. Althoughmany subreddits don’t allow you to linkdirectly or prohibit it, if youactually provide some value first andyou’re not just pushing yourproduct, they will actually be okay withit. For stricter subreddits thatdon’t allow you to link your product, Iwould recommend linking an extra productbeside yours. Plug a complimentaryproduct. So for example, mine isa design tool that complements it very well because it’sfor development. I usually plug that
one after mine, and that way your chancesof getting banned or your post beingremoved for self-advertisement are a lotlower. However, I want togive an example of what not todo. As you can see in this exampleright here, the founder plugs the productright away, mentioning it in theheadline. He immediately starts talkingabout the product, all the features,everything about it. He even linksthe Discord server. As you can see from theengagement, this didn’t do verywell because people don’t care.
They want to get some value first. They wantto read something interesting, and thenif your product is related to that,yeah, you can plug it, and then theymight be interested in it. So step fouris grabbing the post we did on the laststep and posting it on multiplesubreddits. Volume here is superimportant because that increases thechances of one of your posts getting tothe Reddit front page, and that is goingto give you a lot of traffic. Evenif that doesn’t end up happening, let’ssay that you post on 10 differentsubreddits and each of the posts gets onaverage, let’s say around 10k views.
That’s a total of like 100k viewsalready, which is really good. So, it’sstill worth it. So, the last step of theplaybook is to repeat this process. Youshould be trying different types of poststo see what does better in your niche.You can try videos, you can try casestudies, and you can try other types ofposts as well. A good rule of thumb isposting two to three times per week. Ithink that anything more than that willprobably get you banned, so you shouldprobably stick to that rule.All right, cool. Well, there you go.
That playbook was amazing. Let’s switchgears a little bit. Could you just breakdown your tech stack? How did you buildthese products? What tools did you useand what’s your stack?Yeah, so I use Cursor for developmentand for building. I use Next.js and Reactas my main frameworks, and I use Firebasefor hosting and for database stuff.And okay, so you’re doing about 17K MRR.What are the actual costs to run thisbusiness? What do the profits look like?So the overall margins are about 70%.Cursor is 40 per month, and then my mostexpensive cost is the AI API backends,which are about $2.5K per month. Okay, soyou, I mean, you crushed it in the last 4months. You’ve found this whole Redditstrategy. You’re making money online.
What has been the biggest lessonlearned in your journey so far? I wouldsay that when it comes to building aSaaS, you should be solving a problem ina growing market, and a good example Ican give is building a SaaS tool fornewspaper owners. For example, newspapersare in decline, or you canbuild a tool for like vibe coding, whichonly in the last months has beenExploding, and it’s going to keepgrowing. Something else that I wouldrecommend to everyone is that like inany other business model in SaaS,marketing and distribution are actuallyvery important. So even at the start,you should be spending a lot of yourtime marketing instead of addingmore features no one asked for. Andlastly, as a solo founder or smallcompany, speed is one of your majoradvantages. So take advantage of thatwhenever possible.
Okay, those are awesome. The lastquestion that we ask to everyone whocomes on Starter Story: If you could siton Diego’s shoulder before you crackedReddit, before you were making any moneyonline, what would be your advice?Right now is the best time to build. Iwould say that if you have an idea, geta simple MVP out there and startmarketing it as soon as possible.
All right. Well, that’s the best adviceI’ve heard all month. Thank you, Diego, forcoming on the channel. I love the Redditstuff. That’s why I really wanted tohave you on this channel. It reminds meof when I first started. So, thank youfor coming on.
Keep growing, and we’ll have you on whenyou’re doing a million. So, thanks forcoming on, man.Thanks for having me.I love Diego’s story because it’s proofthat you do not need an audience to besuccessful. He did it all just by havinga great working product and, of course, akiller marketing strategy. I reallythink that anybody can do this, put thisinto practice, and create something thatchanges their life. But, of course, youactually have to build something. If younever build it, you’ll never know. And
this is why I created Starter StoryBuild, our flagship program to help youbuild anything with AI. In less than twoweeks, you’ll go from just an idea inyour head to a fully working app readyto ship to the world. And moreimportantly, you’ll learn the skills tobuild whatever you want forever. Ifyou’re interested, head to the link inthe description to check out StarterStory Build. Thank you guys again forwatching. I’ll see you in the next one.Peace.