| Source | https://read.readwise.io/read/01kvxr997a8qm7xrstdrn1qbpb |
|---|---|
| Readwise URL | https://read.readwise.io/read/01kvxr997a8qm7xrstdrn1qbpb |
| Readwise ID | 01kvxr997a8qm7xrstdrn1qbpb |
| Date | 2026-04-01 |
| Author | Your Average Tech Bro |
| Category | video |
| Site | YouTube |
This video is a step-by-step [snorts]guide on how to build, grow, andmonetize your very own SaaS productwhile still working at your 9-to-5 job.This video is primarily going to betargeted at people that are working as asoftware engineer at an existing techcompany, but always had thatentrepreneurial itch inside of them tobuild something on their own and makesome money from their very own piece ofsoftware that they built. And the reasonwhy I’m talking about this is becausethat was exactly what I did. I wasworking in big tech starting from 2019,and starting from 2020, 2021 or so, Istarted building my own apps. And overthe past five or six years, I’ve builtover 14 different apps. And probably thefirst five or six apps made absolutelyzero money. Then the next two or threeapps made a couple hundred dollars amonth. And then now I’ve finally beenmaking a couple of different apps thatmake a couple thousand dollars a month.
And my current app, yourby.ai, iscurrently making roughly seven or eightthousand dollars a month. So, by nomeans am I some crazy millionaire frommy app business. I am just a couple ofsteps ahead of you in your journeybecause I recently just in October of2025 quit my full-time job to go all inon building my own app business righthere. So, the pains of building an apppart-time, while holding down a 9-to-5job, and trying to grow and monetize itmyself as a solo developer, that feelingand that experience is still very rawand real to me because I know how itfeels. So, that’s what this video isgoing to be about. Let’s start gettinginto it. So, in terms of how this videois going to progress, there are four primary sections that I’m goingto go over. Number one is expectationsetting about what the journey ofbuilding an app and trying to grow itand market it is going to be like. Andthen afterwards, we’re going to talk.
About how to find ideas of apps andpieces of software to build. Then we’regoing to go into how to actually buildyour app and some of the things Ilearned transitioning from being a bigtech engineer working with a giganticengineering team to being a solodeveloper and building everything on myown. And then lastly, we’re going to betalking about how to market the app anddifferent marketing strategies that Ihave personally used as a developer. Andjust some general marketing learningsthat you should go into when trying togrow your app. I know that the marketingand distribution portion of the appbuilding journey is usually the hardestpart for everybody, and especially fordevelopers on how to figure out. So,we’re going to do a big deep dive intothe various marketing and how Ipersonally have marketed my apps as wellon the internet. So, let us get into itwith the first part of just generalexpectation settings and what to expect.
Going into this app building journey, Itouched upon this in the intro, but Imyself, I’ve been building apps for overthe past five or six years at thispoint. I built 13 or 14 different apps.In fact, if you want to see more detailsabout the apps that I built, you canactually check out this video right here,where I go over pretty much every singleone of the 14 different apps that Ibuilt, and the various lessons I’velearned from building it. And I rememberwhen I first started going out on my appbuilding, software building journey, Ithought that I was going to hit a homerun on the very first app. And Iactually vividly remember this oneperson that I got connected with over X.He has been like an indie hacker builderhimself for multiple years, and he toldme, he’s like, "Hey, dude, just aheads-up, like, your first couple ofapps are probably going to suck, andit’s going to take a long time for youto actually build something substantial.
That makes substantial revenue." And Iremember hearing that and being like,“Bro, shut up. I’m built different, bro.I worked at Google. I’m a big hotshot. Iknow how to build.” And I was so, soincredibly wrong, and he was soincredibly right because it took me somany tries, I think until my fifth orsixth try until I built an app thatactually made any modest of revenue. So,just realize this is a marathon, not asprint. It’s going to take a while. Youjust have to invest into yourself. Thisis not any different from the old dayswhen we’re actually trying to learncoding and learning how to build for the
very first time yourself. It took a longtime. The beginning was hard. Learningany new skill is really, reallydifficult and takes a lot longer thanyou expect it to be. But then, as longas you go in with that mindset that thisis going to take a while, then I thinkthings happen a lot faster than you willactually expect it to be. You know,There’s that one quote out there wherepeople say people overestimate what theycan accomplish in one year, but they areseverely underestimate what they canaccomplish in five years. So, just knowthat if you really want this, you
really, really want to do this, strapin. It’s going to take a long time. Allright, so now that the expectations havebeen set, the intro is complete, let usnow get into step one, which is figuringout what exactly to build, how to get anidea of an app or a piece of software tobuild. Jump scare. You didn’t think Iwas going to pull up a Roy Lee video,Clue Lee video. And while I understandthat he is a bit of a controversialfigure, I actually think he doesn’t havebad takes because if you have a milliontakes that you post on the internet, acouple of them are going to be good. Andthis is a take that I agree with. So,
you should watch this video in itsfullness. And basically, the gist ofwhat Roy is saying here is that theReason why so many smart people fail atbuilding companies is because peoplethat are smart and typically work atthese like ivory tower big tech places,FAANG places, MAANG MANGA places,whatever you want to call it, they go inwanting to build an ultra sexy crazyproduct in like a really niche B2Bspace. And while if you do that, you canwin really, really big, I think actuallydoing that is much harder in reality.
And if you spent any amount of time onthe internet, especially in the techSilicon Valley bubble, you know peopletalk so badly about lifestylebusinesses, non-venture scalebusinesses. But I’m here to tell you, ifyou are someone that is just trying tobuild your very first app, trying to getany type of traction on the internet,and make your first couple of dollars,first hundred dollars on the internet,don’t have that type of ego. Go in andjust build the easiest, simplest thingsthat consumers want to pay for. AndDon’t be afraid to build in consumer.
Sure, it might not be venture backable,but is that really the game that we’retrying to play right now? Chances are, ifyou’re watching this video, you probablyjust want to figure out how to make sometype of micro SaaS that makes a couplebucks, a couple hundred bucks everysingle month. And I can promise you, Ifeel like that is going to be mucheasier to do with a consumer businessthan a B2B business, in my opinion. Butin the end of the day, it doesn’tmatter, B2B or consumer, you should justbuild something. That is the mostimportant part of this entire step. Youjust have to go out there and takeaction and build something. You know,there’s that really popular saying ofperfection is the enemy of progress.
Don’t try to be a perfectionist. Don’twait for the perfect idea to come in andbuild something. Just get your reps in,build, 'cause that’s the fastest way you’regoing to go through this learning cycle.
Of getting better in this app building,app marketing game. So, here are sometips and strategies that I have in termsof figuring out apps or ideas toactually build out. Number one isactually just rebuild some of yourfavorite apps that you use on aday-to-day basis. Once again, it doesn’tmatter if it’s a consumer app or a B2Bapp or a B2 prosumer app, find thepieces of software that you personallylove to use and that maybe you evenpersonally pay for, and just rebuild itwith maybe a slightly different twist tofix some of the small bugs or small UXthat you personally don’t like about it.
You know, some stuff like a budgetingapp, a calorie tracking app, a reallynice Mac screenshotting tool, like oneof these right here. Like, look at this.You take a screenshot. Bang. Look at howpretty it is. You can change all theaspect ratios. It’s really nice. Ididn’t build this app. It’s just areally popular tool that you can alsoBuild yourself. A voice-to-text tool, itdoesn’t matter. The reason why I’msaying copy your favorite apps thatyou’re already using is because I’m afirm believer because I have done this
myself, if you just want to make yourfirst couple hundred dollars on theinternet, copying works. You can make abusiness that makes some money on theinternet just by blatantly copying otherapps that are existing out there. Now,if you want to scale into like amulti-million dollar business, then yes,you will probably have to differentiatein some way, shape, or form. But just tomake your first couple of bucks on theinternet, copying is great. I mean, hereis my example of that.
[music]>> Back when there was a whole AI meetingrecorder craze going on, I built thisapp, Monty. It’s a mobile app that justlets you record meetings with yourphone. This app peaked at, I believe,18, 1900 dollars of monthly revenue. AndLet’s do a live look on RevenueCat tosee how much money it makes right now.
It’s currently making, I mean, I haven’ttouched this app in over a year, andit’s still making 650 dollars of MRR.
So, once again, this is a blatant copy.There’s nothing spectacular about thisapp. Nothing differentiates about thisapp from all the other meeting recordingtools out there. But we built it, wewere able to market it, and still getpaying customers. So, that is one tipthat I have in terms of how to figureout some apps that you should build.
Another really big tip is also justintentionally scrolling through socialmedia. Now, obviously, if you’re not onsocial media, this doesn’t apply to you.But if you’re on TikTok or Instagram, ormaybe even YouTube Shorts as well, I’msure that as you’re scrolling, you’reeither A, getting hit by ads from otherapps trying to advertise to you, or youstumble upon an organic post on yourfeed that is disguised as an ad andPlugging a product inside of there. Thatis a great way to see what type ofcompetitors are out there, what apps areout there, and see which ones peak yourinterest. Chances are if people arebuilding these apps and marketing themtowards you, or especially through paidor even through organic, that means thatthis is a business that has beenvalidated with real paying customers.
But as somebody that is just gettingstarted, that is not VC-backed oranything, that’s just trying to makeyour first app, make a couple of dollarsfrom it, you do not have the luxury ofcreating a net new industry. So, do notgo into a place that doesn’t have anycompetitors. A space with competitors isa good sign. That means it is avalidated market with people that arewilling to pay money that otherbusinesses are providing. So, yes, gointo a place with competitors. That is agreen flag. And I think intentionallyscrolling through social media, you areGoing to get bombarded with so manypeople trying to market to you for theirpieces of software, for their ads. Andsee if any of them intrigue you at all.
And the last kind of tip that I have inin terms of figuring out what app toactually build is to build somethingthat you feel like you can actuallymarket. Now, obviously, this is reallytricky in the beginning stages becauseit’s kind of a chicken and an eggproblem. How can you know whether or notyou can market a particular app if youdon’t know how to do any marketing ordistribution? So, in the beginning, it’skind of hard. So, just try your best inthe beginning to make some educatedguess about yourself and yourcapabilities and whether or not you
actually can market that app. But then,as you kind of go through the reps andyou try to build and grow, market, buildand grow, and market, and rinse andrepeat over multiple, multiple apps,you’ll start figuring out whichMarketing avenue, what marketingstrategy you particularly like. And thatwill then start to shape the ideas andapps that you actually end up trying tobuild. I’ll touch more on this later instep three when we do our little deepdive into the marketing side of things.
So, stay tuned there. That covers how tofigure out what app idea to build. Now,let’s go over into actually building theapp. Chances are, if you’re watching thisvideo, you are already an engineer at alarger company. You know how to build.
But I will say that building at a bigtech company versus building as a solodeveloper or in a really small team ofyou and a friend, you and a co-founder,totally different ballgame as well. Thissection is going to be a lot shorterthan some of the other sections just cuzyou probably already know how to build.But in case you don’t have a tech stackthat you already know with what to buildwith, I’ll give a recommendation of whatI personally use as well. So, I’ll sayThis. Big tip number one is do notobsess over new tech. There’s a time and
place to learn a new tech stack, a newframework, but if you’re actually reallyserious about building, shipping,growing an app business, speed is thename of the game. Pick whatever techstack, no matter how boring it may be,or I don’t know however sexy it may be,as well, pick whatever tech andtechnology that you feel like you canmove the fastest. Because once again,this is going to be a long iterativeprocess of getting shots on goal,building apps, testing, building,
testing, building, testing, over andover and again. So, speed is the name ofthe game and speed is the biggestadvantage that you can possibly have inthis whole process of building andmonetizing your very first app. If youreally don’t have any tech stack outthere, I would probably recommend usingeither Next.js or TanStack and pairingit with Supabase for your auth andDatabase and stuff like that. In thepast, I’ve used Next.js and Supabase,but if I were to build a brand new appright now, I would probably chooseTanStack Start over Next.js. Do I haveany real reason for that? Hell no. Ijust spent too much time on the internetconsuming tech content and I feel likeTanStack Start is a hot sexy thing outthere and I’m very intrigued by it. But,regardless, Next.js is what I currentlyuse to build my current app. The currentapp that I’m building, Yorbie, which islike an organic social media marketingtool, more on this later on. This isbuilt with Next.js, and it still works.
And one of the most common comments thatI get in all my videos is, “Why do youpay your Supabase to host everything foryou? Why do you pay Vercel to hosteverything for you? You can hosteverything on a $10 VPS, you know?” Andlike, look, sure, I know theoretically Icould self-host my Next.js app or myTanStack Start app or even Supabase,which is open source, on something likeDigitalOcean or even on AWS ECS or onGoogle Cloud Platform with like GCE orwhatever you want to call it or GoogleCloud Run. But, at the end of the day,in my personal opinion, like once again,speed is the name of the game and whenyou are a solo developer or it’s justyou and another developer, why wasteyour time going and trying to build andmanage your own infrastructure when youcan just pay someone to manage it foryou? Once again, I’m a really bigbeliever that in the beginning, speed isreally important and your main focus
should strictly be on building the appand marketing it. And the infrastructureside of stuff just doesn’t feel thatimportant. I feel like it’s adistraction from the core thing that youshould focus on. So, even at my scaleright now at Yorbie, I think we’reprobably around eight grand a month,seven, eight grand a month. Let me pullit up real quick. At Yorbie right now,Our gross volume monthly, this currentmonth in the past four weeks, we’re ataround seven and a half thousanddollars. And I actually have a YouTubevideo, in case you’re wondering, thatwhere I went over the actual costbreakdown of how much I spend on allthe various service providers andsoftware like hosting as well. I thinkat this one, my 5K a month makes $0profit. Full breakdown, I actually goover really in-depthly how much I payfor Vercel hosting and Supabase hosting.
I think right now I pay close to a totalof 500 bucks a month. And sure, I know,for sure that I can make a huge cost savingsby migrating everything onto my own VPS,but then I have to manage that. And forme, I would rather happily pay that $500a month right now just to focus onbuilding the core product because thatprofit generation, at least for me rightnow, is not my core priority. But,maybe later on in the future, yeah, Iwould definitely love to self-host.
Everything directly on, like in, like, aDocker container on AWS, GCP, or on EC2or whatever you want to call it. But,for now, I’m a really big proponent inthe early stages, don’t focus on thatunless you are really good at it and youalready have a whole workflow built outfor that. I wouldn’t spend time doingthat. I would just pay a hosted providerlike a Supabase or Vercel to handleall of that for you. That’s just my twocents. And once again, I’m going torepeat that really great quote ofperfection is the enemy of progress. AndI think this really particularly applies
to big tech engineers, because I think in bigtech engineering spaces, you wanteverything to be perfectly scalable,because chances are any type of codechange that you do push out is going toaffect millions, if not billions ofpeople, depending on what company youwork for. You want crazy 100% testcoverage. You want integration tests.You want end-to-end testing. And that’sGreat in theory, but dude, if you havean app that has zero users, do not addunit test cases. You do not need that.
That’s a waste of your time right now.So, do not worry. Do not focus on havingeverything being perfect. Don’t bothercreating separate dev, staging, prodenvironment. That’s not important. Donot build a perfect app. Build an appthat’s good enough to ship and get usersand get validation that you are buildingsomething worthwhile that peopleactually want to use. And I know I justtalked about how like, “Oh, no need tohyper-optimize by renting a VPS to hostyour app and everything.” I will saythat there are some legitimate concernsabout scaling. Like, for example, withthe app that I’m currently building,which is called Yorbie. Now that we havescaled to past 25,000 users, we are nowstarting to run into some scalingissues. And actually, one of the bigscaling issues that we’re running intois LLM usage and getting rate limited by.
LLM providers. And as a result, I’vebeen looking into solutions to host ourown fine-tuned models on our owninfrastructure, and that is where thesponsor of today’s video, Crusoe, comesin. They’re a really tightly integratedvertical AI company that lets you hostyour own open-source models or your ownfine-tuned models on theirinfrastructure. Their managedinference platform helps you deploy andmanage them so that you don’t have toworry about all the infrastructure associatedwith it. They also have proprietary techcalled Memory Alloy that helps keepinferences really, really fast even whenthe context window gets filled up with alot of information. You’ve been there,I’ve been there when we’re in reallylong chat sessions, and as a chat sessiongets longer and longer, the responsestake a really long time to come back,but no longer with Crusoe’s proprietarytech to keep the inferences super fast.
And the model selection just got wayMore exciting. NVIDIA just launched NeMo Tron 3 Super, which is a 120 billionparameter open model, but it onlyactivates 12 billion parameters atinference, delivering up to five timeshigher throughput and a 1 million tokencontext window built specifically formulti-agent and long horizon AIworkflows. And Crusoe is actually a dayone launch partner for NeMo Tron 3Super, which means you can get access tothe model right now using Crusoe’smanaged inference platform, which ispowered by Memory Alloy. So, you get allof the performance boost without any ofthe headache. And they’re alsosupporting NVIDIA NeMo Tron 3 Voice Chat
throughout this platform, making Crusoeone of the best places to run thecutting-edge open models at scale. I’llinclude a link in the description if youwant to learn more about it. And onceagain, thanks to Crusoe for sponsoringtoday’s video. That is all I got for thebuilding the app portion. Now, let’s getInto the marketing portion. How tomarket your app. This is the big andmeaty section. Oh boy, and we’re goingto dive into it. Chances are, this iswhere most of you are going to getstuck. You know how to build something,but you have no idea how to market it.
And I want you to change your framingfrom this, from instead of just lookingat this as marketing, right? Look atthis as learning any other new codinglanguage or tech stack. The beginningsucks, and it’s really, really hard, andlearning any new tech stack reallysucks. And I think there are so many timeswhere I’m sure you were learning a brandnew coding language or tech stack, andyou’re like, “Oh my gosh, this sucks.Like, what’s the point of doing allthis?” And then, the more and more you do,the better it becomes, and you startto see the benefits of doing this aswell, and you realize it’s not that badafter all. And you, and I know howeasy it is to get stuck in tutorial hell.
When you’re learning a brand new codinglanguage or brand new tech stack,that’s the same thing with marketing.It’s so easy to get stuck in tutorialhell when trying to figure out how to doSEO, paid ads, organic social media.None of that matters. Just watch acouple videos, just get a general idea,but truly the only way you’ll actuallylearn how to do it all is by stoppingthe tutorials and getting out there andtrying to do SEO, trying to do paid ads,trying to do organic social media,trying to do any type of marketingyourself. So, don’t get stuck intutorial hell. Treat it as if you werelearning a brand new coding language,new tech stack. Just change your mindset
on that and how you would approach itthere. Now, I will say the one downsideof market learning and marketing stackversus a new tech stack is the fact thatright now, if you’re learning a new techstack or coding language, you have yourLLMs that are the expert industryKnowledge experts on how to write thatparticular language, write thatparticular framework. But,unfortunately, with LLMs and marketingtactics, marketing tactics change somuch faster than frameworks andlanguages do. So, with LLMs, yes, it’sreally useful in terms of just gettinghigh-level overviews about how certainmarketing levers work or some general
best practices, but because marketing ismuch more contingent on bleeding-edgeknowledge of what’s working right nowversus a month ago. These things changeall the time, the LLMs are less usefulwith learning how to do marketing thanlearning how to do coding, but I stillheavily advise you to use LLMs as muchas you can in terms of just getting ageneral overview and general knowledgeabout how things work, differentmarketing strategies work from ahigh-level overview, but they will nothave the bleeding-edge knowledge becausethe bleeding-edge knowledge is what theBleeding-edge marketers are using tocapture people’s attention. And I reallythink that if you are a solo developer
or even a small co-founding team rightnow, and I really think as a solodeveloper, somebody working a full-timejob, I think that in the beginning thatyou should be really involved in themarketing. In fact, I might even argueyou should do it yourself instead ofdelegating it off to some type ofagency, some type of third-party personto handle all the marketing anddistribution for you. I think about thisfrom a sword and a shield analogy. Youhave your shield to protect you and yoursword to go out there and attack, likeyour strength and your weaknesses. Yoursword is always going to be coding.
You’ll always be most likely, at least,a better engineer, a better builder thanyou are going to be a better marketer.
But, that doesn’t mean that you’re goingto completely forego your shield, youknow? You want to improve your weaknessWhile still strengthening your weapon,so, for example, if you want to end uptrying to hire an agency, hire athird-party service, or hire somebody tohelp you work with the marketing andstuff like that, most people are notgoing to want to work for a product thathas zero users and zero customers.
So, that is why you’re going to have tostrengthen your weakness a little bit,scale to some type of traction, sometype of progress, a couple hundred bucksa month, a couple hundred of users, andthen once you strengthen that, then itbecomes a lot easier to attract peopleto delegate that growth off to somebodyelse and to also pay for that growth andthird-party service. now, in terms offiguring out what type of marketingstrategy to do, number one, it dependson your app. some apps are bound to dobetter on SEO, some apps are bound to dobetter on cold outreach, and some appsare bound to do better on organic social
media. as a general rule of thumb, theThe way I like to kind of frame it all is ifyou are building a B2B app, you shouldjust do cold outreach. That’s the bestway to do it, obsess over it. If you’rebuilding a B2C app, you are much betteroff doing some type of social media, inmy opinion, like organic social media oreven paid ads or even influencermarketing. I want to do a completelyseparate video on like a really, reallydeep dive into social media marketingbecause that is my marketing tool ofchoice as well as my currentco-founder’s marketing tool of choice.
So, that I would say that’s kind of ageneral rule of thumb. But then also,when push comes to shove, I do think youcan market anything on any medium. Youjust have to pick one type of marketingstrategy and really obsess over it. Kindof similar when you’re learning a brandnew tech stack, you might have a brandnew engineer coming over to you beinglike, "I want to learn Next.js or I wantto learn TanStack Start. Which one?
Should I pick? "Yes, each one has prosand cons and nuanced takes on bothsides, but at the end, you can buildanything with any tech stack. And it’svery similar to marketing where paid adsversus SEO versus organic social mediamarketing versus influencer marketingversus cold outreach. Yes, there are alla bunch of nuances between all of them,but at the end of the day, you can stillaccomplish your end goal. And what Ithink is really important for you isjust to pick one and really, really,really obsess over it. And I think in
the beginning stages when you’rebuilding your first couple of apps,you’re probably going to cycle through alot of different marketing strategiesand it’s going to take you time anditerations and multiple reps to figureout which marketing strategy do you feellike you can do the most of. And ittruly is different for everybody outthere. And right now, I’m going to do areally quick overview about just someQuick one-liner, two-liners about thevarious marketing strategies out there.
All right, first up is search engineoptimization or like LLM or GPToptimization.Basically, how do you getyour results to appear in an LLMresponse or in a search result.This is really great because if you can crackit, there is so much free traffic comingfrom these sites. But the one downsideto SEO and LLMO is the fact that ittakes a long time to get this type oftraction. So, you can put in a lot ofwork for SEO or LLMO, but sometimes youwon’t see results until a couple weeks,if not a couple months later on down theroad. Really great marketing strategy,but it does take a little bit of alonger time to get that validation ofwhether it works or not compared to someother strategies at least.
Next up is organic social media marketing. That ismy current marketing tool of choice.It’s also my co-founder’s marketing toolof choice and it is also the reason whyWe created Yorbie as well. Now, fororganic social media marketing, the prois that it is basically free. Youjust have to make it. The only cost ismaking the video or paying a creator tomake that video for you. But like Isaid, I think in the beginning stages,you should make that video yourself. Andwith organic social media marketing, itis one of the fastest ways to getimmediate validation in terms of whatworks and what doesn’t work. Becauseright now, with short-form marketing, itis pretty much democratized virality.
Anyone can go viral. It doesn’t matterif you have zero followers or 10,000followers. Anyone’s videos can go viral.So, theoretically, you can get thelowest CPM, lowest CPC compared to anyother marketing provider out there. Butit is a little bit more of a crapshootin that sense as well. The pros is thatit is a very competitive space. And justto do a quick plug-in for the productthat I’m building because I primarilyBuilt Yorbie to help myself and otherbuilders figure out how to do organicsocial media marketing and distributionfor their products and businesses. Wehave a couple of ways that we do this.
Number one is we have a viral contentdatabase that is a hand-picked, reallycurated set of high-performing viral marketing videos,specifically marketing videos you canget inspiration for your niche, yourproduct, and figure out how to market iton social media. And then once you finda particular video that you like, youcan then remix that video to fit yourbrand or business’s niche or audience ortopic while still maintaining thatoriginal video’s viral format just bygoing into our content remixing tool,which you can see right here. This isthe original video that I created. Ireally like the format. It performedpretty well. And I told it to remix itfor some fictional app out there for AIdating app, AI wingman or wingwoman. ButThe big downside for organic socialmedia marketing is that the trends andthe meta and the strategies change somuch faster than any other marketingstrategy and marketing playbook outthere. And I will also say one of the
cons of organic social media marketingis the fact that sometimes the views andthe virality that you might get on aparticular video, it is potentially lessconcentrated and less focused on aparticular niche of individual comparedto something like paid ads because paidads, you can be very targeted of who youwant to show your advertisement to andit works and it’s great for targetingthose exact individuals in that veryexact user persona. But the downside ofpaid ads is that it is very expensive torun paid ads. Trust me, I’ve lost athousands of dollars trying to run paidads. It’s not easy and theoretically, ifit works, it’s incredible. You put $1in, you get $2 out. Mind-blowing. That’sincredible. Who wouldn’t want that? ButIt is hard. It is expensive, and it takesa decent amount of investment, like acouple thousand dollars to figure out awinning ad, winning targeting strategy.
As well, but it definitely has the samebenefit, the same pro of organic socialmedia marketing in the fact that you canget almost instantaneous results ofwhether or not someone is willing to useyour app or not. Next up is coldoutreach. Cold outreach is amazing,especially if you’re building a B2B tooltargeting a very specific targetedcustomer. Cold outreach is probably theway to go rather than trying to marketyour B2B tool on social media or eventhrough paid ads. You can use coldoutreach to target individual people,individual stakeholders at differentcompanies, and different teams that youknow would use your tool. That’shonestly, I think the best way to go ifyou’re building a true B2B product.
Downside is that cold outreach is hard.Getting people’s attention is hard.
Trying to stand out in somebody’s emailinbox, very, very hard. And I think theother downside to cold outreach is thefact that you’re never going to hit asmuch scale as you would compared to theposting some content that would be forSEO or LLM optimization or social mediaor paid ads as well. It doesn’t scalenearly as well, in my opinion. But onceagain, eventually, as you figure outwhat your marketing strategy is, whatyour marketing toolkit is, yourmarketing stack is, that will thenreally start to influence the differenttypes of apps that you’re going to buildin the future. For example, I know thatI’m not a cold outreach type of guy. Andbecause of that, that really deters mefrom building really deep B2Benterprisey tools because I know thatcold outreach is just not my specialty.
That’s just not what I do. And instead,what I do know is I’m very good at doingcontent marketing. Whether that beYouTube or short-form social media,Doing inbound lead marketing, makingcontent, posting it on the internet, andthen getting leads that way instead. Sonow I know that over the years, that isthe marketing stack, the marketing techthat I personally love and that heavilyinfluences what I can build. I onlybuild things that I know that I can make
content for to attract eyeballs andattract users and customers. And thenonce you go through the marketing steps,chances are marketing will work,marketing will fail. Most of the time,it will fail. And then you just startrinsing and repeating where you marketapp, build it again. Does it work? Youevaluate whether or not it does work ornot. You build another one, market itagain, evaluate, rinse and repeat,build, market, validate, build, market,validate until you figure out somethingthat works and you can build an app thatmakes your first couple hundred dollarsa month. That is a complete
step-by-step. Woo. Okay, that was a longOne. Big fat video right there. Hope youfound it educational. Hope you found ithelpful in some way, shape, or form. Ifyou have any questions or just thoughtsabout anything, leave them in thecomments down below. I’ll try my best torespond to as many of them as I can. ButI hope you find this helpful, and I wishyou good luck in figuring out how tobuild your own SaaS, your own app, makeit some money while still holding downyour 9-to-5 job. I know how difficult itis. It’s not for the weak, but I knowit’s possible because I’ve done it.
Definitely takes a lot longer than youwould ever expect, but it’s possible, andyou just have to keep pushing throughit. Rooting for you. You got this. Bestof luck with everything.