I Built 4 SaaS Apps to $100K MRR: Here's My Exact Playbook

This is everything I know about building a successful SaaS. This is Thibaut, a dude from France I've been following for a while who's launched dozens of products online. But recently, I noticed that he's been on an absolute tear. Over the last four years, I've built four apps which passed over 100 KPMOS. Not just one app. Thibaut has four separate SaaS products doing over $100,000 MRR each, which is unheard of. So I gave him a call and asked him how this is even possible. And he shared everything. I spent for five years because I didn't know this. In this video, Thibaut and I walk through his specific playbook he uses over and over again to launch successful SaaS companies, including the number one thing builders get wrong about validating their ideas, why he's building six different apps versus just one, and his exact 12-step playbook he uses for all of his apps. This is a video you cannot miss. So let's dive in. I'm Pat Walls, and this is Starter Story. All right, Thibaut, the legend is in the house. Tell me about who you are, Thibaut, what you built, and what's your story? I'm Thibaut. Some people know me because I built and existed Tweet Hunter and Tapio. It was an 8 million acquisition. I'm building five apps right now, trying to slowly grow them to 10 million in annual revenue. I've built many apps. So I'm going to be talking about my Kbook, the one that I'm using every day and which got me to have four apps above a hundred K per month. Okay. I mean, insane. Five different products doing $700,000 a month is crazy. Can you break down all these five different businesses? What kind of businesses are they? The highest revenue making is a video making software. It's called Revit.ai. It's basically something where you can input a video, input a text, and Revit will try to create an engaging video. I think Revit is my oldest software. It's making something like 400k per month and still growing 10% month over month, which is quite crazy to me. The second one is called Outrank. It might be the fastest growing of all my products. It just passed 200K per month. It started just as a blog post generator and right now it's slowly becoming an all-in-one SEO SaaS to just grow your organic traffic. The next one is SuperX. It just passed 13K per month. It's an all-in-one SaaS to grow an audience on on X. Next one is PostSinker. It's the smallest of all my products, it's making 1.5K per month. It's also a social media tool. I love this space, but this one is more made for people who want to be everywhere. You can post on 10 platforms. And the last one is the one that I spend the most money on. It's called Feather. It's a blogging tool making about 10K per month. I acquired this for 250K. It takes your Notion Notion pages and Notion contents and put that as a blog on the web. So all that together, I think it's generating something like 700k per month 50k paying customers. The total amount of monthly revenue is growing about 20% per month consistently for over six months right now there's just no sign that it's stopping. This is crazy. You've built over four successful apps. done it all very recently in the last couple years. I talked to a lot of people who want to build SaaS and they struggle. They struggle to even make a dollar. Yet you have done this four times in the last couple of years and have insane success. I wanted to bring you on the channel to share that playbook. You have this whole 12-step playbook that I'm really excited for you to go over. But before we get into that, I want to understand what is the meta here? What are you doing differently in terms of building products, building SaaS, building things online that nobody else is doing. What are you, Thibaut, doing differently than everybody else online? I think there is basically one big thing and hundreds of very small and tiny things. And I think the one big thing is everyone is just building new stuff, adding features because they think that it's going to be the thing that people are expecting. But what they do not do is what's hard for them, which is talking to people. People right now on the market who are able to build software are also the most shy people. And I think I'm part of those like I just I'm a developer, I want to stay on my cave, this entire framework that we're going to talk about, I think it's just about that it's just about you need to do the hard thing that feel uncomfortable, which is talking to people every day and try to understand their true pain. Tebow's story is awesome. And his portfolio of multiple $100,000 per month projects is very impressive. And what I'm even more impressed is the fact that he's been able to do this over and over again. But here's the thing. Tebow isn't just guessing. He's following a specific playbook that we're talking about today, and he's growing his apps at an insane rate. I know a lot of you watching want to figure out how to crack growth just like Tebow. That's why I'm excited to share a free resource from HubSpot for startups that I think you're going to really find valuable. It's called the Hypergrowth Startup Index, and it gives you a clear look at what the top startups are doing differently right now to grow. Things like how they're using AI to streamline operations, rethink their go-to-market strategies, and scale with small, focused teams. It also covers trends like why strategic partnerships are replacing the need for traditional VC funding, and how successful exits have changed from five years ago. I personally found the case studies in there from Clay, G2, and Goldcast especially valuable. They shared the exact moves that helped those companies scale fast. So if you're tired of guessing and want the data behind what actually works, check out the Hyper Growth Startup Index at the first link in the description. I put it right down in there for you to download for free. Thank you again to HubSpot for Startups for sponsoring this video. Let's get back to the story. What I'm really excited to have you come on and share, Thibaut, is your playbook for starting a SaaS. If you were to start over today, you have this awesome 12-step playbook on how to think about building SaaS online. I would love if you could go through this whole playbook for me and for everyone watching right now. The first step that I need you to do is find a way to build your MVP in days or weeks. What I mean by that is take shortcuts and you can find like multiple shortcuts today. It's gonna be using no code. I build some MVPs using bubble.io, use border plates. You can definitely skip many things when you code and most of the expert people will not compromise on those things but I think you should. You will have a 90% failure rate. It's the same for me, it's the same for a lot of people that I know. It's very hard to know for sure that you have something that people want and so if you want to take a year and fail 90% of the time, It might take like nine years to get something that's worked out. If you find a way to compress that in weeks and you're able to ship a new product every week, you're going to reach success much, much faster. Step two, you have this MVP. What I want you to do is find the five to 10 people that are very relevant to this product, that they are your core target audience, and you find a way to reach out to them. It can be through a tweet, a subreddit, or it can be through emails. Why this is important? If your mom is testing your ID, if she finds it relevant or not, there is absolutely no real knowledge that you can gain from that. If the person is not relevant, there's absolutely no point in listening to this feedback, either positive or negative. Step three, you started reaching out to people. What you need to do from there is build a true relationship with each one of the people you're reaching out to. You end up truly understanding what the person's life is about, what the pain is about, and how you can truly deliver value because you really understand the workflow of the people, you really understand the core pain. Item four, talk to them every single day. You are looking for recurring usage. And so you are looking for how to make people to come back every day on your software. And so by talking to them every day, you will understand why they are not coming back or why they are coming back and how you can reproduce that feeling for other customers. One thing that I did, which worked very, very well for me is until each product is making 10K per month in revenue, the support link on each software is directing people to my Twitter DMs and that creates a daily flow of people that comes to me. People feel much, much closer from you and it gives you this insane reactivity where if someone tells you about something and you fix it in like five to 10 minutes, they might be like customers for life. Something that can change the game is step five, understand the ultimate goal of the users. By understanding how far you can go with helping them achieving their ultimate goal and how much you can help them do it so, you can like 10 times or 100 times generate more value to your users. So step six, when it comes to building features, remember that you need to fix your users' problems and not yours. One thing that I'm doing with pretty much every one of my products is being the user of my own product. And by doing that, I'm 10 times more relevant with understanding the core problem and giving the proper solution. Every single time there is a tiny thing to fix, I just fix it and life gets better for both me and the users. When you are able to build a feature in like an hour or two from when people ask it on the tweets, it creates this insane feeling for the guy. He's going to talk about that. He's going to become the first advocate for your product. Step seven, it's about iterating what you did before. You need to do it again and maintain this constant relationship with users. Something that worked insanely well for me is by being active on socials, I was able to maintain a constant relationship with people and I was seeing every day people asking for new stuff on my software. Step eight, at that step a lot of people are trying to go abroad and I think it's happening way too soon. What I want you to do with Step eight is repeat until they cannot live without your software. If you go broad, like if you focus on acquisition and at the same time have a low retention, you will spend a lot of energy pushing people to your software and 99% of those people are going to flow away directly after trying your software. You need to make sure that your retention is good. You need to make sure that you have stickiness. If you want to build a sustainable business, you want true value you deliver to your customer, which translates with stickiness. One amazing way to know if you have stickiness are people complaining about something. Most people think that if you have a user complaining about something, it's usually a bad thing. And I think it's really not the case. Like if you are a user that takes some of his time to complain about something on your software, it definitely means that he's committed to using your software. Like he wants you to fix it. So now we just talked about the hardest part, the eight steps until you kind of, I don't want to say product market fit, but you have some sort of stickiness. Now it's time to go and think about distribution. So what's the next step there? Step nine, basically it's go broad. There are tons of acquisition channels. I think at this step, you need to figure out which ones are really working to you. To do that, you need to go broad. You need to try many, many things and see what's actually working. What's basically true right now is like launching on product hands, launching on socials and talking about your software, like building in public is basically free. So doing that is maybe good enough to get to the one to three K per month that you need to to leave and to be able to spend a little bit more on your products. In my case, launching on product hands and talk about my software on socials is always the thing that I do until 10K of revenue. Step 10, at one point, a company needs to become a media company. Either you are good with socials or you are good with SEO or you are good with co-domaining. This is what step 10 is about. You need to create content. You need to build a pipe or workflow that makes you able to ship content that's going to fuel everything that you do. You need to have something to say about your industry. You need to have testimonials, you need to have face studies of people that are incredibly successful with your software. But you need to have this engine of creating content that will include everything else that you do. Step 11, what you want here is do sustainable things that are able to help you scale much further, which in my opinion are SEO, ads, and aviation. You can set up once and can scale to crazy high limits. Take ads for example. If you have a working ads with 1k per month of ad budgets, it's likely that you can go 10k or even 100k by keeping the optimization running on those ads. It definitely means that there is something to detect here. So I think a very nice example of that is Outlook. It basically grew from zero to 20K per month by just reading in public. But like past 20K per month, if you want the growth to continue at the same rhythm, you cannot just rely on that. So we worked, we started doing ads. We worked the SEO much further by hiring something dedicated to that. And we ramp up the affiliate program, trying to make their life super easy with recommending Alfrink and it worked. That's how we grew from 20 to 200. Step 12 is scale that works and kill what doesn't. I know that I said earlier that you need to go broad and try out all the acquisition channels that are available in the market. It's because acquisition is hard. But in the end, my experience is for each software growth is pretty much about one or two acquisition channels. Those two acquisition channels, I'm going all in on them. Take SEO for example. I know that SEO works very well for posting your like I know people are asking a lot of questions around social media. Once SEO works, you have so much work that you can do which is SEO-related. Find new keywords, find new queries that people are asking for. On each acquisition channel, they work there's always a way to double down on them this is basically my 12 step playbook this is basically what i do with every single one of our products i think this way i grew four products above 100k per month okay tivo thank you for sharing that amazing playbook i do have a question you have six products and you've probably had a lot of other products that you've tried and currently trying lots of other products to see if they have product market fit sometimes i hear people arguing online about if you should just go all in on one product or if you have this sort of portfolio of projects clearly you've gone for the portfolio strategy but i'm curious why i have a family i have like a two kids and a wife and um i really want to be able to sustain the family and i think this move is probably driven by fear like i'm scared as hell right now because like the the the world is moving too fast. Sometimes I feel lost with the 10 AI news that we have every day. It's pretty much every day that you see some new AI killing startups because it makes them obsolete. So I think this move of creating valuable products is really about being more resilient. If OpenAI release a new feature tomorrow and it kills one of my products, which by the way happened when Elon Musk took over X and almost killed Twitter Hunter, while it was making 200 kilobit mass. If that happens today and OpenAI kills one of our products, it's not gonna be the end of the world. We gonna be able to sustain the company and my family, and that's why I'm moving forward this way. I wanna ask you a question that we ask everyone who comes on Starter Story, for that person that's watching this right now, or for young Thibaut before you had your exit, before you had all your businesses, what would be your number one piece of advice to make it in this build online world? Your job is to deeply understand the core need of your user. And to that, I just give two advice, which is one, making a constant communication channel with your user. It can be social. I think it's a great one, but this is really up to you. Talk to your user every day and understand their core situation. And the second one is being the user of my own products. Help me becoming an expert on the problem that I'm trying to solve. And so I understand much more what I'm trying to do and how to solve my own problem. Well, thank you, Thibaut. I think that's the best advice I heard all year. Thanks for coming on, sharing your playbook, amazing what you've built. So thanks for coming on, sharing, being so transparent about everything. That was amazing being here. Like, thank you so much, Pat, for having me. Thank you to Thibaut for coming onto the channel, sharing so transparently all those different SaaS businesses he's built, all six of them that are all really successful. Absolutely insane numbers. I've never seen anything like it. Personally, I think the playbook's amazing, but the biggest piece that he talked about is the need for builders to get out of their shell, to get out of their cave and talk to people, talk to customers every single day, be on X and have that direct line of communication with your customers. I really do believe that that is the difference between a lot of people building stuff, not really seeing a lot of success and the people that absolutely crush it like Tebow. And if you're ready to do the same, to get off the sidelines to build something, to launch it, to get it into the hands of customers and talk to them every day, you should definitely check out Starter Story Build. It is our program where you will come up with an idea, build it, launch it, and get it in the hands of customers in just a couple of weeks using only AI tools. I'll put a link in the description for you to check that out. Our next cohort is starting this week. All right, guys, that's it for this episode. Thank you for watching. We'll see you in the next one. Peace.

Tibo runs a portfolio of successful micro-SaaS projects and in this video, we walk through his specific playbook he uses over and over again to launch successful saas companies. 

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Chapters:
0:00 - Intro
1:10 - Who is Tibo?
1:43 - Tibo’s 5 apps
3:38 - “Do the hard thing.”
4:57 - What are top startups doing to grow?
6:17 - Playbook: Product Market Fit
11:40 - Playbook: Distribution
15:30 - Portfolio strategy
16:55 - Final piece of advice
17:55 - Pat’s notes and reflections

This video is an educational case study of this founder’s experience. It is not financial advice and does not guarantee any income or results. Every business is different and your results may vary.