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

This is everything I know about building a successful SAS. This is Tibo, a dude from France I've been following for a while who's launched dozens of products online. But recently, I noticed that

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 100K per month. Not just one app. Tibo has four

month. Not just one app. Tibo has four separate SAS products doing over $100,000 MR each, which is unheard of.

So, I gave him a call and asked him how this is even possible and he shared everything.

>> I failed for 5 years because I didn't know this.

>> In this video, Tibo and I walk through his specific playbook he uses over and over again to launch successful SAS companies, including [music] the number one thing builders get wrong about

validating their ideas, why he's building six different apps versus just one, and his exact 12step playbook he uses for all of his apps. This is a

video you cannot miss. So, let's dive in. I'm Bat Walls and this is Starter

in. I'm Bat Walls and this is Starter Story.

All right, TBO the legend is in the house. Tell me about who you are, Tibo,

house. Tell me about who you are, Tibo, what you built and what's your story.

>> I'm Tibo. Some people know me because I built and exceeded [music] the Tweet Hunter and Tapio. It was an 8 million [music] acquisition. I'm building five

[music] 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 playbook, the one that I'm using every day, uh, and which got me to have four apps above 100K per month.

>> Okay. I mean, insane. Five different

products doing $700,000 a month is crazy. Can you break down all these five

crazy. Can you break down all these five different businesses? What kind of

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 my products.

Uh 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 SAS to just grow your

organic traffic. The next one is Super

organic traffic. The next one is Super X. It just passed 13K per month. It's an

X. It just passed 13K per month. It's an

allin-one SAS to grow an audience on on X. Next one is Postyncer. It's the

X. Next one is Postyncer. It's the

smallest of all my product. It's making

1.5k per month. It's also social media tool. I love this space. But this one is

tool. I love this space. But this one is more made for people who want to be everywhere. You can post on 10 platform.

everywhere. You can post on 10 platform.

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

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 uh customers. The

month. 50k paying uh customers. The

total amount of monthly revenue is growing about 20% per month consistently for over 6 months right now. There's

just no sign that it's stopping.

>> This is crazy. You've built over four successful apps, have done it all very recently in the last couple years. I

talked to a lot of people who want to build SAS and they struggle. They

struggle to even make a dollar. Yet, you

have done this four times in the last couple years and have insane success. I

wanted to bring on the channel to share that playbook. You have this whole

that playbook. You have this whole 12step 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 SAS, building things

online that nobody else is doing? What

are you Tibo doing differently than everybody else online?

>> I think there's basically one big thing and hundreds of very small and tiny things. And I think the the one big

things. And I think the the one big things is everyone is just breeding new stuff, adding features because they think that it's going to be the thing that people are 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 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 things that feel uncomfortable which is talking to people

every day and try to understand their true pain to 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. Tibo isn't

again. But here's the thing. Tibo isn't

just guessing. [music]

He's following a specific playbook that we're talking about today. And he's

growing his apps at an [music] insane rate. I know a lot of you watching want

rate. I know a lot of you watching want to figure out how to crack growth just like Tibo. That's why I'm excited to

like Tibo. 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 Hyperrowth 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

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

[music] are replacing the need for traditional VC funding and how successful exits have changed from 5 years ago. I personally found the case

years ago. I personally found the case studies in there from Clay, G2, and Goldcast especially valuable. They share

the exact moves that help those companies scale fast. So, if you're tired of guessing and want the data behind what actually works, check out the Hyperrowth 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

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. Tibo is your playbook for

share. Tibo is your playbook for starting a SAS. If you were to start over today, you have this awesome 12step playbook on how to think about building SAS online. I would love if you could go

SAS 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

weeks. What I mean by that is take shortcuts and you can find like multiple shortcuts today. It's can be using no

shortcuts today. It's can be using no code. I built some MVPs using bubble.io

code. I built some MVPs using bubble.io use uh boiler 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 9 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 like much much faster. Step two, you have this MVP.

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 uh target audience and you find a way to uh

reach out to them. It can be through uh a tweets, a subreddits or it can be through email. Why this is important? If

through email. Why this is important? If

your mom is testing your ID, if she finds it relevant or not, [music] there is absolutely no real knowledge that you can gain from that. If the person is not relevant, like there is 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's the person life is about like what's the pain is about and how you can truly deliver value because you really understand the workflow of the people you really

understand like the core pain. Item four

uh talk to them every single day. You

are looking for recurring usage and so you are looking for how to make people come back every day on your software and by talking to them every day you will [music] 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 [music] and that creates a daily flow of people that comes to me.

people feel much much closer from you [music] and it gives you this insane reactivity where if someone tells you about something and you fix it in like 5 to 10

minutes they might be like customers for life. Something that can change [music]

life. Something that can change [music] 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 doing 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 every with pretty much every one of my product is being the user of my own product. [music] And

by doing that, I'm 10 times more relevant with understanding the core problem and giving a proper solution.

Every single time there is a tiny things to fix, I just fix it and life gets better for both me and the users. When

you are able to build that 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

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 [music] 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 broad and I think it's 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

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

stickiness. If you want to build a sustainable business, you want true value delivered to your customer, which translates great stickiness. one amazing

way to know if uh you have stickiness or people complaining about something. Most

people think that if 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 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 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 um basically it's go broad.

There are tons of acquisition channel. I

think at this step you need to figure out which one are really working to you.

To do that you need to go broad like you need to try many many things and see what's actually working. What's

basically true right now is like launching on products, uh, launching on socials and talking about your software like building in public is basically

free. So doing that is maybe good enough

free. So doing that is maybe good enough [music] to get to the 1, two, 3k per month that you need to uh to live and to be able to spend a little bit more on

your product. In my case, launching on

your product. In my case, launching on platkins 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

company. Either you are good with socials or you are good with SEO or you are good with coating. This is what uh step 10 is about. You need to create

content. You need to build a pipe or

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 [music] about your industry. You

need to have testimonials. You need to have case studies of people that are incredibly successful with your software. But you need to have this

software. But you need to have this engine of creating content that going to fuel 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 affiliation. 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 of ad budgets, it's likely that you can go 10k or even

100k by keeping the optimization running on on those ads. It definitely mean that there is something to dictate here. So I

think a very nice example of that is [music] outrank. It basically grew from

[music] outrank. It basically grew from zero to 20k per month by just reading in public. But like past 20k per month, if

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 we started doing

that. So we worked we we started doing ads. We worked the SEO much further by

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 out rank and it worked.

Like that's how we grew from 20 to 200.

Step 12 is scale that works and kill what doesn't. I know that I I said

what doesn't. I know that I I said earlier that you need to go broad and try out all the acquisition channel 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. Those two acquisition channels, I'm going all in on them. Take SEO for example. I know

on them. Take SEO for example. I know

that SEO works very well for posting.

Like I know people are asking a lot of question around social media. Once

[music] SEO work, you have so much work that you can do which is SEO related.

Find new keywords, find new uh queries that people are asking for on each acquisition channel. If they work, there

acquisition channel. If they work, there is always a way to double down on them.

This is basically my 12step 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, to thank you for sharing

month. Okay, to thank you for sharing that amazing playbook. I do have a question. You have six products and

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 you should 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 [music] I think this move is primary driven by

fear like I'm scared as hell right now cuz like the the world is moving too fast sometimes I feel I feel lost with [music] the 10 AI news that we have every day. It's pretty much every day

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

more resilient. If OpenAI release [music] a new feature tomorrow and it kills one of my products which by the way happened when Alon Musk took over X

and almost killed Tweet Hunter like while it was making 200k per month. If

that happens today and OpenAI kills one of our products, it's not going to be the end of the world. we going to be able to uh sustain the company and

[music] my family and that's why I'm I'm moving forward this way. I want to 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 Tibo 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 uh your user and to that I

just give two advice which is one maintain a constant [music] 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

core situation. And the second one is being the user of my own products helped 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 to TBO. 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 Pats for having me.

>> Thank you to Tibo for coming on to the channel sharing so transparently all those different SAS businesses he's built all six of them that are all really successful. Absolutely insane

really successful. Absolutely insane numbers. I've never seen anything like

numbers. I've never seen anything like it. Personally, I think the playbook's

it. Personally, I think the playbook's amazing. But the biggest piece that he

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 and not really seeing a lot of success and the people that absolutely crush it like

Tibo. And if you're ready to do the

Tibo. 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 weeks using only AI tools. I'll put a [music] 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.

one. Peace.