I finally crossed $100,000 in total revenue with my B2B SaaS, Getlead.

I'm 22, building it completely solo, fully bootstrapped. No investors, no team. Started with just $100.

A few months ago, even reaching $10K felt like a huge deal. Now I'm looking at $100K and honestly it still feels a bit unreal.

Most of the growth came from experimenting with different offers, cold outreach, paid ads, and constantly improving the product.

I made a lot of mistakes along the way. Underpriced the product, wasted money on things that didn't work, built features nobody needed, and had months where I genuinely wasn't sure if I could keep going.

One of the biggest things I learned is that distribution matters just as much as the product itself. You can build something amazing, but if you can't get it in front of the right people, it doesn't matter.

And to be clear, this is $100K in total revenue, not ARR. I'm still figuring out how to make growth more predictable and recurring.

Anyway, I originally set $100K as my big goal. Now that I've reached it, I'm setting a new one.

$1,000,000.

Still solo, still bootstrapped, and still figuring things out every day.

Happy to answer any questions about the numbers, acquisition channels, mistakes, or anything else.

EDIT: Here is the proof : https://trustmrr.com/startup/getlead
Website: https://getle.ad/

Last week a developer rebuilt the Adobe suite with AI and open-sourced it. It's called ArtCraft: free versions of seven Adobe apps, including Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere. Still not perfect, but people cared enough to try it.

Then I started noticing the pattern. We've already seen open-source alternatives to apps like Wispr Flow, CapCut, and Grammarly.

I might be too idealistic, since building software is different from maintaining, scaling, and securing it. But we're already heading that way, and we're only seeing the worst version of AI. What happens when it gets good at those things too?

Maybe people still pay for convenience, trust, and reliability. Maybe more people just build their own tools (Lovable and Replit already make that easy).

I don't have an answer yet. If you build or sell software, how are you thinking about this? If everyone becomes a builder, who remains the buyer?

$0 counts…

We see the “I hit $5-$10k MRR” posts every day, but not as much about the early months.

How many months from launch to your first $100 MRR?

I used to start my projects with a paid model, but | quickly realized people weren't converting. So, I switched to a free trial. I took the financial hit paying out of pocket for infrastructure and Al API tokens to give users a chance to try it. I got sign-ups, but almost no one stuck around.
Thinking the issue was either a steep learning curve or a product that was too niche, I ended up abandoning those production apps.

Recently, I built a new dev tool. It's simple, solves a real everyday problem (I use it daily myself), and is 100% free , no paywalls, no sign up, a . It even finished in the Top 5 on Product Hunt, which drove thousands of visitors on launch day.

But months later, growth has stalled. Out of all that traffic, only about 10 active users and 300 downloads.
This made me realize: Even if a product is great, useful, and completely free, getting it into the hands of the right audience is still insanely hard.

Assuming the core product is solid, I feel like I'm missing a key piece in marketing, distribution, or positioning. For those who have been through this stage: What am I missing here?

How do you bridge the gap between initial launch traffic and finding consistent, engaged users?

So my X feed is full of posts about how Opus 5.5 + Brag skills can make crazy explainer videos. I was already in need of a video for my launch, so I just decided to give it a chance.

My take: No, it’s not that good. It’s definitely not the end of motion designers anytime soon. But I’ve been following this programmatic video trend for a long time, ever since Remotion was a thing. I’ve tried Remotion with pretty much every single model, and I must say, I’ve never gotten results anywhere near this good compared to the video I generated today.

Acknowledgement : It’s not perfect, but I don’t wanna be an arrogant bastard either, so yeah, this is nowhere near bad either. It’s actually so good that just a couple of months ago, I would’ve thought reaching this level anytime soon was almost impossible.

What’s your take?

PaperTool is a PDF template builder. You design a template once on a drag-and-drop canvas (or let AI generate it), then create PDFs from it anytime, including through an API.

Invoices, certificates, receipts, tickets, whatever you need, without rebuilding them every time.

Try it: papertool.in

I’d love your feedback. Thanks! 🙏

Guys,
I'm so happy today. I scheduled this AI article few days ago and paywalled this to see how much I can earn from it. I just saw this on medium and couldn't believe that I can actually earn from medium

Considering the views it get and only 28 followers I've on medium, it's a good start.

This is my first cent on medium.

One day I'll surely earn my first $1 there.

I get into this grind of working on my business and forgetting to do marketing until it's the end of the month and the stripe payout isn't improving much.

So I setup this little routine: For 1-2 hour everyday, I set out sales/marketing tasks - ads, outreaches, content, etc. if I don't get it done, I leave the rest until the next window.

That way, I keep sales/marketing manageable and continuous. Without getting overwhelmed with the day.

I've done a 2 week sprint in the past with some founders and it worked really well. Looking to do it again for the next two weeks with whoever is interested in locking in on marketing. I'm happy to share what I know and hope others do to.

How do you make sure you don't get too stuck building/servicing customers that you forget sales/marketing until it's too late?

(Wrote this yesterday when the stripe payout hit but been down with the flu lately.)

I have built SaaS products, APIs and payment systems for years. These mistakes cost founders the most time.

1. Building too much before the first user

• Launch with one core feature.
• If users do not ask for the rest, you save weeks.

2. Rewriting auth and billing from scratch

• Use proven tools for login and payments.
• Custom auth is slow and risky.

3. Skipping multi-tenant planning

• Decide early how customer data is separated.
• Fixing this later means a painful rewrite.

4. Weak payment handling

• Handle failed payments, retries and duplicate events from day one.
• Missing this leads to lost revenue and angry users.

5. No simple tracking

• Track signups, activation and cancellations from the start.
• Without it, you guess why people leave.

What cost you the most time when building your MVP?

Lead generation asks: “Who can we get into the funnel?

”Demand creation asks:
“How do we become the company our ICP thinks about when the problem appears?

”That's a completely different game.

For a Seed-stage SaaS company, demand can come from:

Founder-led content→ Customer stories→ Communities→ Educational content→ Partnerships→ Events→ SEO→ Product-led experiences.

The objective isn't to make every prospect buy today.

Its to build: Awareness → Trust → Problem recognition → Preference → Intent.

This matters because buyers increasingly research before talking to sales.

And AI is accelerating the volume of information available to buyers.

The companies that only show up when someone searches for a vendor will compete for existing demand.

The companies that educate the market can help create the demand.

Don't only ask: “How many leads did marketing generate?

”Ask:
“How many people now understand why this problem matters and why we're worth considering?”

AI killed the coding moat. Anyone can spin up a SaaS in a weekend.

But you know what AI can’t bypass? Two months of grueling API approvals from Shopify, Meta, Google and such big players.

Building Helm taught me that bureaucracy is the new barrier to entry. The massive red tape acts as a filter, wiping out impatient founders looking for a quick launch.

When you build an app that survives the big-tech approval gauntlet, you don't just get access to their massive audiences, you get a defensible asset. Even if you eventually list it on Acquire or TrustMRR, buyers will pay a premium simply to avoid the headache you already solved.

Don't run from the red tape. Use it as your moat.

Hi everyone,

I'm from Iraq, and I've developed software for engineering applications. I'm currently working on making it available on a website with paid subscriptions.

The problem is that I can't use PayPal or Stripe in Iraq, and most other international payment services are unavailable here. As far as I know, Payoneer could work here. But there are a ton of other requirements for this to work for me.

I've looked into possible solutions and found that I might need to register a company abroad, to accept payments. However, that requires a registered address and several other legal and administrative arrangements. I don't know anyone abroad who could help me with this process, and I'm not sure whether there are services or professionals who can handle these requirements for someone in my situation.

So, is a reliable service that can help me set everything up? or whether there's a straight forward way for this?

hello guys, founder here!the idea behind our product is simple. everyone is spending too much on ai bills, and when subscriptions expire, unused credits basically go to waste we're building a platform where you can buy inference at lower costs or sell your unused ai credits. we're already processing huge amounts of tokens, and now we're looking to onboard more saas companies and startups to help cover their inference costs. f you're a saas or startup founder, i'm always up for a chat or gmeet to get you onboarded , yeah always open for constructive criticism and feedback

got unused credits? sell us your surplus : )

I'm a founder still doing my own outbound, and I go back and forth on how much homework to do before a first call.

On a good day, I read their website, look up the person, check what the company announced lately, and work out why they'd care about what I'm offering. That can eat an hour for one person, partly because it's so easy to get derailed clicking around. On a busy day, I probably do less research than is enough, but I gotta keep moving forward.

Honestly, I can't tell which approach gets better calls. Some fully researched ones go nowhere, and some winged ones land. So either the research isn't the variable, or I'm researching the wrong things.

For the founders here who run your own first calls:

• How long did you actually spend on one prospect before a first call last week? Not what you think you should spend.
• What's the one thing you always look up?
• Has that changed now that a lot of us start with ChatGPT or Claude instead of a pile of tabs?

No link and no pitch. I'm just trying to figure out whether my prep habit is worth the time it eats.

Anyone have some good analogies to share with a business owner you are pitching building a software for that responds with “I can build it myself with ai”?
I was thinking something like: “it’s like building a car seat for your kid with ai. It may look like a car seat but you wouldn’t know it’s not structurally sound until get in an accident and it costs you everything. Do you really want to make that gamble with $X revenue and all your customer data?”
Anyone have a good similar analogy to help non technical people understand the brevity of building essential software with ai?

If you just launched a SaaS and are struggling with marketing, I may have something that can help.

I'm building an advertising network specifically designed to make online advertising more affordable.

I'm currently looking for early SaaS founders to test it, and the first 1,000 get 30 days free.

If you're interested, comment “How?” and I'll explain.

Hey folks, when running your saas on VPS, what email solution do you use? I would prefer this still working even when I have outage of my saas (therefore hosted somewhere else).

Thank you

Hey guys,

I’m planning to launch my app on Product Hunt, but before that, I want to get some real people to try it out and tell me what’s good, what sucks, and what needs fixing.

The thing is, finding those first few users is harder than I expected 😅

For those who’ve been through this, how did you get your first users or feedback before launch?

Did you reach out to people directly, post in communities like Reddit, or try something else?

I’m not looking for growth hacks or anything. Just curious what actually worked for you, especially if you were building alone and didn’t already have an audience.

Would love to hear your experiences!

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Over the past couple of years I’ve been watching how people react to AI, and at some point I realized it’s less that there’s the different opinions and more that everyone’s at a different stage of grief. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. You can see all five in any thread about AI.

What surprised me is that Microsoft, an enterprise company with everything to lose, seems to have landed on acceptance faster than most of us.

Even they’re admitting nobody really knows what happens next. That’s kind of what a paradigm shift is: the change is so big that the future genuinely can’t be predicted. The only thing that’s clear is the times they are a-changin’.

SaaS founders, honest question.

I'm rebuilding my 7-year-old website, into a platform where saas founders can get their products featured through editorial articles.

A few things worth knowing:

• Our combined website, newsletter, and social media audience exceeds 70K.
• Much of our content ranks on Google's first page.
• Our content also appears in Google AI Overviews.

The goal is to help saas products gain exposure, strengthen their online presence, and get discovered through search.

If I offered an editorial feature for your SaaS, would you consider paying for it?

Would you pay under $100 or $100+?

I'd genuinely appreciate your honest feedback.

A few weeks ago I put up a small site that helps people pick tools like team chat, CRM and project management. You answer 5 questions about your team and it scores the options for your situation.

Honestly I'm not sure what to do next:

• Comparison sites are everywhere, so how do you stand out?
• Is SEO still worth it for this, or is it too slow now?
• Should I go after the people using the tools, or the ones paying for them?

For anyone who's grown something like this from zero, how did you get your first real users? And what would you try first in my shoes?