How a Solo Dev Hit 10K MRR With a SaaS That Sells to Other SaaS Companies

Lucas: So we've covered a lot of paths to ten thousand dollars in monthly recurring revenue on this show - browser extensions, CLI tools, no-code products, even a golf handicap app. Luna: Right, and I think the goldilocks zone for a solo dev is something that solves your own problem, has a clear technical buyer, and doesn't require a sales team. Lucas: Exactly. And today's episode is about exactly that.

A solo developer named Marcus Chen built a lightweight API monitoring service called Checkpoint - think of it as a focused uptime checker for APIs, not websites. He hit ten thousand dollars in monthly recurring revenue in about fourteen months, completely bootstrapped. Luna: And he sold it to other SaaS companies. That's the interesting twist - it's a B2B SaaS that sells to B2B SaaS.

What was his background? Lucas: Marcus was a backend engineer at a mid-size logistics company. He told me he was tired of getting woken up at 3 a.m.

by false alarms from their enterprise monitoring tool. That tool cost his employer something like fifteen thousand dollars a year, and it was overkill - they only needed to check maybe ten endpoints. So he wrote a simple script that pinged those endpoints every minute and sent a Slack alert if something failed. Luna: And that script became the product?

Classic indie hacker origin story. Lucas: Pretty much. He cleaned it up over a weekend, added a basic dashboard built with a React template he bought for thirty-nine dollars, and launched it on Twitter with a single tweet: 'I built a thing that checks your APIs every 60 seconds and costs less than a coffee per day.' That tweet got about three hundred likes and drove his first fifty sign-ups.

Luna: Less than a coffee per day - that's a strong pricing hook. What did he actually charge? Lucas: He started at nine dollars per month for a single endpoint, then added a tier at twenty-nine dollars for ten endpoints, and a pro tier at seventy-nine dollars for unlimited endpoints and team access. What I found smart is that he didn't compete on features.

He competed on simplicity and price. The big players like Datadog or New Relic charge a lot more, and for a small SaaS team that just wants to know if their API is down, Marcus's tool is plenty. Luna: So he was selling to technical buyers who could evaluate the product in five minutes and make a purchase decision without needing a demo. That's the dream for a solo founder - no sales cycle.

Lucas: Exactly. And he leaned into that. His landing page had a live demo where you could type in any API endpoint and see it get checked every few seconds. The response time, status code, and uptime percentage were all displayed in real time.

It was essentially a working product walkthrough - no signup required. Luna: That's a great tactic. If your user is a developer, they'll trust that more than any testimonial. So what was his biggest growth channel?

Lucas: Surprisingly, it was a public status page. Checkpoint has a feature where customers can host a public uptime page - like a dashboard showing their API's status. Marcus himself used it for his own service, and people started noticing. If you're shopping for an API monitoring tool, seeing a transparent, real-time status page is a powerful signal.

He told me about a dozen customers found him because they visited a customer's status page and saw 'Powered by Checkpoint' in the footer. Luna: So the product itself became the marketing. That's a classic product-led growth play. Did he ever run ads or do any outbound?

Lucas: He spent exactly zero dollars on advertising. His entire marketing budget was the cost of his domain and hosting. He wrote three blog posts - one comparing APM pricing, one about false alarm fatigue, and one tutorial on setting up monitoring for a Node.js app.

Those posts rank for long-tail keywords and drive a steady trickle of signups. But the real growth was word of mouth among indie hackers and small SaaS teams. Luna: It makes sense. When you're a solo dev, your reputation is everything.

If you build a reliable tool and treat your customers well, they'll tell their peers. Lucas: And Marcus did exactly that. He personally responded to every support email within an hour, even at 2 a.m.

He added features requested by customers - like one-click integration with PagerDuty, and a simple API that allowed customers to pull their uptime data programmatically. That API turned out to be a key differentiator. Luna: Let's talk numbers. How did he go from zero to ten thousand MRR?

Give us the milestones. Lucas: Month one: he had about twenty users, mostly friends and Twitter followers, and MRR was around two hundred dollars. Month three: he hit fifteen hundred dollars. He told me the turning point was when a small Y Combinator startup signed up for the pro plan - that gave him confidence.

By month nine, he was at five thousand dollars. And month fourteen, he crossed ten thousand. Luna: Two hundred customers at an average of fifty dollars per month would get you to ten thousand. That's not a huge number.

How many customers did he actually have? Lucas: He had about two hundred and ten paying customers at that point. His average revenue per user was roughly forty-eight dollars. And importantly, his churn was under three percent per month - which is very low for a SaaS product.

He attributes that to the fact that his customers are developers who rely on his tool daily. If it works, they don't want to switch. Luna: Switching costs are real, even for a simple tool. Once you integrate monitoring into your deployment pipeline, it's a pain to move to another provider.

So his sticky feature is actually the integration, not the monitoring itself. Lucas: Right. And he made it deliberately hard to leave - not in a malicious way, but by being the default. His API endpoints are what developers configure.

His Slack bot is part of their daily workflow. Replacing that takes effort, so most people stay as long as the service is reliable. Luna: That's a smart defensibility strategy for a solo founder. You can't outspend the big guys, but you can out-embed yourself.

Lucas: Which brings us to an interesting question: could Marcus have grown faster if he took venture capital? He told me he got a few inbound offers from micro VCs after he hit five thousand MRR. He turned them down. Luna: Why?

Most founders would at least take a meeting. Lucas: He said he wanted to stay independent because the whole point of building this was to have a lifestyle business that gives him freedom. He didn't want to be forced to grow at a pace that would require hiring a team, moving to a dedicated office, or chasing enterprise contracts. He's happy with his current trajectory.

Luna: There's something refreshing about that. In the indie hacker world, we sometimes over-index on growth at all costs. But ten thousand MRR is a solid living in many parts of the world, and it gives you control. Lucas: Absolutely.

And I think that's the lesson from this episode: you don't need to build the next unicorn. You can build a focused, reliable tool for a specific audience, charge a fair price, and grow organically by genuinely helping people. Marcus's story is proof that the indie hacker model works. Luna: And if this conversation gave you something useful - a tactic, a mindset shift, or just inspiration - we'd be grateful if you considered supporting the show.

It's listener-supported and ad-free, which means we can keep digging into stories like this. You can do that at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Lucas: Yeah, that really does help us keep the lights on without running ads. So, back to Checkpoint - one thing I haven't mentioned is how Marcus handled the transition from side project to full-time income.

He didn't quit his day job until he was at eight thousand MRR and had six months of runway saved up. Luna: That's disciplined. Most people would have jumped ship at three thousand MRR. But waiting until you're close to your target income is smart, especially for a solo founder with no backup.

Lucas: He also maintained a slow, deliberate approach to features. He kept a public roadmap where customers could vote on what to build next. That way, he never wasted time on features nobody asked for. His rule was: if at least three paying customers request the same thing, he'd build it.

Otherwise, it went to the backlog. Luna: That's a good heuristic. It prevents scope creep, which is the silent killer of many indie projects. Lucas: Exactly.

So the big takeaway from this episode is that selling to other SaaS companies as a solo dev is very viable if you pick a narrow problem, price it fairly, and make your product indispensable through integration. Marcus's Checkpoint is a textbook example. Luna: And he did it without any venture capital, without a sales team, and without spending a dime on ads. That's the indie hacker ethos in a nutshell.

Lucas: Right. So if you're thinking about your next side project, ask yourself: is there a tool you use every day that could be simpler, cheaper, and built by one person? If you can answer yes, you might be sitting on your own ten thousand MRR story.