He Lost His Job, Then Built a $11K/Month App - Ep. #312

Speaker A: So I come across this guy on Twitter named Caleb. And Caleb has an interesting story. Him and his buddy slash business partner both lost their job around the same time, but they had families to feed, they had people to support, and they'd always kind of wanted to be entrepreneurial to start a business, but they weren't really ready. But they thought, shoot, let's do it anyway. So they did. They wanted to launch a software business, but they didn't have any followers, which is probably true for most people listening to this. So they came up with an idea for an app that, that can help people post their content to social media. You've heard of Buffer Postbridge. There's a bunch of apps that do this. But this app is pointed towards more technical people, developers, and that wasn't really being done. So when they first launched their app, uh, they tweeted about it, and that Tweet got about 200 views. It flopped. They got some friends and family to sign up a couple people from Twitter. But it was crickets for the first month or two, $300 monthly recurring revenue, then 500. In fact, after five months, they had $500 in monthly recurring revenue. But they were stoked about this. On January 1st, Caleb, the Co founder, was at dinner with his wife and they were celebrating $500 in monthly recurring revenue. And he said, you know what? I don't have any Twitter followers, but I'm just going to start posting screenshots to Twitter every time I get another $100 in MRR monthly recurring revenue. So he did. And then things started to change for him. He, even though he had no audience, no followers, people liked that, and they noticed. And without even meaning to, he developed a playbook for building a software business on Twitter without really any Twitter followers. Even to this day, he has like 1200 followers, but it's still driving him a ton of business. And then his next inflection point was learning about AI SEO. How can you get Claude Grok, ChatGPT, Gemini to start suggesting you to people asking about things that might relate to your software tool? Well, he cracked the code and he's going to give us the playbook today. He shares his stripe screen. He talks about his churn, good, bad and ugly. The big breakthrough he had in pricing that, uh, changed everything for him. This is a playbook for starting a software business, whether you're technical or not. And of course, how to get customers for your business. And yes, also how to come up with the right idea. Please enjoy.

Speaker B: So the story for us, I mean this to me is all like, education. Everything that happened in 2025 for us was really just like learning how to launch a product. I'll never forget, it was actually on January 1st, uh, my wife and I put the kids down. We were up visiting my, my parents out of state. And uh, they said, all right, we'll hang out with the kids. You guys go out and like, enjoy a night out on, on New Year's Day or whatever. And while we were sitting down, I pulled up, I pulled up stripe. And my wife just said, okay, so like, how are things? How are things going? And I said, well, let's check. And we were closing in on $500 in monthly recurring. And I was like, wow, this is insane. You know, at 10 bucks a month, I was like, almost 50. People like want to use something that, that I built. And so my wife and I made a deal for every $100 of monthly recurring that we added, her and I would each do one extra push up. So we got back to my parents that night and we each did our five push ups. Um, and then I had seen been, I'd been really inspired by the level of transparency that guys like Jack or Mark Lu or Peter Levels were putting out into, you know, Twitter, um, posting their journeys along the way. Like, if their journey helped me, why don't I just for fun, grab these screenshots. For every $100 that we make in monthly recurring, my wife and I are going to do our push up challenge and, and I'll go ahead and post the progress along the way on Twitter. So starting on January 1st, I started posting our MRR journey. Um, throughout the course of us, uh,

Speaker A: growing, I mean, even though you found Peter Levels, Jack and all these guys, like when they were making like hundreds of thousands a month, you knew that they had been doing that for years. Like, you could tell that they had been doing that when their numbers were not impressive at all. And a lot of the reason they were impressive was because they were so public about their success when it wasn't that impressive. Right, exactly. And so it doesn't. You. They don't need people to follow them for years to finally give them a dollar. Like people start giving them dollars immediately because they're being so transparent and that's so rare. Okay, so you correct me if I'm wrong. You launch late, by early August.ish. um, 2025 and five months, getting to 500 in monthly recurring revenue. January 1st, you make a goal. I'm just going to post screenshots to Twitter to my, uh, at the time, 500 Twitter followers, which is probably the average that most people have on Twitter. I'd love if you could also share your screen of some, like, an average update, $100m update, screenshot, tweet, so I could see what kind of engagement you get on those average. And then the $5,000 one as well.

Speaker B: Yeah. Uh, so here's our, uh, just Twitter post analytics. This, um, was the big one. I haven't, um.

Speaker A: I think I saw this one. I think I saw. Did you? Yeah.

Speaker B: Cool.

Speaker A: Familiar.

Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, I haven't seen a tweet get nearly this many impressions. Even when we hit 10,000, it didn't get. So we ended up getting 24,000 impressions. The biggest surprise to me was the 114 replies. And I went in and unless, you know, unless people have replied. So since then, for at least the first, like, week, I was responding to every single reply that came in.

Speaker A: Good.

Speaker B: Um, one, because I thought it would be good just for the algorithm, but two, because I really genuinely wanted to, like, thank those that were taking the time to celebrate the milestone with us. Um, and hopefully convert some customers as a. As a result.

Speaker A: Man, 6.4% engagement rate. Super good. All right, so can you. Can you open the actual tweet so we can read the whole thing?

Speaker B: Yeah, totally. All right, so this was on, uh, let me see if I can get the date here for you. Uh, so this was on April 8th of 2026.

Speaker A: Okay. And I just said, first SaaS just hit 5,000. Mrr. This is insane.

Speaker B: Wow.

Speaker A: I can't believe that we built a product and grew it to over 5k in 8 months. So crazy proud of this. And we're going to be making some really exciting announcements shortly. New marketing channels, new product lines. Post for me is the best way to handle social media integrations in your app hands. So, like, wow, what a contrast to your first announcement post. You're like, hey, guys, I know this is stupid. Like, nobody likes me. But like, ah, here I did a thing, I guess. But, like, maybe care about it, but you don't have to. Whereas this one's like, we're awesome. This is amazing. We're launching all these things. Buy it.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And absolutely got 100 times more, actually. Sorry, A thousand times more views.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, it really did. And I mean, you could even see it in some of the other posts. Like, for example, I was, uh, posting every 500 in MRR and what I would include was, um, the number of days that it took for us to increase. So at that Point in time, uh, we were seeing anywhere between 500 to $1,000 in monthly recurring being added week over week. And so like the jump from 4,500 to 5,000 only took us five days. So we really started to see a pickup in momentum. I think it was about the time that we hit $2,000 in monthly recurring, um, that our search engine optimization kind of our strategy for organic marketing had gotten really, really good and we had earned a lot of trust with the likes of Google. And we structured content in a way that we started getting picked up by the LLMs. And we have gotten many customers coming to us since then saying chatgpt sent me or I was chatting with Claude and they sent me your way. Um, and I think that it was because of some of those changes that we had made, uh, around the new year that we really started seeing payoff around.

Speaker A: Okay, well I'd be doing everyone a disservice if I didn't ask what those strategic changes were like. How did you structure this content?

Speaker B: So I'm going to pull up our website, uh, here for a second and we have a tab on our website, uh, that says resources. And if you click into all resources, it, it looks like a little bit of a mess. But it's basically just categories and then standalone articles. Uh, and these articles are really specific to how to achieve this one specific goal. Based on this one specific problem. We integrated uh, a chatbot into our website and we turned off all of the AI features. So every single time that you came to the chat on our website, you, you were chatting with either myself or my co founder Matt and you know, we had to sleep. So we did have 24, 7 coverage. But it was, it was really, we were really, really adamant to always being available on our phones or on a computer to at least get that first response to people within the customer service chat really, really quickly. And it was like clockwork. Then what we started to do was anytime we noticed that a problem was felt by one of our customers at least twice, we would make a note of it inside of linear and ah, then we would use AI to generate a resource article based on that problem that somebody was experiencing. So a couple of things were happening. One, we had gotten really good at structuring our metadata on our website so that we were kind of primed to get picked up by search engines. And two, we were providing real customer value for people, users that were actively using our service. And so I think it was that one, two, punch the, like structure the website in a way that's good for the chatbots and structure or choose the type of content that we write based on what's relevant to users. Uh, and the combination of that really started to see our organic, um, search volume grow pretty exponentially. And, um, we ended up seeing a, A pretty. It. It wasn't a spike. It's just been a consistent growth, uh, since that point.

Speaker A: Well, I want to say consistent growth is the best kind of growth. Um, yep. Big, big spikes equal big dips, period. End of story. Right. That which goes up fast comes down even faster. Obviously that breaks the laws of physics, but you know what I mean. Um, so if I were to summarize everything you just said, you were very intentional to be your. To be manning the website chatbot for support yourself, you or your partner. Right? Very intentional, yes. And then you're taking those questions and you're saying, I assume that this question is representative of a question other people have that they're not asking. In fact, uh, people are probably churning from our website because they're not taking the time to ask the question. Right. And that's a key. That's a key. Learning here is like, if someone mentions a problem, especially if they go out of their way, and in this case they are. They're having to click a button and then click again and then start a chat. They're going out of their way to report a problem. That means that they probably represent 10 to 30 more people that are not bothering to go out of their way. And so you need to take that one, um, sample size of 1, which normally we would discard and say, there's something here. Let's use a tool called linear to make a resource article on our website. Because those 29 people that are never asking the question, hopefully, um, they can find their way to us, or people that are like them can find their way back to us through ChatGPT or Cloud or whatever, uh, recommending them to us because they're scraping these resource articles that we're posting that answer questions we're getting from real people.

Speaker B: And this isn't anything that's new. And there's probably a bunch of your users that are like, yeah, man, like, this has been around for ages. And, yeah, but it, it actually works. And it's something that we were preaching to our customers, like, or our clients that we were working with all the time, especially those in, like, a physical service business. Um, I remember, like, one client in particular was a local piano repair shop. And I'm like, man, every single time that you do a bit of repair or a bit of maintenance on a piano. That's an opportunity for you to provide an educational commentary around how to play piano, to maybe design a piano in your house, uh, how to maintain a piano in your house so that you get longevity out of it. And those same principles that applied to the service businesses, the mechanics, the repair individuals, the, the people that are out cleaning, that same thing applies to your digital product.

Speaker A: So, um, you're using AI to write these resource articles, I assume?

Speaker B: Yeah, uh, what we did, the way that we do AI integration is really boring, but it works. We do things by hand, note how we do them by hand, and then apply the by hand notes to AI in order to automate it in the future. So the first handful of these are painstakingly written by, uh, by Matt, my co founder. These first ones over here, social media platforms. And it's really just like a commentary on each of the individual platforms that we are, you know, integrated with. Uh, and then he got a really good system down pat to where he was able to, I think he uses, um, Google's notebook lm, um, to basically just take like a bunch of his notes and findings and consolidate it into a single place. Then he'll go through our support chat, um, find a bunch of commonly felt problems or felt needs. And now we have discord as well that we pull from. He, uh, feeds it into that and then it spits out an article. He does some light editing on it. And then, um, yeah, early on this year he was posting a minimum of one per week and sometimes two, three of them per week.

Speaker A: Okay, um, all right. Can you go back to stripe?

Speaker B: Absolutely. I think the best week, if I remember correctly, the best week that we had was like $1,000 in MRR in one week. And it was, it was somewhere around this time. I'm sure we could, we could find it if we dug into it. Um, but at that same time, the like, relative MRR being like the percent increase started to taper, uh, off, which has kind of been our, our journey recently is, um, really just around like solving churn. That, that's kind of been our, our biggest focus.

Speaker A: Okay, can you show a chart of what your churn has done over time?

Speaker B: Yes. That was fun. The more we started posting about our mrr, the more people started asking. Yeah, but nobody's talking about churn. The lowest our churn was at was 10%. And, uh, since like this year specifically within the last two months or so, churn, um, started to increase. First it hit, you know, 13% and then 16%. Now it's, uh, at over 17%. Uh, and all of our focus, again, that big fancy roadmap that we had, we were like, okay, there are customers who are either losing value or not experiencing the value that we have to offer. So we need to put a pause on net new and really focus in on asking the question of, like, why are people leaving the service after they sign up? Um, and so now we are at the point, you know, 10, 11 months in, um, where we are investing really heavily in, uh, telemetry and metrics, in analytics. Um, we just now started running Google Ads. After we crossed 10,000, we started to run Google Ads lightly as an experiment. And it's really all for the sake of trying to understand and ask the question of where are people finding value? Where are we losing people, and is it possible for us to recover people, um, you know, after they run into problems?

Speaker A: So all stuff, any recurring product or service will eventually hit, there's probably a name for it. I call it like, Churn Equilibrium, where your monthly recurring revenue basically stays flat because it's offset by your churn. Right. And at that point, I mean, you're obviously not anywhere close to that, but hopefully long before that point, which is what you're doing, you really try to figure it out. In my experience, it's usually happening, you know, in the first 10 minutes that, like, they just don't fully onboard. They don't fully grasp the product, you know.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. The other thing that we're experiencing, it's kind of neat because, like, we're experiencing an increase in Churn. We're experiencing an increase in just net new users, which not all of them convert at the same time. We do also have legacy users who are now scaling up their businesses and they're beginning to go through our upgrade paths. Uh, so we start at $10 a month, but you can scale unlimited on our pricing model. And we are, uh, within these last couple of months, walking our first set of customers through the process of upgrading to a $25 plan, a $50 plan, $100 plan. Um, so it's a lot of new. These are new experiences for us, being that it's our first product. And of course, our aim is just to make it as simple and seamless for people as possible, making sure that we're really, like, locked in and focused on providing the right value to the right problems. Uh, and, you know, like anybody else out there, making sure our solution is the best one.

Speaker A: Yeah. Okay, so what, what's the playbook that People could implement if they're not technical, to start a pure software as a service business.

Speaker B: Okay, so uh, playbook, whether you're technical or non technical, the very first place that I'm starting at is identify a problem that you've personally felt and ideate on a way that you could provide a solution to others who would experience that problem. I think that this is gonna drive the most amount of authenticity and as a result the highest quality of something that you can bring to market. So yeah, I mean if I'm launching a product today, I'd really focus on that, like find a solution to a problem that I've personally felt ideate and get everything out popcorn style on that whiteboard, chisel it down to the smallest first step that I can take in order to ship it as fast as humanly possible and then iterate every single day. One small improvement driven, obsessively focused on making sure that you're providing value based on the way that customers and users are actually using the product on a daily basis.

Speaker A: Yeah. What about uh, tech stack? Outside of like tools to build, I mean Stripe, what else would you prefer?

Speaker B: So we have a standard playbook that we roll for everything that we do. We um, we host on Unkey now. They also provide us with some additional tools when we're building APIs. Uh, we use React router for our uh, front end applications. We use Shad CN as the baseline for ui. It's a really, really great way to get really high quality UI components that are 100% customizable. We're using Stripe for payment processing, uh, Posthog for analytics. Um, and Vercel is also a great one to throw out there. They're really convenient for if you're just like, if you want to throw together like a quick marketing site overnight. I mean I'm throwing it up on Vercel to host it. It integrates really well with all of our tools. And then if you're going to start a digital product today, please for the love of God, create a GitHub account. Stop storing code in Google Drive or just like locally on your compute computer. Like you don't even have to understand what GitHub does. Just tell your chat assistant that you have a GitHub account and get that code up on GitHub because God forbid your computer crashes. You would, you don't want to lose all of the, the work that you've uh, been working on.

Speaker A: Anything else we didn't cover that we

Speaker B: should have covered man, I'm sure uh, our entrepreneurial journey, like starting a software development company. Uh, we weren't these, like, courageous individuals who just went all in on our own thing. We started our software development company because my company that I was working with laid off 20% of its employees unannounced. And Matt's company shut down entirely. They, like, filed bankruptcy. They just, like, shut the whole thing down. And so we had a decision to make at that point of whether we were going to go and pursue, uh, other opportunities of employment or try and figure it out ourselves. And we didn't have any immediate opportunities for employment. So as a way of kind of saying, like, we're not going to do nothing because we have families and households that we're taking care of. Uh, we're going to go ahead and we're just going to pursue doing our own thing. Uh, we always knew that we wanted to build and launch products, but it took us two years. Yeah, it took us two years of working on other people's stuff. We said yes to anything. We were saying yes to design work and then outsourcing it, marketing work and outsourcing it. Uh, we were saying yes to, you know, updating WordPress websites, building out webflow sites. Like, we kind of just said yes to the whole scope and the whole range of things.

Speaker A: I like to say say yes to everything until you can afford not to. And there you go. It's super inspiring that you guys both were effectively knocked out on your butt. Right? Lost your job, company went bankrupt. And rock bottom can be a very powerful thing. I, I think most people, not all, but the vast majority of people will not do what they need to do with their life until they're at their own personal rock bottom, which looks different to everyone. Some, some people's rock bottom might be sitting in a federal prison. Some people's rock bottom might be, you know, they didn't get the promotion they needed for that year. It looks completely different. But when we hit that rock bottom, only then are most of us able to truly just grab life by the horns and make exactly what we want of it. Uh, and I'm guessing that if you guys don't have that own personal financial rock bottom, you're probably somewhere worse off today. You might have got a different job and make more money per month, but not building equity in a thing that's growing as it is today. Right. Like, you're objectively in a better position today than where you might have been had you went and just got another job or sat around and said, oh, poor me.

Speaker B: Right, yeah, yeah, I agree with that completely, um, post for me is making monthly, uh, recurring revenue that is exceeded any salary that I had up until this point. So that's kind of exciting. And I don't know if it's relevant to your audience or relevant to, like, this conversation, but at the start of the year, um, we, we had, uh, two boys. We had decided that we were going to go through with our second adoption, um, which was going to us $50,000. Um, as a. As a kind of result of that decision, my wife had decided to put in her notice at work because she didn't want to be working anymore. And then that happened on Monday, on Wednesday, and then Friday I was laid off. M. So it really kind of just like set a fire up in me where I was like, okay, I'm either going to keep a level head, recognize that it's hard, recognize that on paper it's not convenient, it's not easy, it's not conducive to, you know, comfort or whatever, but I just had a really stubborn convict that, like, what I'm gonna do here is I'm going to serve my family. And, and maybe for you, you don't have a family yet or you're living on your own. Well, you're, um. I'm here to set myself up, set up my future. There's something that we're all. There's a why for what all of us are doing. And for me, it was, it was my family and the foundation and the life that I wanted to set for them. And it was either going to be going out and finding a job. I had done that. And somebody else's poor financial decisions put my family in a vulnerable position. Vulnerable position. Uh, or I was going to go make it happen myself.

Speaker A: Amen. Caleb. Super inspiring. Thank you for coming on. Um, where can we find you?

Speaker B: Ah, you can find me on, um, Twitter. Ah, Caleb Panza. It's, um, the most active place that I am. Uh, if you do have a need to integrate social media posting into a SaaS or a product, if you want to automate your marketing or enable your agent, the fastest, easiest, most scalable, cheapest way to do it is to go to postforme.dev and get started with our $10 a month plan. And, uh, maybe you're listening and you're like, hey, that sounds great. I don't have the time or the ability to build a product myself, but I'd love for you guys to build me a product. Great. I would love to build your product. Um, our software company is called Daemoon development. You can go to daemoon.dev and Schedule A call with me and I'd love to hear your idea and see if there's a way that we can serve you.

Speaker A: Okay. Thank you, Caleb. Thanks for coming on.

Speaker B: Thanks so much, Chris.

Speaker A: Hey guys, if you're still listening to this, it's probably because you haven't had a chance to take your AirPods out. You're still mowing the lawn, you're still driving, what have you. If you're still here with me, I would really, really love and appreciate a five star review on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcast. It would mean a lot. If you want to go the extra mile, share this episode with a friend that might have an interest in starting a business. It would mean a ton. Hope, um, you have the best day of your life today.