33:27The Next New Thing · Interview
8 Playbooks You Can Try
A host and a product-marketing veteran watch founder clips and debate which of eight AI-era business models actually work — and why.
June 17thThe argument in one line.
AI collapses the cost and time of building and marketing software so far that one technical person can validate, build, launch, and grow a multi-million dollar business without capital, a team, or anyone's permission.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- You have a product or technical background and are weighing whether to build solo instead of raising money and hiring a team.
- You've vibe coded a prototype and want to know when and how to move to a more disciplined, spec-driven AI-assisted workflow.
- You're a solo founder or small team trying to build content distribution from zero with a limited weekly time budget.
- You already have an audience and are stuck on how to validate a product idea before writing any code.
SKIP IF…
- You're looking for enterprise or venture-funded go-to-market tactics, this is entirely a bootstrapped, self-serve, low-ticket PLG playbook.
- You want a deep technical tutorial on the coding itself, this is a narrative interview, not a build-along.
The full version, fast.
Sabrina sold her first startup, a real-time speech recognition company, and only meant to teach AI online. When her own audience kept asking how to repurpose one video across platforms, she validated the idea with an unscripted 30-second TikTok, called the people who commented, then filmed the entire MVP build as a public YouTube series, cutting the feature list down to one working path. The launch newsletter shipped with a dead video link and it still hit $10K MRR in ten days, because she already had an audience. Early churn ran over 30%, fixed largely by watching two hours of session recordings and turning onboarding into a three-step walkthrough. She now treats AI coding as supervised: she writes the spec, reviews the approach, and only lets AI take 50-60% of the implementation load after a bad experience where an unsupervised session broke production queues. Her content system, one filming day a week, feeding a free library of Claude skills for writing, grading, and cross-posting, is what let her grow to millions of followers and cross into eight figures without hiring past her first employee.
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Create a free account →Who's talking.
00:00guestSabrina
00:00hostProduct Faculty host
Where the time goes.
00:00 – 01:07
01 · Cold open
Highlight-reel teaser of the episode's key claims: no permission needed, $10K MRR in ten days, 0 to 2M followers, and the AI-coding warning about spaghetti code.
01:07 – 06:56
02 · The exit, the burnout, and the pain point
Sabrina recaps selling Qurious, her real-time speech-recognition startup, to Pegasystems, not wanting to start another company, and how repurposing her own growing TikTok/YouTube content became the itch that became Blotato.
06:56 – 10:46
03 · Filming the MVP build in public, then cutting it to one feature
A seven-part YouTube series walks through planning the spec, choosing a tech stack, and pruning the feature list down to a single Facebook-post generator bolted to Zapier for publishing.
10:46 – 14:17
04 · The waitlist mistake and a launch email with a dead link
A hand-picked 50-person early-adopter program cost a month because stated interest didn't match real behavior; launch day went out to tens of thousands with a broken demo-video link.
14:17 – 16:37
05 · Recapping the launch and fixing onboarding
She turns the launch mistakes into more content, then spends hours watching session recordings and rebuilds onboarding as a three-step walkthrough instead of dropping users straight into the app.
16:37 – 21:03
06 · 30%+ churn, and why she wasn't worried
Early churn ran over 30%, but a constant stream of new signups from her existing audience meant she never feared running out of users to learn from.
21:03 – 24:08
07 · From vibe coding to AI-assisted coding
Vibe coding gets you to paying customers; after that she writes the spec, reviews every AI-proposed approach, and still checks for spaghetti code, following a production incident where an unsupervised session broke every queue.
24:08 – 27:07
08 · Choosing a market, and going solo without permission or capital
The best market signal is a category where people already pay for something worse; AI has made it possible to reach that outcome without a team or fundraising.
27:07 – 31:39
09 · Building distribution from zero, and why you copy the hook
TikTok is the most generous platform to new creators; content aimed at true beginners outperformed technical AI-agent content; every post starts by copying a proven hook, credited or not.
31:39 – 38:25
10 · The free Claude skills stack
A content coach, brand brief, post writer, and post grader (scored against a viral rubric) form a free installable Claude plugin that writes and revises content until it scores nine out of ten.
38:25 – 43:36
11 · One filming day a week, AI-edited video, and the cross-post skill
A cross-post skill transcribes footage locally with Whisper, rewrites captions per platform, and batches an entire week of posts from one day of filming; b-roll and animated video edits run through Remotion off a tagged clip library.
43:36 – 45:57
12 · Bootstrapping versus fundraising
Leaving the Silicon Valley bubble reframed what counts as success; bootstrapping to $1-2M a year buys optionality rather than closing off a future fundraise.
45:57 – 46:17
13 · Sign-off
Closing thanks between host and guest.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- A solo founder validated Blotato with one unscripted 30-second TikTok video before writing a line of code, then called the people who commented to check whether their stated interest matched their actual habits.
- A wait-list program that hand-picked 50 seemingly ideal early adopters cost a month, because what they said in forms didn't match their actual posting behavior once she checked their history.
- The first version of Blotato couldn't even publish to social media on its own, it handed off to Zapier, and it still crossed $10K in monthly recurring revenue ten days after launch.
- The launch newsletter went out to tens of thousands of subscribers with a broken video link, and it still worked, because a pre-built audience clicked through to the site anyway.
- Churn ran above 30% in the first two months, and the founder wasn't alarmed, because a constant stream of new signups from her existing audience meant she always had fresh data to fix the product with.
- Switching onboarding from dropping users straight into the interface to a three-step walkthrough, paste a link, pick platforms, get a draft, was the single biggest lever on activation and churn.
- Vibe coding is for validating an idea and landing the first 10 to 100 paying customers; AI-assisted coding, where a written spec and a review pass still gate every change, is what keeps a growing product out of production disasters.
- An unsupervised AI coding session once let a change ripple outward and broke every queue in production, which is why every feature now starts with a spec and a pros-and-cons pass across multiple approaches before implementation begins.
- The single biggest market filter is a category where people already pay for a worse alternative, that existing spend is proof the market is real.
- TikTok's first viral video took six weeks to land, and posting cadence went from once a day to three times a day before growth actually took off.
- Content aimed at a technical audience, AI agents and automations, got ignored on TikTok; simple ChatGPT-prompting content aimed at people who haven't installed the app yet is what actually took off.
- Copying a competitor's or creator's hook, the opening line of a post or video, isn't a shortcut around originality, it's table stakes, because the audience has already voted with views that specific opener stops the scroll.
- A free library of Claude skills runs an end-to-end content pipeline: a content coach for ideas, a post writer, and a post grader that scores drafts against a viral rubric and keeps revising until every post hits nine out of ten.
- A separate cross-post skill transcribes a filmed video locally with Whisper at no cost, rewrites the caption per platform, and waits for human approval before publishing across every channel in one batch.
- The entire content operation runs on one filming day a week: a long-form video in the morning, a batch of short clips after lunch, with ideas pulled from that week's own AI chat logs and scraped trending hashtags.
- Bootstrapping to $1-2M a year solo doesn't close off raising money later, it buys optionality, cash flow now and the choice to fundraise for a bigger swing whenever it makes sense.
Validate cheap, build supervised, distribute on one filming day a week.
WHAT TO LEARN
A solo technical founder can now compress validation, building, launch, and distribution enough to reach millions in revenue without a team, as long as AI coding stays supervised and content stays systematized.
02The exit, the burnout, and the pain point
- Validate a business idea with a single unscripted, unedited video asking your existing audience whether they feel the pain point, then call the people who respond to check their real habits against what they claimed.
- A problem you're already living, like repurposing your own content, is a stronger starting signal than a market you have to research from scratch.
03Filming the MVP build in public, then cutting it to one feature
- Film or document your own MVP build in public. Narrating the process while cutting scope down to one working feature is itself a content asset and a discipline forcing function.
- Ship the smallest possible version even if it depends on a duct-taped tool like Zapier, a working single-feature product beats a polished one still in progress.
04The waitlist mistake and a launch email with a dead link
- Treat a wait-list or early-adopter program with suspicion, what people say in a form can diverge completely from what their actual behavior shows once you check it.
- When a launch goes wrong, for example a dead link, don't panic-fix it immediately if a warm audience will click through anyway.
05Recapping the launch and fixing onboarding
- Recap a bad launch honestly afterward and turn it into more content instead of hiding it.
- Spend hours watching real user session recordings before building dashboards or funnels. Watching where people rage-click or drop off surfaces fixes that metrics alone won't show.
- Redesign onboarding as an explicit step-by-step sequence rather than dropping users into a blank interface. That single change was the biggest lever on activation.
0630%+ churn, and why she wasn't worried
- Don't panic over high early churn if you have a constant stream of new signups. A steady lead source turns churn into an ongoing data feed instead of an existential threat.
- An existing audience functions as a distribution cheat code that a first-time founder without one doesn't get.
07From vibe coding to AI-assisted coding
- Use vibe coding to get from idea to paying customers fast, then shift to AI-assisted coding: write the spec yourself, have the AI propose multiple approaches with trade-offs, and review its output line by line.
- Never let an AI coding session run fully unsupervised in a live product. An unreviewed session can quietly break unrelated systems, one bad session took down every production queue.
08Choosing a market, and going solo without permission or capital
- Pick a market by looking for where people already pay for a worse alternative, existing spend is proof of demand.
- Being your own user lets you honestly say where your product is weaker than competitors and where it's genuinely better.
09Building distribution from zero, and why you copy the hook
- Start distribution on the platform most generous to new creators, and expect the first viral hit to take weeks, not days.
- Match your content to who's actually watching, not to your own technical sophistication. Beginner-level content usually outperforms advanced material aimed at people already in the space.
- Copy proven hooks deliberately. An opening line that already stopped millions of people from scrolling is a validated asset, not something to avoid reusing.
10The free Claude skills stack
- Build or adopt a content system, brief, writer, and grader in sequence, that keeps revising a draft against a scoring rubric until it clears a quality bar, instead of publishing the first pass.
- A single brand brief that accumulates context over time removes the need to re-explain your offer and audience every time you generate content.
11One filming day a week, AI-edited video, and the cross-post skill
- Batch an entire week's content into one filming day, and pull topic ideas from what you're already doing that week rather than starting from a blank page every time.
- A tagged library of raw b-roll clips lets an automated video tool reuse footage across many future videos instead of re-shooting for each one.
12Bootstrapping versus fundraising
- Treat bootstrapping and fundraising as sequential options, not a permanent choice. Reaching solid cash flow solo doesn't prevent raising money later if a bigger opportunity appears.
- A location or environment saturated with one funding narrative, like Silicon Valley and venture capital, can obscure that smaller, solo outcomes are a legitimate and repeatable path.
Terms worth knowing.
- MRR
- Monthly Recurring Revenue, the predictable subscription income a business collects every month, the standard early milestone for a SaaS product.
- ARR
- Annual Recurring Revenue, MRR scaled to a yearly figure, the number SaaS companies typically use to describe their overall size.
- Vibe coding
- Building software by describing what you want in plain language and letting an AI model write and run the code with little to no manual review of what it produces.
- AI-assisted coding
- A more supervised approach where a person still writes the spec, reviews the AI's proposed approach, and catches mistakes before code ships, instead of letting the model run unsupervised.
- PLG (product-led growth)
- A growth model where the product itself, not a sales team, drives signups and revenue, typically through low-ticket, self-serve pricing.
- Churn
- The percentage of paying customers who cancel within a given period, the main ongoing threat to a subscription business's revenue.
- Activation rate
- The share of new signups who complete the key first action that shows they understood the product, tracked separately from long-term churn.
- Warming up an account
- Posting to a new social media account gradually over several weeks before automating it, so the platform doesn't flag the account as spam.
Things they pointed at.
01:07productQurious
07:29toolZapier
09:16toolCursor
21:03toolClaude Code
29:55channelJustin Welsh's LinkedIn post template
38:25toolRemotion
38:25toolHyperframes
41:14toolApify
Lines you could clip.
00:00
“You don't need someone's permission to build a successful multimillion dollar business solo.”
10:46
“What people say is very different from what they actually do.”
12:54
“From October 20, it was probably like ten days to my first 10K in monthly recurring revenue.”
16:37
“Churn was insanely high initially, probably over 30% churn.”
21:15
“I look for spaghetti code or random things that AI has inserted.”
23:06
“You do not need someone's permission to do this. You don't need someone's capital to do this.”
24:31
“As long as someone's already paying money for other tools, the market is there.”
31:31
“Millions of people have already voted that this hook works, that this engaged them.”
37:17
“I'm just the laziest content creator you'll ever meet.”
45:19
“Cash flow is really fun too.”
Where the conversation goes.
00:00 – 06:56steadyOrigin story and burnout
06:56 – 10:46denseMVP build and feature cutting
10:46 – 16:37denseLaunch mistakes and $10K MRR
16:37 – 21:03denseChurn, activation, onboarding
21:03 – 24:08denseVibe coding vs AI-assisted coding
24:08 – 27:07steadyMarket choice and solo operating
27:07 – 31:39denseDistribution and content strategy
31:39 – 43:36denseClaude skills content system
43:36 – 46:17steadyBootstrapping vs fundraising
Word for word.
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You don't need someone's permission to build a successful multimillion dollar business solo. When founders needed capital and a team to build, she proved they needed none of it. Sabrina left Silicon Valley and built a $3,000,000 business, solo and bootstrapped.
I was watching some of your other podcasts where you explained how easy things are today with ChatGPT. I grew basically from 0 to 2,000,000.
From October 20, it was probably, like, ten days to my first 10 k in monthly recurring revenue. Like, these these are all things people take for granted now that were, like, insanely hard problems just ten years ago. And how long is your one d?
Are you recording for, an hour? Probably about twenty minutes per TikTok video. Because, like, I don't do any retakes.
I don't heavily script my videos. I'm just, like, the laziest content creator you'll ever meet. Coming from Silicon Valley, the word influencer is so weird to me.
It's I don't want people to think, oh, yeah. Like, AI can just do everything. You don't have to know what's going on.
I know what's going on at every single step. I have to be the architect driving it. I look for spaghetti code or random things that AI has inserted.
Flight talked about, like, four really horrible things that went wrong.
And now getting into the part where I personally know so many people that want to start their own thing. You actually did this step by step, and you did it in public.
And this is the part that I think our audience is so wanting to to learn about. So would love to know a little bit about Potato, the early days.
How did you come up with the idea? What were the signals? And, you know, as much as you can share about the early days would be awesome.
Yeah. Absolutely. So I didn't ever want to start another company.
I think people have to understand for my first company, I did the venture path, sold the company, happy with the outcome, and I was, like, burnt out, guys. Like, I did not want to start another company. I just wanted to, like, chill, teach people AI.
Uh, but what ended up happening is I was growing so fast as an influencer, which was beyond my wildest expectation. I mean, coming from Silicon Valley, the word influencer is so weird to me. It still kinda gives me the ick.
Like, I don't view it as a complimentary thing. Um, but, you know, there were so many people out there who wanted high quality free education.
I was so passionate about that. And so what happened is I just ran into normal growing pains. It was like, well, how do I take one video and, like, post it on other platforms?
How do I repurpose the same content so that I don't have to create, like, fresh content every single time I sit down? It was all about, like, how do I work smarter and lazier? Because I don't actually like the process of content creation.
I like building stuff. So I was like, how do I kind of build a system to scale myself without having to pour, like, that much more time into content creation or hiring a big team. That was really the the heart of it.
So it really came from solving my own problem. Um, and so what I did, which is what I naturally do, is I started making YouTube videos. Like, here's mymake.com automation to repurpose content into different formats.
And then I would get comments on those videos like, setting up this automation is way too hard. Can you just like is there an app that can just do this for me?
So that was like the light bulb moment. I was like, oh, wait. Like, why don't I just build an app for people out there who don't wanna duct tape these workflow automations together?
Because, like, as you guys know, like, that's a whole other thing you have to maintain. It's never as easy as it sounds. Things break all the time.
There's edge cases. Workflow automation is gonna be really fragile. And so that was, like, the very first, uh, kind of, like, light bulb moment.
Like, oh, maybe maybe I should actually build this. And for me, it, like, it it was not risky at all. Like, if it completely failed, I could just say, oh, I'm gonna give this open source to everybody in my audience for free.
Like, run with it, you know, take the code, do whatever you want with it. So from my perspective, it was just like a fun experiment to see, okay, maybe I could use AI to vibe code this.
I'll film it. I'll make content out of it. And even if it generates no money, I'll just give it to my audience for free.
They'll love that. So that was the, uh, that was the origin story. Okay.
That's the part I'd love to get into. Yeah. Yeah.
Sure. What would the initial emails look like? What was the launch process?
Like, I know we're discussing. There was some fun stuff. All that fun stuff.
Okay. So let me share. So as soon as I had this idea, like, I'm not the kind of person who waits around a long time.
So all I did was this is you can see the timestamp here. It's 08/01/2024. This was around the time I first had the idea.
Okay. I have this idea. I wonder if other people resonate with this problem too.
So what I did since I had a growing audience at the time, I just made a TikTok video and asked people, hey. Do you guys resonate with these pain points? If so, like, drop a comment below.
So I'll play a little bit of the video for you. Of your feedback. Basically, a lot of people ask me for AI automations for repurposing content.
I'm thinking of building a SaaS app where you put, like, YouTube videos, blog posts, things you want to repurpose and add your unique point of view on, and you just plug those in, and then it creates a social media post for multiple platforms that you can then publish in one click. And it could have, like, a set it and forget it mode.
So you describe your business, like, you're trying to accomplish, and then it automatically just, like, finds relevant news, interesting stories related to your business, adds your unique point of view. It can even send it to you so you can, you know, manually edit, review. So it could potentially be in mostly automated social media system for small businesses.
At this stage, I'm just looking for feedback. I just had this idea because it kept coming up, like, the idea of using AI and automations for repurposing content. So so, yeah, that was it.
Like, literally thirty seconds if that to film it. No retakes.
Right? Like, super easy. And then the next stop, uh, the next step was just, like, going through all these comments.
Like, all these people who said, yes. I'm in. Great idea.
What I did next is I just DM'd about, like, ten, twenty of them and set up one to one phone calls just to better understand, like, what tools they're using today and where the solution would fit in, or would it replace completely what they're using today. So, like, just from a speed perspective, like, it's like I had the idea, posted the TikTok video.
Okay. We have a lot of people saying, yes. I love it.
But as we know in the product world, that doesn't necessarily mean anything. Um, so then I chose a bunch of people from the comments, hopped on phone calls with them to, like, really understand what tools are they using, where they're currently paying for, where are their pain points, how are they duct taping these tools together?
And where would my solution fit in into their everyday world?
That's awesome. And so from here, what happened next?
What was the So from here so let me make sure. So from here, I had the brilliant idea of, like, why why don't I just film myself building the MVP? Like, that would be cool.
This was like 02/2024 around August or September guys. Like there were there wasn't that much content around how to actually like vibe code something from idea to launched.
And so I made a playlist that consists of seven parts. K. The part one was just like planning and writing your MVP.
A lot of people are nontechnical. Right? They have no idea what a PRD is.
They have I I meet many people who are vibe coding. They don't know what an MVP is. Like, they don't even know kind of, like, like, that terminology we take for granted.
And so in this seven part series, I literally walk through it step by step. Here's my MVP. Here's the tech stack.
Here's the UI I created. Here's some additional features I added. Here's user authentication.
Here, I plugged in an API for AI powered image generation. Here, I I in my first version, I couldn't even publish the social media. So I hooked it up to Zapier to publish the social media for me.
Like, that's how MVP ish this was. It didn't even, like, let you publish the social media guys. Um, but yeah.
So here's, like, part one where I'm just talking about planning and writing my MVP specs. So I'm really talking through before writing a line of code. Let's figure out, like, who's your audience, narrow down the scope as much as possible, etcetera.
Here's the tech stack that I plan to use. This was my, like, longer term vision. Okay?
Here and here's my spec in 08/02/2020. So what was interesting in this video is I started with this screen. I was like, okay.
I wanted to do all of these things, but then I walked through the exercise of removing features. So I like, in this video, I was like, okay.
But we probably don't need this. We probably don't need that. That's so important to prune.
Yeah. A lot of people like, don't do that. Like, it's it's, um, yeah.
So so many benefits to this.
Yeah. You know, I meet a lot of nontechnical people who are trying to vibe code for the first time. Like, your this audience is obviously way more product oriented, but there are so many things we take for granted from the product side.
Like, obviously, clarifying things down to who is our ideal target user, what is the job to be done, and just trimming as much as possible. A lot of people struggle with that because, like, AI can kind of build anything.
They think that they should try to build everything in the first MVP. So in this video, I was just really walking through the exercise of, okay, let's just remove all this stuff I don't need. Like here, for example, here, instead of creating posts for LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook in the v one, we're just gonna create a Facebook post.
Right? Like, that's it. And so once we removed everything, I mean, it looks crazy basic, but it was.
Um, but it was enough to generate, like, my first 10 k in monthly recurring revenue. Um, so, yeah, I just walked people through all this. Like, uh, and then I actually coded it in cursor AI.
How do you get it out? How how do you you said you got your first 10 k with a simple, uh, with with quite a simple feature set.
What did that look like? What was your launch email like? How did you reach out to your customers?
And what was the launch process like?
So, yeah, I mean, this was, like, the v one guys. Like, really disgusting, but it worked.
So here, you kind of paste in your original content. So let's just say you normally write blogs or newsletters, and you don't normally post to short form social media platforms. So here, you could paste your blog or newsletter, choose the platforms you want, and then it would generate, like, a Facebook post tailored to that platform.
Okay? So that was it. That was, like, literally the MVP.
Nothing that complicated, but it was enough. Um, and so, yeah, a lot of people ask me next, like, how did I get my first, let's say, 10 k in MRR?
So let me talk through that. So this I think this was October 1. I launched my waitlist program to my newsletter and to folks on my TikTok, uh, audience.
Um, and it was really simple. I mean, this was the email. Um, I just talked about, like, a big part of my own success is repurposing my own content.
So I'm building Blotato to scale content creation for these people. If you're interested, fill out this form. So this was my wait list form.
Um, okay. I was really optimistic about this wait list program, But honestly, it was it ended up being way more confusing, um, because I I only selected maybe, like, 50 people with consistent responses.
But what I found was, uh, what people say is very different from what they actually do. I'm like, I should have known this, but, you know, people would fill this out and I'd be like, oh, this is the perfect person for my early adopter program.
And then when I check their post hoc session of like what platforms they're actually posting to, what type of content they make, it does not match at all, like, anything that they said. Um, so I actually regret spending a couple weeks on this early adopter program. I actually wish I just went straight to launch sooner because this ended up confusing me.
Like, like, 50 people with 50 different use cases, 50 different ways that they're posting to social media and types of content that they're creating. So this was one mistake I look back on where I honestly could have just saved a month by skipping this early adopter program altogether. That's that's quite big.
Yeah. There we call this a say do ratio.
What what customers say, and they actually do could be quite different.
So on October 20 was my official launch day. So all I did to launch was release this newsletter to my audience and then also post the TikTok video. And here I wanted to point out, like, all the things that went wrong.
So this was the newsletter, and you can see here there's like a big gray box. So this was supposed to be my five minute launch video on YouTube.
Um, but what happened was I was like so nervous before the launch. I kept making last minute changes to the YouTube video. And like, I uploaded a new version but grabbed the old link, and the old link I deleted.
So, like, this video doesn't exist here. So I don't know how many people were on my newsletter at the time. Maybe, like, fifty, seventy thousand people.
But they all got this newsletter with the old demo link that didn't work. So they would click this and it would say video not found. So that was pretty embarrassing, and then a lot of people, like, emailed me about it.
Video is private. Your newsletter doesn't launch. Um, so, yeah, from this from October 20, it was probably, like, ten days to my first 10 k in monthly recurring revenue, um, which is crazy.
Right? Like, you you we talk about ramen profitable 10 k MRR in the, um, in the in the tech world.
But it's crazy what can happen if you already have an audience that kinda trust you, and you already have, like, people lined up. Like, I had probably hundreds of people that filled out this wait list. Right?
I only selected the top 50 that I felt were the best fit, but there were, like, hundreds of people who had filled out this wait list alone.
Right. Right. Right.
Awesome. So so the the previous audience that you built up was the one of the biggest successes, I think, for for you in terms of getting the initial launch done successfully.
You so did you did you end up sending the video again? Like, did you send up link, this link with a proper video, or or did you not check that? Yeah.
No. It it was the following week. It was not immediately after this email.
Um, the reality is, like, a lot of people signed up anyway.
So because, like, if you click the link here, it just goes to the website. So then they could at least click there to learn more and even though they didn't see the video.
What did you do next? Were you looking at the data, seeing what they're up to, where are they failing, what you know, thinking about your next feature set?
What what happened after the initial excitement when you had these users? How did you keep them retained and and grow?
Yeah. Honestly, it was pretty crazy just keeping up with everything.
Um, the first thing I wanted to do was just recap my launch. Like, as a creator, my mindset is always like, well, how do I make how do I make content out of this even if things went wrong? And I use this as a way to, like, continue promoting Blotato as well.
So, like, here, for example, I talked about, like, four really horrible things that went wrong. Um, this video summarizes it a bit more and has a bit more engagement. So, like, 10 things I learned launching my app.
So this served as, like, not only a recap for me, but also additional marketing. Okay. Here, here, and here.
But from from a product perspective though, it it was just watching a lot of post hoc sessions. Like, literally just sitting there for two hours watching where people got stuck.
And some of it is, in the payments. Like, some people were like, oh, my Amazon Pay didn't work. So, like, just just increasing the number of options that, like, somebody could sign up.
Um, trying to improve the onboarding, just watching those user sessions obsessively. Because, like, I I mean, it's pretty because, like, you can see exactly what people are doing and what they're trying to do. And so there was so much information just from watching those sessions, not even setting up, like Interesting.
Fancy funnels or metrics or dashboards yet, but just sitting there watching the recordings and seeing, like, where people are rage clicking, where they're getting stuck, like, where they're trying to click, things that they'd be trying to do.
Like, that was the number one most helpful thing in the beginning. Yeah. Sign up was a big one.
Onboarding, like, how quickly could we get them to a draft post at all? Because, like, in my initial version, you would kinda just be dropped into the interface.
And then I after seeing people, like, struggle with where to click, I decided to make the onboarding a step by step. Like, literally step one, post a YouTube link or TikTok link that we're gonna repurpose.
Step two, choose up to five platforms that you wanna post on. And then step three, they would get the draft posts for those platforms. So going from, like, just dropping a person in to step by step holder hand type of onboarding was was a big takeaway from this.
Yeah. How how did you think about churn? I'm sure these users have signed up.
It's a brand new product. Probably, it it might be a bit on the higher end.
And how did you reduce that?
Churn was insanely high initially, um, especially before putting that kind of onboarding in place that walk them through it step by step. Like, churn with like, I was lucky to have an audience. So, like, one of the reasons I'm so bullish on either building a personal brand or partnering with someone who understands distribution is, like, it's kind of a cheat code to improving your product because you get a constant stream of people in.
Yeah. So, like, every single day, you know, whatever number of people would sign up, and I'd have new information. Okay.
Like, here's how to improve onboarding. Here's how to improve my activation rates and just stay super focused on that in order to reduce churn.
But, yeah, for sure, like, my initial churn probably in my first month or two is crazy high, like, probably over 30% churn. So Wow.
Yeah. It was, like, alarming, but I was like, well, you know, I just started.
So And you're and you're getting new users. Yeah. Yeah.
Like so I so to a helpful contrast here is, like, my first startup, Curious, like, it was so hard for me to get customers. We were doing outbound enterprise sales, and I had just graduated college.
Like, I knew nothing about sales, nothing about enterprise, like nothing about the call center BPO space. And so my experience there getting customers was like high pain, super slow, super painful.
In this case, because I had a brand and this is a low ticket PLG type of product, like, was just a constant flow of people signing up. So there was never a day I was concerned like, oh my god.
It's just going to it's just going to stop and fail. Because I had that like constant flow of people coming in, I just thought to myself like, well, if I just keep improving the products, improving the targeting of my marketing so that activation rates are better, then eventually, you know, I'll fix these numbers like churn and activation rates, and, um, it'll be good from there.
Um, and that's exactly what happened. Like, I just kept going focused on those things. Um, it was very different from my first startup where, like, every sale just felt so painful and such a long process.
Yeah. That's awesome. I I now wanna get into the kind of you are going you're more developed now, and I would love to get into a bit more about the process of how you do rapid development.
I know that you talked about in our prep session of, you know, having to rewrite all the code. What would that what was that process like?
Okay. Once you're like, this is something interesting, how do you take it from an interesting idea to a more robust build?
Yeah. I think there's this is where, like, a lot of people get confused by content that says, like, AI kills all software developers.
Right? Like, I I really don't resonate with any of that.
Um, I I try to to teach people like, the point of vibe coding is to validate your idea quickly, get your paying customers, and then hire a developer with high conviction. If you look at the old way of doing things, like, even five years ago, building out an MVP would cost, like, 5 to $15,000, like, easily.
It would take three to six months easily for your first version so that by the time you launch your MVP, you're, like, tired and you wanna do something else. Like like, it's kind of drained all of your energy already. Um, and and that was normal.
Like, that was the normal process people went through. With vibe coding, all of that compresses. Like, now you can truly build an MVP in a matter of days.
Like like, literally, that YouTube series you guys saw, it took me more time to edit the YouTube videos than to actually build them. Maybe, like like, it was crazy.
But, yeah, time is compressed, cost is compressed so that you can get your first 10 to 100 paying customers on your vibe coded product and then hire a real developer to take it over. In my case, I did not hire a real developer until millions in annual recurring revenue, but that was because, like, I felt like you you know, after my first startup, like, this type of product seems a lot easier.
Like, after trying to build, you know, our own speech recognition models in real time, super low latency and natural language processing, this to me, this is like, oh, well, this is just an API wrapper, isn't it? Like so I felt, like, confidence like, uh, I could probably code this though.
Uh, but it it was it was it was harder than you think. Like, I don't I don't want people to think, oh, yeah. Like, AI can just do everything and you don't have to know what's going on.
Um, I know what's going on at every single step. . Um, I look for spaghetti code or random things that AI has inserted.
There are many times when I get relaxed and I just let Claude do its thing, and I regret it because it changed something else and exploded all the queues. And, like, it just destroyed everything in production. So, like, you know, it I I call it, like, shifting from vibe coding, 100% AI coding, to now AI assisted coding.
So AI may be taking 50 to 60% of the load. And it's definitely developed, like, since I started using Cloud Code.
In the beginning, it was, like, not that great. So I used it for scaffolding, obviously brainstorming the architecture plan, revising it, helping come up with tests, variable naming.
Like, all of these things around planning and QA testing and scaffolding, it was really helpful with. Now today, it can definitely implement features. Right?
But I'm still providing the spec for it to do so. Like, okay. Let's think through all the things that this is going to impact.
Let's think through three different approaches, figure out the pros and cons of each one. Okay. Which trade ops are acceptable to me?
Like, I'm heavily involved in driving that entire process before I let it run at all.
Got it. And I the this this next part, I wanna get into operating as a one person AI native business.
What has that been like? Could you have the experience of starting your own company in the past, you know, getting it to 10,000,000 above and exit to versus now? Um, for for folks, you know, what does that look like?
What does that feel like? And if you can get into some tips and tricks around that.
Yeah. Absolutely. And so I only hired my first full time person a couple months ago.
So I grew Blotato, so it's been less than two years since the launch. I've grown it from 0 to millions in annual recurring revenue solo and then hired my first person a few months ago.
Um, it's it's been crazy. Like, the my number one takeaway is that you don't need someone's permission to build a successful multimillion dollar business solo. Before, in the old way of doing things, you would literally need capital.
Like, this is not possible before without a bunch of cap like, I raised a little bit of money. I hired a team, and then we built out the rest of the technology and sold it.
Today with AI, like, if you have a product or technical background guys, you can absolutely do a lot of this solo. Maybe partner with someone who already has a brand or understands distribution really well. And, like, it's it's just such a it's just such a .
Like, you do not need someone's permission to do this. You don't need someone's capital to do this. Um, this opportunity is accessible, especially if you have product or technical background.
Got it. So yeah. So you've you've talked about it's it's ever more possible now as it's ever been, um, and everybody should do it.
I think you're finding the wedge or the pain came from your own experience. Is that something that you universally recommend, or is there any other ways that you say, hey.
This is how you should choose your pain point and validate it.
Yeah. I think I think it depends also on the price point for, like, this kind of self-service PLG. Um, definitely, your own pain point is number one.
But, generally, number two, any space where people are already paying for a solution is going to be ripe for disruption, especially now with AI agents and, like, even businesses are rethinking, like, SaaS pricing versus, like, outcome based pricing, for example, with agents.
I think there's a lot of opportunity to disrupt many types of businesses. It's like, as long as someone's already paying money for other tools, like, market is there. You know?
Uh, that's, like, the biggest thing I look for. Even in my own market, I was like, well, people are paying for buffer, Hootsuite, MetraCool, later, like a whole suite of these other alternatives. I just need to make my product better in one dimension.
And because I'm my own user, I can, like, be honest about it. Like, I can I can list all the ways Blotato sucks? And, like, you should probably go use this competitor for that.
Um, but I can also list, like, the couple ways that Blotato is just really, really good because that's what I optimized it for.
That's awesome. That's great. The the next part is probably the one that, um, people are another area they're really interested in learning is our building distribution.
You know, you've obviously done really, really well. But if someone is starting out now, what tips and tricks would you have for them to to build a distribution?
And is it too crowded? Can they still do it? And how do they go around doing that go about doing that?
Yeah. In terms of building distribution, I don't think it's too crowded at all. Like, there's there's not that many credible people building personal brands.
There's a lot of people who have no background in the thing and then build a personal brand and kind of, like, gain experience in the process. I see that very often. But if you have, like, experience in the domain, you have a history of, like, helping customers already or you even just have, like, credible product or tech background, you you will rise above the noise.
There just aren't that many people. When I started on TikTok two years ago, there was literally nobody from Silicon Valley posting on TikTok. Like, there just there weren't found like, I was looking for it.
Like, I would have loved to follow people like that. Now there are a lot more, You know? Hopefully, I hope thanks to, like, my example and some others.
But, like, it's it's really not crowded at all. So, like, don't be afraid to build a personal brand based on what you have right now. Um, in terms of which platforms to start with, always recommend TikTok because it's the most generous to new creators.
Like, I have seen TikTok accounts, their very first video blows up. Um, even in my case, it took about six weeks for my first TikTok video to hit to start going viral. So it hit probably a 100,000 views six weeks into my TikTok journey.
Other platforms like LinkedIn daily? Like, for TikTok to them? Daily.
Yeah. So for the first, let's say, three to four weeks on TikTok, I was posting once per day, and then I ramped it up to three times per day. And that's when things really started taking off.
It sounds like a lot, but, like, if you watch my TikTok videos, like, they're not scripted, barely edited. Like, I I never do retakes.
Like, it's very raw. Um, again, like, I don't view myself as a content creator influencer primarily. Like, it's to me, it's just like a hobby I do on the side to teach people how to use AI.
Like, I mostly just enjoy building, learning, and teaching. So I use tools to compress the time it takes to create content. Like, I always wanna maximize building, learning, and teaching and minimize content creation with So Yeah.
And that's where Lotato is all about. Right? So using it to to to to get it out in many many different places.
So you started posting multiple times on
TikTok, and that helped you grow. And in terms of what topics did you cover, I'm asking because people were like, hey. What do I talk about?
What do I cover in those in those YouTube videos or or TikTok videos?
So for for me, the things that took off were around, like, learning and simple chat GPT prompts. I I think a lot of people in the tech bubble like, I know we're talking about agents and loops and, like, all of these fancy things. But literally outside of the tech bubble, like, people are still trying to install ChatGPT.
Like, I'm not I'm not I'm really not kidding. Like, I went to Barnes and Noble the other day and, like, literally on their checkout shelf was, like, this magazine. And it's like it's like a top seller, guys.
Like, it's like the most bay the stuff you would find basic because we're from a product tech background. But I swear to you, most people out there are just like, how do I write a chat GPT prompt?
How do I make it, like, sound a little bit like me? How do I use it to, like, I don't know, just, like, figure out this homework problem or help me study for this or help me prepare for an interview? Um, and so TikTok taught me really quickly, like, woah.
Because I started on YouTube making AI agent videos and, like, all these fancy things two years ago. Like, my banner on YouTube is AI agents and automations from two years ago. Wow.
Yeah. No one no one cared about any of that. So I learned that real quickly from you from a TikTok.
But just as a general playbook, whatever platform you're starting on, whether it's TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter, whatever, just look at the top performing contents already in your niche and literally copy the hooks. Um, I know it sounds bad, but, like, I encourage people to copy my content all the time. Like, because it's it's gonna teach you really quickly how to make contents, uh, that people actually stop scrolling for.
Um, the hook, the opener is the most important thing. So once you get really good at that, then you can focus on, like, making a lot of your own original content. But until you're good at that, like, nobody's gonna watch your content if you can't get them to stop scrolling.
Got it. Yeah. So you went from if you started did you start all platforms at the same time?
Did you start on TikTok, then you went to YouTube and then So I started actually on LinkedIn, which a lot of people don't know. So I I started doing one LinkedIn post today.
My very first, like, viral LinkedIn post looking back, I took a template from Justin Welsh. It was like old way of building AI startups, three bullet points, new way to build AI startups.
And that was my first post that did really well because I copied an existing viral template. And by the way, Justin Welch copied that template from someone on Twitter. K?
So copying yeah. Like, I I know a lot of people, like, who are brand new, like, are averse to the word copying, but the biggest creators in the world all copy each other.
It's just it's just we we all know that. And so, like, whatever platform you're on, just, like, look at the top performing content and copy their hooks and copy their template, like, structurally, how is the post, uh, constructed, And then fill it in with your own information, but always copy the hook.
Like, don't try to be creative around that. Um, in terms of Just copy it right, like, just exactly as is.
Do you do you credit that too or do you credit them at the bottom or no? Yes.
Uh, I mean, you you should, but, like, most people don't. Like, literally, my Instagram feed is full of people copying my own content and, like, very rarely do people credit me. But, like, that that's okay to me because my goal is just to teach as many people as possible AI.
So if they're copying my content and teaching the same thing to other people, like, that's fine. But you you have to copy the hook because it's, like, the most important thing in, like, all of your content. So here, I would say copy three simple tips to unlock chat GBT genius mode dot ..brain emoji.
You can say whatever you want after the first five to ten seconds. Like, that doesn't matter, but just copy the hook because millions of people have already voted that this hook works, that this engaged them, that this made them stop scrolling.
That's awesome. Is there a hooks library anywhere, um, or is that so you just you just kind of look at it? Yeah.
Oh, yeah. Yeah. So if you go here, we can share this link after.
But I have a bunch of free Claude skills, and one of them is already encoded with, like, a 100 viral hooks. So No way. So so Blotato would do Blotato
would do all this for like, it would give you the hooks.
Uh, Yeah. Well, so you can actually just grab this even without Blotato. So it's just like a plug in you can install.
So here, basically, a plug in that you can install into Clotter Codex. And, like, everything here is free. You don't need Blotato unless you actually wanna schedule it to social media.
That'll that'll use Blotato here. But all these other ones, like your brand brief, your content coach, the post grader, um, repurposing, and viral hooks, these are all free to use.
So we can share the link to this as well if your if your audience is interested. Yeah. Sure.
Um, so, yeah, you would just install this as a plug in. Um, I think there's instructions here.
You can even just tell Claude you can literally drop the link to this in Claude code and be like, import these skills, and it'll it'll figure it out. Um, but basically, it comes with seven skills. The content coach walks you through everything step by step.
So after you install this plugin, if you say, I don't know what to post, the content coach will ask you like, hey. What are you building? What are you trying to sell?
Uh, what kind of content do you like to post? Like, just text. Are you okay filming videos?
If you film videos, we're gonna write some scripts. Everything you say is going to be recorded into your brand brief. So other people call this brand voice.
It's basically like a memory of everything about you and your business, your offer, and your ideal target customer so that you don't have to repeat yourself every time. It's just automatically going to update it. K?
Post writer is actually what's going to write the post. And then post grader, this is, like, people's favorite. This will actually grade the post according to a viral rubric, and you can see the rubric here.
So, like, hook strength accounts for this much. Is it, uh, does it trigger curiosity? Is it specific?
Is it share worthy? Is it a fit to the platform, etcetera? Um, so a lot of people love this because you can sales?
Set Yeah. You can set loops like, okay.
Write me a full week of content. Don't stop until every single post scores nine out of 10 from the per post grader. So, typically, it's gonna go through three to five revisions for each post.
And, like, it's especially going to swap out different hooks until it gets to a hook that it believes will work really well. And this is for this is platform agnostic? Like, you can
this is for LinkedIn and X, Twitter.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
So the post writer already has, like, different examples for, uh, that platform, and the post grader does as well. I will say though, like LinkedIn and x tend to share the same, uh, like viral patterns.
Same with TikTok and Reels and Facebook. Like those tend to same share the same viral patterns. And so I you don't necessarily have to rewrite everything every single time.
So if you wrote something natively for LinkedIn, that will often transfer well to Substack as well as Twitter. So the the other way of saying that is, when I have a post do really well on LinkedIn, it also tends to do really well on Substack.
Do you have do you have agents doing this somewhat, uh, semi automatically for you?
Or Mhmm. I guess you I mean, is obviously doing that. But, yeah, would love to know about that part.
Oh, yeah. So so this is an example. Um, so I'm sharing a different screen here now.
But here I share my actual cross post skill. So for example, let's say I finished filming a TikTok video. This skill will rewrite the caption slightly so it's optimized for each platform, and then it will convert it into text posts for Twitter threads and LinkedIn.
So how the skill works, it'll, like, understand the video by transcribing it. It just uses Whisper locally on your computer so it doesn't cost anything, rewrites it, the caption a little bit for each platform, waits for my approval, and then publishes to all of these places. In my case, I batch content one day a week, so it will, like, schedule everything throughout the entire week.
And you can see the cross post skill here.
You can actually just copy this. Yeah. Perfect.
So you say you you just record once a week and that that does it for the entire week?
Yeah. For so for the longest time, like, up until, I think, February this year, I only made content one day a week. So, like, no no joke.
I really I'm not I don't consider myself, like, a full time content creator influencer. I know, like, everybody prescribes that title to me, but, like, I I like building, learning, and teaching, and I don't like content creation.
I find it, like, tedious in many ways. Um, and so my whole goal has to been to, like, build systems so I can, like, do all the fun stuff, make content out of it, but, like, minimize the actual time I spend making content, distributing it every day. And
how long is your warranty? Like, is that, like, you're are you recording for, an hour? How long are are you taking to do the actual recording of content?
Uh, so if yeah. So let's say if we go by, like, let's say, a TikTok video, it's probably, like, twenty twenty minutes. Yeah.
It's probably about twenty minutes per TikTok video. It's like, don't do any retakes. I don't heavily script my videos.
I don't have a ton of b roll. Like, lately, I've been having more b roll, but that's because I'm using, like, Remotion or Hyperframes to go get the b roll. Like, I like, I'm not the one doing it.
You know? So, um, but, yeah, I'm constantly experimenting
with different ways to, like, make my content more engaging without having to do extra work. Like, that's I'm just, like, the laziest content creator you'll ever meet. Yeah.
Or I guess what I was trying to think about was for people that are finding it hard to get started, I would use your example like, hey. Spend two hours a week, and that's it. I mean, obviously, there's automations built in, but it's sort of it's not every single day.
It's not all the time.
Mhmm. Yeah. It's not every single day.
Like, it's just one day a week. Like, I grew basically from zero to 2,000,001 day a week.
And then two from 2,000,000 to 3,000,000, I only added one more day for my long form YouTube because now I'm filming multiple YouTubes a week. But, like, yeah, that that's only two days a week. So, like, I still have the rest of my week to actually, you know, like, build stuff, make sure potatoes growing and things like that.
Um, I can show you guys an example of, like, an AI edited video if that would be interesting. Oh, that would be very interested. Yeah.
Okay. That's So this was posted, oh, twenty two hours ago.
Okay. So twenty two hours ago, 2,000 comments. K?
So so the beginning is just my usual talking, and that's all positive throughout. K? This is a b roll clip.
So I have, like, a whole folder of b roll clips that hyperframes and Remotion can can use. So it's just, like, tagged with calendar underscore interview slots or something.
K? So it Remotion hyperframes automatically inserts it. This is also a b roll.
Yeah.
How did you get this b roll folder? Like, how did you think about what to put in there? I literally just, like, open my laptop and film my phone like this.
Or, like, sometimes I'll use QuickTime if I'm just, like, grabbing a clean thing. But, like, these where it looks like I'm pointing, I'm literally just, like, pointing with my finger. It's like a four second clip.
And then I just have remotion or hype or or I have Claude analyze what's in the footage, name the footage, and put it in my b roll folder. So it can reuse it in multiple videos. This was just a screenshot of the prompt itself.
Okay? So that's it. And then it inserted it, and that's it.
Yeah. So this was just twenty two hours ago.
Um, and and Claude edited this for you? Is that Yeah. So using remotion this is actually a better one.
Yeah. So this one, like, there's no way I would do this, guys. Like, I am way too lazy to do animations like this.
So let me just play it, you'll see what I mean. It's basically like a tier list. So it pops open the logo, and then it shows, like, okay.
I rate it c tier, b tier, a tier, s tier. Like, I just talked. So the only thing I did was capture my face here.
And then, uh, I believe it was Remotion here did everything else. It grabbed the logos for each company. It created this tier list.
It created this animation like this. Because, like, there's just no way I would make this video by myself.
Like, I'm just not into video editing like this. So this was 100% edited with AI.
Wow. That's cool. That's really awesome.
Sorry. Just the the last question I have on content creation would be around, specifically for that one day that you're thinking about for the week.
How do you, number one, spend that day? Like, where do you come up with ideas during that day, and and and how is that so is that, like, a two hour stretch when you were just done?
Just thinking about the mechanics of that one day a week that you spent on content creation. Yeah. So I actually, like, wrote a playbook about this because so many people were asking me.
So this was this was in, like, link We'll link that below. This this is really helpful. This was late twenty twenty five, and I I literally just documented everything, um, that that I do.
So, like, my mission, my constraints, right, my strategy, my funnel.
These were high performing content types in 2025. This links to very specific examples. And then this part is, my schedule.
So, like, literally, I'll wake up Saturday. It used to be Saturday. I moved it to Sunday.
I used to film one YouTube video in the morning, repurpose it into a newsletter, and then film 20 TikTok videos after lunch. And, like, the ideas for those TikTok videos come from stuff I'm doing throughout the week.
So, like, I can I literally will ask Claude, like, look at three different ways I used Claude this past week because it has access to all of your sessions? Like, it has all the logs from all your conversations, and I can make contents out of that easily.
I also supplement that with, um, I use Apify for scraping different trends in hashtag AI, hashtag Claude. So it also gives me ideas like that. So literally by the time I sit down, I have already at least 10 short form ideas.
So it's it's not like I'm just, like, sitting down from scratch trying to do everything.
That's awesome. I think this, uh, uh, Blotato help section is probably one of the most useful resources with every There's a lot.
Yeah. There's a lot in here. Like, especially, like, especially if you're a beginner, things like warming up your social accounts.
Like, a lot of people just skip that step, you know, and it results in poor, uh, performance. Like, you always wanna warm up your social accounts for several weeks before you automate posting to it. So, yeah, I just try to put, like, stuff I wish somebody told me.
What I you know, stuff like you you normally have to pay a lot of money. It's, like, gate kept somewhere. It's, like, super confusing, but I just try to put it all there for folks.
Yeah. I mean, as I'm thinking about I know we're we're at the hours. I'm thinking about concluding.
I think one of the things that I took away is how generous you are with sharing everything. Like, I the the I mean, even the skills are are are things that are just, you know, potentially even employees.
Like like, peep you know, you you shared a full skill set of how to share stuff properly. We rely on that very heavily here at product faculty too. We've got a lot a lot of skills that we built, but, I mean, you've got them for everything.
And so if someone does wanna get start started, that's the way to do it. I also love that it's not overwhelming. If somebody if anybody was to look at your profile and see, you educate 10,000,000 people, they must think you are working, you know, twelve hours a day making videos.
Yeah. I honestly, like, I wouldn't I wouldn't I like, that's not the life I want. Like, it's never been the life I want.
Like, I like building stuff. I I kinda like building companies when things are going well. You know?
Like, that's I would much rather be known as, like, a serial entrepreneur than an influencer, but at the same time, it is very fulfilling and rewarding to teach people for free and see how they use the knowledge, like build side incomes, uh, make more money for their families, level up their career. So that stuff's exciting, but, like, I couldn't there's no way I could make content full time.
Like, that's just that's not me.
Alright. Uh, for the final question, I wanna ask, is there something that I did not ask you that you think I should have asked that would be really helpful for the audience?
Yeah. A lot of people from a product tech background specifically ask me about bootstrapping versus fundraising. Like, that's a very common question I get.
Um, when I lived in San Francisco, I could not imagine anything but fundraising because that's all you're surrounded by, where you're just, like, inundated with news of thunder monster fundraising rounds and monster exits and things like this. When I physically located outside of Silicon Valley, I realized, like, there are actually so many different ways to build a business.
And so many of my own friends kind of realized, like, you know, I'd be pretty happy if I was just bringing in $2,000,000 a year with my solo bootstrap business. Right?
Like like, do we need a billion dollar outcome to to for that? No. You don't.
And so I I just want people to know like, especially if you have a product or tech background, guys, like, this is such an unbelievable time to be building your own, what they call, micro SaaS. And trust me, you will be perfectly happy making 1 to $2,000,000 a year solo. Um, you you don't need, like, a massive billion dollar exit.
With that said, though, like, the thing it really buys is optionality. Like, let's say you do bootstrap to 1 to $2,000,000 a year, and then you realize, hey. You wanna go bigger.
Like, you still have that option. So I don't want you to think of it as, like, it's exclusively one or the other. Bootstrapping it, getting cash flow in, making sure, like, you're set for life, then you suddenly realize, like, oh, I can actually go back and, like, raise funding for this company, for a different company I wanna spin out.
Like, there's so much incredible optionality once you get to this place. Funny bit. Yeah.
Yeah. You have, like, so many options, and it's just, uh, like, I guess, uh, the other thing to convey is, like, cash flow is really fun too. Like, I know that's from the VC world, like, that's that's insane.
Like, you should just reinvest everything back in the company, raise as much money as possible, but there there are other ways to build successful businesses. Um, like, you know, you and especially if you have a product tech background.
Like, I really think you have an unfair advantage with the AI tools available, And I encourage more people with that background to just go for it, uh, because it's just such an incredible time to be doing this.
Sabrina, this has been an awesome hour. I really appreciate your time, and I know our audience will love this. And so thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me today.
Yeah. Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me here.
It's been fun. Thank you.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
A former Silicon Valley founder who swore she'd never start another company built her second one entirely in public, starting from a 30-second unscripted TikTok and a broken launch-day link, and grew it to millions in revenue without hiring anyone for nearly two years.
How they asked for the click.
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