How I Grew My SaaS to $150K/Year With Reddit and SEO

Transcript

00:00

Every SAS founder should grow their app like this. >> This is Aayush, a guy from India who built an app that makes over $150,000 a year and he grew it using one formula, the Reddit and SEO playbook.

>> If I was starting over, I would run this playbook again.

00:15

>> Ah started on Reddit. Then he moved to SEO and within a few months his app went from no users to thousands.

>> Reddit worked first but then we scaled with SEO. >> I was curious on how he actually did this.

So, I asked Aush to come on to the channel and break down his entire

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playbook. And in this video, we'll dive into his exact Reddit strategy that helped him make his first 10K, the SEO playbook that scaled him to his next 100K, and why he believes this playbook still works in 2026.

This one is going to be fun. Let's dive into it.

I'm Pat

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Walls, and this is Starter Story. All right, real quick before we get into the interview, you're about to get two playbooks for growing a SAS, Reddit and SEO.

This is a really awesome story and if you really liked it, I have something even more for you. Later in this video, I'll be sharing a deeper playbook on how

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to get your first 100 users [music] from Reddit. I'll be talking about that a little bit later, but click the first link in the description if you want it now.

[music] All right, let's get into the interview. All right, Aush, welcome to the channel.

Tell me about who you are, what you built, and what's your story. >> Hey, my name is Aayush.

I'm the co-founder of LFS. Uh, it's a simple AI

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Mac app that has gone from 0 to 150K RR over the last 3 years. We grew it to 150K per year through Reddit and SEO and that's what I'm excited to talk to you about today.

>> Okay, before we get into all that and how you grew this app, I just want to understand, can you explain what this app does? What's the business model?

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What did you build? >> So, yeah.

So, so LFS is a Mac AI assistant. It's a place where you can, you know, index all of your local files like PDFs, Apple notes, all sorts of local knowledge that you have.

Uh, and you can create your own superb brain or knowledge bases out of them and then chat with them and then create content and reports and then and basically use

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for your work. We have three standard plans.

Uh we sell subscriptions monthly, annual, and then we also sell lifetime deals. When you're doing uh downloadable apps, especially Mac apps, the customers expect a lifetime deal.

Expect like a onetime payment thing. It it's it's a mindset uh that they have.

So, we've

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stuck with lifetime deal since the beginning. We've gradually raised prices.

>> I'd love if you could show me just some of your dashboards. I just want to see like where where's this revenue coming from?

Could you pull up some of your Gumroad dashboard setup dashboard and kind of show us some of this? >> So, we have four revenue channels.

uh own website, set app bundle, a Mac app

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store and the iOS app store. We use Gumroad for uh for selling licenses.

This is uh this year's data around 110K from here. Uh we're also on set app.

So yeah, this is over last couple of years we've that we've been on set app. Uh we've done some revenue there.

I can pull up the Mac app store around 12,000.

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Uh there this is our uh website traffic. This is a plausible dashboard.

We're getting around 180k visits uh per year. >> I want to understand how do you even get into this?

What's your background? How do you learn about making money online and building apps?

Can you go a little bit into that? >> Yeah.

So, so my actually my business

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partner Cumber was the one who started Elephant22 and he hired me as a consultant. Uh right at the time I had just quit my job of uh my corporate job of 11 years.

Uh I was part-time consulting with some early say startups helping them with product and marketing. So that's when I started working on LFS.

got some good results uh

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in the first five or 6 months and eventually we reached the stage where he invited me to join him as the co-founder and as the marketing guy uh and then he asked me to go all in on LFS and then he he is the of course the development guy the coder person and I became the marketing person and since then we've grown uh grown the product as as a 2%

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team. >> Okay, cool.

So you're the marketing guy. I love it.

That's why I wanted to bring you on to the channel to really talk about this really cool way of thinking about marketing your product which is Reddit and then SEO. So before we get into all that, I'd just like to understand a highlevel overview of how you took Elephas from zero to over

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$10,000 a month. What was this playbook?

>> So the playbook that really worked for us was the Reddit and then SEO playbook. So Reddit, Reddit is essentially a gold mine of high intent niche audiences.

It's a great place to get feedback initially when you're starting out also great place to get traffic and eventually conversions. In the early

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days, we posted a lot on niche subreddits asking for feedback, showcasing the product, giving demos, which led to initial initial revenue customers. those customers, feedback from those customers, insights from them eventually ended up shaping the product over time.

We essentially use Reddit to go from 0 to $3,000 in MR within a

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within a period of 6 months. So So Reddit is great in initially, right?

But but eventually Reddit stops working or there are like diminishing returns to investing more more of your time or effort in in in Reddit. So SEO is is like the best organic marketing channel out there, especially if you're bootstrapping uh like like us, right?

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This was back in 2023. Uh ChatG was just launched.

Google was still the primary way people searched for information. Right?

We start actually started getting some organic traffic on one of our help articles. Uh right, we we wrote support articles for our initial customers uh to help them out with using the product and those articles started getting traction

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from Google. Uh we accidentally discovered like SEO as a as a channel that that we could go go in and over 12 month period of 2023 we ended up making around $70,000 from purely from Google only.

So uh SEO essentially uh you know took us from 3K to where we are now. we

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are at around 12K per month that we're doing. So, uh I think all of it work perfectly in harmony because when you're starting out, you need feedback, you need traction, you need niche audiences and you need fast feedback.

Reddit is very good for that. But eventually you want uh you know a sustainable scalable

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way of getting high intent traffic uh and for which you don't have uh if you're bootstrapping you don't have a lot of ad dollars to spend then SEO is the best way to go forward. >> Building is getting easier and easier thanks to AI.

So now I have a lot of people DMing me and asking me, Pat, I can build stuff, but how the heck do I

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grow and how the hell do I get users and distribution? So I decided to put something together for free that will help you with that.

We've put together a guide on how to get your first 100 users on Reddit as I've talked to dozens of founders who have used Reddit to grow their business, and this is the stuff that actually works. [music] This is a

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part of Starter Story Mo, which is our complete framework for finding your distribution channel in 2026. So, if you want to use Reddit to grow your product, then head to the first link in the description to grab it and check it out for free.

All right, let's get back to the interview. Okay, so the Reddit then

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SEO playbook. I love this.

It reminds me of what I did when I started Starter Story, which is just go out on Reddit to get early feedback, early traction, and then kind of building SEO behind the scenes because it takes a little bit longer. I want to dive a little bit into the Reddit piece because I think a lot of people watching this might be

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wondering, how can I get my first users from Reddit? I'd love if you could dive if possible into an example of a Reddit post that kind of crushed it for you and drove customers to your product.

Could you do that? >> Yeah.

So, so this is like an example post uh right that did well for us. You know, the focus of the post is a video

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demo of the product, but you also want to wrap it around in a in a use case or a problem solution kind of a framing or a story kind of a framing, right? So, so something like me or my friend was facing this problem.

So, I built this feature to solve it. See, this is how it works.

Uh if you want to try, you can try it for 30 days for free. I'm just

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looking for feedback. You know, if if I should improve this feature in any way, please give your inputs.

I think this works because this is not blatant uh self-promotion. You're explaining the b reasoning behind the feature that you've built.

Uh Reddit is a very smart audience. They hate marketers.

They hate being sold to, but they do appreciate uh

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if you can explain the logic uh uh to them and and talk to them like adults. Something like, "Hey, I built this.

This is why I built it. What do you think?

Can I improve anything here?" And and in general, I think video demos do well like show don't tell marketing. like don't go out there and say how good your product is.

Just show it to people what

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what it can do, right? So for this post, we had just launched the super brain feature at the time and we had no idea whether this is something even useful.

Are people even interested in and this got us a lot of positive feedback and a lot of feature requests which eventually became our main primary uh feature which

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is like a super brain feature that that we have that thousands of people use today to index their documents and and and chat with them and create content with them. after a while mod started uh you know cracking down on them and removing them but good thing is that we do still get some traffic from from these posts but a lot of the engagement

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is is now gone and yeah it is how how you see it is >> and that's the thing that I always hear about from people that want to figure out Reddit they'll post on Reddit and then you know the moderation rules are strict that's part of the game right could you walk me through the exact playbook if you had to start over today to kind of replicate what you did

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>> so yeah so if I was starting out first I'll make a list of all the subreedits where my ICP is hanging out every Okay, at least 15 subreddits. Use something like the map of Reddit uh which is essentially like a free open source project.

It's there on GitHub. You can uh you know enter yours one subreddit and you get to see essentially the map

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of Reddit. And here you can get a lot of ideas and a lot of new niche subreddits that you can go and where your potential ICP might be hanging out.

Any subreddit that is greater than 5,000 members is okay. You don't have to go after really big subreddits.

Actually, smaller subreddits are sometimes better uh because there are niche audiences, simpler rules, the mods are more

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forgiving. uh in fact the mods want more content on the subreddit themselves.

So that is step one. Uh make a list of uh of all the subreddits and then pick one feature or pain point that your product is solving.

Right? So that is step two.

Make a short video demo about it. Explain why you built it in as simple terms as possible.

Share this in a

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subreddit and at the bottom add a link to your product. Say you know try it out for free for 30 days.

We added UTM links to all the links that we posting in uh in subreddits to exactly you know which feature we are talking about. uh what date it is, what subreddit it is.

So you post this on one subreddit, you analyze

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uh it it its performance. And step three is basically uh tweaking the copy a bit and then and then repeating the same post on on another subreddit.

Every day you're posting on at least one subreddit. Never post on all subreddits in one day.

People can see that because there will be a lot of overlapping audiences. So one a day on one subreddit

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is is is good enough. >> I love that playbook, especially doing it every day for 14 15 days.

Not only will it prevent people from thinking you're spamming, but also maybe you make a little tweak to the copy, maybe you improve it. One thing that I want to hear from you is kind of the negativity

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around Reddit. I hear this a lot.

People I shared my thing and you know there were mean comments. The mod banned me.

These really bad things happen. Was that your experience that you got hate from some of your posts or was that not?

And how did you handle it if so? >> Yes, we we got hate but that's okay.

I think you you will get hate. You will

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get banned and it's okay. like maybe like you can create like multiple accounts if if one of your accounts gets banned and you can have backups and burner accounts but eventually learn to deal with negativity like this is business we're doing here develop a thick skin I would say >> okay and then the other question that I have is what defines success on Reddit

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like when you see a post how many up votes how much engagement are you looking to go viral or what was a successful post or marketing on Reddit look like >> so so there's there's no benchmark like we've had posts that have like zero upwards standard post would get 30 40 50 upwards we had gone viral with 300 400

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upwards as well. But you are looking at traffic and conversions.

But I think what Reddit really gives you is the qualitative data that comes from all the comments and the engagement that you get and then how people are responding. What is the mood?

What is the vibe that you're getting about the product, right? Especially when the product is very new,

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you really want to know what real authentic people think about you and and that is something that only Reddit can give you. No, like no other platform can give you like raw honest thoughts from people the way Reddit can can get you.

And just for that, I think Reddit is worth it. At least posting on Reddit is worth it.

>> Okay, cool. So, the Reddit part is

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amazing. I love Reddit and thanks for sharing all that.

Let's jump to the next part of the playbook, which is SEO. And SEO is kind of a buzzword.

What did SEO mean for you and what did that look like especially in the early days? >> I think we happened to accidentally discover SEO.

We we were just, you know,

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we were getting initial customers. We were just uh writing helpful articles, support articles based on the questions that customers were getting, right?

So we wrote we wrote like an article on you know how to create OpenAI API keys. Uh right this is a very simple article just has bunch of screenshots some links you know do this do this do this.

We didn't realize we we ranked for this word

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number one on Google for 6 to 8 months. We were getting a lot of traffic for it and we accidentally realized oh Google is actually a genuine inbound traffic channel.

Of course like this was not a very high intent audience from these kind of articles. But we got a lot of traffic and we got a lot of insights on

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what are the future topics that we could write about to get more high intent audiences. Uh and then that's when we discovered that oh we can actually go and do keyword research and then find new keywords to write uh more articles on and then start getting uh organic traffic in.

>> So you kind of created this article even

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though it doesn't it really has to do with creating API keys which doesn't have much to do with elevate. It was sort of an accident when you created this, but then I'm guessing you saw that and you're like, "Wo, this is getting a lot of traffic.

Let's do this for more articles that have more a little bit more product intent, right? So, you get signups.

Is that right? Could you show me maybe one of those articles that you

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know really drives customer signups?" >> So, yeah. So, so what we did is we went back, we did more keyword research.

We figured out that there are like underserved niches or underserved queries on Google which have low competition but high demand. Like this is an example of an article we wrote 18 best chat GPT Mac apps free and paid.

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Essentially it is a listical where we are highlighting all the best apps that were being built at the time around chat GPT and yeah we were number one uh there and we got a lot of high intent traffic and and conversions uh from from this article itself. We are getting a lot of AI traffic uh as well from here chat GPT claity all the AI answer engines

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basically are are referencing a lot of our articles and that audience is even more high intent because they've already made up their minds about buying so they're coming in and and directly buying uh very quickly. >> Okay, cool.

Well, thanks for sharing that. I want to dive a little deeper into the SEO thing because again, yeah, it is kind of a buzz word.

There's a lot

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of different approaches to SEO. So, I'd love to hear from you, someone who's actually implemented it and actually been very successful with it uh as a, you know, small bootstrap business.

What would be your playbook if you had to start over with SEO today? What would be the steps that you would take right now to kind of crush it with SEO?

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>> I think the very first thing know your exact positioning in the market like where do you lie? Uh, right.

Uh, how does the customer look at the market and where do you fit in? Like for us that was like chat GPT Mac apps uh right so there are a bunch of chat GPT apps there a smaller market was of chat GPT Mac

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apps and within those there were like a small niche of products that that people could could buy. So know your positioning.

Uh right once you know that then it becomes easier to do keyword research because now you're thinking as the customer and and you're you're trying to imagine what would your ICP would you know search on Google or what

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would they type into chat GPT or you can use something like AHFS to get more data and figure out the keywords that your customer is searching for and also the keywords that your competition is already ranking for. So what I really love is inside AHFS like have a filter.

You know, anything with a keyword difficulty of less than 20 and a search

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volume of greater than 500 is is like a very good combination of of parameters. Especially if you are like a new website uh you don't have a lot lot of domain authority.

Then you should not go after a lot of high volume keywords and high competition keywords. You should try and focus on a low volume, high intent uh

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and low competition keywords. Uh this is what I used to do.

Uh I used to buy HS. It was $129.

was a lot of money for us. Use the 500 credits to do keyword research.

Make a list of keywords around 30 to 50 topics and then go back and write out those blog posts. If you're starting out, you can just start with

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like two or three blog posts a week and eventually you can, you know, scale up to six or seven. Even the actual writing itself, you can use a lot of AI tools, but it is better to use AI in SEO for as more as a research assistant.

What you want to figure out with AI is that what sort of content is already working well

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and make like a scaffold or or an outline or a structure of that kind of article and then add your own spin to it. Add your own flavor and your own style or tone to humanize it more.

As long as you can add net new information to the internet, you will win with SEO. I think that is like a good frame to look at SEO is how can you bring your

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personal insights, your user data, uh right, your market intelligence that you have and you're adding new information to the internet. you're not just regurgitating what what uh the internet already has.

Uh I think as long as you can do that, you will win win win with SEO. >> Okay, cool.

Well, thanks for sharing that SEO playbook. Want to switch topics

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a second and go over the actual app that you built. We didn't really go over it in depth.

Would you be able to show me a quick demo of Elephos and how it works? >> Essentially, it's like a knowledgebased app uh where if you have a lot of documents, a lot of files locally on your computer, you can create your own

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personal GPTs out of them. We also have like an offline version.

So it's like 100 you can turn off the Wi-Fi download offline open source models and then use those for using but I'll just give like a brief demo. I created like a brain uh we call them super brains essentially knowledge bases.

Uh you can add all

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sorts of files and folders. I've just added like one file here which is like the deep work.

I like to refer to it often. Basically uh you know you can ask it something like what is deep work according to Cal Newport.

The value is that it will go through only the documents that are already existing on your file or the the documents that you

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have added here in this particular brain uh and come up with an answer based on just that. So that way it's not hallucinating like it's basically AI grounding but essentially people love it because they get answers that they can trust on then they know that something like chatg or claude might hallucinate

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or come up with new content but always comes with answers from your own data and you can add all types of integrations files YouTube videos web pages uh uh we even have an Apple notes integration so we have a lot of people who use Apple notes as a second brain uh and they would just you know hook it up

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with LFS and then just get to you know chat with it uh and and and and then use it to uh to to understand their own notes and then use it for their work. >> Thanks for showing that.

That that's awesome. Looks like a super cool app.

How did you build it? Could you walk through your tech stack?

How much you spend on different tools and languages

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and hosting and those sorts of things and and walk through all that. >> I think Cloud Code is is probably the number one tool AI tool that everyone should be using right now.

It does so much for just $100 a month. We use it both for development as well as for marketing.

Uh LFS is a native Mac app, so it's built with Swift. For marketing, we use AHFS.

It's one of our top tools.

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Uh it's 129 a month, but it's so worth it because you get so much data from it. If you can't afford it, just get it for a month and and you know, do keyword research for a quarter or 4 months.

Uh and then yeah, we use Neuron Writer to to do pre-publish checks on our blog posts. Uh right, it it it's like a tool

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where you can enter a blog post and see how it compares before publishing. Uh right, so that that's very useful.

We use the map of Reddit to research Reddit and and find new subreddits to to go after. Use Nitn.

If someone mentions uh LFS on Reddit or on other social uh platforms, we know and we can we can go

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and comment and reply there. We use ClickUp inside uh the team to manage all all our work.

We use Discord for the team communication as as well as we have a very thriving community of our users. Uh right.

So that community lives on our discord channel and we get feedback and feature requests every day there. We use

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superb block for hosting mailorite for email marketing. Uh plausible for website analytics and uh of course Google search console is free tool from Google for for SEO.

>> Last question that we ask everyone who comes on the channel if you could stand on young Aush's shoulders before you

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started this before you quit your job. Uh what would be your advice anyone watching this who wants to build stuff like you?

>> Put more buy buttons on the internet. Right.

I think lots of people build something in silence for 6 months, have a wait list on a free sign up uh right and they they think that you know automatically you know build it and

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they'll come and nobody buys. I think people are too afraid to charge too afraid to put up a real buy button.

But the the learning and growth that can happen from a buy button is unlike anything else. You'll not learn from a marketing book or a course or a sales book or a course, right?

Because uh when

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you publish uh something online, your product, your work uh that's when you learn like when people look at it, do they flinch at you? Uh do they ignore you or do they swipe their card and pay for you to what you've built to to get to that place?

You have to fail a lot. Uh so both me and Ken, my business partner combined, we we have like 30

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plus failed projects before this. My advice for anyone is, you know, get get that failure out of the way as soon as possible, right?

put more buy buttons on the internet. Test a lot of ideas, short sprints, fail fast, learn fast.

Uh see which few ideas are working, which are making getting most traction, which are

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getting most revenue. Uh and then double down on on the ones that work.

>> Well, that's great advice. Thanks, Aush.

That was super awesome. Reddit SEO playbook and all that was amazing.

So, thanks for coming on and sharing everything. Uh if you enjoyed this, please put a comment down there below and Aish will maybe be able to answer

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some of your questions. Thanks for coming on.

>> Happy to. Thanks a lot for having me, Pat.

This is amazing. All right, Gus, our producer, what did you think of this one?

What did you think of the interview? >> Yeah, I thought it was awesome.

It was really fun to see the two different playbooks. My biggest takeaway is that this is a playbook that like still works

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today. And during the interview, you said like, "Oh, I used this to grow start story even, you know, long before what Aush was talking about." So, it was really cool to see like he only did it a few years ago and it's still something that anyone who built something can can try and do.

And it's like it's almost free, right? That's probably another

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thing I was thinking about is like this is free. It's just effort to post on Reddit.

It's just effort to write those blogs. >> I agree.

And I think one thing that he mentioned, he didn't go too deep into it, which I think is really important. The qualitative data you get from Reddit.

Posting on Reddit is not necessarily about how much traffic I got

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and how much revenue I got and how many paid customers signed up. It's about the engagement and the comments [music] and the feedback you get from real people.

he mentioned this which is Reddit is one of the last places where there are less bots and people will be honest with you

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and they'll have long discussions. There's so many interviews that we've done with people that they'll show me that first Reddit post they did and it had like 50 up votes.

It's not about this scalable strategy. Um and I think a lot of people go in thinking, "Okay, I'm going to make $10,000 from a Reddit post

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that I do." That's not what it's about. It's about getting feedback from users and talking to users and just getting a feel for is this product potentially something that could be validated and then taking that feedback and improving the product.

We didn't talk a whole lot about that, but I really think that if

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you go into Reddit thinking that I'm going to have million dollars overnight, that's the wrong way of thinking. >> Yeah, that's a really good way of saying and I think as you know someone like me who's more in like the early stages of like building stuff and sharing online, it feels like kind of scary, right?

To like put it out there. But at some point in the interview, he said like I think

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you asked him a question about that and he was just like basically you have to develop like thick skin, you know, when when you post on those kind of forums and like just know that you're going to get a little bit of hate, but in the long run he learned a lot from that and it helped him like you said. >> Yeah.

Yeah. So, I'd recommend just is exactly what you said is if you

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sometimes question putting yourself out there, Reddit is a great somewhat anonymous place for you to go out there and experience what it like it's like for someone to be, you know, pessimistic about your product or say it sucks or whatever. Even if it doesn't work as a channel or anything, I'd recommend anybody watching this to just go and try it to experience what it's like to get

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negative feedback on something that you created. Even if nothing else happens, that's a really important step in being a founder and [music] building stuff.

Okay, so that was a great interview. I think hopefully a lot of you guys liked it.

If you are looking to build your app in 2026, whether it's an iOS app, a SAS,

22:49

whatever it is, you should definitely check out Starter Story Build is our platform where within a couple weeks you will find an idea, you will build it with AI tools and you will launch a real product to the real world that is ready to take payments and make money. So check that out.

I'll put the link in the description for that. Otherwise, thank you for watching and we'll see you in

23:05

the next one. Peace.

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