Every SaaS founder should grow their app like this. This is Ayush, 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. Ayush 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 Ayush to come onto the channel and break down his entire 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 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 SaaS. 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 to get your first 100 users 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. All right, let's get into the interview. All right, Ayush, welcome to the channel. Tell me about who you are, what you build and what's your story. Hey, my name is Ayush. I'm the co-founder of LFS. It's a simple AI Mac app that has gone from 0 to 150K error over the last three 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? What did you build? So yeah, 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. And you can create your own SuperBrain or knowledge basis out of them and then chat with them and then create content and reports and basic use for your own. We have three standard plans. We sell subscriptions monthly, annual and then we also sell lifetime deals. When you're doing downloadable apps, especially Mac apps, the customers expect a lifetime deal. They expect like a one-time payment thing. It's a mindset that they have. So we've stuck with lifetime deal since the beginning. We've gradually raised prices. I love you could show me just some of your dashboards. I just want to see like where's this revenue coming from? Could you pull up some of your Gumroad dashboard setup app dashboard to kind of show some of this? So we have four revenue channels, our own website, set up and Mac app store and iOS app store. We use Gumroad for for selling licenses. This is this year's data around 110K from here. We're also on set up. So yeah, this is our last couple of years that we've been on set up. We've done some revenue there. I can pull up the Mac app store around one and a half thousand. This is our website traffic. This is a plausible dashboard. We're getting around 180K visits 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 actually my business partner, Kumbhund was the one who started LFS back in 2022. And he hired me as a consultant. Right at the time, I just quit my job of my corporate job of 11 years. 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 in the first five or six months. And eventually we just stage where he invited me to join him as the co-founder and as the marketing guy. And then he asked me to go all in on LFS. And then he is the of course, the development guy, the coder person and I became the marketing person. And since then we've grown the product as a 2% team. Okay, cool. So you're the marketing guy. I love it. That's why I wanted to bring you on 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 just like to understand a high level overview of how you took LFS from zero to over $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 goldmine 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 days, we posted a lot on niche subreddits asking for feedback, showcasing the product, giving demos, which led to initial revenue customers. Those customers feedback from those customer insights from them eventually ended up shaping the product over time. We essentially use Reddit to go from zero to $3,000 in MRR within a period of six months. So Reddit is great initially, but eventually Reddit stops working. There are like diminishing returns to investing more of your time or effort on Reddit. So SEO is like the best organic marketing channel out there, especially if you're bootstrapping like us. This was back in 2023. ChatGPT was just launched. Google was still the primary way people searched for information. We actually started getting some organic traffic on one of our help articles. We wrote support articles for our initial customers to help them out with using the product. And those articles started getting traction from Google. We accidentally discovered SEO as a channel that we could go in. And over a 12 month period of 2023, we ended up making around $70,000 purely from Google only. So SEO essentially took us from 3K to where we are now. We are at around 12K per month that we're doing. So I think all of it worked 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 a sustainable, scalable way of getting high intent traffic. And if you're bootstrapping, you don't have a lot of ad dollars to spend, then SEO is the best way to go forward. So we're 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 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. This is a part of Starter Story Mode, 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 SEO playbook, I love this. It reminds me of what I did when I started Starter Story, which is just got 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 wondering, how can I get my first users from Reddit? I 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 this is like an example post, right? That did well for us. You know, the focus of the post is a video demo of the product, but you also want to wrap it around in a use case or a problem solution kind of a framing or a story kind of a framing. Right. 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. If you want to try, you can try it for 30 days for free. I'm just looking for feedback. You know, if I should improve this feature in any way, please give me an inputs. I think this works because this is not blatant set promotion. You're explaining the reasoning behind the feature that you've built. Reddit is a very smart audience. They hate marketers, they hate being sold to, but they do appreciate if you can explain the logic to them 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 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 it can do. Right. So for this post, we had just launched the super brain feature at that time and we had no idea whether this is something even useful. 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 feature, which is like a super brain feature that we have that thousands of people use today to index their documents and then chat with them and create content to them. After a while, mods started, 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 is now gone and yeah, 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? So yeah, so if I was starting out first, I'll make a list of all the subreddits where my ICP is hanging out every day, at least 15 subreddits. You use something like the map of Reddit, which is essentially like a free open source project. It's there on GitHub. You can, you know, enter yours one subreddit and you get to see essentially the map 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 5000 members is okay. You don't have to go after really big subreddits. Actually, smaller subreddits are sometimes better because their niche audiences, simpler rules, the mods are more forgiving. In fact, the mods want more content on the subreddit themselves. So that is step one, make a list 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 subreddit and add to the bottom. Add a link to your products. Say, you know, try it out for free for 30 days. We added UTM links to all the links that we are posting in subreddits to exactly, you know, which feature we are talking about, what date it is, what subreddit it is. So you post this on one subreddit, you analyze its performance and step three is basically tweaking the copy a bit and then repeating the same post 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 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 around Reddit. I hear this a lot of 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 got hate, but that's okay. I think you will get hit, you will get banned. And it's okay. Like maybe like you can create like multiple accounts if one of your accounts gets banned and you can have backups and burner accounts. But eventually I learned to deal with negativity. Like this is business we're doing here. I develop a thick skin, I would say. Okay. And then the other question that I have is what defines success on Reddit? Like when you see a post, how many upvotes, how much engagement are you looking to go viral? Or what was a successful post or marketing on Reddit look like? So there's no benchmark. Like we had posts that have like zero upvotes standard post would get 30, 40, 50 upwards. We had gone viral with 300, 400 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 mode? What is the vibe that you're getting about the product? Right? Especially when the product is very new, you really want to know what real authentic people think about you. And then that is something that only Reddit can give you. No other platform can give you like raw, honest thoughts from people the way Reddit can get you. And just for that, I think Reddit is worth it. It's posting on Reddit is worth it. Okay, cool. So the Reddit part is 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 were just, you know, we were getting initial customers. We were just writing helpful articles, support articles based on the questions that customers were getting. Right? So we wrote like an article on, you know, how to create open API keys. Right? It was a very simple article just has a bunch of screenshots, some links, you know, do this, do this, do this. We didn't realize we ranked for this word number one on Google for six to eight 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 is not a very high intent audience from these kinds of articles. But we got a lot of traffic and we got a lot of insights on what are the future topics that we could write about to get more high intent audiences. And then that's when we discovered that, oh, we can actually go and do keyword research and then find new keywords to write more articles on and then start getting organic traffic in. So you kind of created this article, even though it doesn't, it really has to do with creating API keys, which doesn't have much to do with Al of us. So it was sort of an accident when you created this. But then I'm guessing you saw that, you know, whoa, 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 know, really drives customer signups? So yeah, 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. Essentially, it is a listicle where we're highlighting all the best apps that were being built at the time around chat GPT. And yeah, we were number one there. And we got a lot of high intent traffic and conversions from this article itself. We are getting a lot of AI traffic as well from here, chat GPT, cloud, publicity, all the AI answer engines basically 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 directly buying very quickly. Okay, cool. Well, thanks for sharing that. I want to dive a little deeper into the SEO thing. Cause again, yeah, it is kind of a buzzword. There's a lot 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 as a 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? I think the very first thing, know your exact positioning in the market, like where do you lie? How does the customer look at the market and where do you fit in? Like for us, that was like chat GPT Mac apps. Right. So there are a bunch of chat GPT ads. There was a smaller market was of chat GPT Mac apps. And within those, there were like a small niche of products that people could buy. So know your positioning, right? Once you know that, then it becomes easier to do keyword research because now you're thinking as the customer and you're trying to imagine what would your ICP would, you know, search on Google or what would they type into a chat GPT or you can use something like Ahrefs 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 Ahrefs, like have a filter, you know, anything with keyword difficulty of less than 20 and a search volume of greater than 500 is like a very good combination of parameters. Especially if you are like a new website, you don't have a 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 and low competition keywords. This is what I used to do. I used to buy Ahrefs. It was $129. There's 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 like two or three blog posts a week and eventually you can 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 a CEO 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 and make like a scaffold 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 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 personal insights, your user data, your market intelligence that you have and you're adding new information to the Internet. You're not just regurgitating what the Internet already has. I think as long as you can do that, you will win with SEO. Okay, cool. Well, thanks for sharing that SEO playbook. Want to switch topics 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 Eliphaz and how it works? Essentially, it's like a knowledge base app where if you have a lot of documents, a lot of files locally on your computer, you can create your own personal GPTs out of them. We also have like an offline version. So it's like a hundred foot. You can turn off the Wi-Fi download offline open source models and then use those for using. But I just give like a brief demo. I created like a brain. We call them super brains, essentially knowledge bases. You can add all sorts of files and folders. I just added like one file here, which is like the deep work. I like to refer to it often. Basically, 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 document that you have added here in this particular brain 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 chat GPT or Claude might hallucinate or come up with new content. But Eliphaz always comes with answers from your own data. And you can add all types of integrations, files, YouTube videos, web pages, even have an Apple Notes integration. So we have a lot of people who use Apple Notes as a second brain and they would just, you know, hook it up with Eliphaz and then just get to, you know, chat with it and then use it to understand their own notes and then use it for their work. Thanks for showing 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 and hosting and those sorts of things and walk through all that? I think Claude code is probably the number one tool. I told that everyone should be using right now. It does so much for just $100 a month. You use it both for development as well as for marketing. Eliphaz is a native Mac app, so it's built with Swift. For marketing, we use the AXS. It's one of our top tools. 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, you know, do keyword research for a quarter or four months. And then, yeah, we use Neuron Writer to do pre-published checks on our blog posts. Right? It's like a tool where you can enter a blog post and see how it compares before publishing. Right? So that's very useful. Use the map of Reddit to research Reddit and find new subreddits to go after. Use the N8N. If someone mentions Eliphaz on Reddit or other social platforms, we know and we can go and comment and reply there. We use ClickUp inside the team to manage all our work. We use Discord for the team communication as well as we have a very thriving community of our users. Right? So that community lives on our Discord channel and we get feedback and feature requests every day there. We use SuperBlock for hosting, Mailerite for email marketing, plausible for website analytics. And of course, Google Search Console is free tool from Google for SEO. Last question that we ask everyone who comes on the channel, if you could stand on young Aiyush's shoulders before you started this, before you quit your job, what would be your advice to anyone watching this who wants to build stuff like you? Put more buy buttons on the internet. Right? Anything lots of people build something in silence for six months, have a waitlist or a free sign up. Right? And they think that, you know, automatically, you know, build it and 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 learning and growth that can happen from a buy button is unlike anything else. It will not learn from a marketing book or a course or a sales book or a course. Right? Because when you publish something online, your product, your work, that's when you learn, like when people look at it, do they flinch at you? Do they ignore you or do they swipe their card and pay for you to what you've built? To get to that place, you have to fail a lot. So both me and come on my business partner combined, we have like 30 plus failed projects before this. My advice for anyone is, you know, 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. See which few ideas are working, which are making, getting most traction, which are getting most revenue and then double down on the ones that work. Well, that's great advice. Thanks, Aiyush. That was super awesome. Reddit, SEO, Playbook and all that was amazing. So thanks for coming on and sharing everything. If you enjoyed this, please put a comment down there below and Aiyush will maybe be able to answer some of your questions. Thanks for coming on. Happy to answer. Thanks a lot for having me, Pak. 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 today. During the interview, you said like, oh, I used this to grow Starry Story even long before what Aiyush 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 try and do. And it's like, it's almost free, right? That's probably another 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 and how much revenue I got and how many paid customers signed up. It's about the engagement and the comments 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 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 upvotes. It's not about this scalable strategy. And I think a lot of people go in thinking, okay, I'm going to make $10,000 from a Reddit post 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 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 it. And I think as someone like me who's more in the early stages of building stuff and sharing online, it feels like kind of scary to put it out there. But at some point in the interview, he said, I think you asked him a question about that. And he was just like, basically, you have to develop thick skin when you post on those kind of forums and just know that you're going to get a little bit of hate. But in the long run, he learned a lot from that. Yeah. And it helped him. Like you said. Yeah. So I'd recommend just as exactly what you said is if you sometimes question putting yourself out there, Reddit is a great, somewhat anonymous place for you to go out there and experience what it's like for someone to be 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 negative feedback on something that you created. Even if nothing else happens, that's a really important step in being a founder and building stuff. Okay. So that was a great interview. I think hopefully a lot of you guys liked it. If you're looking to build your app in 2026, whether it's an iOS app, a SaaS, whatever it is, you should definitely check out Starter Story Build. It is our platform where within a couple of 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 the next one.
