I never in my wildest imaginations expect to get numbers like this. Meet Rob Hallam, a solo developer you've probably seen all over X in the last few months. But what you might not know about Rob is that he wasn't always successful. He failed for years until he discovered one platform that changed everything, X. I built this entire business through sharing my story on X. Rob simply started posting on X, sharing the wins, the losses, everything. And to his surprise, it turned into followers, users, sales, and ultimately a very successful SaaS business. I went viral first and then got the followers second. Rob might be one of the best minds when it comes to building in public, so I asked him to come onto the channel to break down his story and how he went from $0 to $12,000 a month building on X and posting content, and in this video, we'll dive into the insane opportunity of building in public right now. Rob's exact content system that he uses every day to grow on X and his step-by-step playbook on how to build in public and get thousands of followers if he had to start over from scratch today. Unlike what I thought was the case, it isn't about luck. This is one that you cannot miss. Let's dive in. I'm Pat Walls, and this is Starter Story. What's up, Rob? Welcome to the channel. Tell me about who you are, what you built, and what's your story? My name is Rob Hallam. I built SuperX, which is a platform that helps you grow on X the right way. I launched it publicly four months ago, and since then, we've gone from $1,000 to over $13,000 in monthly recurring revenue, now growing at 25% month over month. The crazy thing is, I built the entire business on X itself using SuperX to grow SuperX. I'm living proof this system works because I've gone from zero to over 34,000 followers just over a year, and that's the playbook building in public that I'm excited to share with you today. Rob, I'm super excited to talk about the build in public. You are one of the experts of build in public. I think I follow you on X. What you do is awesome. We're going to get all into that, but I do want to understand what is this business that you built? Is it a SaaS? Is it an app? Could you show me your business real quick and explain how it works? So SuperX is the only tool that helps you grow on X with Twitter the right way. We're the only platform that shows you which posts went viral, why they worked, and then helps you create versions to go viral yourself. We're doing $13,000 a month right now in monthly recurring revenue, entirely through $29 a month subscriptions. We have about 450 active subscribers right now. Okay, cool. Super cool business. A lot of people watching the channel want to see that this is a real business that's making over $10,000 a month. Could you show us some of the analytics, Stripe, or whatever you look at on a daily basis? So this is our Stripe dashboard. This is our MRR. The majority of it here, the rest is over 11 squeeze. We recently migrated. You can see our net volume since we migrated about a month ago. The majority of our revenue is through subscriptions. So our trial rate right now is around actually about 30%. This is adjusted because we recently migrated over from Stripe. We've got about 60 active trials right now and our churn is close to about 30% as well, but we're trying to get it down right now. Since I started using SuperX properly back in about April, you can see the majority of my impressions have started to skyrocket. And since then I've been able to keep about 100,000 impressions a day. And this is where 95% of the traffic and most of our users have come from. Since I started posting about two and a half years ago, I never in my wildest imaginations expect to get numbers like this. And it's only really happened since I started following the data before that. And I was posting randomly. I was getting, as you can see, completely inconsistent impressions. And now we're looking at about 100,000 impressions a day. All right, cool. Thank you for sharing all that, Rob, sharing all those metrics, being super transparent about that. I love that. We're going to get all into the build and public thing, but I do have to understand about your background. How do you get into building on X, building apps and making money with an app online? What's your backstory? I went through the traditional route my entire life. I studied hard at school, got a good degree, a good science from a good university. And then I became a software engineer. And that was until my first employer laid me off. And with that, I decided I was done with corporate. And that's what led me to start my journey on X back in early 2023. Over the next two and a half years, I built and launched five products that made in total a whopping $0. And while it sucked, they taught me three fundamental things. First, the distribution matters. Secondly, the monetization matters from day one. And thirdly, that you need to focus on building painkillers, not vitamins. But the biggest thing of all of it was that through sharing the hard times along with the winds, I built trust within our community. I posted every single struggle and failure that I had along the way. And that is what led me to the breakthrough. OK, so the breakthrough you mentioned, this is one of the big reasons why I wanted to bring you on the channel, Rob, is this whole idea of building in public. Obviously, you hadn't created the SaaS yet. SuperX didn't even exist at this point. What was that breakthrough? Tell me that story. What happened there? After I had these five failures, for me, money at that point was becoming this thing that was really, really scarce and I was getting really, really anxious. I literally hadn't made any money in over a year. So I made this post and it shared all of my failures and it blew up. It got about 150,000 views on X. And with that came one comment that said I should start a development agency using my skills. So with the momentum of the initial post, I immediately announced I was starting this development agency and I got my very, very first $3,000 client from that initial viral post. From there, it started to go really, really well. The wildest part of all of this was that all of these clients were coming through X inbound to my VMs, through my viral posts. I started to post more and more, trying to get more and more clients and drive more and more revenue. So when I started to get these viral posts, everything in my life kind of felt like it was clicking together because I felt like what I'd seen others do in the past on X was finally real and possible in hindsight. That vulnerability was what made it reach out to so many people because so many people feel this way too. But I had no process to create this content to drive in these clients. So I built one and soon enough I was using AI data and analytics to systematically create viral content on X. And through that, I was making the most money I've ever made in my entire life. And that is when I partnered with Tebow, who is the old co-founder of Tweethunter to build SuperX. He'd acquired the SuperX Chrome extension and I came on to build the SuperX web app with all of my ideas, merging the analytics and the process to build my dream X growth tool. OK, so you realize the power of build in public. You build this sort of dev agency around it, which is amazing. Most people would probably stop there and be like, wow, this is like amazing money. And this is awesome. I get to travel the world and do this, but that wasn't enough for you. You wanted to take it to the next level. So what happened next? At the end of 2024, I had a few things going on. So I had problems with the employee that I'd hired. I had a relationship that was breaking down and I realized that actually building products for other people was completely unfulfilling. In January 2025, I made this new year's resolution where I decided I'm going to start vlogging. That was then when I posted this post that a lot of people now know me for. I shared how filming in public was like. And this was while I was at the airport in Amsterdam, flying to Rio de Janeiro. And then when I landed in Rio de Janeiro, I opened my phone and this post had over a million views. And all of a sudden, this was like another breakthrough, another viral post. But the stale to which this went viral was beyond my craziest imaginations. And the timing of everything just made sense. I'd started vlogging. I closed down my agency and this was also when I was starting to build SuperX. But those first seven months in reality were absolutely brutal. I got hospitalized in Guatemala with food poisoning. A few months later, I got hospitalized again in Colombia and all the time X kept changing their API all the time. So that was causing stability issues in SuperX. And every day I'd open my inbox and see tens of messages saying that SuperX was down. But I kept building and I kept posting and I look back at this now and I realized that I was incredibly uncomfortably vulnerable at many, many times. But at the same time, if I wasn't as vulnerable as I have been, I don't think I would have built the audience. I don't think I would have grown my sass into the numbers that we're doing now. Nowadays with AI, there's so much slot content and people want to follow people. People want to follow stories. It's been this way always. So if you go on X and you share your story, your personality, honestly and vulnerably, that is how you build an audience in 2025. So those brutal seven months led up to the launch in July. I posted this very standard launch post that had a screen recording of what SuperX does, breakdown of what it does, etc. I got 32,000 views. And on top of that, it got 26 signups. So I set it down in front of my laptop. I took a selfie. I posted on X and that post got over 46,000 views, I think. The funniest thing was that although that post wasn't advertising what SuperX was, that post drove way more signups than the initial launch post did. And thanks to that post, we added $1,000 in monthly recurring revenue in just 24 hours. And I took that as a signal to just keep going. So I started using SuperX to grow SuperX. I used a systematic approach that I built into the product of SuperX to help grow us on X. I'd finally systemized my content strategy. I found what was going viral. It built it. I posted it with my personality. Then I doubled down on hits and I killed what didn't work. All of it's organically through the strategy that I just talked about. You don't need followers to start. You need consistency, a storyline and a system. Look, this strategy of building a public is not for everyone. But if you're willing to put yourself out there and embrace the cringe, the chances of you building a successful product, I think, are going to be a lot higher. If Rob's story resonates with you, well, I've got something special that I think you should check out. Inside Starter Story mode, we go over these 17 distribution channels that successful founders are using today. We source all this data from the hundreds of founders that we talk to through the YouTube channel and through Starter Story. And just one of these 17 distribution channels is building in public. And we have a bunch of modules on how to build in public. And I want to give you all that for free. So if you click the link in the description right there, you can access our entire build in public modules, going over not only Rob's, but other build in public strategies that are used by successful founders today and building actual real businesses, making real revenue. But this won't be free forever as as part of the larger Starter Story mode accelerator, if you've built stuff and you're ready to take it to the next level and focus on distribution and getting attention and building audience and getting customers, then you're definitely going to want to check this out. Just click the link below in the description. But again, it's not going to be free forever. All right, let's get back to the interview. All right, well, thanks for sharing that, Rob. I think that's amazing. That's one of the real reasons I want to bring you on the channel is that I genuinely think you are one of the best at building in public. I've been following you for a long time. So I think you have a lot to share and I'd love you to actually share a little bit more. And I know a lot of people watching this want to build in public. They want to grow their followers. They know that having an audience is really, really important in this age of AI. So my question to you would be if you had to start over right now with no audience, zero followers, what would be your step by step process to build an audience like you did? So step one is set your foundation before you post anything set up your profile with these three things, your profile photo, make something friendly, smile, but post your actual face and don't change it often because this is what people are going to associate with you. Then your bio, you want one clear sentence explaining what you're doing. And importantly, this is what a lot of people miss out is your pinned post. You want your goal or your elevator pitch. So in my case, it was left my job, left my home to live on savings and try and build my dream SAS 10k a month. You want that pinned at the top of your profile. This step is crucial. And this is why step one, when people see your content in the feed and they click on it and they go to your profile, they need to instantly understand what it is you're doing, what your story is in order for them to want to go and follow along. Step two is pick your goal and commit to it. What so many people try and do is just post on X, post without intention. You need to pick one specific goal and then document the process of working toward it daily. This gives you consistency because people forget you otherwise because the internet. It gives you a storyline because people follow stories. People follow journeys and it gives you authenticity because it gives you the opportunity to through the journey, share the ups and the downs and it builds trust like crazy. Step three is the content loop. This is the framework that I use that changed everything for me. And it's saying that your content should be four types, entertaining, educational, inspirational and convincing. So that's like selling your product. But the key is that you don't post them randomly. You post them with intention following this loop. Start with something entertaining. This is the viral post that you're going for. You want to post something funny, something relatable, maybe something vulnerable in the fun tool launch, something like that. This gets you engagement. This gets you warmed up in the algorithm. This gets you the attention. And then you follow up with the educational or the selling. Now that you have the attention, you want to teach something, give some free value or picture product, but importantly from a place of goodwill. So you say, for example, here's how you grow on X, with super X. And then the final part of the loop is to turn it inspirational. So at this point, probably got loads of views. Maybe you've got a few sales followers, take a screenshot of that, post it. That itself will potentially go viral. But importantly, if you want to have that impact, you want to share what it means to you. For example, this is why I left my job moments like this, make it worth it, but write it from the heart. You want people to root for your journey authentically. And then once you're at the end of the loop, rinse back to the start and repeat. This loop does three things. It builds trust through authenticity. It educates your audience so that they see the value that you bring and it sells without being annoying. Step four is systemize what works. This is kind of like my secret source, if you want to pull that. Don't guess what to post. Use data. Go to successful profiles in your niche. Analyze their top-performing posts. So I use the Suprex Chrome extension for this, but you can use whatever is comfortable. And then identify the concept. Importantly, the concept, not the actual post that worked. So you want to take that concept, not word for word, and then make it in your own style. A real example in my case was I used Suprex to analyze what was going viral in my niche. I found the cursor of the tweets and algorithm simulator were going viral. So I built this feature in Suprex. I personally dancing demos showing them off. And this worked. It was combining the proven viral concept with my personality. Step five, double down on what works and kill what doesn't. By this point, you're going to have some signal of what's working and what isn't. So you should be tracking every single post performance. And then you want to find your patterns. So what format works best for me? In my case, it was video for you. It might be something different. What style of posting resonates and then what topics engage. So in my case, it was feature releases and authentic moments. And then when you find what works, make more of it. Double down on what works because the algorithm rewards consistency. And then importantly, also, this is a part that a lot of people forget, kill what doesn't, even if it went viral. So in my case, algorithm simulator went viral, but I killed it from Suprex because there was a feature that most people didn't even use. Step six is build real connections. This is a crux of it all. So far, it feels very cold and calculated. But at the end of the day, you want to be building real connections like you build a real community in real life. I see a lot of my audience and followers as genuine friends and they are genuine friends. I've met up with them as I've been traveling through the world. Because the important thing is that growth isn't just through viral posts. You shouldn't just be chasing virality, assuming that you actually want to build something real. You need to build a community through intentional engagement. What most people do wrong is they focus on quantity. So they use AI to spam replies under hundreds of posts, which is a huge problem on X. They'll say generic comments like, so great. Oh, wow, great post. And at the end of the day, they get no real connections built. But what actually works is you want to find people in your niche, in your community that you genuinely want to connect with and make friends with and then reply with real value. Share your experience, share stories, ask thoughtful questions. And stay consistent with the same people, like building any friendship in real life. Show up daily, be yourself, not a robot. Finally, step seven, leverage what the platform wants. Right now, X is pushing video. I don't know what it will be in the future, but video works really well because it keeps people on the platform longer. They're watching your video, so videos get more reach. This does change over time, so you need to pay attention and adapt. For me, when I switch from text to video format, I got 10 times the reach of text posts. But the bottom line of all of this is that, unlike what I thought was the case, it isn't about luck. It's about building trust through consistent storytelling, systemizing variety through data and analytics. I'm focusing on building intentional, real friendships. If you do this, you won't need paid ads. All right, well, thank you for sharing that amazing playbook. That is truly amazing. And I really do believe that anybody can build in public. It's not going to happen overnight, but that was really great. So thanks for sharing that. I realize that we haven't really talked too much about the app that you've built. I think a lot of people watching might be curious about, like, how does this app even work? Would you be able to give me a little bit of a demo of SuperX and just show me what it does and how it works? When you first sign up to SuperX, you land on the inspiration page. This is where we have custom generated, daily inspiration. So none of these posts existed before. They were doing exactly what I said in my playbook. They take what's going viral right now, pull in your context and the concepts of the virality and make posts that will go viral for you. The real source of SuperX, of course, is the Chrome extension. So you can see here, I'm navigating to my profile. This works on any profile. You can see top posts easily like this, sort them by impression, likes, et cetera. It gives you real data insights. I can see the activities on estimate I'm earning through X. And here we can see Pats as well. So you can see that Pats put top posts of all time. We've got one here and over here. And then we can sort through his tweets really easily. And we can take the viral concepts from these tweets and go and send them into SuperX to help us actually write the content, schedule it. For the future, I am the most excited about is this feature that I just released, which is SuperX Engage, which helps you step by step reply to posts in your community from people who you're interested with. And this helps you actually craft those intentional connections that I was talking about. You can reply on the posts in X through SuperX, and you can track your replies all in one place. OK, thank you for sharing that super cool tool. I'm also curious on a somewhat different note is the tech stack behind this. You built all this yourself. What is your stack for building and then also marketing and how the business runs? My philosophy is you pick one stack, learn it deeply and ignore all of the noise because too many people spend way too much time nowadays chasing new technologies instead of just shipping. So my central stack is for development, I use Next.js, Node.js and Tailwind. For databases, I use SQLite. We use the X API, of course, which costs about two to three thousand dollars a month. We use OpenAI and Anthropics, Claude Sonner API, which costs about a thousand dollars a month. We use AWS for our servers, which is about two hundred dollars a month. Zillis Cloud for vectorized embeddings. This lets us do semantic similarity search on tweets that costs about two hundred dollars a month as well. For my personal AI system coding, I use Claude, that costs about two hundred dollars a month. I use Screen Studio for those headbanging demos that go viral. That costs about ten dollars a month. Then Framer for the landing page, which costs about ten dollars a month and Stripe for payments, which of course is free, but excluding fees and post-hoc for analytics, which I think is free. OK, cool. Thanks for sharing that super cool. The last question that we ask everyone who comes onto the channel, if you could go back in time to before you were building in public, maybe even before you had the SaaS, what would be your advice to young Rob or your advice for anyone that's watching this that wants to build SaaS and build in public like you? First thing I would say is breathe. Second, I would say is do things with intention, not with emotion. Figure out what you want, cut out all of the noise and then do an insane amount of volume with intention. Fundamentally, take care of yourself. And if you do all of these things, it's just a matter of time. Well, thanks for coming out of the channel, Rob. I think what you did is awesome. Thanks for sharing all the built in public sauce that you have. I think people are going to really enjoy this. If you like this video, if you're watching this, please leave a comment. If you want to see Rob, come back on the channel and go deeper into building public. I'd love to have him back on, but thanks for coming on, Rob. Appreciate it, Pat. Thank you. I want to thank Rob again for coming onto the channel. Look, I know that the whole built in public thing may not be the sexiest growth strategy in the world. I know that a lot of people watching this might be thinking, well, I don't really want to go and share everything about my life online. But if I were to give advice for someone who's just starting out, who wants to build something, build stuff online, this is the number one thing that I have people do. Share what you're doing online, document what you're doing and share your story in this age of AI, where any sort of app or video or AI slop, all this stuff can be created out of thin air. What's the thing that's actually going to last? Well, it's audience, it's distribution, it's real human connection. And for bootstrapers, people who are building side projects, people who are building stuff online, this may be one of the most important videos you ever watch. I love building public. It's something I've done for a really long time. I think this is a really important video and I hope you enjoyed it. If you're ready to build something, check out Starter Story Build. I'll put a link in the description for Starter Story Build, where you can come up with your idea, build it and launch it in just a matter of weeks. And then of course, focus on the distribution. All right, guys, thank you guys for watching it. That's it for this episode. I hope you enjoyed it. We'll see you in the next one. Peace.
