Meet Nick, a founder from Ukraine who built an app that solved his own problem. Your app should be the best one for one specific person. But what he didn't realize was that hundreds of other people felt the same way. I built something better, faster, and cheaper than the competition. So he built it in six weeks, launched it, and today this microSAS makes over $16,000 a month. I did a bunch of research and could not find a solution. Most founders try to build a tool for everyone, but Nick took a different approach. He picked one painfully specific niche and owned it completely. So I brought Nick onto the channel to break down his exact process for building a niche microSAS. And in this video, we'll dive into how he found an idea that ended up being a gold mine, why he decided to keep going, even when his launch generated $0.00. And his seven step framework for building a microSAS in 2026. This is one of my favorite SAS interviews that we've done, so you can't miss it. I'm Pat Walls, and this is Starter Story. Real quick, guys, before we get into the interview, Nick is an amazing example of someone who built a microSAS to solve a very, very tiny problem. You're going to learn all about why that's important and how he did it and how you can too. And if you watch this video and get inspired to build, then you should definitely check out Starter Story Build. I'll put a link in the description, but you can click that link and get started building your app right now. All right, let's get in the interview. All right, Nick, welcome to the channel. Stoke to have you here. Tell me about who you are, what you built, and what's your story. I'm Nick. I built a Pinterest marketing tool to scratch my own each, and I grew it to 16k MRR over the last two years. Today, I'm excited to share about my experience building this app and how I picked this niche market. I'm pumped to have you on. I really, really like this niche that you picked, and we're going to talk all about that. But before we do, can you share with me what you built, how much revenue you're making, and could you pull up your stripe and other dashboards to show us that this is legit? So Pinterest is like Google, but for images, there are more than 500 million active users on Pinterest, and they're actively looking for stuff. I built a Pinterest automation tool, which can create your Pinterest pins for your website. The person see them on Pinterest and goes to your website. Designing Pinterest pins manually takes like five to 10 minutes to design every single pin. And to grow on Pinterest, you probably need to have like five to 10 pins per day. So it accumulates pretty fast. And with blocked pin, you can create your whole schedule for months or two months in just like a few minutes. And it looks pretty good. We operate on a SAS model and people on the starter plan, they pay around 39 dollars a month. And if they want to scale, they either buy agency plan or enterprise plan. And regarding MRR, I'm a bit above 16k MRR. As you can see, I have more than 400 active subscribers. My chart is wrong. 10%. I also used to have Aluminum Squeezy as my payment provider. So I still have a few monthly recovery revenue there. And regarding my traffic, my traffic is pretty stable. 400, 300, 500, maybe it grew a bit in the last few months, but it's all very steady. And over the months, it compounds and grows into pretty sustainable business. I really like what you built. I think that's super cool. We're going to get on to it. But before we do, I want to understand about your background. How do you get into building apps? Do you have a developer background? How do you get here? I learned software engineering when I was 15. I actually got my first software engineer job as soon as I gradated from school. And I've always wanted to build a big corporate software background. I wanted to work in Google, like SpaceX, I don't know, big, big, those companies. Unfortunately, in 2022, in my home country, the world started, and it made my life much worse. I've had a long depression and understood that probably like corporate path is not a good one for me. But luckily, in like half a year, I found the Indie Hacker community and also I saw the ChargeGPT launch. And I understood that I can make pretty good money and have a pretty good life building the apps on my own. So I decided to write that AI wave. I created a few apps and they all failed. I made zero revenue. Then I tried something different. I decided to create an AI blog about my passion cocktails. I tried bringing traffic to that website where all the different possible methods. I tried Google, I tried Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, everything. And Pinterest worked the best for me. I've tried hiring the person to do the job there to create Pinterest pins. And I understood that I can probably automate it and make the first blog to pin version in around two months. That's awesome. I love that you had a bunch of failed ideas. Then you just said, screw it, I'm going to start blogging. You tried to grow that blog and then Pinterest work. And now you're here with a Pinterest SaaS. So that's super cool. We're going to get into how to find the right idea, which I think you might have some good ideas on. But before we do, let's talk about the build. You said you built this in less than two months. Can you walk me through that? I got this idea back in December 2023. I had a nine to five back then. So I was building on nights and weekends. I started building using GitHub Copilot back then. I didn't use cursor. Hot cogs didn't exist or some other fancy tools. Unfortunately, as I had a job and the goal was pretty complex and I was not that good. It took me around two months to finally get it done. I got a scrappy version built in seven days, but I couldn't make it to a real product and had to rewrite most of it. I launched with the Lifetime Deal because I didn't really expect anyone to buy it. However, I still had 1000 followers on Twitter, but then I saw my friends going viral with different launches. So I kind of hoped it would happen. But really nothing happened. I had to wait for my first paying customers for 10 days. I switched to the regular subscription model, improved the product, and in one month I slowly started getting first real customers. What I love about Nick's story is that he wasn't trying to build a product for everyone. He picked a specific niche and solved a real problem better than anyone else. But as Nick started landing more customers, he ran into something that every fast growing startup probably hits eventually. Compliance. If Nick wanted to sell his software anywhere in Europe, he would need to have proper GDPR compliance. And that's critical if you wanted to grow that market segment, but also incredibly distracting when all you want to do is just build cool stuff. Well, that's where Delve comes in, the sponsor for today's video. Delve is an AI native compliance platform built for teams that want to scale without slowing down. Their AI agents handle the repetitive, painful work like collecting evidence, taking screenshots, monitoring your tech stack, and auto-filling security questions so your team doesn't have to do it. They'll give you a clear list of exactly what to do so you're never in the dark. And unlike traditional compliance tools that feel like a black box, Delve isn't just software. Every customer gets a dedicated customer success manager and direct one-on-one support in Slack to answer questions about compliance with a platform. With Delve, you're getting the full audit solution and there's no need to hunt for an auditor or figure out who to trust. Because Delve works directly with a network of auditors who already know the platform, which dramatically speeds up the path to audit completion. Over 1000 fast-growing startups like Bland, Micro One, and WAP trust Delve to get compliant without slowing their momentum. And for starter story listeners, Delve is offering an exclusive discount on any compliance framework. If you're ready to get compliant without the headache, just check out Delve at the link in the description. Thank you, Delve, for sponsoring today's video. Let's get back to the episode. Super cool how fast you built this, even though maybe it didn't feel that fast for you and you had to start over, you still got it out there. I think what's interesting is that you launched and didn't really see the success that you wanted to see and it did take a little bit more time. So what changed from that launch to actually starting to get customers a little bit slowly? How did you grow this thing to now over $16,000 a month MRR? My three best marketing channels so far are Word of Mouse, Affiliates, with SEO, or ChargeGPT, and other like LLMs recommending me. I take a deep care about everyone using the app. I review screen recordings of what they do, when something happens with their account, or they don't see the growth of interest. I take a look at what happened, maybe they need to adjust their strategy. When they need any feature, I just build it in a few hours or days. And people really feel it when you care and they'd be extremely happy to share a word, recommend it to their friends, etc. And it becomes a snowball at some point where people just start using your app and you have no idea who they are. SEO and ChargeGPT are also very similar. I did a lot of grins in the beginning. I created all the articles, I reached out to influencers. I posted a lot on Reddit, etc. Getting all the backlinks is also a struggle. But at some point, people just keep coming to your website and buying on autopilot. That's the marketing I try to go for, kind of asymmetric one, where you do a lot of things in the beginning, you struggle a lot. But then as it goes further, you just keep getting customers on autopilot. There really was no hack to growing this thing, right? Just experiencing this pain in the beginning and doing a bunch of things possible. But now the customers just come naturally from word of mouth and you're mentioned in LLMs. There's no secret hack. And that shows me that you're building a really, really good business that solves a really, really core problem. And you sort of talked about that already. So what would be your advice for people to find a similar idea or a similar niche to build it? I just think it's important to build different stuff and you never know what your true idea will look like and just find what you love, try to solve these kind of problems. And then eventually in the process, you'll find something boring, something you'd be happy to pay someone money for and you'd be able to automate it with your own product. So for Block to Pin, I chose this market because I felt the pain myself. There was a tedious process where people were doing it over and over again. And now Block to Pin does it better, faster and cheaper. For anyone watching who may feel like they have that idea, or they have a place that they want to build in, they see a pretty good niche, what would be your playbook if you were starting over from scratch to know that it is worth it to go all in and build something in this space? What would you do if you had to start over and build a SaaS in 2026? The first step is find something people already do and something people already pay for. If you come up with a completely unique experience, people have never done before, it will be extremely hard to find customers, to find even someone to talk to, to sell it to someone, especially as an indie hacker. The second step is Google what already exists on the market. Research their G2 reviews, maybe Upsuma reviews, Captera, Ifdura and YouTube videos, watch every single one of them and understand what are the pain points, what people say they don't like about the tool, etc. Also review how your competitors use AI, it's possible that they don't automate anything using AI or it's not the core part of their product because it's hard for a big company to change their entire flow, eliminate 90% of complexity and make the app better. Based on your research, come up with requirements for your MVP. If you did your homework right, your MVP should be faster, cheaper and better for some specific niche, but you should have a clear picture of a person who benefits from your app. Your app should be the best for that specific person, it will be absolute disaster for everyone else. Step 3, Create MVP. With Cloudcode it can be done in one to weeks maximum. Step 4, you need to talk to ICP you pictured, find them wherever you can, Reddit, X, Gold or 3, record YouTube videos, TikToks, Reels, find some random Facebook groups, etc. If you did your job well, your ICP will be happy to try the app out because it's better than the competition, it's faster than the competition and it's cheaper than the competition, only an idiot will refuse it. In reality, you'd probably face issues. Maybe your understanding of ICP was wrong, in this case you need to adjust the app or adjust the ICP, maybe you can't reach your target customers or something else. I don't think it's possible to automate the step unless you are lucky. Personally, I'm not. It's impossible to hide here behind directory submissions or product hunt or viral X launch, you'd need to find a real human who'd benefit from what you created. Step 5, as you found that person, congratulations treat him as your employer. Review everything he did, ask for the feedback, if he has any suggestions implemented on the same day and your job is to make sure he's 100% disfied. Step 6, eventually as you do it for a few dozen people, your app will get better for your ICP, it will have a true value, those customers will become your fans, you'd understand where exactly they hang out, they'll recommend you to your friends etc. Step 7, at this point it's important to still keep working on your app and improving it by 1% every day, maybe improving the charm rate or the onboarding or the emails you've sent, everything you can. If you keep adding one paying customers every day and you have around 10% monthly charm, you'd have around 200 paying customers by the end of the year. If each one pays you $50, you'd have a 10,000 MRR business. I think it's feasible for almost any niche as long as you truly solve someone's problem. Thanks for sharing that playbook, that was amazing. I especially liked what you said about try to avoid hiding behind directory submissions and product launches and just try to help one person and solve their problem. I think that's really powerful. I'd love to see a demo of your app. Could you just show off what you've built? I think it'd be cool to see what you've built and how you built it. Yeah, so as soon as person signs up, I ask him to add a website, draw a few different options. I choose the first one. Now just add any website. It continue. Around a minute, I'll scan your website, understand what it's about and create a few Pinterest pins for you to take a look at. These are the images from my website. I can see them. I can make some changes if I want. And these are the kinds of pins which would work exceptionally well on Pinterest. Then the person can go to his onboarding as he's seen what app is capable of. He specifies different settings, how much pins he wants to pin, chooses for which specific pages he wants to create pins for, chooses which kind of Pinterest boards he wants to pin for. And then we kind of kick off the full pin generation one month in advance. In a few minutes, he'll have a schedule, something like that, when there are dozens of pins on each day and they all look different. They all look unique. They all are very SEO optimized for Pinterest. There are, of course, more to that. Person can also take a look at the analytics, look at what exact pins are working. So it's a lot more than just a dumb scheduler. But the very simple value for person is presented right away that he can get a lot of pins scheduled for him in a few minutes. Looks super cool. How did you build it? What text act do you use? I use Versaul to host my web app. I use Hatsnard to run scrapers and my server. I use Oxel apps for proxies. I use Gemini for AI text and Fela for generating AI images. And I use Sequencee for sending different emails and preventing charm. Thanks for sharing that. Last question. Let me ask everyone who comes on Starter Story. What would be your advice to young Nick before you found this idea? Or what would be your advice to anyone watching this that wants to build a successful micro sass like you have? Try different things out. And once you're ready, pick one niche, solve one specific pain point and stick with it for at least a few months. It doesn't mean you should just be building features in silence. Try different marketing angles, outreach to people on X, Reddit, email, record YouTube videos, do everything you can to reach out to your target audience and build features to stand out for them. Eventually, you'll find something that works and you just need to double down on that. Well, thanks Nick for coming on to the channel and sharing all this awesome story, awesome business. It's going to keep growing. I'm excited to see. So thanks for coming on and sharing everything. Thank you. What did you think about this one? Man, that was really awesome. When I first talked to him in the preparation for this interview, I was really blown away, I guess by like just how niche this tool is. It feels random. You know, I think that's probably when I was like crazy that this guy's making 16k a month with like a Pinterest blogging automation tool. I know of Pinterest automation tools from like seven years ago that were crushing it too. And it shows that, hey, sometimes these new ideas don't need to be crazy new concepts. Like he sort of mentioned it a little bit, but he said like, I just added like an AI element. I helped use like generative AI and now he's crushing it. It's easy to like underestimate tools that you don't use, but how big those actually are. And that's the thing too is like, you hear this, you may hear, oh, $16,000 a month. That's not as much as, you know, some guy that did an AI tool that's making 40, 50 million dollars a year. But this is a business that is going to go like this, like slowly grow and have lower churn because it's a mature market. You know that these Pinterest people have been there for 10 years and it's a totally proven thing. It's not like some AI tool that's a flash in the pan. It's going to die tomorrow. You can't really look at the MRR. You look at the growth and the churn, especially when you're looking at SaaS business like this, which is why I think this might be one of the most valuable interviews that we've done. If you are excited about building something similar, you want to take an old idea and put an AI spin on it. Well, the perfect place to do that is starter story build. You can click the link in the description right now and get started on your idea. It will help you find your idea, build your idea and get it in the hands of real users. Just like Nick said, it wasn't about hiding behind a product launch. It was about getting it in the hands of one user that was genuinely solving their problem. That's what starter story build is all about. So what are you waiting for? All right, guys, we'll see you in the next one. Peace.
