When the tax year ends on the 5th of April, valuable tax allowances may be lost simply because people left things too late. Thankfully, Vanguard is here to help you make well-considered decisions, not rushed ones. Their tax year-end hub is full of clear guidance, helpful tools and timely reminders to help you understand your allowances and give your investments the best chance to grow. Search Vanguard Investor to learn more. When investing, your capital is at risk. Tax rules apply. My name's Gil and I vibe coded an AI app that makes over $30,000 a month. Meet Gil, a developer who built ASAS to $30,000 a month thanks to one simple strategy. Which was, I think, the key thing that made this successful. Instead of spending months building and then finding customers, Gil took a very different route. And I made my first $20,000 before the idea was even built. I brought Gil onto the channel and he shared everything, including how he came up with a $30,000 per month SaaS idea in an industry he knew nothing about, how he built up hype for an app that didn't exist, and the playbook for how anyone can do this starting over from scratch right now. This is one that you cannot miss. I'm Pat Walls and this is Starter Story. Okay, Gil, welcome to the channel. Tell me about who you are, what you built and what's your story. Thanks for having me, Pat. My name's Gil and I vibe coded an AI app that makes over $30,000 a month. Subscriber is an AI script writing tool for YouTube creators. It was profitable from day one and 18 months later, I have over 4,000 customers. We have a SaaS subscription model. We have plans anywhere from $49 to $300 a month. Okay, cool. This business is awesome. Can you give me a little bit more numbers behind the business and how it's doing? The amount of revenue every month varies, but typically it's around $30,000 a month and that's in subscription revenue. And in total in the past year, I've done over $700,000 in sales. So we've got over 4,000 customers today. We acquire those customers through a word of mouth, social media. And a big part of that is actually our programmatic SEO campaigns where we bring in over 30,000 views a month just from Google. Before we get into how you built this, how you grew this, I want to get a little bit more on your background. How do you get to the point where you even start a SaaS business like this? Well, I started my first SaaS actually when I was a teenager. I started coding when I was 15. And by the time I got to college, I was already working out in the field doing freelance software development. And so I actually dropped out of college pretty early and was doing that for several years. After that, I was a victim of Hurricane Katrina. Kind of had to start over. And so I moved to New York City. I co-founded a company called Squidoo, which was a social publishing platform. We grew that to over $10 million in revenue. After Squidoo was acquired, I moved on to consulting for a while. Then I got the itch to start something new. You know, as a startup founder, got into the cryptocurrency space. There was really no quick books for crypto. There was no accounting solution for businesses that are using crypto. So we dove into that. We were one of the first solutions on the market. We raised millions of dollars from VCs. And then we actually ended up selling that company too. OK, so you're in this VC world. You work on and sell multiple companies. How do you decide to go the bootstrap route and how do you come up with an idea that eventually makes $30,000 a month? Well, there's nothing wrong with the VC backed route. But after selling that last company, I was really excited for a change. I started posting videos on YouTube talking about my ideas for what kind of company I would want to start next. At the same time, I was getting more into YouTube itself and getting into this idea of faceless YouTube channels where you can create channels on the back end. So I started putting together a team. I quickly realized that script writing is this huge bottleneck. It's actually really hard to find good script writers, even though we sort of know what a good YouTube script looks like. I tried using chat GPT and I saw that it was nowhere near good enough to, you know, write the kind of script that I wanted to see. But I made a bet that if I took all of my experience as an entrepreneur and as a software developer that I could build a solution that actually worked. OK, cool. Well, I think that's super interesting that you actually attempted to build a business in an industry that you really didn't know all that much about. And that's one of the reasons why I wanted to bring you on the channel is you had this interesting strategy on how to validate an idea that maybe you weren't fully deep into. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? I did what anyone would do. I signed up for X. I opened up a brand new account with zero followers and I started following everyone in the YouTube space. From there, I, you know, started finding opportunities to create things of value for people in that space using my skill set as a software engineer. So I started putting together little pieces of content and I would put it out there using viral giveaways on on X. And from there, I was able to build up an email list of over a thousand people, you know, every week or so. I would just hit hit up this list with new findings that I had. And in the background, I would reach out to each person individually to talk to them about this idea for this app that I wanted to build. So I was getting feedback on this idea. And when I realized I had something, I knew it was time to monetize it. So I mocked up this idea and I then knew I needed to get validation on it. So I set up a presale. The presale was 50 licenses of the software that are basically lifetime subscriptions to it. And it was at kind of an absurdly low price. I figured if I could sell these, that it was validation that this is actually a product that people would want to buy. The first 10 licenses were super, super cheap. And then every 10 after that went up. So there was a little bit of FOMO for those early adopters. Pretty quickly, it sold out, I think, within two or three days. And I made my first $20,000 before the idea was even built. Now there was one catch. And that catch is that I told people at any point in time, you can ask for your money back. I'm going to deliver this product to you in 60 days. And after that, you'll have two weeks to continue trying it and ask for your money back. So if I didn't get this right, all that money that I worked for would be lost. And I had 60 days to just put my head down and make the thing happen. What I love about Gil's story is that he didn't spend months building something that nobody wanted. He validated demand, got the customers, and then he built the app. I think this mindset is the shift that separates winners from everybody else building stuff right now. If you learn how to harness AI, once you have your idea, you can build it really fast, sometimes in just a couple of weeks or even a couple of days. And this is exactly what we teach inside Starter Story Build. Inside Starter Story Build, you'll find our bootcamp where we will show you how to find an idea, how to build it and how to launch it all with just AI. We've had thousands of people already go through our programs and launch their first, second, and sometimes even third apps. It is so cool to see these projects come to life and see how AI is helping people do this even faster. Our next bootcamp starts this week. So if you are ready to get off the sidelines and you are ready to build, just head to that first link right down there in the description to check out Starter Story Build and everything we do to help you build and launch your next big thing. All right, let's get back to the video. I think that's really important that you mentioned there, that final catch, what you didn't really mention right until the end, which is you actually hadn't built the product yet. This is why I wanted to bring on the channel because I think this is so genius. Can you break this down a little bit more about why this works and why you did this? The curse of being a software developer is that it's so easy to fall in love with an idea. And I've done this so many times before. Too often we just get excited about that invention without making sure that it's actually like a painkiller. So as an entrepreneur, we always want to be selling a painkiller, not a vitamin. A vitamin is a nice to have. A painkiller is something you have to have and it's going to sell a lot better. The traditional advice with startups is to go and talk to your friends and say, what do you think about this idea? Give me feedback. Maybe the next level of advice would be to say, how much would you pay for this tool if it existed? I actually think that that feedback is not good enough. In fact, it's actually quite dangerous because it lets you think you have validation. So you go in a hole for three months or however long it takes to build this thing and then you pop up for air and you say, Hey guys, it's ready. And the problem with that approach, they say, you know, I would be willing to pay $20 a month if I didn't have this other subscription or I would be willing to pay once I get this check in from my old company. And I've seen this happen so many times. So the only way to really get validation is to collect money from people. And the faster you can get to that, the more likely it is that your startup is going to succeed. Okay, that's amazing. I think it's one of the best pieces of advice for anybody bootstrapping anything with their own cash. What I really want to get from you, and I think a lot of people watching this would be wondering if you were to give advice to someone watching right now on how to do that, what would be your exact playbook if you had to start over from scratch today? Well, step one is you have to build an audience because if you don't have an audience, you don't have anyone to sell to people buy because they trust you. And especially today, when it's so easy to create products that there's a million products out there, people buy based on believing in a brand or a person post the raw, you know, building public type stories of you with your thought process and what you're doing. And that will help establish trust with people. The way I did that was just by putting out free things of value that took me time to create, but I knew would be helpful to other people. In addition to just showing up and being really authentic about who I was and why I was there, that alone can get you an audience of people that trust you and are engaged with you. And that really is the first step. Step two is you've got to set up an email list and start communicating with people at least once a week. So while your social media can be a great way to kind of interact with new people, your email list is really where you're building that trust. And what's cool is that when you start emailing people, they will email you back and you start this dialogue and you can start to talk to them about your idea. You can even use your email list to put out your ideas, get the replies back as your feedback on how to improve your idea. Show up, do that weekly because when it's time to hit up that email list in order to, you know, start your pre-sale, you're going to need that level of engagement. So step three is you've got to do the math on what validation would look like for you. In my case, I knew I needed to make about $20,000 to fund, let's say, three months of my life in order to work on this thing. And so I worked out how many people I would need based on my target price point of what I thought this type of customer would pay. And that led me to 50 people to buy. And so then I worked out the math of how big does my email list need to be in order to potentially get 50 buyers. And so I thought about conversion rates, you know, it's obviously going to depend. But that gives you a very scientific way of understanding, you know, what kind of audience that you need to build before you're ready to start this pre-sale. Step four is we're ready to do the pre-sale. Now you've got to get aggressive about this because there's no one who's going to be excited about your product unless you make them excited. So you've got to set up an email sequence every single day for seven days. Start teasing out the benefits of this product that you're building. And yes, you can talk about features too, but it's really about the benefits for them, really get emotional and talk about how this benefit is going to impact their life. And the more that you can do this, the more likely it is that people are going to convert. And towards that last day, really start hitting home this concept of the pre-sale that's launching. Do not give any details away yet. Just give a date on the launch day. You've got to have several emails queued up so people know exactly when it's going live. You've got to have reminders when the pre-sale is about to end. And you've got to be firing on all cylinders on all of your social media channels. You've got to be really visible during that time. And if you work really, really hard and engage with people, it's an incredible thing when you actually pull off a pre-sale like that. So a key part of the pre-sale is to have an offer so good that people can't help it. Let's say yes. And if you follow Alex Hormozzi's 100 million dollar offers, he talks about this a ton. For me, for the first 10 customers, might have not even been profitable, but I knew it was something that people would say yes to. I also wanted to give people total security and comfort in their purchase. So the way that I did that was by offering a money back guarantee. So the entire time in between when the pre-sale happened and when the product was delivered, they could ask for their money back. People had the confidence in knowing that they could get their money back, especially for someone who's new in the space. They were able to go ahead and make that purchasing decision. So for whatever your project is, think of an offer so good that people can't help but to say yes. Well, I mean, that's awesome. Thanks for sharing that. I want to switch topics a little bit to tech stack. I understand that you vibe coded this SaaS app. Can you share the actual tech stack that you use to build this and what you use to build this app? I use cloud code. Probably 90% of my code is written with cloud code. I keep it super simple. I'm using a Laravel app, which is a really excellent PHP framework that's got tons of great support. And I'm just hosting that on digital ocean. But I would say in general that, you know, I'm not reliant on a ton of external services, but besides the AI model providers, and it's just a pretty chill setup that I've really been enjoying. So in terms of the cost to run the business, the biggest thing is definitely AI compute. Today, I'm probably spending about $3,500 a month just on the AI compute. And that's coming from a bunch of different model providers. I'm spending about $2,000 a month on ads. And I have another $1,500 a month and other things like web scraping, hosting and sending emails to my users. OK, awesome. Thank you for sharing that being so transparent about the numbers. The last question that I have for you that we ask all founders who come onto Starter Story, if you could stand on young Gills shoulders. When you officially started the bootstrap business, what would be your advice and what would be your advice to anyone watching this right now? Well, the first thing is you cannot fall in love with your idea without validating it by doing some sort of presale, validating that people are willing to pay for it. The second thing is as a bootstrapper, the number one thing that you've got to strive for is profit. There are many decisions you could make as money starts to come in that could creep into your profit, whether that's hiring expensive agencies who promise the world to you or whether that's going off in a completely different product direction. Focus on generating profit from your business and then everything else will be good. It's better to have profit than growth. I think if you're in the bootstrap game, I love it. One final question that I want to ask you one word answer. You've built VC businesses. You built bootstrap businesses like this. What's more fun bootstrapping for sure? Love it. All right. Thank you, Gil for coming on. I love the business that you built. Thank you for sharing all this. I think it's an amazing way of approaching building something. So I hope people enjoying it are watching. Thanks for coming on. Awesome. Thank you, Pat. All right. I want to thank Gil for coming onto the channel and sharing all that. I think what he shared is one of the most important things you can do if you suffer from a little bit of the builders disease. For some people, coding and building is really, really fun. And the scary part is going out, building some audience, getting in front of customers. But unfortunately, that is what you need to do in 2025. If you want to actually build something. This is exactly why we launched Starter Story Build. In Starter Story Build, we will help you take your idea and turn it into a real app using only AI tools in just a couple of weeks. Why? Because you don't want to focus on the build for too long. It's way more important to build a build quickly so you can focus on getting customers, building distribution and making sales. So if you are ready to get off the sidelines, launch something, build it, get in front of the real world, then head to the link in the description to check out Starter Story Build. All right. That's it for this episode. Hope you guys enjoyed it. I'll see you in the next one. Peace.
