How I Make Money with Software Apps (as a vibe-coder) in 2026

What's going on, guys? This is Oliver, formerly from Response AI and a few other software tools that I've since exited and now running um a few different projects. Rosewell.dev, where I teach people how to code and make money from it, and papers.com, where I help people scale their content on social media with AI agents. So in this video I want to talk about the distribution operating system and specifically going from no customers um to actually making serious money with software and as a solo founder you do not have the luxury of money um at the start you don't have the luxury of a marketing department department and you do not have an SDR team to do cold calls for you all day etc right you are the VP of engineering the VP of sales you are the tech person you are the support person and this guide is your manual um for getting money in for your software and getting the first 100,000 you know 10,000 customers. So the first thing is that to grow as a solo founder you must fundamentally shift how you view social media platforms. So X Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, that kind of thing. They are not places for entertainment. They are just for you. They are just digital real estate. Right? I want you guys to do as best you can to not consume any more content from uh these platforms and instead only consider how you can input content to them to get money from it. Right? So your goal is to occupy as much visual space on these platforms as possible. So awareness is built in small relentless increments. Okay? So every post, every comment, every, you know, reply you do, that kind of thing, every single uh sort of thing that goes viral, even if you just reply to someone else's comment on someone else's post, it is a for sale sign on a digital plot of land. Okay? And if you post once a week, you're just a squatter. But if you post multiple times a day across multiple platforms, you are a landlord, right? So what matters is screen real estate. Text is cheap and easily scrolled past, but to truly occupy land, you must use visuals. So, images, infographics, screen recordings, that kind of thing, you know, try and stop their scroll. And if you can use a screen recording tool like Loom or just using, you know, the MacBook screen recording tool or just something free on Windows, a 10-second GIF or video of your tool solving a painful problem is worth 10 threads of writing. Okay, now [snorts] part one. Um, continued. You've got the content funnel. Okay? So, you have control over exactly one thing. The pixels that you push to the screen and your content needs to function as a funnel, not just a broadcast of what you guys are doing with your days, right? Every piece of content you produce must fall into one of three buckets, all driving traffic to your landing page, offer, or your weight list. So, obviously, what we've got is the self-fulfilling lead magnets. So, the most effective way to enter a market is with a Trojan horse. And this is a lead magnet, a free source, a free resource that naturally um leads the user to realize they need your paid tool. So, if you're selling a LinkedIn tool, do not just say, "Buy my LinkedIn tool or buy my thing that writes posts or buy my outreach thing." You create a PDF guide, the top 50 hooks that went viral on LinkedIn in 2025. the user downloads it to improve their writing and they immediately realize that manually typing these out is tedious and then your tool comes in. If you're selling a vibe coding tool or a design tool, release a pack of 50 best design prompts to make beautiful websites with um vibe coding. The user grabs the prompts, tries to use them, and realize that they need a better solution to execute them and then your SAS comes in. Part two, the ground game. Okay, so manual outreach. Before you automate, you must do things that do not scale. You need to feel the market rejection and acceptance personally. Okay? I use three distinct forms of outreach that consistently get me customers. So, protocol A is the Facebook group sniper. So, Facebook groups are considered dead by sort of big tech guys, right? Which this this makes them a gold mine for us because they're full of normal business owners looking for solutions. And you'll find that there are thousands of Facebook groups that are super niche for specific things, right? So you can find you can find a Facebook group about single moms who want to get, you know, um into knitting, right? So not just knitting Facebook groups, but specifically that demographic. And then it can go as granular as um you know um English single moms who are looking to get into knitting. It'll be called something like English sewing mumsite or something like that, right? So, they're full of normal business owners that are looking for things to buy. Now, join groups that are adjacent, like I said, to your problem. So, if you're building the LinkedIn tool, join LinkedIn growth playbook or B2B lead genen or copywriting secrets. Right? If you're building a sales AI or like [clears throat] a CRM or something like that, cold email masterclass, agency owners growth, whatever it may be. Now, the new member hack, go to the members tab of the group, filter by recently joined, and these people are currently active and looking for solutions. Then you just create some sort of um you know, feels illegal to refuse offer. So, free content, a free trial, you'll do the work for them for free, you'll show them how to do things. So with papers.com um what I'm doing is I'm saying look if you want 30 days of content written for you sign up for the trial and we'll do it together. The idea is that you are completely um skipping the possibility that they drop off on the on boarding that they don't understand your tool that kind of thing. You're just giving them the thing up front. Okay. when I ran um a uh a software that that gave you a list of leads um it gave you a list of like startups to um cold call and email like just a list of um you know like a database of leads I would say look I'll send you the first thousand for free and if that looks good then feel free to you know um hop in and pay the $200 for the other the rest of the 25,000 leads right the whole point here is that you're in this position where you've given them something that's super valuable for free and then it is just a taster of what the bigger thing is and ideally this something is extremely valuable. Now the execution use text blaze or a similar text expander right basically what you do is I create a macro for my pitch so I don't have to type it out every time. So instead of using automation that can get you banned, that kind of thing, I send 50 DMs on Facebook per day um so I don't get banned and I get I send them to the specific people inside these Facebook groups. And ideally the people inside the Facebook groups have a bio that says they are a founder, you know, CEO of X or Y. I don't just DM people who are just like random people because they might have joined the group by accident. They might not be business owners. They might just be looking around. They might be trying to pitch other people themselves. So you got to make sure that you are tech you know sort of like um asking people for um you know to sign up to your tool that are actually founders or doing stuff themselves. The routine I typically do is I wake up I send 25 in the morning and then I send 25 before sleep assuming I'm not out of the house or something like that. And the script is literally, "Hey, uh, Steve, excuse me. I saw that you just joined the Facebook group XYZ. I built a tool that helps you or automates with, you know, problem. I'm looking for beta testers to use it for free or I'm looking for people to sign up to the free trial, etc. Um, do you want in?" Now, in general then, obviously, we're back on the we're still on the community aspect, okay? We are joining communities and then we are mining for people who might need our tool. And part [clears throat] three is the dark arts of Reddit and social listening. So Reddit is the most hostile environment for marketers, right? Reddit, they Redditors smell self-promotion like shark smell blood, right? So if you post check out my tool, you'll be downvoted or even banned. Uh and it's really hard. If you [snorts] navigate it correctly, it is the highest converting traffic source on the internet. Okay? And you must become a chameleon. You you aren't a founder selling a product anymore. you are a community member sharing your journey. So the setup identifies you know identify five subreddits that are relevant to your niche. So mine would be SAS entrepreneur ride along side project vibe coding marketing sales that kind of thing. You join them and slowly for about a week you're going to have to um get karma. So what I do is I typically just comment on things and post things that kind of thing. Um but I don't create any of my like big posts. And crucially, set up your Reddit profile to be a funnel for your tools. So in my Reddit bio, it says, I'm the founder of paper schedule that helps people schedule stuff on social media, right? And the same thing applies to you guys. You put in the bio that you are doing X or Y and you are a person and every time you post an amazing post, you'll see that there's a lot of people coming to the page and then obviously from there, you'll see a lot of people attributed to Reddit um coming from your coming to your website. the content, right? You DM the commenters. So, don't just post. Look for high engagement posts in your niche and the people commenting on those posts are your leads. And you can DM them contextually. You can say, "Hey, I noticed that you commented on X or Y post. Here's what I can do to help." The Trojan horse post, write posts that speak from experience. Okay? So, don't say like how I built this tool. It's really good. You say how I grew my LinkedIn following to 10K in 30 days and then casually somewhere like literally five or six paragraphs down casually mention the tool you built to do it right and then only do it once because how it works is it's a prophecy. The people who actually read the entire thing are good leads and the people who read the entire thing will see the tiny mention of it at the end. The people who don't read the whole thing aren't going to be interested anyways. You need engaged readers who will find that tiny little tidbit at the end about your tool. Now part three um continued. So entertainment value. If you don't have a massive success story, you can storyt tell, right? So don't lie about revenue or experience. Fraud is a bad business, right? But frame your struggles and small wins as a narrative. So I built a tool to help me write and it got 100 users overnight. or um you know I posted I had um no engagement on X for 3 weeks and then I did this and got X result. People love an underdog. People love going from like 0 to 100 or 0ero to one. So make sure that you are talking about you know highs and lows and wins. Even if you lose customers you can talk about how you lost a customer and why. And then trend jacking. So create posts about trending topics in the subreddit. If everyone is talking about DeepSeek or everyone's talking about Claude 4.5, write a post comparing them, then subtly showcase how your tool integrates with them, that kind of thing. On top of that, there's the keyword sniper methodology, which is you can't be on Reddit 24/7 looking for people, right? So, you let robots do the watching for you. So, the tool is you sign up for F5 bot, which is totally free forever, and you input keywords related to your competitors and problem um problems in the space. An example is for a vibe coding tool, right? So like cursor, claude, Microsoft copilot, Gemini 3, Visual Studio, Open Code, whatever it may be, and I add them as keywords into F5 bot. Now, when F5bot emails you that someone mentioned a cursor alternative or open code or lovable on Reddit, then you jump in. So do not hard sell, right? Comment, I used cursor for a while, but I switched to my tool because of specific feature. Or for example, you can um if you were, you know, setting up a a CRM, you could um look for people mentioning Atio or HubSpot um or Pipe Drive and say, "Hi, I noticed you mentioned Pipe Drive. I was wondering if you'd like to try out my CRM tool and I can help you with the migration of all your data over to my CRM tool." On top of this, then you've got the video and analytics layer, right? you look at the search queries that bring people to your site or competitor sites or you just go on YouTube and type in your niche and you just filter by, you know, this year um or the last six months or whatever it may be and you just look for posts um on YouTube, so videos on YouTube that are doing well and have good engagement and then you just make your own versions of those um posts. [snorts] How I typically do this um is I transcribe YouTube videos and then I will ask um AI to rewrite this with um some extra sort of nuance or um additional ideas and then from there the plug is that the first line of your bio must be a direct link to your SAS. So very similar to how I'm doing now in my bio I have a link to my um book and I have a link to paper schedule. The call to action in the video says I use a tool called XYZ to do this and the link is in your description. So again, [snorts] I typically what I've done with paper um is I've created my own new YouTube channel, right? And all that's going to be is um is basically content about paper schedule because I don't want to flood this channel with with videos about it because it's not relevant to you guys. But the whole point is that I'm gonna have my own sort of breeding ground for leads on YouTube with a dedicated YouTube account for my SAS. And you should all do that. All of you guys should set up a SAS um related YouTube where it's literally called your name from tool. So mine is Ollie from paper. And then every single video you upload is relating back to your um relating back to your tool. Right? The whole point is that these won't get many views, but the whole point is they'll get views from the right people. So, I know boys and girls who are making 10K a month from YouTube videos that get 500 views because those 500 people might buy a a business course for 10 grand. So, if they get 500 views a video and they upload 20 a month, right? Let's say um that's 10,000 views and only one of them out of 10,000 people needs to buy your business course. Do you see how this works? In the same sense, if you upload a couple of videos that get 100 views each, that's 500 views, and you're telling me that if those videos aren't directly related to your tool, at least one person isn't going to try the tool. So, say with paper schedule, all of my videos are going to be about how to grow on X, how to grow on Reddit, how to grow on LinkedIn, right? When they look in the description, there's a literal tool that helps them do that. So if you are getting if for example you might go viral you might get let's say virality for a new account in this kind of space it could be a thousand views right 10,000 views you know heaven forbid 20,000 100,000 views about your SAS you are going to get a flood of people okay the same thing happens with my book if I get uh if I make a vibe coding video that gets say 10,000 views 50,000 views I literally get thousands of visitors to my book right and then hundreds of people buy the book because it is just um qualified traffic in that niche and in the video like I said you plug the tool subtly. Now the feedback loop you cannot improve what you don't measure. So you need to know if the user came from the Reddit DM you send the X thread the YouTube video whatever it may be. So there's a couple of tools to do this. You can use post hog which is free or datafast which is very cheap and it's privacy friendly easy to set up right the metric that matters is in page views or conversions you need to see that a user clicked the link on Reddit for example landed on the site clicked sign up and then paid and for example if Reddit is bringing thousands of visitors but no sales excuse me and X is bringing a 100red visitors and 10 double down on X stop posting on Reddit. Do you see what I mean? It's just about understanding the feedback loop of what is bringing you customers and then doubling down. I know for example that using DMs on X is currently not working very well. I've sent something like 2,000 and got say two trials, right? Comparatively a video where I sort of mentioned paper schedule um brought me five trials and three customers. the one video that's not even about my tool and you can literally see this in data fast attributed to uh YouTube. So that's what I recommend guys. Now after a few months of this grind, if your product has value if you've made a couple thousand dollars, whatever it may be, and you have revenue flowing through Stripe, Stripe will see that cash flow and they may offer you Stripe Capital, right? This is essentially a loan against your future revenue. And if the terms are good, because they're not always great, take it. And that's to fuel your growth, right? So they might give you $1,000 and say you have to pay back $1,400 and they take a percentage of your um you know of your uh conversion. So if you sell a plan for $50, they might take you know something like $10 or $10, whatever it may be. And the idea is that that's to fuel your growth without some predatory like credit card trick that you're running or something like that. So if the if the um terms are good uh you know like like people who are doing loans then you can use that to reinvest into ads. And then finally to talk about the paid ads the $10 a day experiment. You don't need $10,000 in budget. You need $10 a day. The creative is just a simple video recording of your tool. The copy is take the exact DM scripts and exposts that got the most replies and if they worked organically it will work with paid spend. So if you said, "Hey, I've built this tool that does X and Y and loads of people commented on it." Um, then it will work. And the platform run this on meta or X and you target lookalikes of current customers or interests related to your niche or influencers in that niche. And the goal is you are looking for a system where you put in $10 and get say $50 worth of trials or $15, whatever it may be. Once you find that, you scale the budget. And then finally, you're going to allocate a budget of $50 to $500 for getting links on high authority directories. So this boosts your SEO and puts you in front of early adopters. So Product Hunt is free. And on Product Hunt, you have to launch. Make sure you have like 10 or 20 friends from Twitter or whatever if you can or family members who have Product Hunt accounts to up, you know, upvote you when you do launch. And you should always upvote. So, you should always launch on one minute past midnight on a Wednesday because that's when it all resets. And on You Need, it's paid. Great for steady traffic. Micro launch is paid. And then there are hundreds of AI directories and software like launch platforms there um that I'm going to put in the description. And you can submit to as many as are free or as many as you can afford. And each one is a potential stream of users. And that is my video guys on how to make real money with software in 2026 as a vibe coder. Then any questions at all, let me know.