How This $250K/Month SaaS Got Its First 100 Users (Steal This Playbook)

I've now scaled two separate products to over 3 million in annual recurring revenue. This is Joseph and his SAS makes over $250,000 a month. But this episode is not how to go viral on Tik Tok or get millions of downloads. Nope. This video is about a foolproof way to get your first 100 paying SAS customers. Because if you can get 100, you can get thousands. When it comes to the first 100 customers, capture the lowhanging fruits. I brought Joseph onto the channel to break down his exact steps to go from zero to 100 customers fast. And in this episode, we'll dive into what you can do in the next hour to rank on search engines, why trolling subreddits can actually turn into a million-dollar business, and the exact playbook that you can follow if you're starting over with a new SAS in 2026. If you're building anything in SAS right now, well, this is an episode you cannot miss. All right, let's get into it. I'm Pat Walls and this is Starter Story. All right, Joseph, welcome to the channel. Tell me about who you are, what you built, and what's your story. Thanks for having me, Pat. I'm Joe. Joseph, I've now scaled two separate products to over three million in annual recurring revenue. And I'm currently building a company called Super Demo, an AI powered demo automation tool that helps companies create better, more exceptional product demos in minutes instead of hours. We launched Super Demo around 2 and 1/2 years ago now. And in that time, we've gone from zero to 150,000 plus users, over 3 million in annual recurring revenue. And your name G2's number five fastest growing product in 2025. All right. Before we get into how you built the SAS and how you got all these customers, I want to understand what this product is. Is it a SAS? What does it do? Can you explain that? It helps companies create interactive demos which are kind of guided, clickable, realistic versions of your product that can be embedded anywhere on the web, whether it's on your website or in your documentation. This is an example of a super demo in action. And as you can see, it looks and feels just like your actual product because it's a clone of your product, but it allows people to experience your aha moment and what your product does without having to sign up for a plan or talk to a salesperson. We are a productled growth SAS company. So most of our traffic actually does come from our starter or premium tier. And we look at that as our number one engine for growth, but as you can see here, if I go back into the metrics tab, here's our AR. It's slightly over 3 million. You see the number of demos. Uh, currently we're doing just over 250K in MR and we are growing every month. So it's a pretty exciting time to be around. Thanks for showing that. I'm really excited to talk about building a SAS, getting your first users as a SAS, especially in B2B. I'm excited. But before we do, I want to understand a little bit more about your background. How do you even get to the point where you have this SAS that's making multi-million dollars per year? I've always growing up been a builder by heart. I started my first projects and businesses at the age of 14 and 15. Not because I wanted to be a founder, but I was so enamored with the process of building. That started with me buying and selling electronics on Craigslist. I started an organic soy candle business. I also started a clothing company, digital agency, all the way to running my first venture-funded company in college where we built a B2B seafood marketplace. I think throughout all of those endeavors, one constant problem that I ran into over and over again was it's really difficult to demonstrate the value of your product, the benefits, and after doing a lot of video recordings, a lot of looms, having it constantly be out of date and not just watched by the buyers themselves. I figured there had to be a better way. And it was one of those ideas that I kept in my back pocket. And when I left that company, kind of came back to the drawing board, this was the one I settled on. Going off the topic a little bit, obviously this is a huge business now. It's doing multi-millions in revenue. What did that first early validation look like? Was it just good to go right when you first built it or what did that early days look like? The number one thing is I knew that this was a problem that I had as a business builder having built businesses for a long time. And the next step was do other people face the same concerns and what are they doing as a workaround to try to solve that problem. So I ended up talking to probably a 100 plus founders that were working in the B2B SAS industry and I think the unifying concern was yes this was a really painful problem. People hated creating product demos. People hated the sound of their own voice and that's when I realized hey there's something to run with here. Let's build the one of an experiment where we could see hey can we sell this thing? Are people willing to pay? Okay cool. So, you had this idea, you know, it might be a good problem to solve. And one of the reasons why I wanted to bring you on the channel is you had an interesting strategy on how to get your first hundred customers in a SAS. That's so important. If you can find a 100 people that want to use and pay for your product, you're pretty much set. Everything should hopefully keep growing after that. So, I want to dive into the actual playbook. If you were to start over today, how would you go about it right now to get those first 100 customers? So I would say when it comes to the first 100 customers, I'd go back to my first step of the playbook, which is the lowhanging fruit, capturing the obvious demand first. So what we did early on is we focused on people that were already searching for a solution. What that meant was crafting valuable content and using that as the main engine across the whole funnel. So we ended up creating SEO pieces at the top, middle as well as the bottom of the funnel. And in practice, what that meant in the bottom of funnel is detailed comparison pages pitting Super Demo against our competitors. And when I mean competitors, I mean every competitor that you can find in your space because that's the easiest way to piggyback off of their traffic. And we use that to quickly establish an imperfect but live version 1.0 of pages that would get us ranked and mentioned in LLM early on in the market. figuring out which competitor pages are actually being cited and picking up traction and those are the ones that we would go in and optimize. Then it was all about going to the midfunnel people that are a little bit higher intent. What we ended up doing is we created dozens and dozens of free tools in adjacent spaces like screenshots, SOPs. Our twist here was instead of back then when we built these tools, we didn't have cloud code. We made our entire product experience ungated. So people didn't have to sign up for an account or set up a free trial. They could access certain areas or sections of our product that would let people take screenshots or create tutorials. The end result here, customers would land on the page and quickly find value. Today, I think these free tools bring in roughly 20% of all of our traffic and converts like 15 to 20% of all visitors into signup. What I love about Joseph's strategy is that it's not sexy. It's the stuff that actually works if you want to build a successful business. So, if you have an idea, but you're still a little stuck on how to turn it into something real, stop building in the dark. Something that Joseph talked about was launching parts of his app for free. I call this free tool marketing, and it's one of the eight strategies I wrote about in my million-dollar MVP guide. You can download this guide for free right now. And inside you will get actionable approaches ranked by how fast you can ship them, over 10 case studies of founders who use these exact methods to hit over a million dollars, and the validation framework you can use so you don't waste months building a product nobody wants. Look, this stuff isn't made up. This is all the stuff that I see from founders who come on this channel who built successful businesses. And I put it all in one place for you to check out. This is the exact road map I would use to validate my idea and start building in 2026. So, click the link in the description to grab the $1 million MVP guide for free. Now, back to the episode. Finally, on the top of funnel, what we ended up doing is we created step-by-step interactive demos using Super Demo of thousands of different workflows and keywords. And we would create SEO focused again programmatic pages with super demos embedded. how to export Figma to PDF or how to merge cells on Excel. And our bet was by solving their question in an interactive and engaging way and putting our product front and center enough of them would be within our ICP to say, "Hey, this is really cool." For step two of our playbook, it was all about, as cliche as it sounds, doing things that don't scale to remove friction for buyers. So, I personally offered to create free super demo for founders on Reddit as well as indie hackers. And what I asked them to do is post their product URL. I would take that and I would actually go ahead and create the super demo of their product for them. Then I would comment in line on their post with the interactive demo so that they can just sign up, duplicate the demo, and start using it right away. And the added benefit of doing that publicly was that other people who hadn't even commented would see all of the other products and the links being posted. They would click it, interact with it, and say, "Wo, this is really cool. I'm going to ask him to create me a demo or I'm just going to sign up and do it myself cuz it looks easy. We did permutations of that across many many different channels. This is something very common that I see with a lot of founders who come on Starter Story. I like to call it handtohand combat. Just going in and doing things one by one. Yeah, you don't have to do that forever. But if you can do that a 100 times, a percentage of those likely will turn into customers just by this do things that don't scale. So I really like that. What's this third step? Third is just be everywhere where your users are. I think the challenging thing about distribution nowadays in 2026 is there's no magic channel anymore. There's no gotchas. So for us it was all about how do we get distribution density. So that was SEO and AI LLM as I mentioned through content living and breathing in communities and even doing things like direct outreach through like the product updates building in public in LinkedIn and on Indie Hacker and just sharing our story and being a megaphone as much as you can in places where founders pay attention just like here on starter story roughly 30 40% of our visitors come from SEO and LLM 30% comes from word of mouth watermarks referrals folks creating super demo and sharing it with other people and that creating a viral loop. And third, 20% building in public on LinkedIn. Okay. Well, thanks for sharing that playbook. That's amazing. I think a lot of people watching this are, hey, I got a SAS idea. I have an actual SAS MVP. I have some customers. I'm sure you get a lot of people that reach out to you and go, hey, how did you do it? How did you do 3 million ARR? Even if you've given these people some advice, what do you typically see early SAS founders getting wrong when they start out? I think the biggest thing that comes to mind for me, I would say it's not launching yesterday and chasing perfection. Earlier you can launch, the faster results compound and the faster you find out, do I need to kill this thing? Can we scale this thing with data or do we need to pivot and reorient. The cliche advice that a lot of people give is if you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late. I don't think that holds true in the sense that every product should have great craftsmanship in the AI first era, but as a founder, the only advantage you have over an incumbent is urgency and speed. Yeah, I like that advice. My first question that comes to mind is like, okay, why would I pay for this if I could just use Loom? And there are a lot of other cool product demo tools out there, but yours is actually crushing it. So, I'd love if you could give me just a quick demo how it works. So, I'm going to go right into this banking app. So, you can create a super demo in a variety of different ways. The easiest place to start is our Chrome extension. When you click this button, you're going to get a few different options here that signify different demo types. I'm going to click the guided HTML here and I'm going to start the recording. You just need to click through the workflow or the features or the pages that you want to demonstrate out. Maybe I'm creating for this use case an onboarding demo of how you can go about tagging transactions directly here on Mercury. I want to show the customer how to categorize transactions here. So, I'm just going to emulate and walk through that step. And let's, for example, put this under venue rental. Now that it's been categorized, you'll notice that Super Demo is recording all of your clicks and actions. And from here, you can choose to stop the recording. It's actually going to clone all of the steps. You'll get things in a modular kind of editable editor that looks and feels like a PowerPoint slide, and you can easily go in and make changes as you go over time. I'll just show you what it looks like to the end viewer. So, you'll notice we created this in like 2 minutes. It cloned the entire front end. So through a link, people can essentially access your app or access your product experience. That's like the super highle TLDDR, but you can obviously go in and do things like adding chapters. You can go in and edit the HTML and use one demo template for hundreds of different leads. You could put in like voice overs. You can clone your own voice. If you do want like a Loomike experience, you could also record your face and camera here. Wow, thanks for showing that. Super cool. It's like instead of a video, it's like actually just saving all the HTML and that's pretty impressive. How's this built? What's the tech stack here? We're growing really quickly. So, I'd say we're like rotating through like 50 plus different tools every single month. But at a high level, uh we obviously use super demo for demoing our product for onboarding, for training. We use cloud code, cursor, codeex very very extensively. So, we kind of switch between the three depending on what's the best model or most performant. We use linear for task management. Linear is also super powerful for like connecting to Slack and also connecting to cloud. We use AWS for hosting. We use Postmark for transactional emails. We use intercom for more like triggered workflows and onboarding and for marketing emails and and support. Bunch of other tools like Hrefs, Clay, Zapier for a bunch of GTM and CS efforts. Well, thanks for sharing that. Last question that we ask everyone who comes on starter story for anyone who's watching this that wants to start a SAS, what would be your one piece of advice? I'd say stop obsessing over the competition and the idea and just start building. If you identify the right problem, the world is a very very big place. There's more than enough market in most places for everyone. Most companies I would say die if they do die by and internal combustion than by or by competition. So just get going and start building. Well, thanks Joseph for coming on and sharing all this. It is crazy to see that very niche product can do $3 million a year and I'm sure it's still growing. This is the future. This is building an AI. This is SAS. It's not going anywhere. So, thanks for coming on and sharing everything so transparently and inspiring others. Cool. Thanks for having me, Pat. If you're watching this far and you want to build a SAS, I think that his playbook to 100 customers is really good and it's the right way of thinking when you're starting a SAS. I don't want to be thinking about how do I get 10,000 customers? How do I get 1,000 customers? How do I get 10 customers? Because if you can get 10 paying customers that don't churn right away for your SAS, you know you can go get more. Last thing I want to shout out, if you are looking for your SAS idea and you want to build it and get it in the hands of customers in just a few days, you can do that with AI now. You should check out Starter Story Build. Click that link in the description. You can get started. You can build and launch something very quickly. Thank you guys for watching. I'll see you in the next one. Peace.