I Built A Micro-Version Of A $1B SaaS. Now I Make $50K/Month

Every good business idea is already taken. [music] You've heard it, you've probably believed it, but that is completely wrong. Me and my brother Daniel have bootstrapped this SaaS from zero to 50K monthly. Meet David. He saw a billion-dollar company that was blowing up everywhere, and instead of thinking that he missed his chance, he built a tiny version of it. The plan was really simple. Find one common pain point and triple down on it. And just a few months later, that business hit $50,000 a month. So, I asked David to come on to the channel to break it all down, and in this episode, we'll dive into the $1 billion company that he copied, why you do not need to reinvent the wheel to build a successful business, and his playbook for starting over if he had to do the same thing again in 2026. All right, let's dive in. I'm Pat Walls, and this is Starter Story. David, my man, welcome to Starter Story. Tell me about who you are, what you build, and what's your story. Hey, thanks for having me. I'm David, and me and my brother Daniel have monthly in a space where companies casually reach 200 million ARR. So, I've built Shipper, which is an AI app builder. Essentially, you talk to AI, and it comes back to you with a full app. It has all sorts of suggestions for you to keep going, and it even runs the business for you. Our pricing model is very simple. You pay for credits, which in exchange they let you build apps. Our cheapest pricing plan is $25 a month, and that's more than enough to just experiment and even build a full app, which you can go on to later develop further. So, you built an AI coding tool. When I see this, I think of like Cloud Code or Lovable. You built a indie or smaller version of that. I think that's super cool. Could you show me your Stripe dashboards? Show me how much revenue this thing is making. So, we're currently at 25.6 K MRR, as you can see here. Net volume 65K. That's last month plus what we did this month. ARR is 307K. So, the majority of our MRR is here, but we've migrated Stripe accounts just maybe a month ago. So, as you can see, this is our old account and it's shows from August pretty linear growth all the way up to late February to March. So, 90% of our revenue comes from subscriptions and the other 10% comes from one-off top-ups. They have separate credits called cloud credits which allow people to build back-ends, whereas builder credits let them do everything else. So, even though MRR says 25k, gross volume is 71k. That's because of all the top-ups. We currently have around 690 paid users and zero free users. We don't offer free plans. As much as we'd love to, we've decided it's better to invest the money we're making in building a better product for our paying users. And this is an expensive service to maintain both in terms of time and money. Okay, cool. I like that. I like to see that you have hundreds of paying customers and zero free customers. If you're doing anything bootstrapped or indie, focusing on paid plans only, I think that's super smart. I want to switch topics a little bit and talk about your background. [music] You built an AI coding tool. You must be like a coding genius. How do you get here and build this app that's doing over $50,000 in gross volume a month? So, it all goes back to 2019. My brother and I have started building SaaS and all sorts of tools since then. We're both non-technical. We never really liked to code. So, instead, we've decided to learn marketing. Our first real success was a luxury goods authentication service called Legit Check and that's what funded everything that came after. That actually got featured in Starter Story back then, which is kind of a full circle moment being right now. Since then, we've built, scaled, and even exited and acquired a few companies. So, we've built an AI coding app without any coding experience. David right here is proof that you should not invent anything new. You can find a proven idea, niche it down, build your own version, and it can be successful. But to do that, you need to see what is actually working and what apps are making money right now. So, knowing that, I wanted to put together a free database of 50 plus AI app ideas that are making money right now in 2026 and include real revenue numbers, growth tactics, tech [music] stacks, pricing models, everything. So, you can find the opportunity that fits your skills. If you've been struggling to find that right idea, then this database will make your research process [music] 10 times faster. If you're ready to find your idea and build it, just head to the first link in the description and you can download it for free. All right, let's [music] get back to the episode. Okay, cool. So, you've had some success under your belt, but this idea seems like it could be really big. How did you get the idea to build an AI coding app? So, it was somewhere between 2020 and 2025 and we saw no-code and AI app builders explode. Just a few examples, Base 44 hit 3 million ARR in 6 months. Then, Lovable went to 1 million ARR in a week from launch and is now valued at 6 billion. We figured owning even 1% of the market would be life-changing for us. So, the plan was really simple. Find one common pain point and triple down on Okay, cool. I love that you mentioned find one common pain point, triple down on it. If you can even own 1% of this massive market, which is AI coding tools, it could be life-changing. We're going to talk more about that, but before we do, let's talk about how you build this thing. How do you go about building an AI coding tool? It seems really complicated. We started really small, just us and one developer, and the first version was pretty rough. It broke a lot, but we shipped it anyway. So, instead of waiting for it to be perfect, we just focused on getting it in front of people. Overall, I'd say the first 2 months were the toughest, but things started to improve pretty fast. So, by month three, we had a working product that we were confident with. By month four, we moved past the catching up with our competitors. By months five and six, we were already shipping features that even our competitors didn't have yet. We also kept a close eye on other players in the space, looking at what worked for them, what didn't, so we could move faster and avoid making the same mistakes that they did. Okay, cool. So, you built this AI coding tool, even if you had a developer or two, that's still amazing. This is what's possible building products with AI. So, on that note, I'm curious, like what's the tech stack behind this? We use Crisp for customer support, Notion for the knowledge base, Frel for our road map, and Charge for email marketing, Webflow to host our landing page, WordPress for SEO on our blog and PSAO pages, Data Fetch for analytics, X-Premium and Typefully [music] for marketing, and Told for affiliate management. On the technical side, we rely heavily on Entropic's cloud models, GitHub for version control, Vercel for hosting, Railway for cloud, and Neon for databases. Okay, cool. Thanks for sharing that. Let's talk about the growth. A lot of people watching this build stuff, you could probably go and build an AI coding tool right now if you ask Claude code how to do it, but that's not going to get you users. So, how did you take this from no users to over $50,000 a month in revenue? In short, we got our first users through Product Hunt, Reddit, SEO, and then X, Twitter. To this day, we haven't used any paid channels at all. We launched our MVP on Product Hunt in week one, then made our first $50 MRR from that launch. Reddit drove the initial traction, we were regularly getting 400 upvotes, and that's really pushed us from $50 to 1K MRRs. At the same time, we focused on high-intent SEO keywords like alternatives to X, how much does X cost, with X being our competitors' names. Around day 50 of building in public, X started working, then things went parabolic. In 1 or 2 weeks on X, we made about 20K MRR by just dogfooding the product. One trick I learned from Rob Halam at Super X was to always add your product's link in the second tweet to squeeze more attention and get that extra traffic to your website. Yeah, it's cool that you build in public. You did all the things the right way, but what I really think is cool about this, and one of the reasons why I wanted to bring you on the channel, is that it kind of follows this copy-paste strategy that I've been seeing a lot of people, especially indie developers like you, execute on really well. You find a really growing market, and you simply execute them, but you do something just a little bit differently. [music] All you need to do is capture 1% of the market, and you can have a life-changing exit, right? Someone watching this is going, "Oh, okay. Let me go copy, you know, DocuSign or something like that. But, how do I find what makes it different?" How did you actually find that out? So, my question for you is when you went to go build this, what did you find that you're able to carve out that 1%? What was the differentiation that allowed you to hit $50,000 per month with your AI coding tool? So, most of these other apps, you can only build websites or web apps at this moment. With Shipyard, you can build websites, web apps, mobile apps, Chrome extensions, and all sorts of bots for apps like Telegram, Discord, you name it. We looked at all of our competitors' Trustpilot pages. We looked at their public roadmaps, and we've joined their Discord servers. We were just looking at what their users were complaining about. And we even got people in our customer support chat saying, "I want to turn this website into a mobile app." That's how we came up with the idea of building mobile apps. We started Shipyard with a core idea of eliminating any technical terms, because even though Laravel or Base 44 were aiming to serve non-technical people, they still had certain parts that felt kind of scary. Instead, we made it clear that Shipyard transforms your thoughts and ideas into a live business that can make money with zero skills required. So, from the start, we saw an opportunity to go beyond just websites and web apps. This is the thing that I think a lot of people get wrong. A lot of people watching this are looking for that new idea. Instead, go look at massive [music] spaces, big companies, growing companies, and then doing the indie thing, the bootstrap thing, and winning just exactly like you are. Last question that we ask all founders who come on to Starter Story is if you could give your younger self advice before you got started, what would be your advice? I start with something you genuinely know a lot about or care about. Look at a big industry and ask, [music] "What would this look like if it was built for people just like me?" That's where most good ideas come from. Taking what already works and niching it down to something you really know a lot about. For example, maybe you could build a Duolingo app but for learning how to cook. I think another good example is workout apps turned into a social network. Then you have tools like Calendly, Typeform, or Intercom. They're all big, proven products, but you can rebuild a simple, smaller version. Look for reviews and what people commonly dislike about those giants and then double down on that. You know, I just keep my head down and just keep building. Go build, David. Super cool to see what you built and I think it's going to continue to grow. So, thanks for coming on and sharing. Great. Thanks for having me. All right, Gus, producer of Starter Story, what do you think about this one? Yeah, I think my favorite part of this guy's story is the whole like copy and paste thing. You know, he saw like this opportunity, and how many of these like lovable base 44s have we seen just exploding? And I really like that mindset of can I get just a small percent of this? And uh I think that's a smart strategy. There's this guy named Andrew Chen. He's like a VC. He wrote this essay which is like, "The reason why inventing something new is so hard is that you have to change how people behave or interact with something. To do that is a huge bet. It's not logical to do this as a bootstrapper or someone who's doing indie." What do you think about that? [music] I mean, yeah. What I think is we've talked to enough people on this channel that are building like similar ideas. We put out this tweet once that was like, "Every business idea is taken. That's Here's like a list of 50 ways to make your app different." I can understand that. Starting something brand new, yeah, it seems like impossible. The thing is that you don't need to execute perfectly if you are just in a good market or a good niche. It's hard enough to run a business and do everything right. You can get some things wrong and still be successful if you operate in a space that is already growing and popular and has good margins. If you're struggling to find an app idea or a brand new thing to be building, well, you're in luck because in the description, I'll put that down there, there are over 50 proven app ideas that you can copy and paste just like David did here and change one little thing, see what people don't like about them, and you might have something successful as well. So, click that link down there in the description if you want to check them out. Otherwise, we'll see you in the next one. Peace.