Side-hustling for three years before going all-in and hitting $6.4k MRR

The "competitors making $20-80K/month IS the validation" reframe is the one that'll stick with me. Most people treat existing competition as a reason not to build something, when it's actually the clearest signal the demand is real.

Also the pricing note about no free tier, just 20 credits and then paid from day one. Scary to launch that way, but it sounds like it forced honest signal way earlier than a generous free plan would've.

Curious how much of the jump from SocialKit to PostPeer's early revenue was new signups versus existing subscribers just not churning off on renewal. With usage-based credit pricing specifically, I'd guess failed or expired cards on renewal hit differently than a flat subscription would.

Thanks a lot for featuring me! Appreciate it (:

Really encouraging to read — six projects before something clicked is a good reminder that it's rarely the first idea. I just launched my first small tool (a freelance rate calculator) and I'm curious: looking back, was there something specific about SocialKit/PostPeer that made them different from the earlier five, or was it more just timing and persistence?

Great journey and very practical advice. I especially like the focus on validating with existing competitors, marketing before launch, and building while still employed. Congrats on going full-time—wishing you lots of success with SocialKit and PostPeer!

very nice

The patience to keep iterating until products 5 and 6 is underrated - easy to second-guess yourself before that point but clearly it paid off.

interesting

I love this story cause I've been putting a lot of work into SEO, internal linking, and content lately, so it was especially interesting to read how you start that process before the product is even finished and then repurpose one piece of content across several channels. Also very interesting that ChatGPT and Perplexity are already sending you paying customers. Very nice indeed!

Really enjoyed reading this. ~

The part that stuck with me wasn't the MRR. It was spending three years building before going all in.

I think people often underestimate how much that time matters. You get to make better decisions because you're learning instead of rushing. By the time things start working, you've probably already solved dozens of problems nobody else sees.

Reusing content across multiple channels and leveraging free tools as SEO entry points is a masterclass in distribution. Reusable infra (like CaptureKit) making every subsequent build faster and cheaper is such a smart, compounding moat for solo builders.

Also, interesting takeaway on offering one-time credit packs alongside subscriptions—$500–$700/mo extra per product purely from subscription-averse devs is massive. How are you currently managing queue spikes on AWS Lambda vs Railway to keep your background job costs low?

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The free tools point is the one I keep turning over. For an API business the free tool is obvious, it's a smaller version of the paid thing. I sell courses (kambolab, teaching people who don't code to build with Claude Code) and I'm not sure what the equivalent is.

A free mini-course is the lazy answer, but that's just content, it doesn't get the steady utility traffic your transcript extractor gets. Did any of your free tools feel like a stretch from the paid product but work anyway? Trying to figure out how far the tool can sit from the thing you actually sell.

This is a great reminder that most "overnight successes" are actually years of consistent work behind the scenes. Three years of side-hustling while managing the uncertainty takes discipline that most people underestimate. Hitting $6.4k MRR is impressive, but I think the bigger achievement is proving product-market fit before going all-in. Too many founders quit too early or jump in without validation. Wishing you continued growth—curious what the biggest lesson was during those three years that accelerated your growth?

amazing

"Compounding channels beat spiking channels" is the headline, but the detail underneath it is what got me: PostPeer's first customer arrived a week after a quiet launch, before any announcement, because the SEO was already sitting there. The thing that actually worked had been running for months while you were still building. The launch itself was almost incidental to it.

What I notice is that you compound in two directions at once and describe both almost in passing. CaptureKit's auth, billing, API key management and docs became SocialKit's. And the blog posts and free tools were live before the product was finished. Code compounding and distribution compounding, same idea applied twice.

Since you've done this six times now: if you started product #7 tomorrow with no existing infra and no ranking pages, what would week one look like? Ship something so there's a URL to point at, or write the first posts before there's anything to sell?

Asking because I'm at exactly week one right now, and I'm fairly sure I did it in the wrong order.

Congratulations on the milestone! One thing that stood out to me wasn't the revenue, but the fact that you spent three years building before going all in. As someone who's just starting my own journey, it's encouraging to see that consistency mattered more than overnight success. Looking back, is there one decision you wish you'd made much earlier?

What you shared is so much valuable information. I really love them all.

I just found you randomly on reddit few days ago. Again, randomly i found you on indie hacker and really like to keep learning from you. Just followed you on Reddit, X.

One thing that really stood out to me wasn't the $6.4k MRR—it was the shift in mindset. You stopped chasing "original ideas" and started treating existing competitors as proof of demand. That's a subtle but powerful change that I think many first-time founders miss.

I'm currently building AI SaaS products, and your point about starting SEO and marketing before the product is finished also hit home. It's easy to spend months polishing features while ignoring distribution, but your results show that compounding channels create a much stronger foundation than hoping for a launch spike.

One question: looking back, if you were starting from zero today with no audience and no previous products, would you still prioritize SEO first, or would you spend more time building an audience on X/LinkedIn alongside SEO from day one?

Congrats on your milestone. What Reddit community are you posting the build in? I post in options communities and they prohibit self promotion. Would love some tips for Reddit

Some good info here, thank you!

The part that hit me most was starting SEO and marketing while the product is still being built. I’m building an AI influencer tool right now, and it’s easy to spend all my time on features and leave distribution for “later.” This made me rethink that. I was also surprised by how well the one-time credit packs performed. Did most of those buyers discover the product through SEO and free tools, or were they existing users who simply didn’t want a subscription?

Wow! So many gems!!

Sticking with it through 4 failed products before this one is the real story here. What made you keep going instead of quitting after product 2 or 3?

Solo founders — do you have a referral program for your product? If not, is it because setup is too complex or existing tools are too expensive? Genuinely curious.

This is a brilliant playbook. Jonathan's point about reusing infrastructure — 'Every product makes the next one cheaper to build' — is the exact reason I started building premium Next.js boilerplates (HadiKits).

As a developer, I noticed I was wasting dozens of hours rewriting auth, billing, and landing page structures for every new side project. By building an enterprise-grade template once (with 400+ automated tests and full security), the next 10 products become just a fraction of the cost and time to build.

His focus on 'compounding channels' (SEO, alternative pages) over 'spiking channels' (Product Hunt) is a tough pill to swallow for engineers who just want to launch, but it is 100% accurate. I am actually on the opposite side of the spectrum from Jonathan: I love the building phase but hate the SEO/marketing phase, which is exactly why I am currently looking for a marketing partner to handle the distribution for my templates.

Quick question: Does Jonathan write those SEO alternative pages and use-case pages manually, or does he use a database-driven template to generate them at scale? Curious how he manages the content volume alongside coding.

Congrats on reaching this milestone! What impressed me most wasn't the $6.4k MRR—it was your commitment to building consistently for three years before going all in. That's a powerful reminder that long-term consistency pays off. I also appreciate your honesty in sharing the setbacks alongside the successes. Wishing you even more growth and success ahead!

Every product makes the next one cheaper to build" is such an underrated point — reusing CaptureKit's auth/billing/docs to bootstrap SocialKit is basically compounding infra, not just compounding content.

Also love the "competitors making $20-80k/mo IS the validation" rule. Way more useful than chasing something original with zero proof anyone will pay.

Nice app!

Congrats on the milestone! What stood out to me wasn't the $6.4k MRR, but the fact that you spent three years building before going all in. It's a great reminder that consistency compounds over time. Thanks for sharing the failures as well as the wins. Wishing you continued growth!

Bravo, very inspiring

The one-time credit packs deserve more attention than you gave them. $500–700/month per product against $2.8k and $2.4k MRR is roughly 20% of revenue from a payment option most SaaS founders never build.

The interesting part isn't the revenue, it's who it captures. Subscription-averse developers don't churn they never convert in the first place, so they're invisible in your funnel. You can't see the segment you're losing. A credit pack doesn't upsell existing users; it makes a previously unreachable buyer purchasable, and some convert to plans later anyway.

Question on the $20–80K competitor rule: it clearly works for avoiding dead markets, but does it tell you anything about your own ceiling? You're at ~$6.4k across two products in niches where competitors do 3–10x that. Is the gap just time, or does the rule validate that demand exists without predicting what share you can take?

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This exploration process is amazing.

The CaptureKit trajectory is the interesting data point here — $127 MRR to a $15k sale in 2.5 months is a pretty aggressive multiple, which usually means either the acquirer valued something beyond current MRR (codebase, API integrations already built, a foothold in a space they wanted) or you had a specific buyer already lined up rather than an open market sale.Curious which it was, since "sell fast on low MRR" isn't usually the advice given (most say grow MRR first, multiple later) — sounds like you found an exception to that

The "competitors making $20-80K/month ARE the validation" rule really reframes how I've been thinking about ideas — I assumed no competition meant opportunity, but it more often means no real demand. Also really useful: pricing from day one with a small no-card free tier instead of a fully free trial. I've been leaning toward "free trial, then figure out pricing later" for something I'm building, and this makes me want to rethink that.

Solid breakdown! The rule about no competition meaning no demand is so true, and building APIs for developers who actually pay is a smart playbook. Fast support on whatsapp as a moat against big players is pure gold.

Inspiring path!! especially shipping through several kits before the ones that stuck. For SocialKit vs PostPeer, what drove growth more: SEO/content, communities, or outbound to developers? And after quitting your job, what are you protecting first: focus on one product, or keeping both growing in parallel?

Inspiring path! especially shipping through several kits before the ones that stuck. For SocialKit vs PostPeer, what drove growth more: SEO/content, communities, or outbound to developers? And after quitting your job, what are you protecting first: focus on one product, or keeping both growing in parallel?

I've been experimenting with similar price points. What made you land on [mentioned price] — gut feeling or did you ask users directly?

This is a good reminder that success often happens after several products, not after the first launch. Working on different ideas for three years probably helped him improve his product judgment, distribution skills, and understanding of what users actually pay for. Waiting until he had real traction before quitting also sounds much safer than making the decision based only on excitement. What specific milestone finally convinced him that the business was strong enough to go full-time?

Love your story. I wish I could picvk your brain more feels like I could learn a lot from you. Congrats on your success.

congrats

Others have mentioned it too, but your point about having competition is the validation really hit home. I've been demoralized in the past by telling myself, "someone is already doing this." This will definitely stick with me

The most practical indie journey i've read so far.

Great breakdown, and the part most readers fixate on (the MRR, the SEO system) isn't the most transferable thing here. The real unlock is one line: "every product makes the next one cheaper to build." Jonathan didn't build six products, he built a factory for launching products, each sharing auth, billing, API-key management, docs, landing-page patterns. That's the compounding asset, and it's why his sixth ships faster than his first despite being more complex.

Worth naming for anyone building serially, because it reframes what you're accumulating. Most indie hackers treat each project as standalone and start from zero, which is why project #6 is as slow as #1. Jonathan treats infrastructure as a durable asset that appreciates. The MRR is the visible output; the reusable stack is the machine producing it. If you're building more than one thing, the highest-leverage early investment isn't the product, it's the parts you'll reuse.

The second insight, counterintuitive: "if there's no competition, don't build it, competitors at $20-80K/month ARE the validation." That inverts the instinct to find untapped markets. His logic is sound, because an empty market usually means no demand, not undiscovered opportunity, and validating demand is the slowest, most expensive part of building. He outsources validation to competitors who proved people pay, then wins on a small real difference (support speed, early AI-agent positioning) rather than originality. "Slightly better in a proven market" beats "original in an unproven one" almost every time, and it's cheaper.

The through-line: he removed the two things that kill most indie hackers, slow rebuilds and unvalidated demand, by treating infrastructure and market-proof as reusable assets instead of per-project costs. That's the actual playbook, more than any single channel.

The one to watch if you copy it: reusable infra assumes your products stay in one technical family (his are all scraping/data/automation APIs). Jump domains and the compounding resets. His narrow focus isn't a limitation, it's what makes the factory work.

building nights and weekends until the numbers made sense is the bit people usually skip when they tell the story

Agree with the "competitors making $20-80K/month IS the validation"

If there is competition there is demand, unless you are building absolutely something innovative in which case selling it becomes super hard and you have to convince customers that they need it

Of course existing market means competition, so there is a cost on both sides, but if people are paying for your product while there being an existing market for it, one can infer that you are doing something good

The line I keep coming back to is "paying customers found me through LLM recommendations." Everyone's going to focus on the 1-2 posts a week and the repurposing, but that's the part that actually feels new. And it makes sense that competitor/alternative pages are what surface - those pages are already shaped like the answer to "what's a cheaper X," so there's nothing for the model to reformat.

How did you find out that's where they came from, though? LLM traffic mostly shows up as direct in analytics, so I'm guessing you asked in onboarding or it came up in support? Curious whether you started tracking it on purpose or just kept hearing it.

if there's no competition, don't build it that's the one people fight most. running competitor gaps in bunzee, crowded niches always show the clearest wedges. how do you check the $20-80k number?

Truly Inspiring. I am in the same boat, catching up whenever I can.

Jonathan, great job!

Congrats on the leap, and on hitting numbers that actually let you make it. The "build while you work" advice doesn't get said enough, it's not as exciting as a leap-of-faith story but it's clearly the reason you got to take the leap from solid ground instead of out of desperation.

One line stuck with me more than the revenue numbers though: "fast support is the one thing big competitors can't copy." Everything else you listed (SEO, pricing, reusing infra) is a speed advantage, and speed is copyable given enough time. Personally answering on WhatsApp in minutes isn't. Feels like a preview of where a lot of us will end up competing next as building gets faster for everyone: less on who ships first, more on who earns trust faster once it's shipped.

Really appreciate you sharing the real numbers too, that's the part people usually skip.

Three years of side-hustling through five failed attempts before the sixth worked is a longer runway than most people talk about. What made you finally trust the numbers enough to go all-in — was there a specific moment, or more a gradual buildup of confidence?

Stories like this are a good reminder that consistency compounds. Three years can feel like forever when you're building, but it's encouraging to see what steady progress can turn into.

Really inspiring journey! I especially liked the focus on SEO, building in public, and creating products that solve real problems. I'm following a similar approach with my Snow Day Calculator, publishing helpful content and improving the tool over time. Consistency and providing value really do make a difference.

The underrated move here is selling CaptureKit at $127 MRR for $15K, roughly 10x annual revenue, and using it to fund the leap. As an investor I watch founders hold small products too long out of attachment, when selling early buys focus, and focus compounds faster than any single project. The shared auth, billing, and docs infrastructure across the Kit products is the same idea: every product cuts the build cost of the next one.

Good and inspiring post.

I understand the idea behind "If there's no competition, don't build it," since competition is often a strong signal that there's real market demand, but I wonder if this applies differently to larger, more ambitious projects. Some of the biggest companies today were built by creating or redefining markets, not by entering crowded ones.
A lack of competition doesn't always mean there's no demand, it can also mean the problem hasn't been solved in a compelling way yet.

I guess the real challenge is distinguishing between "there's no market" and "there's an untapped opportunity."

This is an inspiring article.

That post inspired me too much. I also inspected all of your projects and that's so interesting! congrats!

Starting SEO while building, instead of waiting until launch, is such a valuable takeaway. The “take the leap from solid ground” approach also makes this journey feel both practical and inspiring. Congrats on the growth!

The tip about offering one-time credit packs alongside subscriptions is gold. Developers really do hate recurring subs until they've tested the waters. Congrats on taking the leap, Jonathan!

his resonates a lot — congrats on 2 months in, that's no small thing after a layoff. The SEO/distribution lesson is such a common one though, so don't beat yourself up too much over it. Feels like almost every solo builder learns "build in public from day 1" the hard way once, myself included. At least you're catching it early (2 months) rather than 6-8 months in with zero traction. Curious — are you doing the distribution catch-up manually right now, or trying to batch it across platforms at once?

Congrats on the progress.

Thank you for such useful experience sharing, it's almost 2 months since I start building stuff after being laid off. And my first project is 100% based on what I think is cool. I did some simple search on the competitor and there's 2 but I doubt any of them having 3000+ MRR. I made a huge mistake of not working on SEO since day1, trying to distribute now and then realize that need to have enough contributions on all platforms first lol. It's definitely a lesson learned

Congrats on the progress! It's always encouraging to see how consistency and patience can pay off. Building something on the side for years before going all in takes real dedication. Thanks for sharing your journey and the lessons you learned—it’s motivating for others who are still in the early stages. Wishing you continued growth and even bigger milestones ahead

This hit differently reading it on day 100 of my own build.

The point about compounding channels beating spiky ones is exactly what I'm seeing. Product Hunt and directory listings barely moved the needle, while SEO work I did months ago is only now starting to turn into consistent traffic.

I definitely got the order wrong, though. I built first and focused on SEO later, so I'm still catching up on the "start before and keep going during the build" lesson.

The part about sharing real numbers being uncomfortable but worthwhile also resonated. I posted my own zero-users update today, and hitting "Publish" was honestly harder than shipping the code.

This hits different reading it at day 100 of my own build. The "compounding channels beat spiking channels" point is exactly what I'm learning right now, Product Hunt and directory listings did nothing for me, but SEO work from a few months ago is only just starting to show up in real traffic now. I did it in the wrong order though, built first, SEO after, so still catching up on the "start before and during" part. The line about sharing real numbers being scary but worth it also lines up. I posted my own zero-users update today and it was harder to hit publish than any code I've shipped.

Great journey! I really like the idea of building multiple small products and learning from each one.

I'm also building SaaS products while working full-time, and I think the hardest part is not building the product but finding real market demand.

Congrats on reaching $6.4k MRR!

Very cool,his is a refreshingly practical story. The idea that competition is validation, not a red flag, really stands out, especially paired with the discipline of starting SEO before the product is “finished.”

Congrats, Jonathan — this is a refreshingly practical story. The idea that competition is validation, not a red flag, really stands out, especially paired with the discipline of starting SEO before the product is “finished.”

I also like the compounding mindset: reusable infrastructure, reusable content, and fast support all make the next stage easier. Curious: which SEO page type has converted best for you so far — feature pages, alternative/comparison pages, or free tools?

The "competitors making money IS the validation" framing is one I wish I'd internalized earlier. Different world — I'm a chef, not a developer — but the same math applied: EzWrite exists in an already-crowded writing-tool space, and the wedge ended up being small stuff like regional dialect detection, not reinventing the category. Took me a while to trust that "small and real" beats "original."

That's a great news

Leaving the day job with $6k+ MRR already locked in is such a clean way to take the leap, congrats Jonathan!

The point about competitors being the ultimate validation is spot on. I also loved the detail on one-time credit packs — so true that devs hate recurring subs until they've actually tested the product.

Wow what an amazing journey man, i really love ur obsession or u can say approach with the "Kit" approach, all the best really happy for u

That is one amazing journey. Hoping to see your growth!

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