Growing an AI product to $70k+ MRR within a year via YouTube

After selling his SEO marketplace, Vasco Monteiro built Journalist AI and grew it to $70k+ MRR within a year. And he did it all via YouTube.

Here's Vasco on how he did it. 👇

Whatever it takes

My entrepreneurial journey started in 2015 after watching an Alex Becker video on how to make money with SEO. I tried and tested every single business model under the sun until I had some success with freelancing and, now, SaaS.

Here's a video on everything I did. I even did Fiverr voice-over gigs dressed as a clown!

My first success at building something was Vettted, a B2B SEO services marketplace that I scaled from $0 to over $300k in revenue in its first 12 months of existence — while working on it in my parent’s basement.

Along the way, I documented every single thing on YouTube. Here’s one year of building in seven minutes.

After selling Vettted, I shifted my attention to scaling my current AI SaaS, Journalist AI. When an insane technology like AI comes into play, it’s dumb not to build something using it.

Shitty MVPs

Journalist AI is an SEO article writer and automatic blogging tool. It's a SaaS, so we make money off of subscriptions.

I’m not a developer. I have no idea how to code. So to build it, I partnered up with someone who does.

That’s the best way to build a successful product. Partner up with people as talented as you, just in a different scope of work.

To validate it, we sent a shitty MVP to people and got feedback. Then, we improved it from there.

Everything goes wrong

As a founder, everything is going to go wrong all the time. That’s a guarantee.

Vettted was a marketplace, and marketplaces are one of the hardest businesses to succeed in. I was juggling both the supply and the demand side simultaneously. Sounds simple, but it’s insanely hard.

For Journalist AI, churn is an issue. And the reliability of AI, along with how it chooses to do things, is often hard to control. Those are my two biggest problems right now.

But there were plenty of other problems along the way:

• I lost $200k

• I lost my developer

• I got a cease and desist letter

• Our site was down for 16 hours

• Paypal kept $16k of our money for six months

So yeah, things will go wrong. What you need to do is bounce back. And figure out the best way to do so.

That means you need to:

• Get proper sleep.

• Organize yourself.

• Lock your phone up so there are no distractions.

• Go somewhere to be away from friends, family, and obligations so you can focus 200% on your goals.

• And sacrifice a lot, especially in the early days.

Grow via YouTube

As far as growth, it's all YouTube. That, and building in public on X, but I don't do that much anymore.

Here's my literal step-by-step marketing strategy that grew our business to 7 figures.

There are three steps:

1. Produce money-making assets: Creating three different types of videos — evergreen tutorials that get views forever, clickbait videos that get quick views, and have a high viewer-to-buyer ratio, and news-based videos that capitalize on trending topics. The key is to drive sales by providing valuable content and strong calls to action.

2. 10X your output with creators: Multiply your efforts by hiring in-house creators. We own multiple YouTube channels and place creators on each, effectively becoming our own media company. This strategy allows us to scale content production and maintain control over our assets.

3. 100X your output with pay to play: Use paid ads to push our videos further, ensuring they reach a wider audience without relying solely on the YouTube algorithm. By running ads that look natural in the search results and on the homepage, we gain unlimited distribution as long as we keep investing.

Create. Share what you’re doing. The good things, the bad things, new features, new failures. Everything. People resonate with that. And, at the end of the day, people buy from people.

All my success comes from putting myself out there in this way. 99% of people on social media consume. You have to create more than you consume if you want to be the 1%.

Motivation hack

Building a SaaS takes a lot of work. I hired a personal trainer to train with every day at 7am. It forces me to get out of bed so I don’t become lazy and wake up at noon.

It’s hard to have a schedule when you’re an entrepreneur and there’s nobody making you follow that schedule. The workaround is to make your schedule dependent upon other people.

Resources

The only book I recommend reading is How to Win Friends and Influence People. All other self help books are just a copy of that one.

And I've been following Alex Becker for his business advice since 2016. He helped me a lot in shaping who I am and my success as an entrepreneur.

What's next?

I want to buy a plot of land and build a house. That, and scale Journalist AI to $1M MRR.

You can follow along on YouTube and X. And check out Journalist AI.