From a cleaning side hustle to a $3M/yr SaaS for cleaning services

Amar Ghose started a cleaning business as a side hustle while working in tech sales in Silicon Valley. He shut down the service after a year, but went on to build a SaaS for cleaning services called ZenMaid. Now, it's a $3M/yr business.

Here's Amar on how he did it. 👇

Starting a cleaning side hustle

I actually grew up in Silicon Valley and worked there briefly before starting ZenMaid and becoming a digital nomad. In those days, I was doing sales for tech startups.

I decided to start my own maid service called Fast Friendly Spotless as a side project in 2012. I had to relocate and close that business for personal reasons after about a year. But then my friend, Arun, approached me. He had been following my journey closely and he had an idea: Build software specifically designed for other maid services.

Initially, we were drawn to the opportunity because it would let us be digital nomads, but we genuinely fell in love with the industry. I've since met so many incredible maid service owners — the kind of people I wish I'd known when running my own cleaning company. Looking back, their support might have kept me in the industry longer.

In 2013, ZenMaid was born. It's a scheduling software that simplifies operations for maid services worldwide. Today, eleven years later, we're generating $3M annually and maintaining healthy growth as a bootstrapped lifestyle business.

Bootstrapping and sushi

When we founded ZenMaid, neither of us was established in our careers. I was just starting in tech sales, while Arun was pursuing his PhD at Stanford in an unrelated field — he wasn't even a computer science major. We both maintained separate income streams while building ZenMaid, but they weren't substantial, which actually became part of our motivation to succeed.

Working part-time on ZenMaid — me with my day job and Arun with his PhD program — meant making certain sacrifices. We didn't draw any salary from the business for the first two and a half years, reinvesting everything back into growth. It wasn't until 2015, when I became a digital nomad, that we finally started paying ourselves.

The only exception to our strict reinvestment policy was celebrating key milestones with high-end sushi dinners. This tradition has persisted through 2025 — whenever Arun and I find ourselves in the same city, we seek out the finest sushi restaurant available. We've built quite a collection of photos and memories from these celebrations over the years.

Validation through grind

To validate our software idea, we took a straightforward but grinding approach: cold emails and cold calls to maid services.

I started by finding cleaning companies on Yelp, reaching out to learn about their current scheduling systems and pain points.

I followed a process I learned through The Foundation (a course on building SaaS companies from scratch), but similar validation methods can be found in Steve Blank's customer development work and other resources like The Mom Test.

My validation routine was intense: I sent 20-50 cold emails daily before my day job, making early morning calls to East Coast maid services, and spending entire Saturdays just dialing for dollars. This effort eventually yielded about 20 potential customers who pre-committed to paying for our software once launched.

Interestingly, when we actually released the product, only two of those twenty became paying customers. But those initial twenty pre-commitments gave us enough confidence to push forward — something we might not have done had we known only two would convert.

Our key differentiator in 2013 was remarkably simple: We offered a dead-simple scheduling system with pre-written, automated text messages specifically designed for cleaning companies. While this might sound basic today, it was our killer feature that got us through the door and started our journey with ZenMaid.

MVPs and unnecessary features

The initial ZenMaid product was built entirely through sweat equity, with just me and Arun hustling as long as we could. I focused on sales, marketing, and everything non-product related, while Arun was our star developer who I empowered to build the best possible product while I handled customer development.

When we reverse-engineered the costs, we estimated that it would have taken about $250k in development work to get off the ground and acquire our first 10-20 customers. In reality, it took Arun and me two and a half years without pay, spending most of our free time outside of work building the business until it could generate enough revenue to pay me a minimal salary to go full-time.

ZenMaid wasn't truly financially worth the effort until we were six or seven years into the business.

When developing ZenMaid's initial scope and features, we adhered strictly to lean startup methodology. We started with an intentionally basic calendar system that handled essential client and cleaner communication, enhanced by industry-specific SMS and email templates. This simplified approach proved sufficient to enter the market at a $20 monthly price point.

We encountered an interesting lesson in feature development early on. A beta user insisted on two specific features, refusing to sign up without them. After investing significant development time implementing these features, they subscribed but never actually used them. This experience taught us that sometimes features serve more as psychological checkboxes — like QuickBooks integration — where users demand them but rarely utilize them in practice.

The product's evolution was significantly shaped by the support of various communities, particularly Indie Hackers, who provided invaluable guidance and camaraderie throughout our development journey.

Tried-and-true tech stacks

On the front end we're using TypeScript, React, tailwind, react-query. Our back-end is powered by Ruby on Rails and we're migrating it to a graphql API (some of our pages are still server-side rendered by Rails).

Our tech stack has not changed much over time. We are big fans of technologies that are battle tested and widely adopted because it's easier to train and recruit for them. 

Optimization and new features

ZenMaid operates on a SaaS subscription model. Pricing is tiered based on the number of clients our users serve, making it scalable for them and us. Our first paying customer in 2013 was a lifetime deal for $1,000 (a risky but exciting milestone).

Today, we generate $250k+ in monthly revenue, driven by a mix of pricing optimizations, new features, and strong retention efforts. Our margins are healthy, thanks to our lean, remote-first team.

For aspiring entrepreneurs: Don’t underestimate the power of customer feedback — it’s a goldmine for growth.

Any marketing channel can work

We've been in business for over 11 years now, and with my marketing-first mindset, we've experimented with numerous marketing channels.

I believe most marketing channels can work for any business — when they fail, it's usually due to messaging and execution rather than the channel itself. What's interesting is that some channels that failed for us early on now work exceptionally well, and vice versa. This is pretty normal for businesses like ours.

Let me break down the most effective channels for ZenMaid:

Cold Email

While we don't use it anymore, cold email was crucial in getting our business off the ground, helping us acquire our first 100-150 users.

Partnerships

We got lucky with an early partnership that, combined with our cold email efforts, helped us reach about 200 users and created a strong foundation. Today, partnerships are central to our marketing strategy, contributing to our content, paid marketing, and community initiatives.

Content marketing

We've been creating content since the early days, documenting what works for us and other successful businesses in our space. The ZenMaid magazine (our blog) and YouTube channel are showing promising growth.

While the absolute numbers might seem modest, we're reaching our exact target audience - maid service owners - which makes the engagement particularly valuable.

Advertising

We've had success with paid advertising over the years, making several classic channels work well for ZenMaid including Google, Facebook, Instagram, and Capterra, though Capterra hasn't performed as strongly since the recent Google updates. Overall, advertising continues to generate good returns, although we haven't reached the point where we can scale it indefinitely.

Community

We maintain two Facebook groups: The ZenMaid Mastermind, which welcomes everyone in the industry, and the ZenMaid Inner Circle, which is exclusive to our software users and trial members.

These communities are central to the broader ZenMaid ecosystem, where people have formed strong connections with our brand, built friendships, participated in mastermind sessions, and grown professionally. This has even led to spontaneous meetups worldwide, making community a crucial pillar of our growth.

The Maid Summit

We've run The Maid Summit annually since 2018/2019. It's the world's first and largest virtual summit for Maid Service owners. It's an excellent platform for featuring our industry partners and introducing them to our audience — something both sides greatly value.

The summit content feeds into our paid ads and partnerships, enhances our content marketing, strengthens our community, and sparks meaningful discussions.

Podcast

Our newest initiative is the Filthy Rich Cleaners podcast, currently at about ten episodes. Having launched it with our established, trusted audience base, we're seeing impressive numbers and believe it will become a significant growth driver.

An important note here: I view marketing holistically and do not believe any single channel deserves exclusive credit for our results. Each builds on the channels we've already succeeded with. We've taken a long-term approach to building ZenMaid's marketing engine, focusing on elevating the entire industry and consistently providing free value through content.

Our strategy is to remain top-of-mind when maid services consider switching scheduling software. Our software will do the talking from there. While we employ direct response marketing principles, we're playing the long game — we're completely comfortable with leads taking six to twelve months to convert into customers... even if we would prefer it to be much less!

Essential indie hacking habits

When it comes to essential habits, I've focused on three that have been integral to my success. These aren't guarantees of success — rather, they're the bare minimum, without which, failure is almost certain.

1. Maintaining a Beginner's Mindset

I've always embraced being a lifelong learner. Even after 11 years, I'm more aware than ever of how much I still have to learn about marketing, management, leadership, and other core business areas.

2. Consistency is King

From day one in early 2013, I committed to spending focused deep work time on the business — typically 15 minutes to an hour daily on improvements that could move the business forward long term.

This meant working on turning it into an asset rather than just another job. I've maintained this practice, and now it's my full-time focus instead of working in the business.

3. Persistence

The final, and perhaps most crucial habit, is simply not giving up. Several entrepreneurs started alongside my cofounder and me in 2013 — many with more talent, experience, and resources than us. The key difference between our success and their failures? They eventually stopped improving their products, marketing, and customer service.

After months and years of compound effects, the difference became dramatic. That's why there's a graveyard of competitors while we're thriving at the top.

Leverage these resources

I use different resources depending on where I am in life and business challenges. For books, I focus mainly on autobiographies and mindset. Here are a few of my favorites on mindset

1. The 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss

2. Relentless by Tim Grover — who trained Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan

3. Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin

4. Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell — this one's more strategic and tactical, but timeless

And my favorite autobiographies:

1. Steve Jobs biography (Walter Isaacson)

2. Elon Musk's 2015 biography (Ashlee Vance)

Podcasts provide real-time insights into what's currently working for companies — something books can't always deliver due to publishing timelines. While books are excellent for deeper reflection, when you need to understand what's working for companies like Airbnb today, you need to hear directly from practitioners through podcasts.

My top three recommended podcasts:

1. My First Million with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri — startup and business insights

2. Lenny's Podcast — nominally for product managers but excellent for company building, organization, and leadership

3. The Game with Alex Hormozi — invaluable for management, leadership, and strategic business thinking.

And here's a great article by Patrick Collison that I'd recommend reading.

What's next?

I want to continue scaling ZenMaid while keeping it fun and sustainable. Personally, I’m exploring new ways to give back to the entrepreneurial community, whether that’s through content, mentorship, or new projects.

My ultimate goal? Work less, impact more, and visit another 31 countries.

You can follow along on Facebook, X, Instagram, LinkedIn, my blog, and the Zenmaid blog. And check out Zenmaid and The Maid Summit.