Hitting $23k MRR in six months after five failures
Rob Hallam got laid off and spent 2.5 years failing to grow five products. After launching a dev agency to keep the lights on, he realized that all of his clients came from his viral posts on X, so he reverse engineered those posts.
From there, he partnered with Tibo and built SuperX. And six months later, it's at $23k MRR.
Here's Rob on how he did it. 👇
Five failures
I'm Rob. I'm building SuperX, the only platform that helps you grow faster on X — the right way.
I took the traditional path for most of my life. Worked hard at school, went to university, got a computer science degree, software engineering job, yada yada. Then, my first employer laid me off, which wasn't unwelcome at that stage, and I decided I was done with the corporate world.
I spent the next two and a half years trying to build something online. Five products, five attempts — earning me a total of $0. Every single one flopped. But I kept posting on X about what I was working on, sharing the failures along with any small wins.
Then one post blew up. I shared everything that had gone wrong, and it got 200,000 views. Someone in the comments suggested I start a dev agency. I announced it the next day, landed a $3,000 client from that same post, and suddenly had inbound work coming through X constantly.
That's when I realized the content was the distribution. I started building tools to systemize how I found and created viral posts. That became SuperX.
We launched in July 2025 and hit $1k MRR on day one. Now, we're at $23K MRR with around 650 paying customers at $39/mo, growing around 20-25% month over month, and I run it while traveling the world.
Desperation and pattern recognition
This all came from desperation and pattern recognition.
After those five failures, I was starting to get seriously anxious about money. Living in financial scarcity messes with your head in ways that are hard to explain until you've been there.
The dev agency changed that. But it also revealed something: Every single client was coming inbound through X. Every time a post did well, my DMs filled up. The problem was I couldn't make it happen on demand. Some posts would blow up, others would flop, and I had no idea why.
So I started building tools to figure it out. I wanted to reverse-engineer what was working: Find viral posts in my niche, understand the patterns, and create my own versions. Then, I partnered with my now-cofounder, Tibo.
Partnering up and rebuilding
While I was building those internal tools, I connected with Tibo. He'd acquired a Chrome extension called SuperX from another maker. It helped people find viral tweets, which was exactly what I'd been trying to solve for myself. He already had an audience in the X growth space, but he was juggling multiple products and needed someone to build it out properly who shared the same vision, so we decided to partner up. My task was to turn the extension into a full-fledged web app.
That was the plan anyway. In practice, I rebuilt everything from the ground up. The Chrome extension, the analytics infrastructure, how we embed and search tweets, authentication, syncing between the web app and extension, even migrating payment processors from Lemon Squeezy to Stripe.
It's the most complex project I've ever worked on. The first seven months before launch were brutal. I got hospitalized twice while traveling, first with food poisoning in Guatemala, then stress-induced neck spasms in Colombia. X kept changing their API and breaking things. I'd wake up to dozens of messages saying SuperX was down. But I kept building and kept posting about it, which was probably the only reason we had an audience ready when we finally launched.
The SuperX tech stack
Here's our stack.
For development:
Next.js
Node.js
Tailwind
SQLite
X API is our biggest cost at around $2-3K/month.
Claude Code for AI-assisted development
For AI:
OpenAI
Anthropic's Claude API
For the business side:
Stripe for payments
PostHog for analytics
Framer for the landing page
Screen Studio for the demo videos that tend to do well on X
Organic growth
Growth has been almost entirely organic. On launch day, we added $1K MRR in 24 hours. From there, it's been about going viral over and over again. Every time a post blows up, we get a wave of signups. The content is the growth engine.
The strategy is simple: post with intention, not randomly. I follow a loop:
Start with something entertaining or vulnerable to get attention.
Follow up with something educational or a product demo while people are watching.
Then post the results, the screenshot of signups or revenue, and make it inspirational.
Repeat.
People see my content on X, sign up for a 7-day free trial, and about 30% convert to paid.
The key is systemizing it. I use SuperX to find what's going viral in my niche, break down why it worked, and create my own version. I'm not guessing what to post anymore. I'm finding proven concepts and adding my personality.
Video has been huge. When I switched from text posts to video, I got around 10x the reach. X is pushing video hard right now (going the TikTok route), so I leaned into that. The dancing demos, my lifestyle vlogs, and the screen recordings with my face in the corner consistently outperform everything else.
The other thing is building real connections. Not spamming replies with "great post!" but actually engaging with people in my niche. A lot of my early users came from relationships I built just by being genuinely interested in what other people were working on.
We've spent maybe $5K total on ads, but 95% of our users have come from organic content.
Distribution from day one
If I had to start over, I'd focus on distribution from day one. My first five products failed because nobody knew they existed.
With SuperX, I built the audience and the product at the same time. I set myself a goal when I started: Post a video every day until I hit $10K MRR. It sounds simple, but most people don't do it. They post when they feel like it, get discouraged when something flops, and disappear for a week. The algorithm (and the Internet) forgets you fast.
Consistency compounds. I went from 900 followers to 40K by showing up every day. Some posts do nothing. Some blow up. But you only get the big ones if you keep showing up.
Keep going when it gets tough
Running a business while traveling sounds glamorous, but getting hospitalized twice while your product is breaking is not fun. There were points where I genuinely considered quitting.
What kept me going was posting about it. Sounds weird, but sharing the struggles publicly meant thousands of people holding me accountable. I couldn't quit because I'd told everyone I wouldn't.
Build for freedom
Do things with intention, not emotion.
Figure out what you're actually optimizing for. For most indie hackers, it's freedom. And freedom comes from money. So optimize for money from the start.
That means validating early. Ask people to pay before you build the thing. It feels uncomfortable, but you can always refund them if it doesn't work out. What you can't get back is the months you spent building something nobody wanted.
What's next?
Up next: $100K MRR. Sooner rather than later.
Beyond that, I want to keep creating. Not just SuperX. I want to grow my YouTube channel, make more vlogs, maybe build something in real life. I love being behind the camera and in the video editor.
A good friend of mine and legendary indie hacker, Tony Dinh, told me he sees life in three buckets: create, learn, and love. My goals for the future are to optimize for all three. Money is the lubricant, which is why the $100K target comes first.
You can follow along on X, YouTube, and Instagram. And check out SuperX!
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