Made $12,000 with my SaaS in 7 months. Here’s what worked and what didn’t

This is gold insight, I was looking at some of my basic digital products I am building and wondering how to promote them, in short you have really helped tailor my strategy. Good luck on growing and increasing your revenue!

This is gold, Chris. Love how you leaned into content and community instead of chasing vanity metrics. SERPtag sounds like the kind of tool built by someone who actually feels the pain those are the best kinds. Thanks for sharing the wins and the flops it’s rare and super valuable. Rooting for your next 12k!

Fellow indie hacker here—your ‘content + community’ growth playbook is spot on! The ‘fast iteration on feedback’ part especially resonates. Early users truly shape product-market fit.

Two questions:

How do you balance SEO content creation vs. product development time?

Did you explore other cold-start channels (e.g. niche forums/LinkedIn) after paid ads failed?

PS: Love the lightweight approach. Bookmarked SERPtag!"

Awesome breakdown, Chris—really appreciate you sharing both the wins and the misses. Quick question for you:
You mentioned that replying on Reddit and other communities led to some of your first paying users. Can you share more about how you approached that? Like, were there specific subreddits or Slack groups that worked best, or certain types of questions that drove the most engagement?

Thanks for the detailed post and congrats on your accomplishments!

I recently released a service for SEO as well. But with a bias towards technical problems on websites. Broken links, blocked links in robots.txt, wrong canonical, etc. Right now I'm just starting to try to attract users, but I'm not doing very well. I'm going to try to take some advice on long-tail keywords.

Maybe give some advice on where to look for them? And what are the best places to post articles?

Congrats on the growth! Curious. Did you ever face deliverability issues while scaling?
A lot of SaaS folks hit volume limits fast and don’t realize their emails are silently landing in spam, killing half their potential.
This is the part I specialize in fixing, because no reply usually means no delivery, not no interest.

Huge congrats on hitting $12k—super inspiring to see that kind of traction as a solo founder! 🙌
Really appreciate you breaking down what worked and what didn’t. The part about focusing on long-tail keywords and iterating based on real user feedback really hit home.

Also love that you leaned into community and organic growth instead of burning through ads—great validation for staying lean. Definitely checking out SERPtag, sounds like exactly what I’ve been needing. Keep pushing! 🚀

Totally agree with your take — content takes time, and the only way to win is to keep showing up and doing the work. Appreciate you sharing the honest side.

Can anyone please guide me?
I’m a MERN Stack Developer, and I’ve been struggling for the past 4–5 months across all platforms, but I’m still getting zero results. I genuinely want to get clients so I can grow and improve.
Can someone please tell me what I might be doing wrong and what I should do to improve?

Thanks for the success story! And well done!

Love it; very inspiring. Thank you for sharing.

Straight to the point, without clutter - I love it! :D
This post resonated with me big time. I went straight for "1. Paid ads (Google/Facebook)" which really gives you a high, because look at all that traffic. But no real conversions and you just end up with a hangover. What was your timeline from blogging + SEO to hitting 94.9k impressions? Exponential or slow and steady?

Great advice, very insightful. Provides guidance on what to pay attention to and what not to .

Thanks for sharing your experience! $12k in 7 months is solid progress.

I'm curious, when you talk about scaling what works and what doesn't, how much of a bottleneck has email communication (sales, support, onboarding) been for you? We solve this problem with Reply4.com, an AI email assistant designed to generate automated responses, I'd be interested to hear your experience.

Really appreciate these tips — super useful for someone like me who's just starting out with SaaS. Thanks so much!

Congrats on the $12K milestone, super inspiring, especially as a solo founder! Your focus on low-competition keywords and community engagement clearly paid off

Quick question: When you were testing Facebook ads, what kind of targeting and creatives did you try?

I’ve found that Facebook ads can work well, even for SaaS, but only when the strategy aligns closely with the audience's pain points. It’s less about the budget and more about the message, targeting, and funnel. Would love to hear more about your ad experiment

not too familiar with seo but would thousands of long tail/short keywords on all your pages help?

Thank you so much for the insight! I am working on a SaaS tool and this is super helpful!

I appreciate your insights. Starting from the solution of the problem, I obtained traffic through blog posts and SEO promotion. This is very useful experience. Thank you for sharing.

I like how you work. Straightforward. I am looking for front-end and back-end coders for my Saas . Got any recommendations? I am all about sales and I am an expert on real estate. Help

cool, that grate, i just finished my full TTS frontend website with working API

I am currently trying to build a SaaS tool. thank u so much for this amazing post

Thanks for sharing this , Chris - super inspiring for somone like me who's just starting to build my own Saas. Reall appreciate you for being honest about both what worked and what flopped - not enough people talk about the failures too.

This is great advice, thank you!

Wow, I am a builder, and I am currently in the starting phase of my small venture too.

I build and sell templates, and this is a very great advice because I have been strategising all day on how to get decent organic traffic myself for my different products, and your suggestions are extremely helpful.

Amazing. Thanks for the post, it actually helps me understand what to do in order to ship my SaaS.

It was exciting to even read. Congratulations.

I'd like to give a small tip, maybe useful maybe not. I know a guy who works with social marketing and shared a good method. You need a website for it and Cookies to save some information about your visitors/potential clients. Make a profile of your ideal client (eg. age, gender, where are they active etc) and combine these to make targeted ads. If you do like I did it (not the good way) like targeting the whole world it won't make anything, I've been there. Hope it helps!

It is good.

This was such a refreshing and honest read.

The way you broke down what worked vs what didn’t especially the part about replying on Reddit and niche communities was good! Most people overlook how powerful just being helpful can be and seeing 2.8k clicks in 28 days from organic traffic? That’s not a small win, that’s serious traction for a solo founder.

The “hidden keywords” feature you added from user feedback shows how closely you’re building with your audience not just for them. That part stood out.

Thanks for sharing the journey so openly.

Posts like these give other solo founders a bit more courage to keep going.

Looking forward to the next milestone update! Cheers Chris and Team.

Wishes from GudSho Team.

Very cool! How long did you work on it until getting to the 12k month?

Really enjoyed reading this