Staying close to customers and hitting $16k/mo

from my experience running B2B outreach across both, it's less about which platform and more about where your ICP actually talks.

LinkedIn is where people wear their professional hat. Good for connecting with decision makers, terrible for getting a candid opinion from them. Facebook groups (the right ones) are where those same people ask the dumb questions they won't ask on LinkedIn. Engagement tends to be more genuine because there's less performative career signalling.

"The Facebook groups tip resonates a lot. I'm building a content site targeting Spanish-speaking US residents and that's exactly where my audience is. Did you find that posting consistently in groups was enough, or did you also run ads early on?"

"Staying close to customers" is advice everyone gives but nobody explains how. What does that actually look like day-to-day for you? Do you have a system for collecting feedback or is it more organic conversations?

Great story. I like the emphasis on staying close to customers. A lot of founders focus on marketing tactics or growth hacks, but consistent conversations with users often seem to drive the biggest improvements. Did you actively schedule calls with customers, or did those conversations happen more organically through support and email?

Love the "scratch itches and focus on small improvements" philosophy. That's exactly how FontPreview.online started — I was tired of guessing font combinations and testing them in different tools, so I built a simple way to see fonts with my own text. Just solved my own problem, then realized others had it too.

The "build based on real user feedback" piece is underrated. It's tempting to build what you think people want, but when a feature comes directly from someone asking for it, you know it'll be used.

Quick question: you mentioned Facebook groups as a key channel — how do you approach those without coming across as spammy? That balance is something I'm still figuring out.

This feels very grounded. Building from real frustration, keeping the scope practical, and letting user demand shape the next product all feels like a very clean way to build. Curious whether SEO Utils or Ring Tonic taught you more about what kind of business you actually want to keep building.

Great ! How did you get your first users?

Interesting how often small UX details end up mattering more than big features.

Those are also the easiest things to miss if you’re not really close to how people use the product day to day.

The two-product split here is interesting — SEO Utils on one-time pricing, Ring Tonic on subscriptions. That means the subscription revenue at $5.4k MRR is where the compounding risk lives.

Subscription call-tracking at that MRR probably means 50-150 subscribers depending on price point. At the industry average 1-3% monthly card failure rate, that is 1-4 failed payments per month — not catastrophic individually, but they compound quietly if not followed up systematically.

The manual recovery pattern (someone noticing a payment failed and reaching out) is fine until it is not. Ring Tonic at $10k MRR will have 5-10 failing per month, and by $20k, it is a real ops burden.

How are you currently handling failed Stripe payments for Ring Tonic? Built tryrecoverkit.com/connect specifically for this — 30-second Stripe connect, Day 1/Day 3/Day 7 automated recovery emails. Worth setting up now so it is running before it becomes a problem.

Really like this approach. Building from real demand instead of assumptions is such a strong way to do it. I also think the “solve your own problem first” angle is massively underrated, that’s often where the best products come from. Impressive numbers too, fair play

Brilliant post. The "staying close to customers and word-of-mouth driving growth" insight is gold. One underrated lever I'd add: formally capturing that word-of-mouth through customer testimonials and case studies. You mentioned "happy users recommended the product to others" — imagine converting a fraction of that organic advocacy into written testimonials or brief video clips on your homepage/pricing page. You're already close to customers, so collecting and showcasing their feedback (in their words, about real problems solved) amplifies word-of-mouth 10x. It turns organic recommendations into visible social proof that converts new prospects at scale. Great execution on the product — adding the testimonials layer would multiply the growth you're already seeing. 🚀

Really liked this one. Staying close to customers is such an underrated advantage for small teams. When founders actually talk to users and build based on real feedback, the product naturally moves in the right direction. A lot of startups overcomplicate growth, but listening to customers and solving their problems consistently is what really compounds over time.

At KFW-The CHRO Bridge we often discuss similar ideas around leadership and people strategy—staying close to the people you serve, whether they’re customers or employees, usually leads to better long-term outcomes.

Great story. I think many developers start by building products for other people before realizing they should build for themselves.
It's inspiring to see how focusing on real user problems can turn into a sustainable business.

$10k+ MRR and building two products solo — seriously impressive!

I noticed both SEO Utils and Ring Tonic could shine even more with a short, crisp video that explains your value instantly. Just a 30–60 second highlight can turn curious visitors into confident users, and showcase the polish your products deserve.

I help founders create slick, high-impact videos that make their tools feel intuitive and irresistible. If you want, I can mock up a quick example to show what your users would see no commitment, just proof.

Curious if you’d like me to do that?

The one-time pricing angle for SEO Utils is underrated. Most SEO tools are subscription-first by default, not because the model fits the product — just because it's what everyone does.

Choosing a pricing model that actually matches how users want to pay is itself a distribution strategy.

The Ring Tonic origin story is also a good reminder that your existing user base is your best product research team. You didn't have to guess what to build next — they told you.

HELLO! Can we connect on linkedin i am intrested in these stuffs.Can you guide me if it is possible on how to make these services?

The SEO Utils → Ring Tonic product birth sequence is worth highlighting. You had a captive user base that already trusted your philosophy (one-time, simple, affordable), and they handed you a second product brief directly. That's a distribution advantage most founders don't talk about: when your first product works, your existing users become your best product researchers for product #2 — no cold outreach, no guessing.

The BYOK Twilio angle is smart positioning too. Most call tracking tools lock you into their carrier margins, which creates a latent trust problem ("are they just reselling minutes at 10x?"). Letting users plug in their own Twilio key makes the pricing story much cleaner — you pay Twilio for usage, you pay me for the software. Separates the infrastructure cost from the product value cleanly.

Curious whether you've found tension between the one-time model on SEO Utils and the subscription model on Ring Tonic. Do Ring Tonic users ever push back expecting one-time pricing there too, given the brand association?

Really liked the part about building from your own need first and only expanding once real demand showed up. Also agree that “staying close to customers” sounds obvious until you actually try to make it part of your routine.

Inspirational story! Building products based on real user demand and staying close to customers is a powerful strategy for long-term growth. Reaching $15K+ per month as a solo founder shows how consistent feedback and fast shipping can create real value.

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Great insights—thanks for sharing this journey!

Inspirational👏
Love this approach!

The "build for your own team first, then release publicly" pattern is underrated. Most advice says to validate before building, but sometimes the best signal is just solving your own problem well enough that you'd pay for it yourself.

Curious about the Facebook groups approach — did you find a way to post there without it feeling like self-promotion? That line is hard to walk, especially in SEO communities where people are pretty good at spotting content marketing.

Building from your own pain and then expanding from user demand is such a strong pattern. Also love the point about small workflow improvements, that’s usually where the real product value shows up.

The part about "small workflow improvements" creating the biggest value really stood out to me.

When I started dogfooding my own MVP for 30 days, I kept a log of every tiny friction point I encountered. The pattern that emerged was surprising: users don't notice when things work well, but they *definitely* notice when a decision point is missing.

I ended up removing a configuration step that I thought was essential—turns out, 60% of my own usage skipped it entirely. The product got simpler, and engagement went up. No new features, just subtraction.

Phuc's point about one-time pricing removing the recurring decision for customers is a smart extension of this. Sometimes the best UX improvement isn't in the UI at all—it's in removing a mental burden from the user's life entirely.

Appreciate the transparency in the interview. These are the kinds of details that actually help other builders.

Building from real problems and shipping fast seems like the common thread behind many successful indie products. Also love the point about small workflow improvements — those often create the biggest value for users.

Hardwork Pays Off!!

nice

getting to $16k on word of mouth alone is genuinely impressive - it means your retention is solid enough that paid acquisition could actually work well now. the scary thing about running ads before pmf is that you're paying to acquire users who churn, and you never recover that. but once word of mouth is compounding, that's usually the signal that paid can scale it further without burning money into a leaky bucket. curious - have you tested any paid at all, or been 100% organic so far?

This is an underrated observation. Most product roadmaps are additive by default. The backlog fills up with "add X feature," "integrate with Y," "support Z format." Very rarely does someone file a ticket that says "remove this workflow entirely" or "eliminate this decision the user has to make."

But the highest-impact changes I've seen in products are almost always subtractive. Removing a configuration step that confused 60% of new users. Killing a feature that three people used but created support tickets every week. Merging two separate screens into one because the split only existed for historical reasons.

Phuc's approach with one-time pricing is a version of this applied to the business model itself. He looked at subscription fatigue in the SEO tools market and removed the recurring payment decision from the customer's life. The customer doesn't have to evaluate "is this still worth $29/month" every time they see the charge. They already paid. They just use it. That's one less friction point per month, compounded across every customer.

The tricky part is that removal requires more conviction and courage than addition. Adding a feature is low-risk because you can always deprecate it later. Removing something means you're making a judgment call that this thing doesn't deserve to exist. Most teams avoid that judgment call because it feels risky. But the teams that get comfortable making it consistently ship better products.

Really interesting journey. What was the biggest challenge when you were getting your first users?

This is a solid example of how staying close to customers drives sustainable growth. Prioritizing real conversations, understanding pain points, and iterating based on user feedback builds not just revenue, but trust and long-term engagement.

Hitting $16K/mo is clearly the result of disciplined listening and responsive product evolution a great reminder that deep customer relationships often matter more than chasing feature velocity alone.

This is a great example of demand-led building instead of idea-led building.

You didn’t start with a big vision deck — you started with friction. Then users pulled the next product out of you (Ring Tonic). That’s organic product expansion done right.

Thanks for the shoutout! Keeping things simple and focusing on small UX improvements has been the biggest win for me. Onward to the next milestone! 📈

Well written! As someone who recently launched, I learned a lot by just reading this post. I didn't know about the "build in public" concept, so that is something I will try out going forward.

Thanks for sharing!

Really enjoyed this breakdown.

The Facebook group angle is especially interesting — it’s not a channel many founders talk about openly, but it clearly worked for you.

Also fully agree with the “build what you need first” approach. Some of the most interesting products seem to come from solving real internal problems rather than following a roadmap from day one.

Thanks for sharing this.

Really respect how both products came directly from real usage instead of market guessing.

“Build the minimum you need for yourself first” + “grow from real usage rather than assumptions” — that combination seems to show up in a lot of durable indie businesses.

Also interesting that Ring Tonic came from SEO Utils users asking for something adjacent. That feels like a much lower-risk way to expand compared to starting from zero again.

I’m earlier in my journey and building a small multiplayer game right now. Reading this reinforces the idea that distribution and user conversations matter as much as the product itself.

Curious — when SEO Utils crossed the first few thousand per month, what changed the most? Was it audience growth, word of mouth compounding, or a specific feature that unlocked demand?

Really appreciate the transparency here

I am currently building my first startup RightCar, a car discovery platform.

Something I'm realizing early is that building the product

is actually easier than figuring out distribution.

Did you focus on audience early or only after traction?

The "unfair access to reality" point is the most honest advice in here. Most founders spend months guessing what users need. You had real deadlines and real clients from day one, which basically compresses years of learning into weeks.

The Khabib story is also worth sitting with. Massive distribution, zero retention. It's a reminder that getting people in the door and keeping them there are completely different problems, and most early teams only figure that out after the damage is done.

The glass box vs black box realization is something a lot of AI builders skip because the black box version is faster to ship. But in any high-stakes workflow, the moment users can't explain why the AI did something, trust is gone and it rarely comes back.

The Ring Tonic origin story is underrated. A second product born entirely from listening to existing users, no brainstorming, no market research, just paying attention. That's the cleanest form of validation there is.

The "scratch your own itch first" approach also removes so much noise early on. When you're your own first user, you know immediately if something is broken or clunky without waiting for feedback to tell you what you already feel.

One thing I'd add to your advice: stay close to your churned users too, not just the active ones. The people who left usually have the most honest take on what wasn't worth paying for.

This really resonates with me. The "build what you need first, then share it with a community" path is exactly what happened with my project. My wife is a freelance vocalist and I watched her cobble together 5 different tools after every gig — spreadsheets, mileage apps, invoice templates, Notes app. I built her a single tool to replace all of it.

The bit about sharing in Facebook groups and iterating on feedback mirrors what I'm finding too. Niche communities where people already talk about the problem are 10x more useful than any growth hack. I'm wondering, when you shared in those SEO Facebook groups, did you lead with "I built this" or "I'm trying to solve X, here's what I've got so far"?

Love the focus on staying close to customers. At what point did you formalize feedback into a system instead of just conversations? Curious how you avoid building edge-case features.

That's a dope strategy.. taking a large service that only has a few features people actually use, and slicing that out into a smaller SaaS at a lower price.. Smart! How are you tracking your churn and other revenue metrics?

That’s a really good point — thoughtful UX/UI can make a big difference. I've begun to see just how much of a difference small improvements to workflow can make. Sometimes the best update isn't adding functionality, but it's removing friction.

Really strong example of how staying close to customers drives sustainable product growth. When founders consistently embed user feedback into their roadmap and decisions, it reduces risky assumptions and accelerates product-market fit. Hitting recurring revenue milestones often comes not from chasing features, but from deeply understanding user context and validating small bets early.

The Ring Tonic origin story is the part that sticks with me most. You didn't sit down and brainstorm a second product — your existing users basically told you what to build next. That's such a different energy from the "validate an idea in a spreadsheet" approach most people recommend.

I'm curious about the DataForSEO API decision. When you realized existing SEO tools were too expensive, did you consider just building on top of free/cheaper data sources first, or did you go straight to DataForSEO because the data quality difference was that obvious? That tradeoff between cost and accuracy early on seems like it could make or break a tool like this.

Great young man

Love this approach — especially building from your own pain and validating through real user demand.

What stands out to me is how much leverage you got from shipping fast and iterating publicly. That trust loop (fast release → feedback → changelog → repeat) is powerful.

I’m curious — have you optimized your landing flow and onboarding for conversion based on that same feedback loop? Sometimes small frontend UX tweaks (clarity, friction removal, CTA structure) can unlock disproportionate growth compared to new features.

Also, with your one-time pricing model, lifecycle automation (email, upgrade nudges, retention triggers) could be a strong multiplier.

Really solid indie execution here.

As a developer, I sometime sees gaps in the existing tool by mid to large scale companies
is it worth it to make something to fill those gap ?

16k a month ist crazy

Love the “build what you need first” approach.

Starting with internal tools removes so much guesswork — you already know the pain is real.

Also interesting how Ring Tonic came directly from SEO Utils users. That kind of adjacent product expansion feels way less risky than chasing random ideas.

At what point did you know SEO Utils had real product-market fit versus just early adopter enthusiasm?

This is exactly the kind of story I needed to read today. I'm building StayActive a desktop utility for remote workers (anti-idle / keep-alive tool) and the "Desktop-first" approach you describe really resonates.
How did you find your first paying customers? Was it purely organic from IH, or did you actively reach out to communities?

Really liked the emphasis on small, demand-driven improvements.

When you say you stayed close to customers, was that mostly reactive (support conversations) or did you have a more structured way of reaching out regularly?

I’ve noticed it’s easy to say “talk to users,” but harder to build a consistent loop around it.

I'm also a full-stack developer turned indie founder. Like you, I started building my own product. Sure our tech stacks are different (Rails/React instead of Go/Laravel), but the shift in mindset I'm sure is the same. I also chose to build the product I needed for my own use, handling everything myself, bootstrapping everything so far to stay independent.

I've also been entirely heads-down for 18 months and kept telling myself I'd share the journey once things were perfect. Maybe that was just an excuse. Reading this made it clear I've been wrong to wait.

Ring Tonic is also a great example of what staying close to customers actually looks like in practice. A whole second product born directly from listening to your existing users. That's not something you can plan for; it just happens when you're paying attention.

Those are impressive numbers for a solo founder.

Hi man, congrats! Apart from the "build in public" strategy, did you use other marketing/distribution techniques ? Ex UGC, Ads

Congrats on $15.8k MRR! The Ring Tonic origin story (users asking → building) is exactly right.

Curious on your "continue shipping" plan: When deciding what to build next for SEO Utils or Ring Tonic, how do you validate a feature is worth the engineering time before coding?

I learned the hard way that "users asking" ≠ "users paying." Built something once that everyone said they wanted, $20K, 3 months, 0 sales. Now I test with video prototypes first — validate demand before the MVP.

Would love to hear your take on pre-build validation vs. shipping fast and iterating.

The part about building for others vs building your own thing really hit me.

I been building apps for clients from 7 years now. 100+ apps delivered. Every time I build something great for a client I think same thing — why am I not building this for myself.

Your one time pricing idea for SEO Utils is very smart. Most founders I work with are tired of subscription fatigue. They will pay good money for something that just works without monthly bill.

One thing curious me — Facebook groups worked better than X or LinkedIn for you? We always assume LinkedIn is best for B2B but sounds like you found different answer.

Asking because we also trying to figure out best channel for our agency right now 😄

Super solid journey — especially building from your own pain first and then expanding based on real user demand.

Going from internal tool → $10k+/mo product is no joke. And the fact that Ring Tonic came directly from user requests shows you’re actually listening, not guessing.

Also love the “scratch your own itch + small UX improvements” angle. That’s where indie founders quietly win.

Really cool to see Ring Tonic in here — I'm building in a related space (AI voice agents for service businesses that answer missed calls and capture leads). The phone call vertical is so underserved by tech.

The part about "build in public sooner" hits hard. I spent months heads-down building and barely talking to anyone. The moment I started cold calling potential customers instead of cold emailing them, I learned more in a week than I did in 3 months of building alone.

Also love the "scratch your own itch" philosophy. I noticed service business owners losing customers to missed calls and realized nobody was solving it well. Voicemail is broken — 80% of callers just hang up. That became the whole thesis.

Question for Phuc: with Ring Tonic being call-tracking focused, have you seen demand from customers who also want the actual call answering handled (not just tracked)? Curious if that's a feature request you've gotten.

Biggest takeaway: hanging out in FB groups/X/LinkedIn and shipping what users literally ask for > any growth hack.

Rooting for 20k+ soon — keep it up! 🙌

Interesting story. Did building in public ever become a distraction, or did it mostly help you stay focused on the right problems?