Leaving his VC-backed company to bootstrap a product to $1M ARR in 10 months

Miquel Palet left his successful, VC-backed company to build a product focused on developers. Now, Zernio is making $1M ARR.

Here's Miquel on how he did it. 👇

Leaving a successful business

I've been building companies since I was 18. I dropped out of university in my final year to build a Spanish edtech company called Ucademy (now 120+ employees) via the VC route. I left after three years to build another company, this time in the software space.

That was ten months ago. Zernio is a social media API for developers to build social integrations in minutes instead of months. It covers everything from posting to analytics to DMs to advertising.

I wanted to build a product focused on developers because I could more easily sell to myself than to a profile I didn't understand. It seemed like everyone built on social media, but nobody focused on developers — they focused on end users. So I decided to try it, and it worked well from day one.

We have been doubling our MRR MoM since we started. As we get bigger, keeping that pace becomes more difficult, but we're still growing fast. We just crossed 1M ARR a month ago.

Building v1.0 in a weekend

We built the initial product in a weekend. Building the basic integrations was easy. Securing all required approved scopes then took around a month, with some taking up to six months.

For the first version, we decided to include only the five biggest social media integrations instead of covering everything. Currently, we have 20+ platforms.

Zernio runs on Next.js 14 (App Router) with MongoDB and Tinybird for data, deployed on Vercel. We use Axiom for logs, Crisp for support, and Fumadocs for documentation. Cloudflare hosts some infrastructure components.

Nailing the infrastructure from the start is crucial when scaling an infrastructure product. We didn't do this — we opted for simplicity. If I were starting over, I'd do it differently.

As we scaled, we had to migrate some key things into Tinybird for analytics data because we handled a huge amount of data, and MongoDB was too slow and expensive for it. The same applied to Vercel; we had to migrate some parts to Cloudflare queues that Vercel couldn't handle using its serverless functions.

A SaaS model

We offer three monthly plans: Starter ($19), Accelerate ($49), and Unlimited ($999). Developers typically begin with a lower plan and scale as they require more capability.

Each plan allows connecting more social accounts; the Unlimited plan offers unlimited account connections. Unlimited plans typically serve SaaS companies with many users, and Build plans are for people testing or trying out integrations.

Our product is fully self-serve, and we do not have demos, so users just sign up and test the product on the free plan, upgrading if they hit limits.

SEO and paid advertising

We mainly acquire users through SEO and paid advertising. For both, we target BOFu keywords, like 'social media API'. These don't need many searches because they convert extremely well. Each visitor is looking for our exact solution. We've been running this strategy since day one.

Nowadays, we also acquire users through feature launches, YouTube videos, and creator partnerships.

Still, we find it difficult to attribute much of our growth, so we never know exactly where our users come from.

Build a team early

Building a team was the best single decision I've made — and it's uncommon in the indie space. Relying on people better than you, I think, is a big advantage in the long run.

We currently have a team of four developers and one marketer. One developer focuses on customer support. Great customer support is a huge advantage, as we can iterate much faster on customer feedback and give excellent service.

Focus on customers and acquisition

Here's my advice: Ignore most of the noise on social media and focus on your customers and acquisition.

Personally, I always start with paid acquisition — ads — from the beginning. If you have the budget and it doesn't require a large investment, you need to start appearing in front of your potential clients.

What's next?

From here, I want to keep growing our team, adding new products, and doubling down on what's already working.

To learn more about Zernio, check out zernio.com. To learn how we're building it and what we're learning, follow me on LinkedIn and X.