How I Built It: $30K/Month Micro-SaaS

Messaged artist friends and other people (warm and cold) saying 'I built this for you, do you want to use it?', setting up their pages for them. Early users were grandfathered into a free plan. Not scalable, but it drove early interest and feedback that he addressed before launching on Product Hunt. In his final advice he prescribes the hard work of reaching out to customers and doing outreach.

After addressing feedback from the first users and making changes, launched on Product Hunt. The traffic prompted him to try monetizing.

After the Product Hunt traffic, launched a premium version at around $3/month to check whether people would pay at all, then looked at how to scale it.

First scaling channel after reaching ~100 MRR. Worked early on, then Instagram changed its algorithms (around 2021 or 2022) and the channel stopped being viable. No spend or targeting details given.

Switched to Google Search ads after Instagram ads faded, targeting people actively looking for a link-in-bio tool or a web page builder. Spends about $100/day; it is his biggest expense and the channel he has relied on most for about four years.

Raised the base paid plan from $4 to $5 a month towards the end of June. With many customers each paying a small amount, a $1 rise moved MRR noticeably. No mention of grandfathering existing subscribers or of churn.

Anchors pricing on Linktree, the biggest competitor, and keeps the paid plan cheaper than theirs. Prefers many customers paying a little over fewer paying more; the Pro plan covers higher-paying users.

Pro plan starts at $12/month and includes a custom domain and 5 pages; customers can add more pages for more money. People managing many pages (agencies, multi-brand users) end up paying much more.

While building Visual he noticed many artists used Linktree but thought its pages did not look good. Gave himself two weeks to build an alternative focused on nicer pages, later adding more website-builder features (multiple pages, richer blocks, customization). His advice: pick a validated space, iterate until it works, then commit.

At signup users choose to start from their Instagram, from a link, or from scratch. The Instagram option scrapes the public profile (picture, name, public info), generates a banner, then lets the user pick a profile template and theme as starting points before a short celebration screen. He calls Instagram the best start because it is more structured.