Koran Thorne set out to get 50 users in 25 days with Reddit as the main channel. He built karma for two weeks, then his first posts were removed by Reddit's spam filter, his comments became invisible to everyone but him for nearly a week, and the account was banned sitewide. Day 10: 0 paying users.
Arthur Yuzbashev's first two products died on Reddit: six bans, one BuildFast sale. He tracked what had triggered each ban, turned that into MediaFast — a tool for marketing on Reddit without getting banned — and sold it by sharing the story on X. Month one: $360; by January 2026: $5,400.
Tony Dinh launched Xnapper, a screenshot tool, on Product Hunt and hit #1 Product of the Day: 1,428 votes, 6.2K website visits, 164 sales and $4,212. He credits the launch-day email to his beta list most.
Tibo's SEO tool launched on Product Hunt as ContentPie, placed #8 and stalled at $300 MRR. Renamed Outrank and repositioned as an autonomous SEO machine, it relaunched to #1 Product of the Day and passed $10,000 MRR within two months.
Tibo bought the #1 spot on outbid.lol — a viral site where the highest bidder gets the homepage — for Outrank, then measured new trials against the same days over the previous 8 weeks: 50+ trials above baseline in two days.
Launching a $9/month membership with no list and no following, Taiko_TOEDA published the day-15 numbers: $0 revenue, 3 Product Hunt upvotes, 0 stars across 17 GitHub repos. The only thing that worked was a careful argument in someone else's replies.
Sofia DM'd 200 potential users. Two replied: one wasn't interested; the other pitched her his own SaaS — a better pitch than hers — and she became a paying user of it.
Sabba Keynejad grew VEED's first 1,000 paid users by recording 40+ YouTube tutorials himself and answering questions on Quora, Reddit and Facebook groups — until he was banned from Quora and most subreddits. YouTube stuck: VEED later hired someone to post a tutorial every day, and the channel passed 50K subscribers.
Rob Hallam rebuilt a standard referral program around affiliate tactics borrowed from larger brands. He says it added $10k MRR in 30 days; his MRR screenshot shows $23.2k, up 62% vs December.
After directories, Twitter and a Product Hunt Product of the Day took Talknotes to $1,500 MRR, Nico Jeannen made Facebook/Meta ads his main channel — writing new ads from what users said in the onboarding form. He took it from $0 to $7,500 MRR in 11 months and sold it for $200,000.
With no strong social following, Nevo David built Postiz as open source so he could post it in developer communities like r/selfhosted and DEV, shipping a new version for every small feature to keep having something to post.
Nevo David noticed many people automating social media with n8n, shipped an official Postiz n8n node and a better public API, and cold-pitched Skool communities. MRR went from $6,523 to $12,648 in one month.