Revealing Everything About My 2500 Month SaaS Side Hustles Marketing Tech Stack Costs
Revealing Everything About My 2500 Month SaaS Side Hustles Marketing Tech Stack Costs
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00:00I've built two SaaS apps to $500 a month of recurring revenue and in this video
00:04I'm going to be pulling back the curtains on both of them to show everything about how I grew the app
00:08Showing you real stripe revenue numbers as well as other important metrics like number of users retention
00:14Costs so you can see how much profit i'm making not just pure revenue
00:17I'm basically going to be showing you my entire secret sauce of how I built everything and how I monetize everything and how I grew
00:23Everything so let's get started fair warning
00:25The vast majority of this video is going to be just screen recording of me info dumping a ton of information
00:30So get ready. It's going to be super dense, but hopefully you find some helpful information in there
00:35All right
00:35So let's get started with the very first SaaS product that I built which is called nexus researcher.ai
00:40So the very first app that I built is an app called nexus research.ai
00:43Which you can see right here and it's essentially an ai-powered reading and note-taking tool
00:48This is a very common tool that's out there
00:50It's one of those chat pdf tools where you essentially upload a pdf and then from that upload a pdf
00:55You can then chat with it to extract any information that you want
00:58Now I will be the first to say this is not the first product to come out in this space
01:02I shamelessly copied or got inspiration from I stole like an artist basically
01:07I saw that this tool
01:09Has proven market demand where people were building companies off of it and making a ton of money off of this type of idea
01:14So I just leaned into it and made some tiny differences from it
01:18And I basically made the idea my own idea
01:20So I talked about this in my previous video where when you are trying to build one of your very first
01:24Products do not be afraid to copy other existing ideas that have been proven to work
01:28You want some type of market validation out there?
01:30So it's a very straightforward product and what makes this a little bit different is the fact that you can chat with multiple papers at
01:36Once they can see you're right here. You can ask one question to multiple papers to extract all the information out there
01:41This is a little bit more unique
01:42This is my own twist to the whole pdf reader ai pdf reader idea
01:47And then you can also take notes at the same time while you're reading a certain piece of paper as well
01:52So those are some other smaller twists to this original idea of a chat pdf ai application
01:57But then adopting it as my own and putting some small twists to it
02:01So now if we go over to let's go to our stripe dashboard
02:05You can see that this is nexus app and you can see that currently i'm at around
02:09450 dollars of monthly recurring revenue
02:12But what's even crazier if you go to where i'm hosting this website, which is for sell.com
02:16You can see I literally have not touched this app in forever
02:20So this it says 24 days ago was the last time that I touched this app
02:23But really I was just redeploying this application to get a new environment variable out there
02:28So really I actually haven't touched this app in 70 days
02:31It has been so long and it kind of just prints money for me. It's actually insane
02:35So if you go look at the revenue, you can say i'm at around 450 dollars of monthly recurring revenue and in this year to date
02:41Which is pretty much the entire existence of this company of this product. It has made roughly
02:472600 total so not life-changing money not enough to like retire me by any means, but i'm not going to complain at a free
02:55449 that come into my pocket every single month
02:58So in terms of how I built this application, this is a next.js application that is hosted on versell
03:03Like I showed here i'm using next.js as my entire stack front end and the back end
03:08I'm using stripe as my payment processor
03:10I actually have an existing video where I talk about my entire tech stack of what I use to build my applications
03:15And this is exactly that it is using the same exact tech stack that I talked about in that video
03:19So it uses planet scale as my database in the back end
03:22Make sure to watch that video for more details if you're interested and then in terms of how I grew this application
03:27Let's go over to instagram because it was 100
03:29Social media marketing so we go over here
03:32Let's go to
03:34Come on
03:38It was 100 social media marketing in terms of how I grew this application
03:43And if you go over to the reels, you can see it's kind of a big account 4 000 followers
03:47But better than just a pure follower number is actually the number of impressions that I got
03:52So there were actually two main video series that I used to grow the social media account and get impressions about my product
03:58So the first series was this one if colleges were honest
04:01So I talked about all the big colleges caltech stanford mit
04:04What else you pen columbia princeton all the big name elite prestigious schools now?
04:09I knew that this is going to go viral because for college students college is such a huge portion of their identity
04:15And this whole series of if something were honest
04:18This has been done for ages and years and years on social media and on youtube and all of that
04:23So I knew that this is a proven format and because college is such a strong identity for the students that are attending there
04:28They want to see like oh, how is this person going to roast my school?
04:31I knew that it was going to invoke some type of reaction both positive and negative
04:34But you know, nope, no such thing as bad press all press is good press
04:38So that was the one video series that kind of first blew me up
04:41But the one downside to this series was that it did not show the product at all
04:45It didn't talk about the product at all
04:47But it was still useful because it got a lot of eyeballs to my account and helped grow my account to a certain
04:52minimum number of followers
04:53So then from there the second series that I used to more organically show the product was this series right here
05:01It will put it on mute in the background
05:02So essentially what I did was I would find a really interesting article or a headline
05:07And then I would use my tool nexus research.ai to summarize the entire text of that
05:12So in every single video I say hey i'm too lazy to read this entire article
05:16So i'm going to be using nexus research.ai to summarize everything and get all the information out there
05:21Now as you can see this is an infinitely reproducible format because there is so much interesting articles out there so many different interesting
05:28uh pieces of text that I can summarize and explain to the to the people of the internet, but you can also see that
05:33You know, they will not always go as viral as the other videos
05:37So you can see this one only got 7 000 views. This one's got 13 000 views. Let's see. What else this one?
05:42Got 14 000 views 19 000 views
05:45So even though it would get less views on social media
05:48You got to remember that all views are not created equal
05:51I was okay with the less amount of views because I knew that this type of video series was going to attract higher intent
05:57Customers and it will showcase the product much more organically and being like yo, this is too much to read
06:01It clearly showcases the problem being too lazy to read an entire article and then the solution
06:06So i'm going to upload it to nexus research.ai chat with it to get all the information that I want
06:10It clearly showcased the problem that this tool is facing as well as the solution that this tool provides
06:15So those are the two main series that I followed through with to grow my social media
06:19And this is literally all that I did to grow nexus research.ai
06:22So as you can see the last time that I posted on this app was almost eight weeks ago
06:26So that's two months and it still regularly gets new customers and it regularly gets more payments coming in like the mrr has been
06:32Kind of stagnant at around the 400 but also slowly starting to grow again
06:36So I did this across instagram
06:37I did this across tiktok and I did this across youtube shorts as well
06:40That was straight up my entire growth strategy for nexus research.ai
06:44And the pricing for nexus research is just a simple subscription plan
06:48I believe I had a weekly subscription plan a monthly subscription plan and a yearly subscription plan
06:53But I will say the vast majority of my subscribers actually use the weekly subscription plan because most people were just using this for like
07:00One or two homework assignments in that week and they didn't have any use for it either
07:03So I loved introducing the weekly plan
07:05Yes, it does introduce more churn because it does introduce more people cancelling their subscription
07:10Honestly, i'm okay with that
07:11I actually think a product like this kind of has churn built into it
07:14And i'm personally okay with that because this is just like a side hustle
07:17I'm not trying to maximize the number maximize the profit maximize the revenue
07:21It's okay for people to turn and i've accepted that and I really do recommend people check out weekly plans in your products a lot
07:27More it's not going to work for every single product out there
07:30But I do think it's something that people do not think about as much from just the monthly and it is starting to gain a
07:35Little bit more popularity outside of just doing the monthly and the yearly
07:39So consider putting a weekly subscription because it definitely increased conversions and it definitely increased my app's revenue for sure
07:44So then if we want to go over to the analytics page right here
07:47Which I am using post hog to do all of my analytics tracking for my application
07:51You can see that it's still pretty active like every single day
07:54We get like 20 30 messages or so being sent and then we can see the weekly active users
07:59Just staying around the 600 to the 500 mark
08:01And then when we look at the retention chart
08:03You can clearly see that there's a pretty big drop off after the week one to the week two mark
08:08So once again, this is another data point that I used to introduce the weekly plan because it shows like okay
08:13Most people are treating this as a weekly product because most people are not making it past week
08:18One week two week three like there's a huge drop off from week zero to week one
08:22And then an even bigger drop off from week one to week two people are treating this like a weekly product
08:27So let's make a weekly product
08:28Maybe more people will end up converting and purchasing the product and lo and behold they did and that is a great example of tracking
08:34Everything analyzing your metrics to make informed decisions about your product now
08:38We've talked about how nexus makes around 450 bucks a month of revenue
08:42But how much cost am I actually having to incur as well for nexus?
08:45There are three major costs associated with it
08:47Number one is open ai which is the ai that we use to power nexus number two is pine cone
08:53Which is a vector database that we use to power nexus and then number three is versell, which is our hosting platform
08:58So for open ai our last month's bill was nine bucks
09:02Really really cheap and then for pine cone
09:04Our bill was actually free because I applied for some startup credits and I am still just chipping away at the startup credits right here
09:11But I think I did some really rough back of the napkin
09:14Calculations as to how much uh pine cone would cost us if we didn't have the startup credits
09:19And I think it costs maybe like five ten bucks a month
09:22So still really cheap and then for versell hosting
09:25I just paid 20 bucks a month for a pro plan to host everything within this organization of yatb
09:30So for that 20 bucks a month for the entire organization of yatb i'm actually paying 20 bucks a month to host multiple apps
09:36So not only nexus but also the second product that i'm going to be talking about later in this video
09:41Perfect interview to ai and last but not least we are using planet scale as our sql provider in the back end
09:46And unfortunately planet scale got rid of their free plan
09:49And now we have to pay 40 bucks a month to use their database kind of expensive at least for what we need it for
09:54Right now, but the entire app is already built on planet scale and we just don't want to move away from it
09:59So that brings our total cost to roughly like 80 bucks a month or so for nexus research.ai off of
10:06$450 of revenue still a pretty healthy profit margins
10:09So that is a quick overview of nexus research.ai what the product does my revenue as well as my growth strategy with social media
10:15So the second app that I also have generating around 500 bucks a month is this app called perfect interview.ai
10:21It is an ai powered mock interviewing tool and the way that it works is we generate unlimited practice interview questions with the help of
10:28Ai so as you can see the way that it works is somebody uploads a job description and then from that job description
10:32It generates an unlimited number of practice questions
10:35So then within those practice questions
10:36You can then answer them get ai to help generate an answer for you or rewrite your answer to make it sound smarter
10:41Make it sound more concise and you can also upload your resume your cover letter such that whenever we generate these interview questions and help
10:48Generate answers to these interview questions. It's all based off of your previous work experience
10:52So that is the overall product and once again
10:55The tech stack is not any different from the nexus research.ai app or the video that I had previously where I talked about my
11:01Go-to tech stack everything is done on next.js. Although this landing page is built on framer.com
11:06So the landing page is hosted on framer
11:08But the actual app itself is hosted on versell with next.js and once again database is planet scale authentication provider is clerk
11:15You already know the whole gist make sure to watch that video where I explain my tech stack for more details
11:20So now let's go over to some of the revenue numbers
11:22So perfect interview is a different product because unlike nexus research, which was a subscription based
11:27This is largely one-time purchase based
11:30We actually a b tested it and we found that our conversion rate when we were offering a subscription plan was roughly
11:360.6 or 0.7 percent
11:38But then when we test compared to the people that had one-time purchase as an option for the same exact price
11:43Let me say well the conversion rate for the one-time purchase was roughly 1.3 1.5 percent
11:48It was straight up so much higher
11:50So that was a good that was a good signal for us to be like, all right
11:52One-time purchases is the move and I talked about this in some previous videos, too
11:56But I really do think a lot of saas companies and saas products
11:59Should consider one-time purchases a lot more and the way that this app perfect interview does one-time purchases is the fact that each job
12:07Description that you upload like the job company description and we generate all those interview questions for you
12:12That is one purchase of right now. I think it's twenty dollars or fifteen dollars
12:16I don't know what the current price is. It's been a while since I touched it
12:18But that was a good way to box it in saying hey you pay us fifteen twenty dollars
12:22You get to upload one custom job description and interview prep with it forever for life
12:26And then a lot of people have left comments saying like oh
12:28But like are you worried that providing lifetime access to a certain part of your product is going to increase cost because yes
12:33You're right
12:34People can still incur like open api costs by generating answers with ai or rewriting their answer with ai
12:39That's true. But as of right now our retention and the usage of the product is pretty low as well
12:44So we're pretty confident that that is not going to be an issue because most people for perfect interviews use case
12:49At least just use the product for one job interview that they have and the minute that they have the job interview
12:54They're done. They never use it again
12:55So obviously every single product is different not every product fits with a one-time purchase plan
13:00But I do think a lot more products fit with the one-time purchase plan than people give credit for so I really recommend if you
13:05Want to increase conversions try out the one-time purchase. I think it works really great and I personally with perfect interview right here
13:11It's not double the conversion rate compared to subscription
13:14So as you can see for the revenue right here
13:16And then if we look at this year's current revenue
13:18You can see that we have done roughly two thousand dollars of gross volume and net volume from sales is fifteen hundred dollars
13:25So that's with all the fees taken out and everything
13:27And once again the way that I ended up growing perfect interview was all through social media
13:31But this time I actually have a co-founder who does all the social media marketing for me
13:36And I actually don't have to post all those videos. So let's go over to check out the app right here
13:40So this is the instagram page and we also have a tiktok page a youtube page
13:43That's posting the same exact format. Nothing different now. I will say with this account of perfect interview.ai
13:49We definitely had an advantage because my co-founder mingming duck on social media. He posted these collaboration posts on instagram
13:56Essentially, he posts a viral video on his main account, which is pretty big and he collaboration posts it with a perfect interview account
14:02So that we get a lot more eyeballs on the perfect interview account and this one is a great example of that
14:06You can see that he did a collaboration post between perfect interview.ai and mingming duck for this video
14:12And we got a lot of eyeballs onto the perfect interview.ai account because of that
14:15But we can't do that for every single post and we post a lot of original content strictly for perfect interview
14:20And there's a mix of content that we've done. We still haven't quite honed in on the strategy of what content does well
14:26But we did this one street interview series where we were trying to guess people's jobs in new york city
14:31Because it's kind of job related and perfect interview is definitely a job related tool
14:34Co-founder actually has this series where he just does this silly face of looking super surprised and then in this type of video
14:41He then highlights the product films the product and shows off the various features of the product as well
14:46So watch this you can see right here
14:47Now we're transitioning to showing the job showing the app how it works and all of that and somehow this video type
14:54Goes pretty viral time and time again every time that he does it as you can see this video got 15 000 views
15:00But then another video of a similar format. Let's see. It's gotten like 10 000 views 13 000 views
15:06123 000 views
15:07So he found this format that works of showcasing the product and its various features and that was literally our entire growth strategy
15:14It's just pure social media and it makes 500 bucks a month
15:16Now do we think that it could be bigger if we did other marketing strategies?
15:20Yes
15:20We are exploring some other marketing strategies as well to try to get more impressions and more people to know about the product
15:26But we haven't had any success with them quite yet
15:28We're still a little early and we can confidently say the only real marketing that we have done is social media
15:33and that is where 100 of our revenue has come from and then if we go over to our analytics and we go over to
15:38Our retention graph once again kind of similarly to nexus research
15:41You can clearly see that this is not a tool that people will use for
15:45Significant portions of their life for weeks and months on time
15:47You can see that the drop off the retention drop off is really big after week one after week two
15:52Once again indicating that this is better off as like a weekly product or just a one-time purchase-based product
15:57And that was another data point that we used to transition to just treating this product and not as a subscription
16:02and instead offering it as a one-time purchase and once again because we use our analytics because we use the data that we have
16:08To make that decision of turning it into a one-time product
16:11We were able to increase our conversion rate increase our revenue and it's been pretty good so far
16:14So for perfect interview, we've talked about how it makes roughly 500 bucks a month of revenue
16:18But what are the costs associated with it as well?
16:20And for perfect interview, there are three main costs that we incur number one is openai our ai provider
16:27Number two is planet scale, which is our database provider and number three is hosting which is done on versell
16:32So for openai as you can see last month, it's actually pretty expensive
16:36It was like 137 dollars, but that's because we played around with gpt4, which is really expensive
16:41We also had some really inefficient ways of overusing ai when we didn't need to so for the month of april
16:47It was pretty high at 137 bucks a month, but then for the month of may
16:51I think this has a lot more cost optimizations that we worked on
16:54So let's just assume let's say i'm filming this on the 9th
16:57So 571 divided by 9 and then we're gonna multiply that entire thing by 30
17:03So really for this month, I think we're going to be looking at a $20 bill from openai
17:08Which is substantially cheaper than 137 bucks, which was the previous month when we were just spending unnecessary amounts on ai
17:14We've trimmed it down got a lot of cost saving improvements
17:17So we should be seeing roughly a $20 bill
17:19Hopefully for perfect interview.ai and for the database we are using planet scale and that costs us 40 bucks a month
17:25I was using planet scale when they were on their free plan, but they unfortunately got rid of that recently
17:30And now we're paying 40 bucks a month for that
17:32So that brings a total to around 60 dollars and similarly to nexus research.ai
17:36I'm hosting this on versell, which I am paying 20 bucks a month for but that same 20 a month covers hosting for both
17:42Nexus research as well as perfect interview.ai
17:45So the total cost comes out to roughly 60 to 70 dollars a month
17:49So our total profit from 500 dollars of revenue is around 400 to 430 dollars of profit
17:54So that's an overview of the products that we built on the growth strategies that we use and now in terms of the future
17:59State of the product for both of these products
18:01I am actually thinking of kind of just letting them coast on the side and i'm not really actively planning to work on them
18:07Too much more for nexus research
18:08Well, the reason is because I think it's a super crowded space with a lot of other really big competitors
18:13The big reason that i'm not really planning to work on either of these two products much more is the fact that i'm actually working
18:18On a third product idea that I think can make a lot more money. The opportunity is a lot bigger
18:23it's a higher value product, which is my biggest gripe with nexus and
18:26Perfect interview. I really disliked how the price of the goods sold was super cheap
18:31It was like a 20 purchase 30 purchase and it's really hard to make a substantial amount of money with a super cheap product
18:37Like that you need a lot of volume and I think that's pretty hard
18:40And at the same time and because these are more b2c products rather than a b2b product
18:44It would be pretty hard to increase the price really substantially without getting some type of backlash from our existing customers
18:50So for that reason neither of my co-founders for either of the two apps really want to continue building it out
18:55And we're okay
18:55Just letting it coast making some really passive income like 500 bucks a month on the side
19:00And we're okay with leaving it at that and with perfect interview.ai
19:04We know what it would take for us to 10x the revenue to become like a five thousand dollar ten thousand dollar monthly revenue product
19:10But to do that
19:11We would need to shift our social media marketing to be very much
19:14So like career advice driven where we want to be a career influencer provide job tips recruiting tips
19:19But at the end of the day my co-founder andrew and I who is mingming duck on social media
19:24We don't feel like we are the right founders to do that. Neither of us are super gung-ho about making that type of content
19:29We don't wake up and get super excited with the idea of helping other people land their job
19:34Don't get me wrong other people definitely are that excited and get excited in that space
19:38But that's just not us and then on top of that we actually found another idea that we're very interested on working on that
19:43We think is much more up our alley where we have a lot better like creator product fit founder product fit
19:50And top where we can be where we're much more excited to build talk market the product
19:55So that's why we're going to be shifting all of our focus into this third product and once again
19:59Letting perfect interview.ai and letting nexus research.ai
20:02Kind of just coast off into the sunset and make some small amount of cash every single month
20:07That's an overview of the two stats products that I built that make 500 a month of recurring revenue
20:11So let me know in the comments down below if you have any other questions that I can help answer if there's any part
20:16Of the product that you are curious about that. I didn't go over in this video
20:19Let me know how I can help but other than that
20:21Thanks so much for watching the video and I will see you in the next one