1. One founder is using highly-orchestrated, AI-executed outbound campaigns to book 500 sales calls per month over email. They’re doing around $2M/yr run rate. I’m kind of flabbergasted since it seems like almost nobody out there is actually doing AI outbound well; obviously, it takes skill and taste in addition to ‘lots of tokens’.

2. Another has been taking advantage of Claude Code to find budget cuts of around ~$250k/yr, thus far in 2026 alone, across a portfolio of companies, despite flat MRR; good profit gains, but now it’s time to increase marketing and sales output.

3. Yet another founder of a B2C app fended off a copycat and a cyber troll and grew an app from literally $0.00 in revenue, to an over $200k ARR run rate, in five weeks.

This is all cool stuff. There’s also a lot of more mundane stuff happening, too. Frankly, MOST of growing a SaaS is kind of mundane:

1. Wildfront as a portfolio overall has been stuck at around 100k/yr run rate for a whole quarter. We’re blocking and tackling to find new influencers to work with on marketing DemandBird, getting new API access from LinkedIn that unlocks meaningful pipeline, managing ViewExport as best we can despite not putting much sales effort behind it, and welcoming 1-2 new members to our founder mastermind series each month.

2. Two of our other mastermind founders are stuck at around $1k/mo MRR, give or take. They’re on the right track. Doing good things. But revenue doesn’t always come bursting through the door, rootin-tootin like Yosemite Sam. Sometimes it’s hunting and pecking around, doing tough and unrewarding customer development, getting a tip from a peer, and making small wins that - collectively - unlock a bigger prize. Unsexy, for sure. And yet this is the work many of us are doing before we can go riding off into the sunset with our millions.

No matter where you are - if you’re taking a $2M ARR company to $3M and in ‘optimization mode’ on sales and marketing, or if you’re just starting out trying to productize your agency and add a tech layer to it so you can achieve greater scale via an AI SaaS component - the path is similar:

You take a hunch about a product the world might need.

You talk to plenty of customers about that, and run a basic version by them.

If and when you get it right, people start paying you money so you can afford ramen.

Somewhere in between a month and three years from that point, you get to $15k MRR and the lights sort of ‘turn on’.

Stuff gets easier.

You have some cash flow to reinvest.

Then you can run marketing experiments and find the channels that work best for you.

You decide to hire a team member or two.

Hopefully in the process, you’ve learned a thing or two about compliance, finance, bookkeeping, and filing tax returns on time.

Your customer contracts are in order.

You have a privacy policy and enforceable terms.

You find out how to cache AI responses, use a mix of models, and not spend every penny you earn on Anthropic API costs.

Eventually, you kick and scream your way to $1-2M ARR and now you’re a ‘real company’. With 63% net income margins, you’re starting to feel like a pig in shit.

You learn to be an actual CEO, not a faux-CEO on Twitter with no team and barely any revenue (jk, nobody ever does that, right?).

You realize that to build a good company involves being a good leader, not just a good growth hacker and coder.

You have decisions to make: try to sell to PE, or grow more, or maybe wait for lightning in a bottle to strike and have a strategic reach out.

Perhaps you hire a broker at that point to test the market and not leave this process to chance.

Maybe the sale works, maybe it doesn’t.

Maybe you decide, screw acquisitions, I’m going to build a generational company with an ESOP.

Maybe.

The early steps are much clearer, but the later steps… well, it’s impossible to predict the future. After a certain point, with more going on and more money involved, there’s just not one clear blueprint of how to do things. You, your choices, your idiosyncrasies, your goals, become much more important.

I’ve sold a few businesses now. My cofounder Mac has, too. It’s great to sell as a bootstrapper. But if you’re like us, the first thing you want to do…. is get right back into it once the last earnout check clears… or even before it does :)

How about you - where are you in this journey? You read this far, you may as well reply to us and let us know. Tell us what you’re building, what you’re struggling with.

We’d 100% love to hear about it, and give you some feedback if you’re open to it.

But… what do YOU want to hear more about? If everyone votes overwhelmingly in one direction vs another, we will adjust our focus to fit what you want to hear about.

(Also, if you hate getting our emails, this is your cue to just opt out - I’d rather you not be on our list if you don’t actually want to be here, we can just follow each other on socials)

1. A consumer app (from cold start to $100k+ run rate in <1 mo) sold only via organic TikTok posts for $9/mo (we convinced them to increase it to $13+/mo and it worked!), with a couple hundred net-new paid subscribers joining every week, and a Discord-based community engagement and support motion. Solo founder.

2. An enterprise regulatory response SaaS (several months to get 2 customers for a total of $350k ARR), sold via relationship building, both in-person and video calls. Getting even one customer to trust them enough to put their data into their system is tough, let alone multiple. Solo founder but has a developer.

Which would you rather own, and what can you take from this?

Hmm.

The consumer app is growing much faster out of the gate, and takes comparatively little effort to acquire customers, but probably has a lower eventual revenue ceiling.

The enterprise SaaS is painstaking to grow, but once you get in with this tight-knit group of huge accounts? You have gigantic revenue potential to go after.

My answer is: there’s no one right answer. If you asked me that question, I’d pick the consumer app, but that’s just because of my personality and what I uniquely find stressful vs not stressful. Serving giant customers makes my whole day feel high-pressure in ways I don’t like, but to some people - usually those that were executives at large companies? Serving enterprise accounts is the only way it all makes sense and feels worth doing.

Each one has its own moat

In the case of the B2C app, its moat has nothing to do with the quality of its technology (it’s a good product, but like all of our products, it’s copyable). Its moat is authentic community presence. The founder is in it with the customers, reachable in Discord, moderating the community. He’s practically a folk hero.

The enterprise SaaS has a similar moat, but it looks very different: the founder used to work in the department that now buys his solution, AND they’re not afraid to plug software gaps with services. If you try to vibe code a competitor… oops! They don’t trust you, and you don’t know how to speak the customers’ language.

→ Here’s the takeaway question for you:

How can you embed yourself more deeply into your customers’ community? How can you speak their language better than anyone else? Who in your space do you know, really know, not just “chatted with on LinkedIn know”, and who wants you and your company to succeed?

The answer to this question can take many forms. You might spend time and effort contributing your expertise to your customers outside of just product support. You might moderate a subreddit dedicated to your topic. You might have equity relationships with important industry figures. You might invest in a customer community that becomes an unparalleled media source in its own right.

There are a ton of ways to build a strong moat.

These days, “great code” isn’t usually one of those.

You have to show up in ways that AI can’t.

-Alex

P.S. Are you a founder with <$50k ARR and growing? Let us know how you’re building your 2026 moat. And, consider joining the founder mastermind that I facilitate inside of Wildfront, too… we have 2 slots open right now before I have to put us back on waitlist mode again for a few months.

Bing Webmaster Tools (yes, that Bing) just released even more detail on its AI search tracking capabilities.

Now, it tells you not just the number of citations, but the % citation share for a particular grounding query, like “best social media software 2026”.

“Grounding query”: what your LLM uses to run a web search for something you’re asking about, to pull in updated information outside of its training data set.)

This gives you a lot more AI search visibility (though only for ChatGPT and other Microsoft-owned AI surfaces). For free.

That said: if you’re an agency selling GEO services and need more reporting and workflows, you might want something like Amadora.ai (founded by one of our Wildfront SaaS Mastermind members) for your reporting.

Here’s how to track AI search page-by-page

Go to the “Pages” report, and click the arrow to drill down into an individual URL:

That gives you just the Grounding Queries of an individual URL on your site, so you can see just what that one page is showing up visible in LLMs for:

For example, this one URL on LayoffAlert is cited a few thousand times per month, and this is the high level citations breakdown (grounding queries redacted).

Pretty cool.

How does this help with SaaS marketing?

1. Look at where you’re low on citation share, vs other similar queries. Feed this data to Claude (there’s no API for this yet so just do it by hand once every 1-2 weeks) and ask it to review the ranking page on your site, and figure out where the content could be improved to better-target the query in question.

2. Look at where your citation share % is increasing, and if similar traditional-SEO search volume for that query is high, it’s a good bet you have room to improve on that query set. Same action item: feed it to Claude, or just use your own brain, and figure out if you need to beef up your backlink equity or content coverage on this particular topic.

3. It confirms that you should make more listicles. Listicles are cited INSANELY well, still. Oh, “Google said they nuked this”? Doesn’t matter. The data say that listicles continue to provide massive AI visibility.

Let us know if you want help finding this data for your own SaaS, or if you’re an agency needing help integrating this data into your workflow!

-Alex

As long as your target customer uses a computer for at least a good chunk of their work. Even if your ICP doesn’t post much.

LinkedIn is for “scrolling social media but feeling like you’re productive”.

And that’s where your SaaS comes in.

To shortcut all of the ‘guru advice’ out there and just give it to you straight:

The way to generate revenue with LinkedIn content is to make your way into LinkedIn’s organic reach system - with your personal founder profile (not your company’s brand account).

To do this, you must first decide that you actually care about helping and educating the people who are part of your market - if you see this as a ‘lead gen channel’, it might work, but it won’t work nearly as well as it otherwise would.

Then, you need to decide that your job is to provide “professional infotainment” to these actual live humans (not algorithms), somewhat consistently, who will appreciate what you’re publishing.

This content you publish should be pleasing to read, correct and credible, and it must go beyond the obvious.

You will also need to do more than just post: you’ll need to write comments on the posts of other people in and around your market. These should represent your real opinions. You might want to try to write 100-400 comments per month. (Practice, and you can do this in 1-2 hours per month.)

As you converse with people on LinkedIn, you should also send Direct Messages (DMs). You need to Connect to someone first before you can message them. Above all, treat this like real life: social skills will serve you far better than any template or sales playbook.

All of this can get pushed to your CRM, tagged and coded with things like “what solution the person currently uses”, “features they would need before they can sign up with you” (so you can follow up with them later), etc. Agents can handle all of this my sidebar pullout looks for any mentions of competitors of our SaaS being used, and when I click to upload my message history, it detects any ‘dealbreaker’ features that we lack and logs those to CRM:

Over time, you’ll notice this all stacks up. Maybe about 2-3 months into it, you’ll hear people saying to you, “I’ve been reading your posts for a while”. You’ll start to get more free trial and demo request signups that feel like they were out of the blue. Marketing will just get easier.

Growing your organic LinkedIn presence, as the founder of your SaaS, is a warm light that improves all of your other marketing channels. It is a multiplier that lowers the difficulty level of PR, market feedback gathering, and referral asks. It’s difficult to put a dollar value on the ability to write a post about a new feature and get instant signups, registrations, new MRR, questions, and subscribers.

The same of course is true for any social network that you build a presence on, of course. This doesn’t just go for LinkedIn. But if you sell to corporate types? LinkedIn has the highest concentration of those. Of course corporate folk use Instagram, and TikTok, etc; but on those sites, they’re mixed in with a lot of others, so the signal strength is lower.

I worked with Apollo to create a free social selling course that covers this system. Find it here:

The Wildfront Academy, also free, has a section on LinkedIn, too. It’s longer and homemade.

Reply with any questions or if you want me to take a look at your LinkedIn presence and give you my two cents.

-Alex

Psst! Check out this AI Newsletter for sale, with 41k subscribers, $10k TTM revenue, and an asking price of $17.5k. We’re looking into acquiring it ourselves…

Let me tell you about a subject that’s near and dear to my heart: managing all of the revenue we earn :)

I grant: you probably don’t think too often about where your company banks. Maybe you already use some of the names in this email, maybe your SaaS banks with your local credit union, maybe you’ve been with Wells Fargo since 2002 and you’re never giving it up.

Either way, hear me out.

When you’re starting up a new entity, or if your current bank is being annoying and backwards and not tech-friendly, you’ll get to thinking: where is the best place to keep our primary operating checking account?

We’ll tell you about the two best financial tools we’ve come across. Both are not only free but actually pay you to use them, and serve slightly different purposes.

Let’s get into it.

Wildfront Banks With… Mercury

For years now, we’ve kept our primary operating checking account with Mercury. It rocks. Here’s what we like:

1. Just about everything is free: ACH, payments, domestic wires, QBO integration, API… and we only pay minimal fees for international wires

2. They pay you a $250 signup bonus when you open an account: you just have to deposit $10k+ for at least a few days, within the first few months of opening the account

3. Can bank and manage money via CLI, using their MCP or API. Very straightforward to tie into internal financial oversight dashboards, automations, and inter-company management

Overall, it’s been very smooth and easy.

Now, they have decent virtual card & spend management functionality and are working on improving it. But for provisioning virtual cards, setting limits per vendor, accounting automation, and ensuring your full credit limit is not exposed to the potential dishonesty of any one vendor, we prefer…

Wildfront Uses Ramp for Vendor Spend & Credit Cards

Ramp is the best corporate card and spend management platform we’ve found. Virtual cards for every subscription, automatic receipt matching, clean expense categorization, and free API access available with every account.

Wildfront is an official Ramp partner because we believe in it that much. Plus: just like Mercury, they’ll pay you $250 cash back when you sign up and put a thousand bucks of your normal spend, through your virtual cards.

Oh, and it’s free to do all the essentials: earn yield on your money throughout the month, provision unlimited virtual credit cards, sync transactions to QBO/Xero/Claude Code or whatever you use.

One caveat: since there’s no founder personal guarantee, Ramp won’t accept you unless you can link $25k+ of account balances to prove you’re not trying to take advantage of the lack of credit check. If that’s the case, you’ll have to settle for using Mercury for everything. Hopefully you have $25k lying around you can show to them for purposes of getting a credit limit :)

We also do keep a checking account with Ramp, but their banking UX isn’t as great as their credit card UX, so we’ve found it convenient to keep them separate vs consolidating everything with just one of these providers.

Have questions about our experience with either of these? Fire away.

Now go out and get some more customers.

-Alex & Mac

First, a few startups for sale on Microns.io that we like:

1. AI Calorie Counter iOS App, asking price of $1.6k for $952 TTM Revenue from 25 customers.

2. Newsletter about AI, asking price of $17.5k for $10,000 TTM Revenue from 41,000 subscribers.

Mac and I went to MicroConf last month in Portland OR, our hometown.

And we noticed something interesting.

The bootstrapped tech founders there were either in a great mood, or a sour mood. Of course, the sour ones had flat revenue growth or even a decline; the happy ones were growing 30-70% per year, or sometimes more.

We asked one friend how business was… (paraphrasing a longer conversation here)

“Hey ___, you’re looking glowing! How are you? How’s business?”
“Thanks! Yes I am doing pretty well. Business has been pretty good.”
“Yeah? AI isn’t killing you or anything?”
“No, just the opposite. AIs are recommending us constantly.”
“Really? How much are you up?”
“Well we did a little under $5M the year before. But We’ve probably done a little over $8M in the prior year to today.”

That’s pretty freaking cool.

We had multiple conversations like that.

The theme we noticed was this:

The founders that were growing at a healthy clip, were the ones that LLMs were recommending.

But, one HUGE caveat here is this…

To “Do AEO”, or To Let AEO Happen?

While the founders getting recommended by LLMs showed a strong correlation to growth, that wasn’t entirely because of LLM search.

Wait, what?

Well, correlation is the key word.

If you build up a strong brand around your company, product, or even yourself as the founder, you’ll naturally end up with great search discovery.

And when I say ‘search discovery’, I mean, your product’s discoverability in search results, whether through Google blue links, or ChatGPT recommendations, or Claude Code’s suggestion of what tool to use for whatever you’re building, etc.

These founders generally had not done a ton, or any, ‘manipulating’ of AI chatbots to get them to recommend their product. They’ve just been in the market for a while, doing good work, often using their product itself to spread their digital footprint far and wide.

Using traditional marketing lingo, we might say they’ve been doing a combination of things:

1. “product-led growth”, such as by their product's growth causing their brand footprint to grow
2. “product-led SEO”, by their product’s growth causing their SEO footprint to grow
3. “digital PR”, by accepting high-value interview and sponsorship opportunities

This has led to an observation of mine that I think more bootstrappers need to hear:

Social Media and (AI)SEO are Merging

More and more, we see LinkedIn posts and articles, Reddit threads, Youtube videos, and other social media content getting ranked, cited, or otherwise pulled in when someone is looking for a solution or product:

So, if you’ve been on the market for a while, and the industry/your customers have spoken positively about you publicly, you’ll naturally have good AEO.

Okay, great.

Now, what if you’re still building up your brand?

What if you can’t just wait around forever, because you need to grow revenue to hit a firm deadline in the next 3-6 months?

You can do a little of what the real estate folks call “forced appreciation”: instead of just waiting for all of this to happen naturally, you can get the brand engine going, along with AEO, at the same time:

1. Get your customers to write reviews on the review platform of your choice. Don’t spread thin or overthink the choice: pick one and go with it.

2. Get mentioned in listicles, and write your own listicles. For an extremely long time, listicles have been a core foundation of SEO, and they’re even more important in the AEO age. You can do this today. We certainly are. Even if Google nukes this tactic a little, it’s still worth doing.

3. Build up your social media presence. Right now, LinkedIn and Reddit are the top-most-cited social platforms, in search results. For whatever reason, Twitter isn’t getting cited much yet; but that could change.

Above all: build that cross-platform social presence. Invest in it as a channel. I’ve been doing it for ~10 years, and I’m very glad I have. It’s literally created millions of dollars in wealth for me. I’m also starting from scratch on new channels, like Twitter; Substack, we’re still very small comparatively, but there’s been meaningful growth here.

This is why our biggest focus for 2026 is growing our social media management tool for small teams, agencies, and growing brands: DemandBird.

Click below to get started.

Why use the product? DemandBird helps you not only schedule, publish, and analyze your social media posts and presence: we help you systematically create the right content, find the right places to engage, and repurpose your best work. AI-assisted, not ‘fully AI-automated’.

I want to leave you with one other tidbit:

I know a lot of you are feeling behind. Left out. Anxious about change.

Whether you have an AI product or a traditional SaaS with AI features, it can seem like there’s no escape from the feeling that, while Anthropic is doing billions of dollars in revenue per month, you’ll just never get that big, and what are you even doing if you’re not building a frontier AI model :)

I feel that way sometimes, too.

But keep in mind that there are such huge sums of money being thrown around for AI in the capital markets, that there is a tremendous incentive to distort the narrative around it. Whether you’re a doomer, a boomer, or something in between (me, I’m a hybrid!), just try to stay grounded. Present. Spend most of your time growing your business, and some of the time dreaming and staying open to new, big ideas. If you start to feel uncoupled from serving your customers: breathe. Come back to the purpose of all this:

Build cool stuff, Serve customers, Have fun, Repeat.

Have a great weekend y’all!

-Alex

2. The network feed (viral play). Inside DemandBird, you can pull all your team's posts across all platforms into one feed for easy engagement. This makes it easy to engage with your business pages/posts from your own personal accounts (and vice-versa), but also your teammates' posts.

The interesting part: you can also invite DemandBird users who aren't in your account into your network feed. Once the affiliate platform is live, that invite earns you affiliate revenue and lets you add them to an engagement pod. So if I invite a non-team member, and he's on a different DemandBird account, his posts show up in my feed instantly and we can engage with each other's stuff. The more people you invite, the more revenue you make and the bigger your engagement network gets.

3. PDF branding (awareness play). Agency and team reports get exported and shared, as that's their whole purpose. We added DemandBird branding to those PDFs. Low-effort, but reports get passed around inside agencies and out to clients, so it puts the name in front of buyers we'd never otherwise reach.

4. The tweet pop-up (the simple one). Easy in-app prompt for users to tweet about DemandBird, probably post-onboarding or at another high-affinity moment. Not clever, but the bar to ship it is basically zero. I haven't done this yet, but I am thinking about where it might sit and also if Twitter's the right platform for it. I don't think this is easy to do on LinkedIn (reply and tell me if I’m wrong?).

What I like about this mix is that they compound differently. The public feed is a slow-burn SEO bet. The network feed has viral potential especially once the affiliate portion is live. PDFs are pure brand surface area. The tweet prompt is a quick win.

What I don't know yet is which of these will actually move the needle versus which just feel good to build. Curious what's worked for you, especially anything in the viral/referral category?

Hit reply and let us know.

Mac (and Alex)

Staring at a blank page sucks. What do I post today?

Or maybe you’re the opposite… a million ideas scattered everywhere, and you don’t know where to start.

And that’s before we even get going. Posting consistently is hard. Posting across multiple platforms is harder. What works on one won’t work on another — the topic might carry over, but the format won’t.

Your text is too long for one. Your image is the wrong format for another. You either bail or you’re hours in.

You go to find that perfect photo, but your assets are all over the place.

Want a teammate to review or approve? Track that too.

Want to actually be effective? Repost what works. Rewrite the same idea in different ways.

Oh, and now we need to integrate content creation and scheduling into our agentic workflows via API or MCP. Who does that well?

Overwhelmed yet? I’m tired already.

This is why Alex and I built DemandBird.

DemandBird handles writing, scheduling, asset management, approvals, and reposting across every major platform, from one place. A million tools promise to help, but they only handle one piece. We tried as many as we could and still weren’t happy. So selfishly, we built DemandBird for ourselves. Over time it became clear we’d built something worth sharing.

Between the two of us, we’ve built and sold social media products and a social media agency. We know the space, we know what people want, and we know exactly what’s missing.

We’re still early, with dozens of users. But people are saying things like “wow, it just works” and “this is so intuitive.”

And we already have people building complete content production workflows with Claude Code using our APIs and MCP.

We’re agentic-forward, but we still care deeply about intuitive interfaces and workflows.

As founders, we’re building with care. We respond to every customer quickly. We hop on calls all the time. We get to know many of them. We love it this way.

In an age where it’s easy to hide behind anonymity or an AI-generated facade, we’re here with faces forward, to help you be your authentic self, with wider reach, less friction, and maybe even a bit of fun.

We don’t believe the world wants AI-generated content. But we do believe humans can do better with AI, so we strive to make DemandBird your best content production assistant.

If you’re a team, an agency, or an individual who wants to try us out, give feedback, or hop on a demo call, we want to hear from you. Hell, I’ll hop on a call just to hear you vent about your content workflow, just cuz.

Start your free trial at demandbird.com, then reply to this email and I’ll apply a Wildfront discount.

Alex and I feel, more than ever, that we’re onto something. Personal brand and authentic voice matter more than ever to stand out from the noise.

Join us?

— Mac & Alex

P.S. We’re opening up our partner/affiliate program soon. Reply here if you think you’re a good fit. We’d love to talk to you.

That means you run a tight ship, cut costs wherever you can, you focus on marketing as much as on product, and try to grow MRR profitably.

Great. That’s us, too!

And now, what do most startup bootstrappers do, when looking for ideas? Well, we often start with what everyone likes to do: we solve our own problems first.

But here’s the problem:

Not all of them, that’s for sure: SaaS founders definitely still spend money. We certainly do, across the Wildfront SaaS portfolio.

But there are a lot more hackers now for whom the build vs buy equation has changed relatively quickly, mostly in the last 12 months. And when it comes to simple and overpriced tools, ‘build it ourselves’ has become a more appealing option than ever.

For many founders, this is resulting in higher churn numbers than ever. And in downward pricing pressure:

Alex is a very capable founder, so if he’s experiencing 14 months straight of net MRR losses? Dang, I can really feel that sting! Of course, I’m not saying his tools are simple or overpriced: I’m just validating this reality, if your business too is experiencing trouble with net-new MRR sales, or higher than average churn, if you sell to tech founders.

As always, though, there’s some good news:

Thankfully, most SaaS subscribers are not indie hackers.

I was in a group yesterday with seven people who own marketing agencies doing between $300k and $8M of annualized revenue.

I shared with them that we recently launched DemandBird, and I asked:

Would any of you consider building your own AI-coded social media tool in-house? Am I an idiot for putting a lot of my personal time and marketing effort into a scheduling and analytics tool?

To the former question: there was a unanimous chorus of, “absolutely not.” Shaking heads, and looks of exhaustion and despair rolled across the room at the mere suggestion of it.

Even moreso, they thought that a simpler, better, more affordable scheduling tool sounded sorely needed in the market!

So why aren’t these non-SaaS founders systematically vibe coding replacements for all of their tools?

Because their businesses are already demanding and complex enough as things stand, without increasing their workload and difficulty level further. The market remains tough enough for them, without adding more stuff to their plate.

They’re focused on finding another $500k-2M of annual revenue in the next six months in a difficult climate, not on getting lost down the rabbit hole of developing a whole new set of skills (UI, UX, CI/CD, Claude Code, API management, you name it…).

These people have personal incomes of at least $300k-1M/yr, often more than that when you count equity buildup. To them, saving $29/mo to have a worse experience and to be their own product support team, is frankly below their pay grade.

Personally, I fall into the income bucket I’ve just described. I am frugal. But I’ve spent $29 on a cup of soup and a piece of fresh bread (Iceland prices, anyone?! That actually is indeed what we paid, at a little cafe in Grindavik…). I’m just not vibe coding something, and committing myself to maintaining it, to save a couple hundred bucks a year.

The prize has to be bigger than that.

SaaS is becoming a mature business model, not a pool of easy money

Now, I’m not saying that all you have to do is “not sell to indie hackers” and you’re in for a smooth ride. No way.

It helps to sell to non-SaaS customers, that’s for sure. They’re less likely to take on, let alone enjoy, the process of vibe coding a replacement for your tool.

But now your competition has become other indie hackers wanting that same non-SaaS tool budget. And it’s easier than ever for them to build a simple tool that competes for it.

(The remaining difficulty, of course, is the customer side: sales, marketing, support, distribution, and all of that. We’ve written extensively about that.)

Things are different today. In the old days of 2012-2021: if you spent time building a complex enough product, that used to be a real moat. It was difficult for your competitors to catch up to you.

You could afford to slow down engineering velocity, allow meeting bloat to infect your product development pipeline, and just not ship very fast or care that much. And you could do this while cash-flowing at a healthy clip, and not have much to worry about.

To be fair: the beginning of getting a SaaS off the ground has always been hard… but it used to be smoother sailing once you were established and north of even, say, ~$50k MRR or so.

In 2026?

You can still win. Absolutely. But it’s a lot harder to win while sitting on your laurels than it used to be. Even when selling to non-SaaS customers. (But as I argue, this difficulty doubles if you sell to other indie hackers!)

So you just can’t really stop performing at a high level anymore.

If you stop listening to customers, if you stop providing world-class support, if you don’t innovate or build new functionality, if your UI looks like it’s from 2012?

You used to be able to make do with that.

But not these days.

It’s not a SaaSpocalypse, it’s a SaaS Cambrian Explosion

Far from the death of SaaS: instead what we’re seeing is an explosion of SaaS. And even when Claude pulls the subsidies and starts charging full price, it’ll always be cheaper than it ever was before, for people to make new tools to cover new use cases that were previously not worth the effort to cover.

Nevertheless, I firmly believe that SaaS is far from a lost cause. It’s a great business. (If it wasn’t, Mac and I wouldn’t be spending almost all of our time in it!) And yes, you can tip the odds in your favor by selling solutions to customers who aren’t nearly as interested in AI coding as you are.

But regardless of who your customers are: the bar has gone up. It’s easier than ever for others to compete with you. Your product quality must be high, and your company must be easy to do business with.

You need to be clever and strategic about who you choose to build for.

I don’t mean that I think you should give up: I just mean that the game has changed.

These days, you need to plan to keep giving it your all. Not just in the beginning. But for the entire lifecycle of the company. Or at least until you cash out and you’re no longer the owner.

But not before then.

Big milestone: a founder in our mastermind series sold his 10th customer this week. One of them found the product through AI search, signed up, and converted without ever meeting them. All in the same day. AI search is quietly becoming a real acquisition channel.

Join the thread

Claude Code: Replacing $10k/mo of SaaS and G&A costs

One founder vibe-coded an app integrating HubSpot, Zoom, sales coaching, web design, Eventbrite registrations, print materials, and more—all with Claude Code. What used to take a team of 5 and two months to launch a single page now takes 10 minutes solo. Add Wispr Flow for dictation at 180 WPM and the productivity is unreal. A smaller dev team can now do more, and excess legacy tool cost can be wiped away.

Join the thread

AI Overview: Much Easier Than You Think

“It is STUPID easy these days to get yourself into the AI Overview.” A founder shared how low-effort it still is to get your brand into the AI Overview. Read exactly how and see examples, in the community thread.

Join the thread

Next Monthly Mastermind Series

The first SaaS founder mastermind call was such a huge success that everyone unanimously wanted to keep it going. So we are. Taking applicants now for new mastermind entrants, too, so let us know if you’re interested in joining:

Apply To Join Founder Mastermind

Quick Hits

• Onboarding email sequence inspiration — A founder reshared what Mac & Alex have been doing and it challenged them to rethink their own. Thread

• Meta ads consultant needed — Looking for someone to help a multi-location gym owner grow their Portland market. Thread

This is what happens when you put a bunch of founders in a room together.

— Mac & Alex

Existing:

→ Wildfront+: Mastermind roundtable series & community for product founders (non-SaaS but a subscription)
→ RalphBlaster.com: Kanban style autonomous coding platform
→ ViewExport.com: Slack eDiscovery tool for IT and legal teams

Adding to that list...

Just Launched: DemandBird.com: Cross-platform social scheduling and repurposing tool

Mac and I are very pumped.

It’s taken us several months to rebuild the portfolio from scratch, since our last exit in August, to a low six figure or so run rate.

ViewExport has been a solid contributor, but the Wildfront+ community has been growing faster. RalphBlaster is still new but gained 30+ subscribers in the initial launch.

DemandBird, however, is shaping up to be one of our best yet.

Advantages of Our Social Media SaaS

Here’s why we think it’ll be successful right out of the gate:

1. AI defensibility moat. Claude can’t schedule your social media posts for you. Getting all of the details right (formats, platform specific stuff, even just getting approved to use the API) is tricky. And besides, this is one area where a UI does actually help: it’s a lot faster to see, at a glance, whether you have content scheduled for all of your time slots or not.

   

2. Huge latent demand. We exited our last social media tool, Aware, at ~30k MRR. There were 1000+ actively paid users, most of which were active at least a few times a week. Many thousands more had tried the product or even just seen it. This puts a significant audience within reach. Even just my “LinkedIn Job Update” auto-post started driving people in:

   

3. Buy Wins Vs Build. Our target customer isn’t trying to hack together and maintain their own relatively complex social media scheduling tool. Their time is worth more than that. And since we’re pricing at $19/mo out of the gate, it’s very difficult to make the argument for DIY-ing a copy of this. Even as we grow, I can’t see a non-technical social media team trying to Claude Code their way into a cross-member, cross-platform scheduler instead of just spending a few bucks. We’re not talking big bloated enterprise contracts here, after all.

SaaS Diversification vs Focus

We’re loving the portfolio model of our holdco. No plans to change that. But we’re also seeing the benefits of focus, too. That means we probably won’t (can’t, easily?) add new products to our lineup until we either (1) start hiring or partnering with product owners, which we are open to doing, and/or (2) sell non-core assets at fair market values.

How To Work With Us

1. Partners. Want to partner with us with one of our products and earn or buy ownership? Reply here and let us know. We’re open to marketing partnerships on RalphBlaster (indie hacker with X audience would be ideal), as well as DemandBird (marketer or something with marketing clout).

2. Masterminds. You can also join one of our SaaS Founder Mastermind groups, too. Send a quick application form here if that sounds like something you want to get in on. Next meeting for Groups 1 & 2 are on April 3th and 4th.

…and feel free to spin up a free trial of DemandBird, too, if social media scheduling is making your life hard :)

Thanks so much for reading.

-Alex & Mac

The honest postmortem: a small amount of bragging rights, a site badge, a decent albeit nofollow SEO link, and a possible signal boost for LLM citations. But IndieHackers itself barely drove any traffic, even from their large newsletter. 1-2 customers total.

Verdict: Fine for a very early-stage launch. Little point in doing this if you’re an established SaaS, unless you’re really going after an ultra-well-rounded SEO/AEO presence. The plan now? Add the badge to the site and see if it helps with LLM citations across the portfolio. Everything’s an experiment. → Join the thread

───

LinkedIn Algorithm Shift: Ditch the Stock Photos

A heads-up for anyone posting on LinkedIn: images that aren’t directly relevant to your post now seem to hurt performance. For literally years, it was the opposite — slap an image on everything. Now? Text-only posts appear to do better (and PDFs even better than those…) unless the image is genuinely necessary to make your point. → Join the thread

───

The $100 Directory Submission Shortcut

Shared a startup directory submission spreadsheet after using a $100 service to handle directory listings for LayoffAlert.org. Low cost, job done, results delivered. Planning to repeat this for other new projects in the portfolio. Sometimes the best move is to pay someone else to do the grunt work. → Join the thread

───

Mastermind Calls Are Happening

We’re launching community mastermind calls: structured sessions where every attendee shares what they’re working on and gets real feedback from other founders. Already 8+ founders signed up. The plan is to split into curated groups (likely by stage, i.e. under vs. over $100k ARR) so everyone gets meaningful time. First call has invites out. If you want in, speak up in the thread. → Join the thread

───

This is what happens when you put a bunch of founders in a room together. Launch postmortems, AI experiments, algorithm intel, and now live masterminds. Come hang out → Join the community

-Mac & Alex

→ If you would like an invitation to be in one of the mastermind groups, please reply back to this email to let me know.

The format we’ve been discussing in the community is roughly as follows.

Mastermind Call Format

This meeting structure has been very helpful for me in past mastermind groups: I propose that we go around the room in order, and each person:

• gives an update on how their business is doing

• presents challenge(s) they’re experiencing on which they want help, and

• we have some group feedback and challenge help time for each founder.

Example: if we have 5 people, we’d have maybe ~5 mins of each founder sharing an update on their business and requesting feedback, followed by 6-7 mins of group feedback and discussion on the issues raised.

Segmentation: Based on attendance and the richness of the discussions, we could further split these meetings into smaller ‘chapters’ so to speak, based on business model, ARR range, and/or industry.

Length: It’s also likely that one hour won’t be enough time and that we’ll all leave the meeting wanting a longer one—my past experience with this format is that 2-4 hours is especially helpful and rich for groups of 6-7, or 90-120 mins for groups of 4-5 people, especially in the $1M - $10M revenue range, once there is a more ‘stuff going on’ operationally. But let’s see.

What To Expect

To speak for myself: I have seen an enormous ROI on my investment of time, from participating in well-curated groups like this over the years. There has occasionally been ‘direct’ ROI—say, I found out about a tax credit that resulted in directly receiving $200k, or ended up actually doing business with someone in the group—but most of the return has been the quality of discussion.

In other words: the main thing we would like to get from these calls, as we hope you will get, is to engage deeply with other founders in a focused way that results in each of us growing our business more sustainably, rapidly, and profitably than without the support of the group.

→ If you would like an invitation to this mastermind group please reply back to this email to let me know. If we have too many people for one group, we will create multiple groups, so let us know if this time doesn't work with your time zone.

Thanks,

Alex & Mac

Top Of Funnel (Awareness)

1. Mac posted on Twitter. (This was the main tweet). We had no idea if it would perform well, since it was literally just “here’s this internal tool we made”. I tallied up the reach on his other relevant posts, too.

That’s about 0.2% conversion from “saw Mac’s tweets” to giving us an email address. Not bad actually, often we see lower conversion rates from social media.

Middle Funnel (Interest)

2. We then emailed the lovely folks who joined our waitlist a few times, to try to let everyone know in the meantime “hey we heard you loud and clear, we’re building! here’s what we’re working on “. After all, even using RalphBlaster to… build RalphBlaster… it still wasn’t instant.

That’s 7.6% conversion from total waitlist to product signup. This is lower than we expected. But my hunch is that because there was a ~3 week time gap in between the initial Tweet, and when we actually sent invites to sign up to the product (essentially just the development cycle of getting the product done and shipped), there might have been a loss of interest. Hard to say for sure.

Then, the ~53% conversion from signup to someone paying us a buck for the first month with the intention to auto-renew if they liked, it is quite consistent with our past experience for products of this price point. (With our last SaaS tool, this conversion rate hovered between 40-60% pretty much throughout)

Bottom Funnel (Revenue)

What really matters, though, is the actual projected financial impact. We didn’t expect a ton from the initial launch, since our experience is that getting to $10k MRR can often be a slow grind if you’re doing so profitably (although of course if you’re underpriced and hyper-allocated to marketing, you can get there unprofitably much faster!).

Here’s where we landed:

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To our members: thank you for being so supportive and inspirational.

If you haven’t yet joined us, we’d love to have you. Join here.

🚀 RalphBlaster Goes Live

The ralphblaster.com landing page went live — and someone signed up within two minutes, before anyone was even told it existed. This c…

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Instead, I love seeing something come to life that I created out of nothing. As I handed coding off …

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Couple days ago I posted a video on Twitter about a workflow I created for automating my Claude Code process, and thousands of builders are piling on:

Click here to see the full tweet. The full video is at the end of this post.

Here’s what we’re building and why it’s getting so much attention among startup builders.

Before I begin, this is a little heavy on the technical side.

But it’s almost more interesting for non-technical people because what we’re about to see will enable non-technical folks to create tickets and execute them on their own without needing a developer until the final review. So while some of this is technical, I’ll try to put it in layman’s terms.

(If there’s something you don’t fully grasp, it’s okay. I think you’ll get the gist. Or you can reply and ask Qs.)

Within the last couple of weeks, something called Ralph Wiggum came out. Yes, it’s named after the Simpson character. What Ralph does is a basic bash script, which is just a simple system script that you can run to instantiate Claude Code over and over for several broken-down tasks that build a feature.

In other words: you define the feature, Claude helps you break it down into bite-sized steps or pieces, and then Ralph takes over and runs through each individual step to execute it. In the end, you’ll have your feature built and tested.

What’s cool about this is that until now, as we built features with Claude Code, we usually have had to “watch it go and approve” things.

You’re sitting there hitting the “accept” button, which is kind of mind-numbing.

Meanwhile, context windows build up and then max out if we forget to reset them. While this is great overall and an improvement over manual coding, as we keep striving for more and more hands-off processes, that’s where RalphBlaster comes in.

Last week, I started playing with Ralph and building features required much less of my time during the actual build process.

I was able to knock out so much so fast.

But then I quickly became overwhelmed trying to keep up with what I had started and where everything was in the cycle. So a couple of days ago, I decided to build what has now become RalphBlaster.

I initially built it as an internal tool. Then yesterday, I made a video of it and put it on Twitter, and it’s been going viral.

So last night, we bought the domain ralphblaster.com and I’m packaging it up to release the product.

In this newsletter is the demo video, but basically what it does is to give you a visual Kanban board where you can create tickets.

And this is where it gets exciting:

Not just developers can create these tickets; anyone with access to the Kanban can do so.

It’s as easy as adding something to a Trello board.

Once the ticket is in the Kanban, you can click a button to generate a PRD (“Product Requirement Document”).

A PRD clearly defines what the feature should do and shouldn’t do and creates user stories—real-world situations of what the user might be trying to do that this feature would solve.

So while “PRD” might sound fancy, it’s really just a text file definition of what the feature should be.

Once you click the generate PRD button, Cloud Code generates the PRD and moves the ticket to a new column in the Kanban for review.

When you’re happy with it, you can click Approve. At this point, RalphBlaster picks up the ticket and does all its work in the backend before executing it.

A side note for technical people: RalphBlaster does all of this in a git worktree. This means it’s an isolated environment that enables us to run multiple tickets on the same project without interfering with each other. We can review them individually and then move on to the next project or revert one if needed.

Through the UI, you can watch the status of the ticket or wait until it’s automatically moved into the Kanban column called “In Testing”. At that point, it’s ready for manual review. The user can choose to merge changes and deploy or make other changes if necessary.

What’s even more exciting is creating a queue of tickets or bug fixes and having Ralph knock them off one after another while you’re asleep—either sequentially or in parallel.

While this was initially intended for local use only, I was cajoled into posting a video of it online and of course, it blew up.

So because everyone is wanting to get a copy of RalphBlaster, I’m now working on getting it to run on remote servers so others can use it too. The idea is you’ll be able to manage your tickets on RalphBlaster.com with a connection to your local machine or whatever server you want this working on. It’ll be set up to use your own Cloud Code account, so you won’t need to pay for AI credits through us.

That’s all for now!

Let me know if you have any questions and head here if you want to join the waitlist.

And if you haven’t already, join our private Founder community by becoming a paid subscriber. If you like this, and all things product, marketing, SEO, and more, you’ll love it in there.

Mac

Here’s the full video:

Problem is: the “regular linkedin dot com feed” is usually pretty awful. It’s designed to keep you scrolling mindlessly, not engaging strategically.

Build An Engagement Feed That Helps You Sell More

Do this instead:

1. Go to …

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