The Healthiest Bootstrapped SaaS Growth Lever

And why getting Claude to recommend you is a lagging indicator, not a channel in itself

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.

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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’.

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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