How I Grew My SaaS to $150K/Year With Reddit and SEO

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How I Grew My SaaS to $150K/Year With Reddit and SEO

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Jan 22, 2026

Ayush built Elphas, an AI app that’s making $150K/year. He grew the business in two phases: Phase 1 was Reddit and Phase 2 was SEO. This video breaks down his exact Reddit playbook and his SEO strategy, that helped him go from zero to $150K/year in just a few years.

Grab the niche communities playbook → https://build.starterstory.com/build/playbook-communities?utm_source=youtube&utm_campaign=ayush

Build your own app with AI → https://build.starterstory.com/?utm_source=youtube&utm_campaign=ayush1

Follow Ayush: https://x.com/ayushtweetshere

Check out his app: https://elephas.app/

🔔 Follow the Second Channel: @StarterStoryBuild

🏁 We're hiring: starterstory.com/jobs

This video is an educational case study of this founder’s experience. It is not financial advice and does not guarantee any income or results. Every business is different and your results may vary.

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Every SaaS founder should grow their app like this

This is Ayush a guy from India who built an app that makes over 150 000 a year

and he grew it using one formula the Reddit and SEO playbook

If I was starting over I would run this playbook again

Ayush started on Reddit then he moved to SEO

and within a few months his app went from no users to thousands

Reddit worked first but then we scaled with SEO

SEO I was curious on how he actually did this so I asked Ayush to come onto the channel

and break down his entire playbook and in this video we'll dive into

his exact Reddit strategy that helped him make his first 10K

the SEO playbook that scaled him to his next 100K

and why he believes this playbook still works in 2026

This one is going to be fun Let's dive into it

I'm Pat Walls and this is Starter Story

All right real quick before we get into the interview

interview you're about to get two playbooks for growing a SaaS Reddit and SEO

This is a really awesome story and if you really liked it

I have something even more for you

Later in this video I'll be sharing a deeper playbook

on how to get your first 100 users from Reddit

I'll be talking about that a little bit later

but click the first link in the description if you want it now

All right let's get into the interview

All right Ayush welcome to the channel

Tell me about who you are what you build and what's your story

Hey my name is Ayush I'm the co founder of LFS

It's a simple AI Mac app that has gone from 0 to 150K over the last three years

We grew to 150K per year through Reddit and SEO

and that's what I'm excited to talk to you about today

Okay before we get into all that and how you grew this app

I just want to understand can you explain what this app does

What's the business model What did you build

So yeah LFS is a Mac AI assistant

It's a place where you can index all of your local files

like PDFs Apple Notes all sorts of local knowledge that you have

and you can create your own super brain or knowledge bases out of them

and then chat with them and then create content and reports

and basically use for your work

We have three standard plans

We sell subscriptions monthly annual and we also sell lifetime deals

When you're doing downloadable apps especially Mac apps

the customers expect a lifetime deal

They expect like a one time payment thing

It's a mindset that they have

So we've stuck with the lifetime deal since the beginning

We've gradually raised prices

I'd love if you could show me just some of your dashboards

I just want to see like where's this revenue coming from

Could you pull up some of your Gumroad dashboard setup dashboard

and kind of show us some of this

So we have four revenue channels our own website

set app bundle Mac app store and the iOS app store

We use Gumroad for selling licenses

This is this year's data around 110K

From here we're also on set app

So yeah this is over the last couple of years that we've been on set app

We've done some revenue there

I can pull up the Mac app store around 12 500 there

This is our website traffic

This is a plausible dashboard

We're getting around 180K visits per year

I want to understand how do you even get into this

What's your background

How do you learn about making money online and building apps

Can you go a little bit into that

Yeah so actually my business partner Kamband

was the one who started LFS back in 2022

And he hired me as a consultant

Right at the time I just quit my job my corporate job of 11 years

I was part time consulting with some early stage startups

helping them with product and marketing

So that's when I started working on LFS

Got some good results in the first five or six months

And eventually we reached a stage where he invited me to join him as the co founder

founder and as the marketing guy

And then he asked me to go all in on LFS

And then he is of course the development guy the coder person

And I became the marketing person

And since then we've grown the product as a two person team

Okay cool

So you're the marketing guy

I love it

That's why I wanted to bring you onto the channel

to really talk about this really cool way of thinking about marketing your product

which is Reddit and then SEO

So before we get into all that

I'd just like to understand a high level overview

of how you took LFS from 0 to over 10 000 a month

What was this playbook

So the playbook that really worked for us was the Reddit and then SEO playbook

So Reddit is essentially a goldmine of high intent niche audiences

It's a great place to get feedback initially when you're starting out

Also a great place to get traffic and eventually conversions

In the early days we posted a lot on niche subreddits

asking for feedback showcasing the product giving demos

which led to initial revenue customers

Those customers feedback from those customers

ended up shaping the product over time

We essentially used Reddit to go from 0 to 3 000 in MRR within a period of six months

So Reddit is great initially but eventually Reddit stops working

There are diminishing returns to investing more of your time or effort in Reddit

So SEO is the best organic marketing channel out there

especially if you're bootstrapping like us

This was back in 2023

ChatGPT was just launched

Google was still the primary way people searched for information right

We actually started getting some organic traffic on one of our help articles right

We wrote support articles for our initial customers

to help them out with using the product

And those articles started getting traction from Google

We accidentally discovered SEO as a channel that we could go in

And over a 12 month period of 2023

we ended up making around 70 000 purely from Google only

So SEO essentially took us from 3K to where we are now

Around 12K per month that we're doing

So I think all of it worked perfectly in harmony

harmony because when you're starting out you need feedback you need traction

you need niche audiences and you need fast feedback

Reddit is very good for that

But eventually you want a sustainable scalable way of getting high intent traffic

And for which you don't have

If you're bootstrapping you don't have a lot of ad dollars to spend

Then SEO is the best way to go forward

Building is getting easier and easier thanks to AI

So now I have a lot of people DMing me and asking me

Pat I can build stuff but how the heck do I grow

And how the hell do I get users and distribution

So I decided to put something together for free that will help you with that

We've put together a guide on how to get your first 100 users on Reddit

As I've talked to dozens of founders who have used Reddit to grow their business

And this is the stuff that actually works

This is a part of Starter Story Mode

which is our complete framework for finding your distribution channel in 2026

So if you want to use Reddit to grow your product

then head to the first link in the description to grab it and check it out for free

All right let's get back to the interview

Okay so the Reddit then SEO playbook

I love this

It reminds me of what I did when I started Starter Story

which is just got on Reddit to get early feedback early traction

and then kind of building SEO behind the scenes

because it takes a little bit longer

I want to dive a little bit into the Reddit piece

because I think a lot of people watching this might be wondering

how can I get my first users from Reddit

I'd love if you could dive if possible into an example of a Reddit post

that kind of crushed it for you and drove customers to your product

Could you do that

Yeah so this is like an example post right that did well for us

You know the focus of the post is a video demo of the product

but you also want to wrap it around in a use case

or a problem solution kind of a framing or a story kind of framing right

So something like me or my friend was facing this problem

So I built this feature to solve it

See this is how it works

If you want to try you can try it for 30 days for free

I'm just looking for feedback

feedback If I should improve this feature in any way please give your inputs

I think this works because this is not blatant site promotion

You're explaining the reasoning behind the feature that you've built

Reddit is a very smart audience

They hate marketers

They hate being sold to

But they do appreciate if you can explain the logic to them

and talk to them like adults

Something like hey I built this

This is why I built it

What do you think

Can I improve anything here

And in general I think video demos do well

Like show don't tell marketing

Like don't go out there and say how good your product is

Just show it to people what it can do right

So for this post we had just launched the Superbrain feature at that time

And we had no idea whether this is something even useful that people are even interested in

And this got us a lot of positive feedback and a lot of feature requests

which eventually became our main primary feature

which is like the Superbrain feature that we have

that thousands of people use today to index their documents

and chat with them and create content with them

After a while mods started you know cracking down on them and removing them

But good thing is that we do still get some traffic from these posts

But a lot of the engagement is now gone

And yeah it is how you see it

And that's the thing that I always hear about from people that want to figure out Reddit

They'll post on Reddit

And then you know the moderation rules are strict

That's part of the game right

Could you walk me through the exact playbook

if you had to start over today to kind of replicate what you did

So yeah so if I was starting out

first I'll make a list of all the subreddits where my ICP is handing out every day

At least 15 subreddits

Use something like the map of Reddit

Reddit which is essentially like a free open source project

It's there on GitHub

You can you know enter your one subreddit

and you get to see essentially the map of Reddit

And here you can get a lot of ideas and a lot of new niche subreddits

that you can go and where your potential ICP might be hanging out

Any subreddit that is greater than 5000 members is okay

You don't have to go after really big subreddits

Actually smaller subreddits are sometimes better

because they're niche audiences simpler rules

The mods are more forgiving

In fact the mods want more content on the subreddit themselves

So that is step one

Make a list of all the subreddits

and then pick one feature or pain point that your product is solving right

That is step two

Make a short video demo about it

Explain why you built it in as simple terms as possible

Share this in a subreddit

And at the bottom add a link to your product

Say you know try it out for free for 30 days

We added UTM links to all the links that we were posting in subreddits

to exactly you know which feature we are talking about

what date it is what subreddit it is

So you post this on one subreddit

You analyze its performance

And step three is basically tweaking the copy a bit

and then repeating the same post on another subreddit

Every day you're posting on at least one subreddit

Never post on all subreddits in one day

People can see that because there will be a lot of overlapping audiences

So one a day on one subreddit is good enough

I love that playbook especially doing it every day for 14 15 days

Not only will it prevent people from thinking you're spamming

but also maybe you make a little tweak to the copy

Maybe you improve it

One thing that I want to hear from you is kind of the negativity around Reddit

I hear this a lot of people

I shared my thing and you know there were mean comments

The mod banned me

These really bad things happen

Was that your experience that you got hate from some of your posts

or was that not

And how did you handle it if so

Yes we got hate but that's okay

I think you will get hit

You will get banned and it's okay

Like maybe like you can create like multiple accounts

if one of your accounts gets banned

and you can have backups and burner accounts

But eventually I learned to deal with negativity

Like this is business we're doing here

Develop a thick skin I would say

Okay and then the other question that I have is

what defines success on Reddit

Like when you see a post how many upvotes

How much engagement

Are you looking to go viral

Or what was a successful post or marketing on Reddit look like

So there's no benchmark

Like we've had posts that have like zero upvotes

Standard posts would get 30 40 50 upvotes

We had gone viral with 300 400 upvotes as well

But you are looking at traffic and conversions

But I think what Reddit really gives you

is the qualitative data that comes from all the comments

and the engagement that you get

And then how people are responding

What is the mood

What is the vibe that you're getting about the product

Especially when the product is very new

you really want to know what real authentic people

think about you

And that is something that only Reddit can give you

Like no other platform can give you like raw honest thoughts

from people the way Reddit can get you

And just for that I think Reddit is worth it

Just posting on Reddit is worth it

Okay cool

So the Reddit part is amazing

I love Reddit

And thanks for sharing all that

Let's jump to the next part of the playbook which is SEO

And SEO is kind of a buzzword

What did SEO mean for you

And what did that look like especially in the early days

I think we happened to accidentally discover SEO

We were just you know we were getting initial customers

We were just writing helpful articles support articles

based on the questions that customers were getting right

So we wrote like an article on you know

you know how to create OpenAI API keys right

This is a very simple article

Just has a bunch of screenshots some links you know

do this do this do this

We didn't realize we ranked for this word

number one on Google for six to eight months

We were getting a lot of traffic for it

And we accidentally realized

oh Google is actually a genuine inbound traffic channel

Of course like this was not a very high intent audience

from these kinds of articles

but we got a lot of traffic and we got a lot of insights

on what are the future topics that we could write about

to get more high intent audiences

And then that's when we discovered that

we can actually go and do keyword research

and then find new keywords to write more articles on

and then start getting organic traffic in

So you kind of created this article

even though it doesn't

it really has to do with creating API keys

which doesn't have much to do with Elevus

So it was sort of an accident when you created this

but then I'm guessing you saw that you know

whoa this is getting a lot of traffic

Let's do this for more articles that have more

a little bit more product intent right

So you get signups is that right

Could you show me maybe one of those articles

that you know really drives customer signups

So yeah so what we did is we went back

we did more keyword research

We figured out that there are like underserved niches

or underserved queries on Google

which have low competition but high demand

Like this is an example of an article we wrote

18 best ChatGPT Mac apps free and paid

Essentially it is a listicle

where we are highlighting all the best apps

that were being built at the time around ChatGPT

And yeah we were number one there

and we got a lot of high intent traffic

and conversions from this article itself

We are getting a lot of AI traffic as well from here

ChatGPT Cloud Publicity

all the AI answer engines basically

are referencing a lot of our articles

And that audience is even more high intent

because they've already made up their minds about buying

So they're coming in and directly buying very quickly

Okay cool

Well thanks for sharing that

I want to dive a little deeper into the SEO thing

because again yeah it is kind of a buzzword

There's a lot of different approaches to SEO

So I'd love to hear from you

someone who's actually implemented it

and actually been very successful with it

as a you know small bootstrap business

What would be your playbook

if you had to start over with SEO today

What would be the steps that you would take right now

to kind of crush it with SEO

I think the very first thing

know your exact positioning in the market

like where do you lie right

How does the customer look at the market

market and where do you fit in

Like for us that was like ChatGPT Mac apps right

So there are a bunch of ChatGPT apps

There are smaller market was of ChatGPT Mac apps

And within those there were like a small niche of products

that people could buy

So know your positioning right

Once you know that

then it becomes easier to do keyword research

because now you're thinking as the customer

and you're trying to imagine what would your ICP would

you know search on Google

or what would they type into ChatGPT

or you can use something like Ahrefs to get more data

and figure out the keywords

that your customer is searching for

and also the keywords that your competition

is already ranking for

So what I really love is inside Ahrefs

like have a filter you know

anything with a keyword difficulty of less than 20

and a search volume of greater than 500

is like a very good combination of parameters

especially if you are like a new website

you don't have a lot of domain authority

then you should not go after a lot of high volume keywords

and high competition keywords

You should try and focus on a low volume

high intent and low competition keywords

This is what I used to do

I used to buy Ahrefs

It was 129

It was a lot of money for us

Use the 500 credits to do keyword research

make a list of keywords around 30 to 50 topics

and then go back and write out those blog posts

If you're starting out

you can just start with like two or three blog posts a week

week and eventually you can you know

scale up to six or seven even

The actual writing itself

you can use a lot of AI tools

but it is better to use AI in SEO

as more as a research assistant

What you want to figure out with AI

is that what sort of content is already working well

and make like a scaffold or an outline

or a structure of that kind of article

and then add your own spin to it

add your own flavor and your own style or tone

to humanize it more

As long as you can add net new information to the internet

you will win with SEO

I think that is like a good frame to look at SEO

is how can you bring your personal insights

your user data right

Your market intelligence that you have

and you're adding new information to the internet

You're not just regurgitating

what the internet already has

I think as long as you can do that

you will win with SEO

Okay cool

Well thanks for sharing that SEO playbook

I want to switch topics a second

and go over the actual app that you built

We didn't really go over it in depth

Would you be able to show me a quick demo

of Eliphos and how it works

Essentially it's like a knowledge base app

where if you have a lot of documents

a lot of files locally on your computer

you can create your own personal GPTs out of them

We also have like an offline version

So it's like 100

but you can turn off the Wi Fi

download offline open source models

and then use those for using

But I'll just give like a brief demo

I created like a brain

We call them super brains

essentially knowledge bases

You can add all sorts of files and folders

I just added like one file here

which is like a deep work

I like to refer to it often

Basically you can ask it something like

what is deep work according to Cal Newport

The value is that it will go through

only the documents that are already existing

on your file or the document

that you have added here in this particular brain

and come up with an answer based on just that

So that way it's not hallucinating

Like it's basically AI grounding

but essentially people love it

because they get answers that they can trust on

Then they know that something like ChatGPT

or Claude might hallucinate

or come up with new content

but Eliphos always comes with answers from your own data

And you can add all types of integrations

files YouTube videos web pages

even have an Apple Notes integration

So we have a lot of people

who use Apple Notes as a second brain

and they would just hook it up with Eliphos

and then just get to chat with it

and then use it to understand their own notes

and then use it for their work

Thanks for showing that

That's awesome

It looks like a super cool app

How did you build it

Could you walk through your tech stack

how much you spend on different tools

and languages and hosting

and those sorts of things

and walk through all that

I think Cloud Code is probably the number one tool

AI tool that everyone should be using right now

It does so much for just 100 a month

We use it both for development

as well as for marketing

Eliphos is a native Mac app

so it's built with Swift

For marketing we use Ahrefs

It's one of our top tools

It's 129 a month

but it's so worth it

because you get so much data from it

If you can't afford it

just get it for a month

month and do keyword research for a quarter or four months

And then yeah we use NeuronWriter

to do pre published checks on our blog posts

It's like a tool

where you can enter a blog post

and see how it compares before publishing

So that's very useful

We use the map of Reddit to research Reddit

and find new subreddits to go after

We use Net10

If someone mentions Eliphos on Reddit

or on other social platforms

we know and we can go and comment and reply there

And we use ClickUp inside the team

to manage all our work

We use Discord for the team communication

as well as we have a very thriving community

of our users right

So that community lives on our Discord channel

and we get feedback and feature requests every day there

We use Superblock for hosting

MailerLite for email marketing

Plausible for website analytics

And of course Google Search Console

is a free tool from Google for SEO

Last question that we ask everyone

who comes on the channel

if you could stand on young Ayush's shoulders

before you started this

before you quit your job

what would be your advice to anyone watching this

who wants to build stuff like you

Put more buy buttons on the internet right

Lots of people build something in silence for six months

have a wait list or a free signup right

And they think that you know

automatically you know build it and they'll come

and nobody buys

I think people are too afraid to charge

too afraid to put up a real buy button

But the learning and growth that can happen

happen from a buy button is unlike anything else

You'll not learn from a marketing book

or a course or a sales book or a course right

Because when you publish something online

your product your work

that's when you learn like

when people look at it do they flinch at you

Do they ignore you or do they swipe their card

and pay for what you've built

To get to that place you have to fail a lot

So both me and Kamban my business partner combined

we have like 30 plus failed projects before this

My advice for anyone is you know

get that failure out of the way as soon as possible right

Put more buy buttons on the internet

test a lot of ideas short sprints

fail fast learn fast

see which few ideas are working

which are making getting most traction

which are getting most revenue

and then double down on the ones that work Well

Well that's great advice

Thanks Aayush

That was super awesome

Reddit SEO playbook and all that was amazing

So thanks for coming on and sharing everything

If you enjoyed this

please put a comment down there below

and Aayush will maybe be able to answer some of your questions

Thanks for coming on

Thanks a lot for having me Patrick

This is amazing

All right Gus our producer

what'd you think of this one

What did you think of the interview

Yeah I thought it was awesome

It was really fun to see the two different playbooks

My biggest takeaway is that

this is a playbook that like still works today

During the interview you said like

oh I used this to grow Starry Story

even long before what Aayush was talking about

So it was really cool to see

like he only did it a few years ago

and it's still something that

anyone who built something can try and do

And it's like it's almost free right

That's probably another thing I was thinking about

is like this is free

It's just effort to post on Reddit

It's just effort to write those blogs

I agree

And I think one thing that he mentioned

he didn't go too deep into it

which I think is really important

The qualitative data you get from Reddit

posting on Reddit is not necessarily

about how much traffic I got

and how much revenue I got

and how many paid customers signed up

It's about the engagement and the comments

comments and the feedback you get from real people

He mentioned this which is

Reddit is one of the last places

where there are less bots

and people will be honest with you

and they'll have long discussions

There's so many interviews that we've done

with people that they'll show me

that first Reddit post they did

and it had like 50 upvotes

It's not about this scalable strategy

And I think a lot of people go in thinking

okay I'm going to make 10 000

from a Reddit post that I do

That's not what it's about

It's about getting feedback from users

and talking to users

and just getting a feel for

is this product potentially something

that could be validated

And then taking that feedback

and improving the product

We didn't talk a whole lot about that

but I really think that if you go into Reddit

thinking that I'm going to have

a million dollars overnight

that's the wrong way of thinking

Yeah that's a really good way of saying it

And I think as someone like me

who's more in the early stages

of building stuff and sharing online

it feels kind of scary to put it out there

But at some point in the interview

he said I think you asked him a question about that

And he was just like basically

you have to develop thick skin

when you post on those kind of forums

and just know that you're going to get

a little bit of hate

But in the long run

he learned a lot from that

and it helped him like you said

Yeah so I'd recommend just exactly what you said

is if you sometimes question

putting yourself out there

Reddit is a great somewhat anonymous place

for you to go out there

and experience what it's like

for someone to be pessimistic about your product

or say it sucks or whatever

Even if it doesn't work as a channel or anything

I'd recommend anybody watching this

to just go and try it

to experience what it's like

to get negative feedback

on something that you created

Even if nothing else happens

that's a really important step

in being a founder and building stuff

Okay so that was a great interview

I think hopefully a lot of you guys liked it

If you're looking to build your app in 2026

whether it's an iOS app a SaaS whatever it is

you should definitely check out Starter Story Build

It is our platform where within a couple of weeks

you will find an idea

you will build it with AI tools

and you will launch a real product to the real world

that is ready to take payments and make money

So check that out

I'll put the link in the description for that

Otherwise thank you for watching

watching and we'll see you in the next one

Peace

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