I built a $14K/month SaaS using Discord

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I built a $14K/month SaaS using Discord

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Jan 15, 2026

Sam Adeniyi used Discord to validate and launch his first saas and now it makes $14K MRR (built entirely with ChatGPT + Cursor). This video breaks down how he used Discord to validate his idea and how knowing a niche community lets you build the perfect product.

Learn how to find customers like Sam → https://build.starterstory.com/build/playbook-communities?utm_source=youtube&utm_campaign=algrow

Join an upcoming Starter Story Build Bootcamp → https://build.starterstory.com/?utm_source=youtube&utm_campaign=algrowsam

Follow Sam: https://x.com/samgrows

Check out Algrow: https://algrow.online/

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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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I built my first SaaS around six seven months ago and last month I did over 40 000 in revenue

This is Sam a university student who built a SaaS with zero coding background

But here's the even crazier part

He validated this idea in a way I've never seen before

Discord

I would mute my mic and literally just share my screen

He found a tiny community started showing off his product

and just six months later he's at 14 000 a month with over 10 000 users

I got my first 400 users all on Discord

This is such a crazy simple strategy that I had to get Sam to come on the channel and break it

all down and that's exactly what he did

And in this video we'll dive into how he shipped a broken MVP that didn't even work

and why that didn't matter how he went from zero to 10 000 users in just six months

and how Discord might be the untapped channel to find your first 100 customers

All right this one you cannot miss

I'm Pat Walls and this is Starter Story

All right Sam welcome to the channel

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

My name is Sam

I've outcoded my first SaaS six months ago called Algro and I've gained over 10 000 users

and made over 14 000 in revenue in the last 30 days

And the way that I did this is something that I don't see many founders doing

and it's tapping into Discord communities and growing your SaaS through that

And I'm excited to share that playbook with you today

Awesome Sam

Before we get all into Discord which I think is amazing

I don't even know a whole lot about Discord which I'm really excited to learn from you

But first what is the app that you built

You built a SaaS

Can you explain what it does

So there are two core features of our product

We help creators research and also replicate viral formats

We have three different pricing plans at the moment

There is a 25 a month plan a 45 a month plan and an 80 a month plan

So as you can see here we analyze the subscriber counts the average views per video

and you are given a list of trending formats that are working in real time

And when you find a channel you like you can either save it in Algro

If you want to take it a step forward you can go and create the videos themselves

So if you find a channel for example that was trending with Sora 2

you can plug it into the AI video generator and then generate it inside of Algro

download it and then optimize it for whatever platform you post on then you can post it

Okay super cool business that you launched

Before we get into the whole Discord strategy and all that

I'd love if you just showed me a little bit more of the metrics behind the business

and pulled up some of your Stripe dashboard

and just showed us a little bit more about how the business is doing financially

All right no worries

Here is the last four weeks on Algro

And as you can see it's made over £10 000 in revenue

When you convert that into dollars it's around 13 000 to 14 000

In terms of customers we have exactly 480 new customers this month

So initially when I launched Algro I launched it as a tool for faceless YouTubers

However in the recent months Algro has grown to influencers using it

I see dropshippers using it

So it has many different use cases now

Okay cool

Thank you for sharing your metrics pulling up your Stripe dashboards

and being transparent with all that

I want to understand a little bit more about your background

How do you even get into the idea of building a SaaS

All right

So I've been around the internet for the past three years

looking for different ways to make money

The first way I started was affiliate marketing

Me and my two best friends from home we worked with a company called Rizap

And we posted faceless texting stories about different fake scenarios

to help promote our app

And we did over 10 000 in revenue with that company

However it wasn't sustainable

But I took that money from Rizap

And I thought okay let me try different business models

So I went to something called YouTube Automation

where you post videos online and make money from ad revenue

And I had a close friend called Mason

who first introduced me into the idea of

why doesn't someone build a way for us to find more short channels to run

Because the more channels you have to run the more opportunities to make money

And I was like you know what I'll try the idea

So I opened up a notepad

And I blurted out on the chatty voice mode my whole idea

So I was given a bunch of code

And I was just copying it back and forth into notepad

And then I googled and I saw something called Visual Studio Code

And I still didn't know what to do

So all I would do is just still copy back and forth

But instead of notepad I did it on VS Code

And that's how I coded my first ever MVP

However I showed that to my friend Mason

And he was like so raw dogging it in VS Code is dumb when cursor exists

And I didn't know what cursor

I thought it was something like a mouse cursor at the time

So I downloaded it

And ever since then I've just been with cursor

You basically have no technical experience

How did you teach yourself this

Did you build the whole MVP

How long did it take you to do this with AI coding tools with zero technical experience

All right

So the initial MVP that you see it was coded in about a week

And that is the version I did on notepad

When I first shipped my product I hosted it on a site called Heroku

And the first person I gave it to they got an application error

But they still managed to use some of the core features and were able to still use the app

Yes there were bugs

Yes there were issues

But the main idea of the app was working

So as long as what you're trying to solve works I think you can ship anything

Okay cool

You can build anything nowadays

This isn't news

I want to understand about the marketing

How did you get your first customers

And then how did you build this to something that makes over 10 000 a month

So the way I did it is I hopped on a site called discord org

Type in any keyword or any niche

And it'll find you discord communities with people in that niche

And what I did is at the time there was a server called MoneyMine

I went to search bar and I typed in the word niches

But the major result that I found was people were searching

how do I find a niche

Or how can I replicate this niche

When I saw that people were repeating how do I find a niche

I was like okay that is the demand

I see the demand

So I thought let me get a bit more validation

So what I used to do is I would go in that server

and I would join a discord voice chat

And I would share my screen

Not talking nothing just me using my tool

And I was seeing at Sam what are you using

At Sam what is this

And I would respond to them being oh it's a tool I built

And I did this for about like a week straight

It even attracted the eyes of the discord server owner

to the point that he created a YouTube long form promotional video on the tool

I didn't ask him

I didn't pay for it

I didn't do anything

And then after weeks of just sitting in the discord server and screen sharing

I thought how can I get these people to convert to my product

And I saw the typical thing was for a SaaS to release a waitlist

And I was able to send that waitlist to those discord servers

So I would put in the discord server in the chat just a waitlist and be like

if you want to try the tool just sign up here

And once it's released you'll get an email or something like that

And that's how Agro started

Man I just love hearing how Sam went out and found his customers

through this platform called discord

It's really something that I haven't seen or heard of that much

I mean I hear a lot about Reddit and Facebook groups but not discord

And if you stick around to the end

you're going to hear him break down his entire process

But it got me thinking about all the niche communities

that are out there where you can go find customers

I get a lot of DMs from you guys about where is the best place

to post my product and get my first customer

But the truth is there are a million places to do it

And it's different for every type of business

and customer that you're trying to reach

Honestly it's easy to get lost or confused

and potentially even pick the wrong distribution channel

And I know a lot of you guys watching might not know exactly where to start

So I decided to put something together for you for free

where you can find your perfect distribution channel

Again this is all free

I put together the ultimate playbook of how to find customers

through niche communities not only discord but Reddit

Facebook groups and all sorts of places where you can find customers for free

And this is all based on real data and real examples

from successful founders that I talked to through this YouTube channel

and also through starter story

This is important because it's what is actually working

and you can download the whole thing for free right now

Just click the link in the description to get it

but it won't be free forever

All right let's get back to the interview

Discord is this untapped market almost

but I assume that discord has a huge spam problem

Why didn't you get banned

Why do people love your stuff so much

They were willing to self promote it

What did you do right

What would be your advice for other people

who want to nail discord distribution

Most discord communities that you join have server rules

and in the rules it always says

no self promo or else you'll be banned

And most people see that and what they'll do still

is go in the server and be like

hi I've got this tool please use it

But you just look like spam

You look like an annoying person

And I think the main thing you have to do first

is build maybe a bit of rapport in the community

A person would give me like a type of channel they were looking for

and I would use my tool to help them find that channel

So I wasn't directly selling it to them

because at the end of the day

those people will tell their friends

word of mouth was so big for me at the beginning

Just because it solves a pain point that is so big

people will end up telling other people

I asked them where did you come from

They'd be like oh my friend told me

Okay cool

This is amazing

Could you give me the playbook on how you would get customers

from niche communities or specifically discord

if you had to start over today

So the first step that I would have for you

is to find where your ICP lives

attempt to find if there is a discord community for your niche

Let's say we're going to build a SaaS that creates 3D assets or something

So what I would do is I'd go on discord

and have a look at the blender servers

their outputs

and I would join every single one of them

and do the same thing for Cinema 4D

And then for step two

I would say you need to listen before you build anything

One cool thing about discord is you can scroll through

and copy and paste days and days worth of chat history

copy and paste it into chatTBT

and give it a prompt saying

list me all of the pain points that these people have talked about

over the last couple of days

You want to be looking for recurring pain points

because those are the ones that would have more demand

So the more struggle there is

the more likely the product is going to do to do better

in my opinion

Step three now you want to validate your ideas

by having real conversations with people

So once you DM these people

you need to have a goal in mind

Drop them a screen recording of whatever

like a quick loom

a sped up of your tool

And if you see them like give great feedback

like on my days

this is something I've been looking for

something like that

that is a strong indicator

that you're building the correct thing

However I say at least try and find five

six different people in different servers as well

Step four I would say you should build in public

with the community

I don't mean the whole Twitter build in public

where you document the process of you building your SaaS

I genuinely think that's a whole bunch of rubbish

but that's my personal opinion on it

I think that you should build your product with your users

So if you think you can collect enough users

then just build a wait list and get the emails ready

But another really cool thing you can do beyond the wait list

is make your own Discord server for your future product

So instead of being scared of getting banned

for self promo in the big communities

you can start growing your own private Discord community

and then you're funneling in your ideal customers

And I'm all for emails

I think emails are great

but Discord is 10 times better

in terms of building a relationship with your users

I think young people will go on Discord

more than they check their emails

So for step five

another thing you want to do

is turn all of your early users

into potential advocates for your product

So one thing I did is I gave all of my early users

to help me validate my idea

I gave them all free access

So the early access user would have free access

then his friend would have to pay

But his friend might be a bit skeptical

on how the tool works

But the really cool thing is

the early access user can just show him

because he has free access

And that is how our group grew as quick as it did

because I posted in these communities

and these people would tell their friends

And that is how it initially blew up

Okay cool

I want to change topics on a second

I know that you vibe coded this without technical background

What's your tech stack

How'd you build this and what tools do you use

So I've upgraded from the 20 a month cursor plan

to the 200 a month cursor plan

And then I have an AI image generation feature

instead of Algo

So that is based off Nano Banana

where I'm paying around I'd say 100 a month

There's also AI video generation

which uses models like Sora 2

And I'll say I'm paying around 200 a month

Hosting now costs me about 100 a month

I'm still on Heroku

And then in terms of email marketing

I use a site called MailerLite

and it costs around 80 a month

And in terms of like different AI compute now

other cost of Gemini

I'd say it goes to around 300 to 500 per month

Cool

Last question that we ask every founder

who comes onto the channel

If you could go back in time

what would be your advice to young Sam

or for anyone watching this

who wants to build a 10K plus per month business

My main advice for people would be

build your tool to accommodate for scale

You need to initially better yourself

think that okay cool

I'm going to have 100 000 users building my tool

and you want to have the frameworks behind that

And you might not know them

but when you tell Cursor to think that way

it will change his mindset

and the way it prompts you to do things

It will prompt you in a way that will accommodate

for those 100 000 users

instead of just that one user being you

Because then it saves you so much time

and money down the line

Well that's great advice

For anyone watching

vibe coding building stuff

believe in yourself

Thanks Sam for coming onto the channel

Amazing strategy Discord

I love it

So thanks for coming on

and sharing everything so transparently

Thanks for having me on

All right

Thank you to Sam for coming onto the channel

and sharing all that

I'll bring Gus our producer on

What'd you think of this one Gus

Yeah that was pretty awesome

My big takeaway is like

there's a million places to find customers

but Discord is just not something

I've ever thought about

Maybe I'm just old

Like I don't use Discord

That's probably part of the problem

Yeah he did sort of mention this a couple of times

It's like he said

my users are younger and they're on Discord

They don't check their email

I think that's really important

If you're going to build this business

and then you're going to go promote it on LinkedIn

that's not going to work

Right yeah

It's just crazy to think

like there's these tiny places

and pockets on the internet

It's pretty cool

A million different places to go find people

You just got to like understand

a certain niche really well

to know where to go look

And what I thought was cool in the early days

he didn't even have the ability

to build any software

but he just built something super niche

I think that's super cool

And it's what I would recommend

for anyone to do who wants to get started today

who wants to build stuff

go to small communities

solve a really really niche problem

for a really really niche customer

You could probably vibe code something really quickly

and just start getting interest and validation

So if you're looking to do that

and you want to build something quickly

I definitely check out Starter Story Build

It is our platform

We will teach you how to build

and vibe code products to production

in just a couple of weeks

You'll come up with your idea

you'll build it and you'll launch it to real users

You might be on Discord just like Sam did

I'll put a link in the description for that

Our next cohorts are starting this week

If you're looking to start and build

and get off the sidelines and build something

definitely check it out

Thanks for watching

I'll see you in the next one

Peace

Starter Story

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