How I Used Reddit to Hit $17K MRR (With ZERO Audience)

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How I Used Reddit to Hit $17K MRR (With ZERO Audience)

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Jul 9, 2025

This is how Diego Roshardt built an AI app to $17K MRR with zero audience.

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Follow Diego's journey: https://x.com/DiegoRoshardt

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🏁 We're hiring: starterstory.com/jobs

Chapters:
0:00 - Intro
0:54 - Who is Diego
1:12 - AppAlchemy breakdown
1:30 - Diego's ideation strategy
1:55 - How to validate an idea
2:23 - How to build fast with AI
2:50 - Build a professional website with one prompt
4:07 - Numbers behind AppAlchemy
4:26 - $17K MRR with no audience
5:26 - Reddit Marketing Playbook
10:12 - Tech Stack
10:33 - Costs & margins
10:54 - The biggest lessons learned
11:53 - "Start now"
12:26 - The final word

This video is an educational case study of one 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.

Chapters

Stack

Transcript

Chapters

Stack

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I built a 17K MRR SaaS with less than 100 followers on X

A few weeks back I got a cold DM from a guy named Diego

He said hey I got a story for you

He told me about his successful app and how fast it grew

But when I checked his X account he only had 70 followers

I think anyone can build a successful business without an audience

I couldn't find him on YouTube or TikTok or Instagram

So I asked hey how did you do it

And what he shared blew me away

I call it the Reddit marketing playbook

And I just had to know more

So today I brought him onto the channel to break down how you can use Reddit to validate

market and make money from any idea

All right let's dive in

I'm Pat Walls and this is Starter Story

All right Diego welcome to the channel

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

My name is Diego and I built an AI SaaS that makes me around 17K per month

I started it four months ago

And just by using Reddit alone I've been able to get over 1 million eyes on my product

while spending 0 in marketing

All right amazing

I'm really excited to talk about the Reddit stuff

But first let's talk a little bit more about the app that you built

What exactly is the app and what does it do

My app is called App Akamai and it allows you to build mobile app designs very fast using AI

It's like Cursor but for designing mobile apps

Okay cool

So we're doing stuff in AI

How did you come up with the idea for this

A few months ago I actually wanted to build my own mobile app

and I paid a designer on Upwork for a decent design and it was hundreds of dollars

And every time I wanted to make like a little change I had to pay him extra

I thought that if I could build an AI tool around this

I could save people a lot of time and money

Sick

I love it

So once you had kind of found the idea for this you started building it

how did you validate that this was something that you wanted to

you know take all the way and actually launch

So it was a problem I myself had experienced

So I knew there was something there

So I built the simplest MVP

I ended up building the MVP in about two weeks

and I started marketing right away on Reddit

I got my first gay MRR and even more purely off Reddit

All right two weeks to build this is insane

Would you have any tips for people watching on how to build apps quickly with AI

Yeah so I don't use the newest libraries or frameworks

because AI is always going to be a lot better at the libraries

libraries that are the most used on the web

And something else that I do is that I use a lot of UI component libraries

like Chakra UI or Ant Design

and this allows you to prototype a lot faster

and to make your website look nicer too

Okay before we finish Diego's story

story I did want to point something out

Diego builds really fast

He doesn't waste time overthinking

He just goes for it

I talked to a lot of successful founders

and this is one of the most common themes I see

Build fast so you can validate faster

And that's exactly why I want to put 10Web on your radar

10Web is an AI powered platform that generates complete

ready to launch websites just from a single prompt

And what's even cooler is 10Web just launched

their brand new AI Website Builder API

With just one API call

it can generate a fully functional hosted WordPress website

from just a single text prompt

10Web is way more than just a typical template builder

It helps you build a real production ready site fast

With 10Web your users get a website that is SEO optimized and mobile friendly

drag and drop editable

fully e commerce ready with WooCommerce

and built on WordPress

but completely white labeled under your brand

This tool can literally save months of work

And 10Web handles everything

so you can focus on what makes your product unique

Just click the first link in the description

to book a strategy call and see how it works

Thanks to 10Web for sponsoring the channel

Now back to Diego's story

Okay cool

So let's go into the numbers a little bit on the business

Can you just share some of the numbers behind what you built

Right now there are more than 1K paying customers

I've got it around 20K or more signups on my product purely from Reddit

And the traffic per month is about 20K

Okay so one of the reasons why I wanted to bring you on the channel

and what I love about your story

is that you did this with basically zero audience

At the time of recording this

you have less than 100 followers on X

no YouTube channel

and just friends and family on your Instagram

But my big question and why I wanted to bring you on the channel is

how did you do it

So a lot of people think that you need a big audience to grow a SaaS nowadays

I got my first KMRR and even more purely off Reddit

I would say that Reddit is probably the most underrated marketing channels

for two different reasons

One you can get a lot of reach for no cost

The other reason is that compared to all the other platforms

you can get very precise targeting

In Reddit there is a subreddit or think a community for pretty much everything

So you can choose a lot of different communities or subreddits

that are related to the product you're selling

selling and target the actual users that are interested in what you're building

All right so we know the power of Reddit

Let's actually dive into the specifics

into this whole Reddit marketing playbook

Can you give me your playbook for getting users and making money from Reddit

Absolutely

So the first step is actually becoming an active Reddit user

If you're not using Reddit already start using it daily

This has two different purposes

The first one is becoming familiar with the platform

and seeing what kind of posts do well

The second one is warming up your account

because any posts that come from a newly created account

will be automatically filtered out by Reddit

So step two is creating a list of subreddits

And this one is very important because you need volume for this to work

The more the better and you can go broad and narrow

So there are a lot of different ways to find subreddits related to your product

but the one I recommend the most is using a Reddit ads tool

And you don't need to pay for any ads for this

You just go to the Reddit ads page

You create a new campaign here

When you go to the targeting section you can look for communities

If I look for for example no code which is related to my own product

I'll get a lot of different communities that are related to this one

And I can keep adding more and I'll keep getting more recommendations

So the third step is creating a killer organic post

The reason that most people fail on Reddit is that their posts don't feel natural

They feel very pushy and they make it completely around their own product

What you want to do instead is provide a little bit of value in your niche

and then you can plug or link your product in the middle of the post

The good thing about Reddit is that most successful posts have actually the same structure

Here I have a post of mine that did very well for app Akamai

And as you can see here

every successful post starts with a catchy attention grabbing headline

What most people do here instead is that they mention their new product

or they announce it like they announced the launch

And this is not what you want to do

After the catchy headline you still don't want to mention the product immediately

You want to provide some value in your niche first

In this specific post I did a case study on a very successful mobile app

This one I actually found it on Twitter and I summarized it

And then I plugged my product at the end

If you link your product directly

you're going to get a lot more traffic to your website instead of just mentioning it

Although many subreddits don't allow you to link directly or it's prohibited

If you actually provide some value first

and you're not just pushing your product they will actually be okay with it

For more stricter subreddits that don't allow you to link your product

I would recommend linking an extra product beside yours

Plug a complimentary product

So for example for mine it's like a design tool

So like Cursor complements it very well because it's for development

So I usually plug that one after mine

And that way your chances of getting banned

or your post being removed for self advertisement is a lot lower

So on the other hand I want to give an example as well of what not to do

So as you can see in this example right here

the founder plugs the product right away like mentioning it in the headline

He immediately starts talking about the product

all the features everything about it

He even like links to Discord

And as you can see from the engagement this post didn't do very well

because people don't care

They want to get some value first

They want to read something interesting

And then if your product is related to that yeah you can plug it

And then they might be interested in it

So step four is grabbing the post we did on the last step

and posting it on multiple subreddits

And volume here is super important

because that increases the chances of one of your posts

getting to the Reddit front page

And that is going to give you like a lot of traffic

Even if that doesn't end up happening

let's say that you post on 10 different subreddits

and each of the posts gets on average let's say around 10K views

That's a total of like 100K views already

which is really good

So it's still worth it

So the last step of the playbook is to repeat this process

You should be trying different type of posts

to see what does better in your niche

You can try videos you can try case studies

and you can try other type of posts as well

A good rule of thumb is posting two to three times per week

I think that anything more than that will probably get you banned

So you should probably stick to that rule

All right cool

Well Diego that playbook was amazing

Let's switch gears a little bit

Could you just break down your tech stack

How did you build these products

What tools did you use

And what's your stack

Yeah so I use Cursor for development and for building

I use Next js and React as my main frameworks

And I use Firebase for auth and for database stuff

And okay so you're doing about 17K MRR

What are the actual costs to run this business

What do the profits look like

So the overall margins are about 70

Cursor is 20 per month

Vercel Hosting is about 40 per month

And then my most expensive costs the AI API backends

which are about 2 5K per month

Okay so you crushed it in the last four months

You've found this whole Reddit strategy

You're making money online

What has been the biggest lessons learned in your journey so far

I would say that when it comes to building a SaaS

you should be solving your problem in a growing market

And a good example I can give is building a SaaS tool

for newspaper owners for example

which like newspapers are in decline

Or you can build a tool for like vibe coding

which only in the last month has been exploding

and it's going to keep growing

Something else that I would recommend to everyone

is that like in any other business model

in SaaS marketing and distribution

are actually very important

So even at the start

you should be spending a lot of your time marketing

instead of like adding more features no one asked for

And lastly as a solo founder or small company

speed is one of your major advantages

So take advantage of that whenever possible

Okay those are awesome

The last question that we ask

to everyone who comes on Starter Story

if you could sit on Diego's shoulder

before you cracked Reddit

before you were making any money online

what would be your advice

Right now is the best time to build

I would say that if you have an idea

get a simple MVP out there

and start marketing it as soon as possible

All right well that's the best advice I heard all month

Thank you Diego for coming on the channel

I love the Reddit stuff

That's why I really wanted to have you on this channel

It reminds me of when I first started

So thank you for coming on

I imagine you're gonna keep growing

and we'll have you on when you're doing a million

So thanks for coming on man

Thanks for having me

I love Diego's story because it's proof

that you do not need an audience to be successful

He did it all just by having a great working product

and of course a killer marketing strategy

I really think that anybody can do this

put this into practice

and create something that changes their life

But of course you actually have to build something

If you never build it you'll never know

And this is why I created Starter Story Build

our flagship program to help you build anything with AI

In less than two weeks

you'll go from just an idea in your head

to a fully working app ready to ship to the world

And more importantly

you'll learn the skills to build whatever you want forever

If you're interested

head to the link in the description

description to check out Starter Story Build

Thank you guys again for watching

I'll see you in the next one

Peace

Starter Story

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