My One-Man Rewards App Makes $25K/Month
Who are you and what business did you start?
I'm Avneesh, the founder and only employee at Savewise.
Savewise is a platform that helps you maximize earning points, miles, and cash back while shopping online.
It searches over 25 shopping portals (like Rakuten) and offers on your credit cards (like Amex and Chase) to tell you how to “stack” deals to get double discounts for things you’re already buying.
Savewise is the only product that searches through both types of offers, and it shows it in the context of your shopping flow.
Our primary customers are people who love to earn credit card points and airline miles, then flip them first-class flights and 5-star hotel stays. But this product works just as well for people who just want to save on every purchase.
Today, we're averaging $25k revenue / month.
This screenshot below shows the power of the product - stacking deals at a store like lululemon
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How do you come up with the idea for Savewise?
This idea was something that I was already doing manually every time I shopped.
I'd check many different shopping portals to see which had the best rate, then try to remember if I had an offer on my several credit cards for the same store. Exhausting.
There were sites out there than searched one or the other, but none of them searched both simultaneously.
So I started building Savewise to scratch my own itch.
I've built lots of consumer products before at companies like Instagram, Microsoft, Foursquare, and Dropbox. I'm love building great user experiences to solve problems, and as someone who loves deal hunting and travel hacking, this idea felt like the perfect intersection of my background and passion.
The idea for Savewise was "pre-validated" - there are tons of content creators and Facebook groups in the travel hacking space that have millions of followers. All these creators and groups focus on showing people who to find these deals...manually. All I needed to do was create software that automated this.
How did you launch Savewise and get initial traction?
I told the world about the Savewise launch through Reddit, Facebook Groups, and cold messaging lots of content creators.
The response was...indifferent. I didn't support enough data sources, so the product wasn't compelling enough. I started with 3 shopping portals, and nobody cared. When I got to 10, a few people cared. When I got to 15 shopping portals and 2 credit cards, only then did growth start to snowball.
I started out targeting the "wrong" audience. I initially focused on people trying to save money, but it was the "travel hackers" where I found product-market fit, even though the product works for both audiences. It took a lot of trial and error to figure that out.
I didn't have a monetization plan in the beginning. I figured if it got enough users, I'd eventually build more products I could charge for. But about 8 months in, power users started asking for features that they said they'd pay for.
So I built them, and sure enough, they paid.
The biggest lesson I've learned from this business is how much raw persistence matters. Today, you see a lot of products that go viral and generate millions in revenue "effortlessly".
That's not the story of Savewise. I got banned from lots of subreddits, shilled my own product, cold messaged hundreds of travel creators. I was days away from giving up 9 months in, when that persistence finally started to turn around all of a sudden.
What was the growth strategy for Savewise and how did you scale?
The tactics used to grow the product was getting "smarter" about finding and messaging my target customers on all the traditional channels: Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, email, etc.
On Reddit, instead of posting in traditional indie hacker or solopreneur subreddits, I set up keyword alerts for Reddit so that any time someone mentioned "shopping portals", "cash back", "stack offers", I'd find a way to naturally plug Savewise. For key topical subreddits like airlines and credit cards, I'd message the mods requesting to post, and illustrate why my product should be shared, even though it was self-promotion.
I found Facebook Groups that were specifically dedicated to stacking deals (e.g. How Double Dip with Rakuten). Since I had all the data, I'd export a list of stores with stackable discounts to a public Google Sheet, share it in the group (so I didn't violate self-promotion rules), and included a link to Savewise in that Google Sheet. I got thousands of users from this.
I cold-messaged creators in the travel hacking space over and over again. Early on, I was ignored. Then once I had a "Pro" tier for Savewise, I offered to give them a a free Pro membership to try out the product, and all of a sudden they started to pay attention. It helped that the product was finally good enough when I figured that out.
Eventually, major publications in the space (like Frequent Miler) published thorough reviews of the product. They are an authority in the space, so the review drove a lot of traffic from my exact target customers.
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What were the biggest lessons learned from building Savewise?
I initially bought a .xyz domain (savewise.xyz). I bought it for $2 because I wasn't certain about the idea. Turns out, lots of platforms auto-flag .xyz domains as spam. I didn't figure that out for 2 months.
I focused too much early on on "savers" instead of "travel hackers". It took trying and failing to appeal to savers that forced me to pivot to travel hackers. I wish I'd marketing my efforts to different customer segments early on.
Savewise went viral on Black Friday on the r/Amex subreddit (500k users) and the site completely crashed due to demand. I hadn't adequately planned for the biggest shopping weekend of the year. I worked 20 hours/day for 5 days straight.
I learned just how much consumers hate subscriptions. I started offering a Pro subscription when power users asked. But I quickly got lots of requests for a "lifetime deal". People were willing to pay up front for 2 years of the product just to not have a subscription. 97% of my revenue now comes from lifetime memberships.
I still have not figured out SEO. Google refuses to rank my site. I spent lots of time trying to figure out SEO, and eventually realized I couldn't just rely on Google for growth, so I found lots of other wise. I'm so glad I diversified how I get traffic.
I use a combination of lots of technology infrastructure (cloud hosting, authentication, payments, analytics tools, admin dashboards, etc.) as well as the Copilot/Cursor have helped me build insanely fast. AI is rightly getting a lot of credit for new startups, but don't sleep on all the tools that now exist that you don't need to build.
I have used every possible "startup credit" available. Most tools I use to run my business, I use for free. These are tools that most companies pay thousands of dollars a year for, but I still fit squarely within their free offerings. Why pay if I don't have to?
I really believed in this idea. I know that even if it wasn't a business, this was a product that should exist in the world, so I committed to building it, and hoped the business would come. There is just no replacement for raw hard work and persistence. I probably work 70 hours a week, and honestly, I love it.
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More about Savewise:
Who is the owner of Savewise?
Avneesh Kohli is the founder of Savewise.
When did Avneesh Kohli start Savewise?
2025
How much money has Avneesh Kohli made from Savewise?
Avneesh Kohli started the business in 2025, and currently makes an average of $300K/year.
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