How to grow your app with zero followers (three real world examples)
TL;DR
You don't need a large audience to build a profitable SaaS. Three founders demonstrate how Reddit posts, targeted YouTube content, and paid ads can each drive meaningful growth from zero — with real revenue numbers to back it up. ---
Key Concepts
Value-first content
tap to reveal ↩
Publishing posts/videos that help the audience first, then plugging your product as an incidental solution
Cost per acquisition (CPA) vs. lifetime value (LTV)
tap to reveal ↩
The core math that determines whether paid ads can scale indefinitely
Channel concentration
tap to reveal ↩
Picking one marketing channel and scaling it deeply rather than spreading thin across many
Notes
§Strategy 1: Organic Reddit (Diego Rashard — $17K/month)
- Posts starting with "I built an app that…" get near-zero engagement
- Nobody cares about your product; they only care about themselves
- Write posts that deliver standalone value; include your product as a link at the bottom
- Good title formats: "My app made $40K in one month — please build that little idea of yours" or "Here's a free fitness plan I used to build 5 lbs of muscle"
- The post should be worth reading even if you remove the product link
- Use Map of Reddit (mapofreddit.com) to discover closely connected subreddits for your niche
- Sort target subreddits by Top → This Week/Month and reverse-engineer high-performing title styles
- Repost (slightly varied) content across multiple related subreddits to multiply reach
- Use the "Related Communities" sidebar inside each subreddit for more targets
- Many subreddits will permanently ban self-promotion — expected, experiment freely
- Warm up new accounts before posting; cold accounts rarely work
§Strategy 2: Targeted YouTube Content (Vasco — $70K/month)
- Single marketing channel only: YouTube
- Founder runs three separate channels (personal, tips-focused, product brand) using the same thumbnail style — low incremental effort
- Every video description contains a link to the SaaS product
- Even a small conversion rate across high-view videos drip-feeds paying users
- Pay other creators a few hundred dollars per video to produce content on their own channels — profitable if MRR gained exceeds the cost
- Identify your best-performing organic videos, then run YouTube promote ads on those (not underperforming ones)
- Choose "Website visits" as the promotion goal so viewers click through to the product
- Promoted videos blend into organic results, improving click-through
§Strategy 3: Paid Ads — Meta & Google (Samuel Rondo — multiple profitable products)
- Best for validating willingness to pay and acquiring first 10–100 customers quickly
- Can scale indefinitely if LTV > CPA
- Example: $30/month × 4-month avg. retention = $120 LTV; $30 CPA = 4× ROAS
- Meta Ads: better for consumer-focused products
- Google Ads: better for B2B products
- Go to
facebook.com/ads/library→ Category: All Ads → search a competitor - Filter for ads that have been running a long time — longevity signals profitability
- Study format (video / image / carousel) and copy for inspiration
- Paid ads give immediate feedback; SEO and affiliates take too long to validate an idea
- Run ads first, build slower channels (SEO, affiliates) in the background
Actionable Takeaways
- Before writing any self-promotional Reddit post, ask: "Would this get upvotes if I removed my product link entirely?" If no, rewrite it.
- Use Map of Reddit to build a target list of subreddits, then batch-post a single piece of value-content across all of them with minor tweaks per audience.
- Pick one video/content channel and create multiple accounts or sub-channels around it rather than spreading across platforms.
- Check your YouTube analytics for your single best-performing video and run a "Website visits" promotion on it before investing in any new content.
- Before launching paid ads, calculate your LTV; only scale if projected CPA stays well below that number.
- Search the Facebook Ad Library for competitors, sort by oldest active ads, and use those as creative templates.
Quotes Worth Keeping
“
No one cares at all what you're doing. They only care about themselves.
“
The post should stand on its own if you were not to include that link in the first place.
“
If the lifetime value is more than the cost per acquisition, you can just scale that indefinitely.