Running A $200 Monthly No-Code Micro-SaaS Business
How he bought a micro-saas for $5,000 & is earning $200 MRR from it
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Hello! Can you introduce yourself and tell us about your business?
Hi there, I'm Louis, a 30 yo Frenchman. 🇫🇷
As a solo builder, I've been trying my hands on SaaS businesses for 2 years. I've started, sold, and shut down multiple projects on the side.
My latest one is QuickAPI, a no-code API backend.
I also run a Retool agency as my main gig, but I'll focus on QuickAPI in this article.
How was the business started?
I started the project as a business need for my previous company.
One weekend, I was toying with the idea of using machine learning to classify job titles for marketing purposes and trained a simple model around this.
I sold access to the model via a bare API to a few customers. I then had the idea to create a real landing page to eventually widen the sales and reach more people.
However, I had to spend more time preparing the API for public use: user management, billing, usage limits, analytics, etc.
Eventually, I built a minimal version of this in 3 weeks, and it worked pretty well. A few days later, I stumbled upon a very similar business called "QuickAPI" online.
I reached out to the founder and bought his business for $5,000.
I then proceeded to merge the two platforms. I was mostly buying some tech as QuickAPI did not have customers at that time (but around 200 free users).
That's how QuickAPI was re-born.
How did you get your first initial customers?
Because I bought an existing brand, it was easier to get started.
I mainly reached out to previous users to get to know them. After ~50 calls with users, I managed to sign up 5 of them onto a paid plan, which got me started.
Of course, my first price was way off and low. Eventually, I onboarded new users to higher-paid plans, which better reflected the value of QuickAPI.
I also took some time to search the tools people were using to build APIs or publish data and joined related forums to engage with people who might be interested.
One thing I noticed is that it feels easier to go where you're used to (I'm on X and Indie Hacker), but that's not always where your users hang out, so I had to search further away from these channels.
Since launch, what are your marketing strategies or channels to get new customers?
That's still a work-in-progress, but I'm slowly building up my SEO game and outbound campaigns on Linkedin.
I'm experimenting with SEO by building as many useful APIs as possible and marketing them through QuickAPI to generate some backlinks and more revenue.
The same thing I did with JobTitlesAI It's a little too early to tell though.
How does the business make money?
QuickAPI is a pure SaaS because it allows people to run their business; it works with a paid monthly subscription.
There is no free tier yet, but a free trial. Right now, I'm more focused on acquiring new customers than on playing with pricing changes. Eventually, the price will update as QuickAPI provides more value over time.
That's the early days, I reached $200 MRR and burning about $150/mo of technical expenses.
I expect to be able to reach complete baguette profitably in the coming year at around $6,000.
This is when I can live off of QuickAPI, even though I don't plan on ditching my other revenue streams.
I spent between 5-10 hours a week on the business, which is why I need to be very picky about the tasks I do and don't. As a former developer employee, the hardest part is to let go of the urge to code and add features when you should be doing marketing and sales. But after a year, it's a lot easier to do.
Where can we go to learn more?
Follow me on X where I post about how I build QuickAPI and other businesses!
Thank you for reading!