通过YouTube构建组合业务，年增长至300万美元

A $3M/yr portfolio

I'm Jacky Chou, and I run a portfolio of online businesses out of Vancouver, BC, including an SEO agency called Indexsy and a cluster of SaaS tools: LocalRank.so, Trackings.ai, IndexChex, RankTack, and a few others. I also operate a short-term rental in Lisbon and publicly track monthly revenue across all of it on social media. In March, revenue was $246.8k. My trailing-12-month revenue is $3M.

$20k MRR right out of the gate

I cofounded my first software product, Localrank.so, with Peter Wang. I had been publishing daily videos on my YouTube channel for over two years, and then I saw a gap in the market. Peter and I launched the MVP in a week and hit nearly $20k MRR right out of the gate. It's a Django app with a React frontend, running on Hetzner, using Postgres, Redis, and Celery for background jobs. We use AWS and Cloudflare for infrastructure, Stripe for payments, and several AI APIs for smart features. Nothing too exotic.

A portfolio model

I use a portfolio model. I run a few different revenue lines — my SEO agency and a cluster of SaaS tools — that feed into each other. Each stands alone, but they share audience, distribution, and significant operational overlap. Recently, the SaaS cluster has grown toward parity with the agency, which is my desired direction.

An organic flywheel

I've grown mostly through content and publicly sharing my progress. Here are a few key strategies: YouTube first. I consistently prioritize this channel. Videos with relatively low view counts drive significantly more product signups than posts that get tens of thousands of impressions on other platforms. YouTube's search intent differs. Viewers watching a "best local SEO tool" video are much closer to buying than those scrolling a feed. Public revenue tracking. I post monthly revenue breakdowns across my entire portfolio on social media. It builds trust, attracts other operators, and generates a steady stream of inbound leads for the agency and the SaaS tools.

How to do video content right

Here's how to create quality video content: Document, don't perform. The easiest authentic content is showing what you're doing. Build in public. Share the wins, the losses, the revenue, the failed experiments. I have a build-in-public playlist on YouTube where I do exactly that. No production crew, no script doctor, just me talking through what happens in the businesses week to week. Stop optimizing for views early on. The first 50 videos are practice. You're learning to talk on camera, finding your voice, and figuring out what your audience cares about. View counts are a terrible scorecard at that stage. Just publish and keep going.

Three challenges

Here were my biggest challenges: Getting clapped by Google. I've been hit by algorithm updates more than once. When you're running an SEO agency and SEO-driven content businesses, Google updates aren't abstract; they hit revenue directly. The lesson I keep relearning is to take chips off the table when things are good. Don't assume the run will continue forever. Waiting too long on SaaS. I should have started building SaaS earlier. The agency was working, so I easily kept pouring energy there, but recurring revenue from software is a fundamentally different game. Sharing too much. Being public about what I'm building has been a huge growth lever, but it cuts both ways. Sometimes I share a playbook or a niche and then watch competitors flood in within months.