发布数十款应用后终于跑通，实现3.3k美元MRR

Getting tired of corporate work

I have worked as a Salesforce developer in a 9-5 job for eight years. After a few years in a corporate environment, you learn most things. The work grows repetitive, and you simply trade time for money — nothing I enjoy. Four years ago, for my bachelor's thesis, I built a mobile app: a simple social media app that mapped your current location and showed local events around you. It was the first time I built an app that people downloaded and gave positive feedback about. The feeling was amazing. Since then, I've been non-stop building and working on side projects in my free time. I've built countless apps. Most made $0. Then, I finally built something that clicked almost immediately: a social media lead generation tool. Ten months ago, I saw a post on Reddit. Someone was asking other builders what they were building and offering to send them Reddit posts from people seeking their solutions. The post went viral. Hundreds of people commented, needing help with lead generation. And it gave me an idea. So, I started building my own lead generation tool, Leadverse. The idea is simple: You paste in your product or service, and the tool continuously looks for new social media posts asking for what you provide. This removes the 'spam' approach of cold email tools, because you only reach out to people already asking for your help. And since the DMs are automated too, you can get traffic on autopilot. Fast forward to today, I've crossed $20k in gross revenue, with 130+ paying customers and $3.3k MRR.

Finding time to build

I'm building it solo, fully bootstrapped. I build it on nights and weekends. My dev background made building it straightforward. The MVP took about a month, but that's just because I'm very busy with my 9-to-5 job, freelance gigs, and family — I recently had a baby. So, finding free time to focus on my side projects is my biggest challenge. After building it, I posted on Reddit in the same format I saw working before — asking other builders to share what they were building and offering to send them leads for free. The post went viral, as I expected, bringing in traffic and my first paying customers.

Technical difficulties

Here's my stack: React (frontend), Supabase (backend), Stripe (payment gateway), Resend (email automation). The biggest technical challenge so far has been balancing LLM costs and output quality. The entire lead generation engine I built is fully AI-powered, and the LLM API calls account for 90% of my costs. So, I'm continuously optimizing LLM prompts and changing models to cut costs while maintaining high output quality.

Finding the right business model

I started with a freemium model. Everyone could sign up and use the tool until they reached a certain number of leads. It seemed like the safest option, but it wasn't. My main traffic source is Reddit, which means many users have no intention to use the tool long-term, people sign up just to test the free tier once. Reddit is amazing to grow your traffic; however, you must account for slightly lower user quality. Normally, I wouldn't care, but it increases my cost per user, so my model didn't make sense. I switched to a three-day free trial with CC details required upfront and saw improvement almost immediately. Fewer people started the trial, but the conversion rate was much higher. This meant less money wasted on non-serious users and more money from users who intended to use the tool. Then, I increased the free trial from three days to seven days. This further increased the numbers. Three days was too short. People didn't have enough time to see the value. I still use a 7-day free trial today and do not plan to change it anytime soon.