SaaS case studies: revenue and exits — 5/5
SaaS cases
97–107 of 107
Lancer: He Shut Down a 15-Person Agency for a SaaS — $10K MRR in 60 Days
Ivan Nedelkovski gave up a 15-person freelance agency in 2025 and launched Lancer, which automates writing Upwork proposals. He hit $10,000 MRR (30 paying users) 60 days after commercial launch, and now sits at $20,000 (100 users). Almost all of the first $10,000 came from a single referral by one instructor.
Pckgr: $83,000 a Month from One Narrow Intune Pain Point, Built with No Code
Pckgr, which automates the packaging work for distributing apps in Microsoft Intune, started by dropping into Reddit and Facebook groups where Intune admins already gather, completely free. Through a $25/month entry price and staged increases, it reached $83,000/month (about ¥12.45M).
From optician to $28,000/month across three SaaS products: choosing only the battles you can win
Samuel Rondot, a former optician, hit $30,000/month with his first business — run entirely by hand, without writing code — and used it to go independent. He now runs three SaaS products in parallel, mostly through SEO, totaling $28,000/month. When LinkedIn's restrictions cut into one product, the others carried the business.
Setter AI: $10K MRR in a Year and a Half — a Prototype Sold Two Weeks After the Idea
Josef Büttgen's AI meeting-setter SaaS "Setter AI" sold a prototype within two weeks of conception and reached $10K/month (about $120K/year, roughly ¥18M) in eighteen months. His previous product spent a year with nothing to show for it.
Zigpoll: Solo at $125,000/Month — the Day It Realized It Had Misread Who Its Real Customer Was
Jason Zigelbaum runs Zigpoll, a survey SaaS for e-commerce sites, solo — no co-founder, no funding — and reached $125,000 MRR (roughly ¥18.75M) in June 2026. The turning point was realizing he had been locking his best customer segment out of the tier where the features they needed lived.
Hit on the Fifth Try: an AI Design Tool at $10K/Month in Six Weeks with Zero Ad Spend
After four design tools that didn't land, a three-person team narrowed focus to mobile app design and hit $10K MRR within six weeks of launch, with zero ad spend.
AppstoreSpy: A #1-of-the-Day Product Hunt Launch Converted Only 10 Paying Users — What Grew It Was 113% in the 4 Months After v2
Cyprus-based app-market analytics tool AppstoreSpy got its first paying customer within a week of launch, 50 customers within 2 months, and hit #1 for the day on Product Hunt — which converted only 10 paying customers. Growth was 113% over the four months following v2. Monthly visits: 20,000; MAU: 7,000; email subscribers: 13,000.
Raised $20K before writing a line of code. The YouTube-script AI that reached $62K/month in 18 months
Gil Hildebrand pre-sold 50 lifetime licenses for $20K before building anything, then grew YouTube-script AI Subscribr to $62K/month in 18 months.
¥250,000/month on his 6th solo project — from a 50-yen-per-transaction failure to 50 paying users at ¥4,000/month
A developer who built six solo projects reached about ¥250,000/month in recurring revenue with his fifth product, an Instagram chatbot tool. His first product failed at a 50-yen-per-transaction commission and a few thousand yen a month; rethinking price point and billing model was the turning point.
SuperLemon: $25,000 MRR in 14 Months for a Two-Person Shopify App That Stopped Raising Prices
Preetam Nath's Shopify WhatsApp app SuperLemon reached $25,000 MRR in 14 months. Cutting the price from $29.99 back down to $10 won 1,500+ paying merchants.
Buttondown: A Stripe Engineer's Weekend SaaS — 5% a Month for Five Years to $75,000/Month
Justin Duke, a Stripe engineer, started newsletter SaaS Buttondown as a December 2016 side project. Roughly 5% monthly growth for the past five years brought it to $75,000/month (about ¥11.25M). He didn't go full-time until year seven.