Building a $15k/Month SaaS While Working Full-Time

That’s Justin Duke’s story 😎

The blurb from a recent podcast interview…

Justin Duke is the founder of Buttondown, a simple email newsletter tool without all the bloat. In December 2022 Buttondown was around $15k MRR. He also runs Spoonbill, which is a way to stay updated on what people change on their social profiles. 

At the time of recording this Justin was an engineering manager at Stripe so you’ll hear references to that, but he’s since left to go all in on being a founder.

Apparently Justin started Buttondown in 2016. He built it for personal use, but shared updates on Twitter and a few followers said they’d pay to use it too 🥳

Someone on Hacker News asked how Justin got traction on his side hustle.

He replied with some hard truth…

This may be an unsatisfying answer: slowly.

I tweeted and wrote a fair deal about the process, and had good-but-not-great launches on HN and Product Hunt. There was definitely no ‘big bang’ where one day I did not have product-market fit and/or traction and then the next day I did; it was a slow drip of new users and new customers who helped refine the product & its position.

This is a strong advantage of having something be a side project; your runway is drastically longer than other business models. (For example, from 2017-2018 MRR slowly grew from around $500 to around $1500. This slow growth felt painful, but also it was incredibly sustainable since I wasn’t drawing a salary from it; churn was extremely low, and the only real problem was a small top-of-funnel since I wasn’t going viral or spending money on ads.

My takeaway from that: sometimes the best thing you can do as an entrepreneur is go get a “real job.” 

That way, there’s less pressure to pay the bills with your own projects, and you can give them room to grow organically instead of trying to force it.