6 Years, $1 Million SaaS

Jason McCreary did this with Shift, “a SaaS which automates upgrading Laravel projects.”

(Laravel is a free, open-source PHP web framework.)

Jason recently posted the short and long version of his journey.

You could say that he started it by following the Permissionless Apprenticeship model…

I built Shift during a conference hackathon. Earlier in the day, I gave a talk on upgrading Laravel. In attendance was Taylor Otwell, the creator of Laravel. Afterward, I talked to him and asked if he knew of any scripts for upgrading Laravel applications. He said, “No, but I’d use it.”

So Jason went ahead and built an MVP, posted about it on Twitter, and Taylor retweeted it. That helped drive the first few sales 💵

Still, it sounds like it was a grind for Jason in the early days: he earned just $220 from the project in the first few weeks.

10 months later he was up to $4000 a month, and only 3 full years after he began the project did Jason quit his day job to work on Shift full time.

Now he’s riding high at $30,000 per month 💰

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