From Locksmith to $74K/Month SaaS in 4 Years

Tim Bennetto tweets….

Was a locksmith, taught myself to code at night, started a SaaS and now have 1k+ paying customers.

Without coding, it would never of been possible.

His SaaS is Pallyy, a “social media management platform” that is now earning $74,000 per month 💰

In another tweet, Tim shares how it all happened….

➜ Learning to code

Spent 6 months or so learning HTML, CSS, JS and Nuxt.

Every evening I would spend a few hrs doing this with CodeCademy (a free learning platform).

➜ Building an MVP

Spent 30 days building an MVP of an Instagram analytics platform.

Point of difference would be that you could “share” your Instagram analytics with others.

It was very very basic.

The initial launch didn’t go well, mainly because Tim had no audience at the time (about 4 years ago) 😕

But the project started gaining traction when…

Friend had a free IG analytics tool, he gave it to me & we redirected it to my platform.

Ended up getting me around 100 customers (at $5/mo).

The sharing feature that was the original focus didn’t interest anyone. So Tim pivoted to focus solely on the analytics dashboard.

But it was still a tough grind to grow the business 😩 …

Growth completely stalled, in total for almost 2 years.

People wanted scheduling & analytics but at the time Instagram scheduling wasn’t possible due to their API.

When Instagram finally opened up their API, Tim built a scheduling feature and added support for other platforms, and scheduling quickly became the #1 feature 🎯

With scheduling now the core of the product, Tim decided to rebrand from the original name, Sharemyinsights…

“Pallyy” was short, a cheap dot com and fun but also not limiting to a certain feature.

Then it was another 2 years before Tim “started marketing properly.” 

He hired a content writer for blogging and social media, optimized for SEO, created alternative pages (example), and launched an affiliate program 🚀

The result…

This was the turning point.

The following year had around 10x growth.

Now, after 4 years of running Pallyy solo and hitting $74K in monthly recurring revenue 🤑 Tim is expanding the team by hiring a developer.

He says…

Anyone can build a SaaS.

The motivation for me was building a better lifestyle. I’ve got no degrees, dropped out of school, had zero coding or marketing knowledge.

Just get started and learn along the way.

His advice for coming up with business ideas 👇

Don’t re-invent the wheel. Don’t try to come up with a unique idea. 

Find a validated market, with lots of competitors and build something. 

The more competitors, the better.

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