From laid off to starting a SaaS and $8K MRR with my productized service
Published in 2023, this chronicle by @frenchriera details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing. Key verified financial milestone: $8K MRR.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Charging customers from day one acts as the ultimate filter for building software that solves genuine, high-urgency problems.
Keeping fixed overhead low and leveraging lean infrastructure allows founders to stay alive until market tailwinds kick in.
Small, repetitive improvements in customer retention and conversion rates yield massive returns over multi-year horizons.
Community Debate Themes:
The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.
CATEGORY Bootstrapping & MRR →
HISTORICAL ERA Post-ZIRP & AI (2023–2026)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 7 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 2 comments
Hey everyone,
I've got to share this with you because, honestly, it's been a wild ride.
6 month ago, I was all in on the crypto wave, working hard and feeling like I was on the cutting edge.
Then the market crashed, few months later, I was out of job.
I felt it coming, with all the massive tech layoffs, I knew I needed to diversify my incomes. This is when my flatmate told me about a guy running a design agency by himself and was doing crazy numbers.
I think we all know the story of Brett from designjoy.co and his productized service.
Think of it like a (very expensive) gym membership but for design. People sign up, pay monthly, and get a set amount of design work. It seemed so straightforward, and I thought, "Hey, I could do this with web development.”
So I took Brett’s course and joined his community to learn how he was doing it and start my own venture with all the right cards in hand.
But getting started wasn't a walk in the park… As a software engineer, seing that you’d need to connected dozen of different tools to run your agency to finally offer a shattered experience to your subscribers was unthinkable.
After talking with a lot of different people trying to start a productized service, I decided to work on making this process easier and accessible to all.
That's when I decided to build https://breeew.com. It's a simple platform, but I’m proud of it!
It helps you create and manage productized services, it essentially reproduce DesignJoy workflow but from a single place, you never need to do any manual action, everything is automatically managed for you. (I spent a lot of time on making the perfect UX)
Anyway, fast forward to today, I actually started by own productized service (liberto.dev) and generate $8K monthly recurring revenue.
It's not just the money (though that's pretty sweet), it's the feeling of being my own boss that's truly priceless.
I know a lot of you out there are hustling hard, maybe feeling a bit stuck or looking for a side gig that could turn into something more. I'm telling you, if I can do it, so can you.
You've got the skills; you just need to put them out there in the right way.
If you're curious about how I made it work or just want to bounce around some ideas, I'm here for it. Let's help each other out.
And hey, if you want to see how https://breeew.com could work for you, go take a look. I built it to help people just like us get ahead.