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The Startup Ideas Podcast

10 Unknown SaaS Making $50K+ MRR (Copy Them)

08 Dec 2025

Transcription

Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?

0.031 - 25.296 Greg Isenberg

If you've ever wanted to build a SaaS that pays your bills, today's episode is for you. I brought on my friend Rob, who has a portfolio of bootstrap profitable SaaS businesses. And together we go through a bunch of apps that do anywhere between 20,000 MRR and $300,000 MRR. And we basically reverse engineer how you can copy what they're doing,

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Chapter 2: How does the Waitlist Strategy work for SaaS launches?

25.276 - 45.26 Greg Isenberg

and get customers to whatever SaaS you want to build in 2026. And there's a bunch of alpha, there's a bunch of sauce that's in this episode that no one shares. They don't share it because they don't want competition. I don't care. I want you to go build something that ends up changing your life.

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45.761 - 97.065 Greg Isenberg

And today's episode, there is a ton of sauce that I think that if you stick through the end, you will have that unfair advantage. All I ask is one little thing. Stop the video, like, comment, and subscribe so that this gets seen to other people. I want to make sure that people are enjoying this content. So please let me know. Enjoy the episode. I brought on my friend Rob Hoffman.

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97.045 - 110.376 Greg Isenberg

Tell us how we can copy what they're doing, bring them to new niches. In this episode, what I hope it's going to be is basically the de facto, so you vibe-coded a SaaS, now what? Rob, welcome to the show.

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Chapter 3: What is the Wave Surfer Strategy and how can it generate MRR?

110.737 - 115.307 Greg Isenberg

In your words, by the end of this episode, what are people going to get out of it?

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115.54 - 138.021 Rob Hoffman

Thank you, Greg. Stoked to be here. And here is my goal for the episode. I literally wrote it down because I am dead set on providing as much value and sauce to your audience as possible. So this is what I'm thinking. By the end of this episode, you will learn how to get customers for your SaaS.

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138.22 - 143.669 Rob Hoffman

And so my goal is to provide the most tactical and actionable guide for you to get customers for your SaaS.

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Chapter 4: How can Language Arbitrage be leveraged for SaaS growth?

144.35 - 167.286 Rob Hoffman

And here's why. I see everyone on X, you probably do too. They're vibe coding, micro SaaS, tools, apps, and... The real problem is nobody knows how to get customers. So everyone kind of sucks at marketing. And so I've broken down six proven playbooks, one of which we used ourselves. And I'm going to walk you through it.

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Chapter 5: What are the benefits of using AI Search for customer acquisition?

167.807 - 189.579 Rob Hoffman

And so if you don't know who I am, because you probably don't, I am a real person. This is me on X. I'm Rob. I'm in three profitable bootstrap companies, Contact, Mentions, and Clio. We clearly love the .so domain. And so two are software companies, one is an SEO agency. And so, yeah, I'm ready to dive in.

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Chapter 6: How does Signal Search Strategy enhance local SEO efforts?

189.98 - 208.525 Rob Hoffman

Let's do it. I've broken it down in terms of six playbooks, and I actually have a bonus one at the end as well. And the reason why I've given six playbooks, and I'm going to give you examples of companies, real companies, including one of ours, that have used these playbooks to get customers.

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208.825 - 240.359 Greg Isenberg

Just so the audience knows, those examples that you're going to give on the left-hand side, if you scroll to the left, you're going to go through Clio, TrustMRR, Teachazee, Tally.so, LocalRank, MailScale AI. You're going to tell them how much money they've made, what is the playbook they've used. You're going to break down the playbook and And what else are you going to do?

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240.8 - 253.008 Rob Hoffman

Yeah, so I'm going to take you through six different SaaS tools, how much money they make, their playbook for getting customers, and how you can steal this playbook for your own SaaS.

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253.83 - 255.133 Greg Isenberg

Great, let's get into it.

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255.232 - 256.014 Rob Hoffman

Hell yeah, let's do it.

Chapter 7: What strategies are effective for High Ticket Ads in SaaS?

256.595 - 277.339 Rob Hoffman

So I'm going to just start over here with the six different playbooks and then I'm going to go and show you the real examples. And the reason why I've given six playbooks is because everyone's going to have their own preference of how they want to acquire customers based on your skill set, based on your level of interest in these different strategies.

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277.96 - 303.497 Rob Hoffman

So I'm going to start right here with number one, which is the waitlist strategy. And this is actually a strategy that we used for our own SaaS tool, Clio. And in fact, we also used it for our other SaaS tool, Mentions. So we know that it works because we ran it twice. And in both cases, we were able to grow to 60K MRR for Clio and 20K of MRR with Mentions in like a month or two.

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303.477 - 308.003 Rob Hoffman

Okay, so we're going to start here with Clio. So first of all, what is Clio?

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Chapter 8: What are the overall insights and actionable takeaways from this episode?

308.463 - 325.384 Rob Hoffman

Clio is an AI tool that helps you create content for platforms like LinkedIn and X that is optimized to go viral, build an audience, and get you customers. So that's what it does. In terms of MRR, we're at 61, 62K of MRR.

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325.853 - 347.827 Greg Isenberg

Sam Altman, the co-founder of OpenAI, just said that it is the era of the idea guy and he is not wrong. I think that right now is an incredible time to be building a startup. And if you listen to this podcast, chances are you think so, too. Now, I think that you can look at trends to basically figure out what are the startup ideas you should be building.

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348.007 - 370.326 Greg Isenberg

So that's exactly why I built IdeaBrowser.com. Every single day, you're going to get a free startup idea in your inbox, and it's all backed by high-quality data trends. How we do it, people always ask. We use AI agents to go and search what are people looking for and what are they screaming for in terms of products that you should be building.

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370.827 - 391.686 Greg Isenberg

And then we hand it on a silver platter for you to go check out. We do have a few paid plans that take it to the next level. give you more ideas, give you more AI agents and more, almost like a chat GBT for ideas with it. But you can start for free, ideabrowser.com. And if you're listening to this, I highly recommend it.

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393.348 - 414.433 Greg Isenberg

So, which is crazy, by the way, because when I hear that pitch, I feel like there's like a hundred companies doing the same thing. Like what gave you the kahunas, I think is the word, or the chutzpah, to build something in such a crowded niche and still hit almost a million dollars ARR?

415.996 - 443.316 Rob Hoffman

I think a lot of people wonder, why don't I just use ChatGPT or Claude to do this, or maybe there's a few other players in the space? We know this space really well because we use LinkedIn to get customers for all of our businesses. So we actually just built this tool for ourselves originally, and it worked so well. We basically used the tool to continue building an audience, acquiring customers.

444.097 - 451.084 Rob Hoffman

And so we knew that what we had would work because it worked for us. So we were just dogfooding. Other than that, I don't know.

453.507 - 460.494 Greg Isenberg

I think the lesson here is just because it's a crowded space, there still could be an opportunity if you use one of these playbooks. Let's continue.

461.816 - 488.774 Rob Hoffman

Step number one for the waitlist strategy. This strategy, it's basically three steps. You're going to do content to email to webinar. So step number one is you have to create content. And this is where most people go wrong already is they don't know how to create content. So the type of content that you create that's going to allow you to acquire customers for your SaaS, we call it edgy sales.

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