Hitting $20k MRR in 6 months without marketing

Non-technical solo founder, Dustin Stout, built an all-in-one AI content creation suite in 2 months using no code. Then he grew it from $0 to $20k MRR in 6 months without marketing. And now he's at $23k MRR.

I caught up with him to find out how he did it. 👇

Building hope (and a season of darkness)

James: You hit the $20k MRR milestone within 6 months, which is quite an achievement. But it sounds like this success is about a whole lot more than money.

Dustin: Yeah, and it feels indescribable. Since 2019, I've been in what feels like a season of darkness.

James: What happened?

Dustin: My first SaaS disintegrated, two more products failed, my wife was dealing with some massive (nearly life-threatening) health issues, I had a friend commit suicide, and our personal finances were drying up. All while trying to "keep it together" and be a good dad and husband.

James: That's a lot.

Dustin: Some days I found myself waking up wishing I hadn't. I couldn't take it anymore. If it weren't for my faith in God and my wife's constant support, I probably wouldn't have made it through.

James: Sounds like you did make it through, though... and then some.

Dustin: It was really hard. But when you have a family depending on you to put food on the table, you find the energy to put one foot in front of the other.

I told myself, "If God hasn't taken me home yet, there's still something left for me to do here."

James: So what happened?

Dustin: I built Magai. The first month that it opened for public signup was when a light of hope broke through the darkness. My wife's health issues had mostly dissipated, we were entering back into a somewhat normal life (post-pandemic), and people were actually paying for and praising my product.

James: Wow, what a relief that must have been.

Dustin: Yeah, just to hit $1k MRR, it felt as if a huge weight was lifted from my shoulders. Then, when it kept going up, I almost couldn't believe it.

There were many challenges that came along with the growth — as all businesses face — but I knew this was clearly a new season of life. I had hope again.

Exiting a toxic startup environment

James: Before we dive into how you grew Magai to $20k/mo, tell me about your first SaaS.

Dustin: I started a Wordpress plugin company in 2014 with two friends who were developers. While I could design and customize WordPress themes myself, I wasn't a developer in any sense, so partnering with two developers made sense.

We all saw a huge gap in the marketplace for social sharing plugins, and all had ideas about how we could create something that would be revolutionary. Turns out, it was.

James: So it was successful?

Dustin: We had a moderate rise to success, netting our first 1,000 paying customers in the first year. At some point, the revenue got to the point where we were (a) making enough that we didn't necessarily need to take on much side work, and (b) could afford to hire staff to run most of the day-to-day.

James: So why did you leave?

Dustin: Ultimately, my partners and I grew apart. We had several offers for acquisition which they blocked, despite my many attempts to reason with them.

The number of disagreements and toxicity of the relationships got out of control. So I left.

James: How did that work — did they buy you out?

Dustin: Yes, I sold my 33% and was paid out in 18 monthly installments.

James: Did you invest that into building new products?

Dustin: I used the money mostly to just survive — it wasn't much. At the beginning, my wife still wasn't working, and we've got 3 kids to feed, so all the financial burden was on me.

I took up consulting again, but found it hard to go back to client work after running a digital product for a few years. So while most of the money was going towards just providing for a family, I did use the little extra left over to help get the other products off the ground.

How to get funded

James: What happened next?

Dustin: When I left the plugin company, I had two ideas that had been stirring in my mind for a few years.

One of them was a long-form content repurposing app. The idea was that you would paste a link to a piece of content (ie. blog post) and the app would instantly create 30+ highly effective social media posts to promote the content across all the major platforms.

The other idea was a way to produce social media graphics by just typing in your text — zero design skill needed. The end goal was AI-powered design at scale.

James: Did you seek funding?

Dustin: Since I wasn't a developer and these ideas were much bigger than what WordPress was capable of, I knew they needed to be custom-built apps. So I needed to hire a development company to spec out the MVPs and see what it would cost.

Well, my initial plans would have required 6 figures. And I definitely didn't have that kind of cash.

James: So what did you do?

Dustin: I had to go through a painful process of pairing down the MVPs to be even leaner than before. When I finally got it within a fair range that I felt like I could raise money for, I started sharing the mockups and ideas in some trusted private groups to get feedback.

James: And that's where you found your investors?

Dustin: Kenny was part of the private Facebook group of entrepreneurs.

I met Casey while speaking at a conference in Atlanta. He and I immediately connected and stayed in touch. He very much became a mentor and counselor to me in the difficult times I mentioned.

James: Why did Kenny trust you enough to give you money before you built the product?

Dustin: He mostly just trusted the recommendation of the other folks in the group when they vouched for me. After meeting with him once to share the combined vision of the two apps, he wanted to invest in me.

Both investors told me that it wasn't the products they were buying into, but me. They trusted me because they saw my vision, my determination, and most of all my integrity.

James: How much were you asking for?

Dustin: A small $15k was all that was needed to get the first product built. In exchange, I gave up 7% of the new entity, SoVisual.co LLC.

It didn't take long to get the first project funded. Soon after, I got another $15k in exchange for another 7%. I now had $30k and would be able to build both MVPs simultaneously.

Try, try again (and fail, fail again)

James: Bold decision.

Dustin: Yeah, and as many products go, they ended up costing more and taking longer to build than originally anticipated.

James: Been there. So what happened?

Dustin: The MVPs never really had enough of a value proposition to drive adoption. The market just didn't buy at the scale I needed it in order to continue funding development.

Despite exhausting every angle I could, these products failed to recoup even half of the initial investments.

James: Did you ever take anything over the $30k?

Dustin: I never asked them for more than their initial buy-in. And although they did offer help in more than a few ways, I never required them to give any more.

James: So what happened when the products failed?

Dustin: When the two products failed and I began exploring the next step, I had every intention of (a) building a product without the need to hire help, and (b) making sure that my early investors were a part of it by default.

I wanted to honor their trust in me, and that's what I did. I built Magai by myself in 8 weeks. No investment. And I built it as a product of SoVisual.co LLC — which meant that both Casey and Kenny were already silent partners.

James: Classy move.

Dustin: Loyalty is very important to me. If you can't do right by the people who supported you at your lowest, you don't deserve to have good people around you.

Integrity is the most important virtue, and if I would have just abandoned the partners who took a risk on me, I wouldn't have been able to sleep at night.

James: And it sounds like that attitude is exactly why they invested in you in the first place.

Build in public before marketing

James: Let's talk about how you grew Magai.

Dustin: Coming off the heels of such weighty and exhausting failures, I wanted to be cautious and build smart. Since I was building this product by myself, I had to wear all the hats.

James: That must've been a big adjustment.

Dustin: It was a stiff learning curve for me.

James: You're a designer, but you have a lot of experience marketing experience. What did you do to grow Magai?

Dustin: After following many founders building in public, I decided to take that approach.

James: Why not try your more traditional marketing appraoches?

Dustin: Focusing on building in public instead of doing traditional marketing was mostly a matter of staying focused on making the product as great as possible before blitzing the market.

I knew that I had enough of an audience who would follow the build-in-public journey thanks to 10+ years of growing an online presence. So I trusted that would be enough while I focused on the product.

I suppose I was also somewhat insecure about my building ability and knew it would be much harder to "fix" things at scale if I grew too quickly. So the slow growth was a means of lowering my risk in a few ways. The goal was always to hit a few specific product development milestones, and then shift focus to marketing. That time is almost here.

James: Did you just call $20k MRR in 6 months "slow growth"?

Dustin: Haha, well, I guess it's all relative, right? Compared to my last products, the growth is neck-breaking. Compared to the growth of ChatGPT, it's insignificant.

I've seen a lot of startups with more exciting stories than mine, so I guess that's what I tend to compare myself to. Having been in the marketing space, I know that I could have grown much faster if I would have applied my marketing experience. So that's why I refer to the growth as "slow" I suppose.

Affiliate program + marketing audience = 🚀

James: Fair enough. So BIP alone was resopnsible for $20k MRR?

Dustin: Well, to be fair, there were a few things I had going for me that gave me a bit of a marketing boost without much effort.

James: Do tell.

Dustin: For one, I've built an audience around my personal brand for the last 10 years.

Secondly, I created an affiliate program out of the gate.

Combine those two things — especially considering many of my online friends are marketers — and I didn't have to do much more than build in public.

James: Interesting. So you didn't use your marketing experience as much as you used your marketing network.

Dustin: 10+ years of grinding as a blogger and social media expert definitely worked in my favor.

James: What is your BIP process?

Dustin: It's not very sophisticated... any time I have a new feature I'm working on, I share a screenshot (if appropriate) and talk about the WHY or HOW behind it.

James: That's it?

Dustin: I also have been trying to share at least one revenue update per month. And any time I come up with a fun or interesting use for the product, I try to share that as well.

It's not very structured, but I'm highly intentional about bringing people into the process as much as I can. The only platforms I use with consistency are Twitter (X), and Facebook. Between these two, I had all the audience I needed.

Explore new uses for your product (skip the niches)

James: You mentioned sharing about new uses for you Magai. Are those all within a small niche?

Dustin: I voraciously ignore the advice that "riches are in the niches." While I don't deny the power of creating something that is created specifically for a small, well-defined demographic, I could never bring myself or my ideas to fit into one specific niche.

Now, I've definitely created marketing campaigns and landing pages aimed at specific target audiences, but when it comes to building a product, I have never been able to come up with a product that is limited to a single niche.

James: You've never been able to? Or you've never wanted to?

Dustin: It's a choice, for sure. But it's a choice based on how I'm built. It is in my nature to think through a wide range of applications for a given solution/product. And I don't like being confined to a single label.

No code (and how to teach yourself any skill)

James: Ok I want to circle back on one thing before we close out. Your first product had two developer co-founders. Development of your second and third products was outsourced. But you built Magai on your own. How?

Dustin: I built Magai using a combination of nocode tools (mostly Bubble) and the limited amount of HTML/CSS/JS I know. Learning to work with APIs inside of Bubble is really the biggest part of it.

Not having high-level coding skills always made me think my ideas were going to require heavy capital to execute. But nocode allowed me to unleash those ideas without the capital-intensive barrier.

James: And you taught yourself this skill?

Dustin: Yeah, every skill that makes me money is something that was self-taught. In this case, a few dozen YouTube videos and a course called NocodeMBA were all it took.

James: Do you have a process?

Dustin: I can't really say I have a process for learning. For me, when my curiosity is engaged, I just fully immerse myself in the subject. Googling articles, YouTube videos, or online courses — I seek out everything I need to know.

And while learning, I try to actively put things into practice. This is why a 10-minute Bubble tutorial would usually take me an hour—because I like to build while I learn. And then I like to explore various opinions and approaches to the same topic to get a broader perspective.

You can figure out anything if you search hard enough.

James: True enough. Where can people find you?

Dustin: Best place to find me is dustinstout.com, magai.co or @dustinwstout on all the social things.

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