He Lost His Job, Then Built a $11K/Month App - Ep. #312

Chris Koerner (0:00)

So I come across this guy on Twitter named Caleb, and Caleb has an interesting story. Him and his buddy slash business partner both lost their job around the same time, but they had families to feed, they had people to support, and they'd always kind of wanted to be entrepreneurial to start a business, but they weren't really ready, but they thought, shoot, let's do it anyway. So they did. They wanted to launch a software business, but they didn't have any followers, which is probably true for most people listening to this. So they came up with an idea for an app that can help people post their content to social media. You heard of Buffer, PostBridge, there's a bunch of apps that do this, but this app is pointed towards more technical people, developers, and that wasn't really being done. So when they first launched their app, they tweeted about it, and that tweet got about 200 views. It flopped. They got some friends and family to sign up, a couple people from Twitter, but it was crickets for the first month or two. $300 monthly recurring revenue, then 500 In fact, after five months, they had $500 in monthly recurring revenue, but they were stoked about this. On January 1st, Caleb, the co-founder, was at dinner with his wife, and they were celebrating $500 in monthly recurring revenue. And he said, you know what? I don't have any Twitter followers, but I'm just gonna start posting screenshots to Twitter every time I get another $100 in MRR, monthly recurring revenue. So he did.

And then things started to change for him. Even though he had no audience, no followers, people liked that and they noticed. And without even meaning to, he developed a playbook for building a software business on Twitter without really any Twitter followers. Even to this day, he has like 1200 followers, but it's still driving him a ton of business. And then his next inflection point was learning about AISEO. How can you get Claude, Grok, ChatGPT, Jim and I to start suggesting you to people asking about things that might relate to your software tool? Well, he cracked the code and he's going to give us the playbook today. He shares his Stripe screen. He talks about his churn, good, bad, and ugly.

The big breakthrough he had in pricing that changed everything for him. This is a playbook for starting a software business, whether you're technical or not. And of course, how to get customers for your business. And yes, also how to come up with the right idea.

Please enjoy.

Caleb Panza (2:15)

So the story for us, I mean, this to me is all like education. Everything that happened in 2025 for us was really just like learning how to launch a product. I'll never forget it was actually on January 1st. My wife and I put the kids down. We were up visiting my parents out of state and they said, all right, we'll hang out with the kids. You guys go out and like enjoy a night out on New Year's Day or whatever. And while we were sitting down, I pulled up Stripe and my wife just said, okay, so how are things going? And I said, well, let's check. And we were closing in on $500 in monthly recurring. And I was like, wow, this is insane. At 10 bucks a month, I was like almost 50 people want to use something that I built. And so my wife and I made a deal for every $100 of monthly recurring that we added. Her and I would each do one extra push-up. So we got back to my parents that night and we each did our five push-ups.

And then I had seen, I'd been really inspired by the level of transparency that guys like Jack or Mark Liu or Peter Leavels were putting out into Twitter, posting their journeys along the way. Like if their journey helped me, why don't I just for fun grab these screenshots for every $100 that we make in monthly recurring. My wife and I are going to do our push-up challenge, and I'll go ahead and post the progress along the way on Twitter.

Starting on January 1st, I started posting our MRR journey throughout the course of us growing.

Chris Koerner (3:51)

I mean, even though you found Peter Leavels, Jack and all these guys when they were making hundreds of thousands a month, you knew that they had been doing that for years. You could tell that they had been doing that when their numbers were not impressive at all. And a lot of the reason they were impressive was because they were so public about their success when it wasn't that impressive, right?