How a Solo Founder Built a SaaS by Selling to Bakeries

**Fexingo** (0:01)
So, you walk into a bakery, smell of fresh bread, display cases full of croissants. But behind the counter, the owner is probably juggling three different spreadsheets, a sticky note pad, and a phone that won't stop ringing for cake orders.

**Luna** (0:18)
That's exactly the image I had when I first heard about BakerStack. It's a SaaS platform built by a solo founder specifically for independent bakeries.

**Fexingo** (0:27)
Right. And the story behind it is textbook niche first. The founder, a guy named Mike Chun, was a software engineer who happened to marry into a family of bakers.
His mother-in-law ran a small bakery in Portland, and he saw her pain firsthand.

**Luna** (0:44)
What was the specific pain? Because bakeries aren't exactly a trillion dollar market like restaurants.

**Fexingo** (0:51)
No, but they have a unique set of problems.
Bakeries deal with perishable inventory that has a shelf life measured in hours. They take custom orders for cakes and pastries with specific decorations. And most POS systems are built for restaurants. They don't handle the complexity of a bakery's production schedule. Mike's mother-in-law was using a whiteboard and a paper ledger.

**Luna** (1:16)
So, he built a solution for her. Classic scratch your own itch.

**Fexingo** (1:21)
Exactly. But he did something smart.
Instead of building a full-blown product for her alone, he spent a weekend creating a no-code prototype using Bubble and a simple database. He showed it to three other bakeries in Portland, asked them to try it for free, and watched how they used it.

**Luna** (1:39)
Three bakeries. That's a tiny sample size.

**Fexingo** (1:44)
Tiny, but enough to validate the core workflow. The prototype handled two things.
Inventory tracking by ingredient and order scheduling with a calendar view. Within two weeks, all three bakeries were using it daily. And more importantly, they started asking for features, like a way to send order confirmations to customers automatically. That told Mike he was on to something.

**Luna** (2:08)
So when did he start charging?

**Fexingo** (2:10)
Month two. He added a simple payment tier, $40 a month per bakery.
No free plan, just a 14-day trial. And he had the guts to ask his original three testers to pay. Two of them converted immediately. The third said she'd pay once he added a specific feature, a daily production sheet. He built it in three days and she paid.

**Luna** (2:34)
That's a great feedback loop. He's essentially getting paid to build the product he would have built anyway.

**Fexingo** (2:41)
That's the ideal, right? He kept that loop going for the first year.
No outside funding, no ads. He'd go to local bakery associations, attend trade shows, and offer a demo. Every feature request from a paying customer got prioritized. By month 12, he had 70 bakeries on the platform.

**Luna** (3:02)
70 at 40 bucks a month. That's about $34,000 in annual recurring revenue.
Not bad for a side project.

**Fexingo** (3:11)
But here's the twist. He didn't stop there.
He realized that bakeries were a very word of mouth industry. If one bakery in a city used BakerStack, others would hear about it. So he created a referral program where existing customers got a month free for every new bakery they brought in. That drove his growth to 500 bakeries within three years.

**Luna** (3:34)
500 bakeries at $40 a month. That's $240,000 in annual recurring revenue.
Solo founder, no employees, no office.

**Fexingo** (3:45)
And he's still the only developer.
He outsourced some design work, but the code base is his. He's profitable and growing slowly. He told me that his biggest challenge now is not technical. It's support. Bakeries are not tech savvy. They call him at 6 a.m. because they can't log in.

**Luna** (4:04)
That's the flip side of selling to non-technical small businesses. The support burden is real.

**Fexingo** (4:11)
Yeah. He actually built an automated on-boarding sequence with video tutorials to reduce the calls.
And he hired a part-time customer success person, his first employee, just to handle the morning rush.

**Luna** (4:24)
It's interesting that he's kept it so lean. Most founders would have raised money and tried to build a platform for all food service by now.

**Fexingo** (4:34)
And that's the trap, right? Mike specifically said he doesn't want to be the next host.
He wants to be the best software for bakeries. And that focus is what makes him defensible. A big competitor like Toast would need to build bakery-specific features, but they're not going to prioritize a niche that represents less than 1% of their customer base.

**Luna** (4:56)
So he's basically built a moat by being too small to matter to the giants.

**Fexingo** (5:01)
Exactly. And that's the lesson for solo founders.