How a Solo Founder Built a SaaS by Selling to Tattoo Shops

**Fexingo** (0:01)
You ever walk into a tattoo shop and notice the iPad at the front desk?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:06)
Yeah, usually running some kind of booking app or portfolio viewer. It's pretty standard now.

**Fexingo** (0:13)
Right, and that's actually a relatively recent shift. Ten years ago, most shops were still using paper appointment books and handwritten consent forms. So today, I want to look at a solo founder who built a SaaS specifically for tattoo studios.
His name is Jesse, and his product is called InkFlow.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:32)
I've heard of InkFlow. It's pretty big in the industry, but I didn't know it was a solo operation.

**Fexingo** (0:39)
Yeah, and that's part of what makes the story interesting. Jesse was a tattoo artist himself for about eight years before he started coding.
He got tired of the clunky software his shop was using, something called Tattoo Manager, and decided to build his own.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:56)
So he was a customer who became a builder. That's a common path in vertical SaaS.

**Fexingo** (1:02)
Exactly. And the thing is, tattoo shops are a weirdly perfect vertical for SaaS. They have predictable needs, appointment scheduling, client intake, consent forms, aftercare instructions, inventory tracking for ink and needles payment processing. But they're also a fragmented market. There are about 40,000 tattoo studios in the US alone, and most are small businesses with one to five artists.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:28)
So a classic long tail opportunity. And the founder has insider credibility.

**Fexingo** (1:34)
That credibility matters a lot. When Jesse started pitching InkFlow at tattoo conventions, he could sit down with a shop owner and say, I've been behind the chair.
I know why you hate the current options. That's hard to fake.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:49)
Let me guess, the first version was ugly and barely worked.

**Fexingo** (1:54)
Actually, he spent six months building a pretty polished MVP.
He taught himself Ruby on Rails and built a web app that handled bookings, digital consent forms, and a simple CRM. Launched in 2018 with a beta group of 10 shops in Portland.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:11)
And what was the pricing?

**Fexingo** (2:14)
Started at $79 a month, then moved to $99.
Plus a 3% fee on credit card transactions processed through the platform. That's pretty standard for this kind of vertical SaaS shops are used to paying processing fees anyway, so bundling it makes sense.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:31)
That's actually a smart model. The subscription is your base, but the payment cut scales with their revenue.

**Fexingo** (2:38)
And that's how Jesse got to about $50,000 in monthly recurring revenue by early 2023, with just under 500 shops. He's still solo, no employees, just a few contractors for design and support.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:53)
50k MR solo is impressive, but I'm curious about the sales process. Tattoo artists aren't exactly known for being early adopters of technology.

**Fexingo** (3:04)
That was the biggest challenge. Jesse told me that in the early days, he'd visit shops in person, offer to buy the artist a coffee and just chat. He'd show the app on his laptop, walk them through a booking. The conversion rate was maybe 1 in 10
But once they signed up, churn was really low, under 3% monthly.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:25)
Because the alternative is paper or a terrible legacy system. Once you get them on something decent, they stick.

**Fexingo** (3:33)
Right. And he leaned into community marketing, sponsoring tattoo conventions, offering free InkFlow merch to shops that posted about it on Instagram.
Word of mouth spread within the industry pretty fast.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:47)
I imagine the consent form feature was a big sell. Tattoo shops have a ton of liability, and digital forms with timestamps and e-signatures are way better than paper.

**Fexingo** (3:58)
Huge. Jesse built the consent forms to be compliant with health department regulations in every state. That's a lot of edge cases.
Some states require specific wording about blood-borne pathogens. Others don't. He had to research all of that.

**SPEAKER_2** (4:14)
And obviously, that's hard to replicate if you don't know the industry. That's his moat.

**Fexingo** (4:20)
It really is. I mean, you could clone the booking and payment features pretty easily.
But the industry-specific compliance, the integrations with tattoo-specific hardware like wireless tattoo machines that track time, the aftercare email templates, those are the things that take years to build.

**SPEAKER_2** (4:37)
So where is InkFlow today? Still solo.

**Fexingo** (4:41)
As of mid-2026, yeah, Jesse has grown to about 420 shops. MRR is around $55,000.
He's been approached by a couple of larger POS companies about acquisition, but he's not interested. He likes the independence.

**SPEAKER_2** (4:59)
And he's still the only developer?

**Fexingo** (5:02)
He contracted out a mobile app for iOS and Android last year. That was about $40,000.