How a Solo Founder Built a SaaS With a Day Job

**Lucas** (0:01)
So, you're working 40 hours a week at a company that isn't yours, and you want to build a SaaS product on the side. That's the situation for more first-time founders than any accelerator will admit.

**Luna** (0:14)
Yeah, the just quit your job and build. Advice is aspirational, but not realistic for most people.

**Lucas** (0:21)
Right. And today's guest, well, the case we're looking at is Maria Chen.
She's a software engineer at a large insurance company, and last year she launched TaskSync, a project management tool for remote teams. She kept her day job the whole time. She hit $2,000 in monthly recurring revenue in six months, with a tiny fraction of the hours a typical startup founder would spend.

**Luna** (0:45)
And she did it without taking any funding or quitting. So the big question is, how did she fit a SaaS build into the margins of a 9 to 5?

**Lucas** (0:54)
Exactly. Maria's approach came down to three specific constraints she set for herself.
First, she would only work on TaskSync between 5 a.m. and 7 a.m. before her day job started. Second, she would use no-code tools to build the first version so she could get it live in weeks, not months. And third, she would automate customer support from day one, because she knew she couldn't answer emails during work hours.

**Luna** (1:23)
The early morning block is interesting. Most people think about late nights, not early mornings.

**Lucas** (1:30)
She told me that after a full day of coding at work, her brain was fried. But 5 a.m., that's before the cognitive load of the day hits.
She said she got more done in those two hours than she used to get in four hours after dinner.

**Luna** (1:45)
Makes sense. And the no-code MVP, what did she actually use?

**Lucas** (1:51)
She used Bubble for the front end, Airtable as the database, and Zapier to connect them. The first version was essentially a shared to-do list with comments and due dates. She launched on Product Hunt three weeks after she started building. It was rough. She got 40 upvotes and maybe 50 signups. But that was enough to validate that people wanted it.

**Luna** (2:13)
50 signups is a pretty low bar. But for a side project, that's proof of concept.

**Lucas** (2:20)
Exactly. And from those 50 signups, she talked to 15 users directly. She asked them one question.
What's the one thing you'd pay for? The answer was integrations, specifically connecting TaskSync to Slack and Google Calendar. So she built those two integrations over the next month. And that's when she started charging $9 per user per month.

**Luna** (2:43)
So she went from a free MVP to a paid product in about six weeks total.

**Lucas** (2:49)
Right. And by month three, she had 40 paying users.
That's $360 MRR. Not huge, but it's real revenue. And she hadn't spent a dime on marketing. Her growth came entirely from posting in a few remote work Slack communities and a Reddit thread about project management tools.

**Luna** (3:09)
I've seen founders spend thousands on ads to get less than that.

**Lucas** (3:13)
Yeah. Maria's approach was scrappy by design.
She didn't have time for fancy funnels. She just put the product in front of people who were actively looking for a solution. And that leads to the third constraint, customer support automation.

**Luna** (3:30)
Because she couldn't answer emails during the day.

**Lucas** (3:33)
Right. So she built a knowledge base using Help Juice. That's a knowledge base SaaS. And she linked it directly in the app. Every time a user clicked Help, they got a searchable FAQ.
She also set up automated email replies for common questions. Password reset, billing issues, integration setup. By month four, 80% of support tickets were resolved without her ever touching them.

**Luna** (4:00)
That's a big deal for a solo founder with limited time. So she's essentially running a business that doesn't demand her attention during work hours.

**Lucas** (4:09)
Exactly. And that's the key insight. Most side projects fail because the founder burns out trying to do everything after hours. Maria engineered her business to not need her during the day. She worked her two morning hours and then she was done. No checking emails at lunch.
No sneaking into a conference room to fix a bug.

**Luna** (4:31)
Did she ever feel like she was going to get caught or that it was affecting her day job?

**Lucas** (4:37)
She said the first month was stressful.
She was constantly worried her employer would notice her side project. But she made a few deliberate choices.
She used a separate laptop. She never accessed TaskSync from her work computer, and she didn't use any company resources. She also checked her employment contract. There was no non-compete that would block a project management tool. After month two, she relaxed.