How a Solo Founder Built a SaaS With a Day Job and a Newborn

**Fexingo** (0:01)
Sarah Chen was a product manager at a regional bank in Cleveland. She had a newborn, a mortgage, and roughly two hours of free time a day.
She also had an idea for compliance software that she couldn't shake. So she built it in the cracks between midnight and 6 AM.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:19)
And she did it without quitting her job, without venture capital. And I think this is the part that gets people without losing her mind.

**Fexingo** (0:27)
Exactly.
And look, we talk a lot on this show about constraints being a feature, not a bug. But Sarah's constraint wasn't just time. It was the kind of exhaustion that makes you question whether you even have the right to be doing this.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:42)
If these conversations are useful for what you're building or running, and honestly, if today was worth a coffee to you, that's the link. buymeacoffee.com/fexingokeeps the show ad free and running.

**Fexingo** (0:56)
Yeah, that's the only way this thing stays viable. So Sarah's product is called AuditFlow.
It automates the audit trail documentation that compliance officers in regional banks have to produce for regulators. She didn't set out to build a SaaS company.
She set out to solve one specific painful problem she knew from her day job.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:18)
And she validated it on Reddit. I love that part. She found a subreddit for compliance professionals, and just watched for weeks before posting anything.

**Fexingo** (1:29)
Right. She told me she spent 15 minutes a day during her lunch break, reading threads.
She was looking for the language people actually used when they complained about manual audit work. And when she finally posted a description of what she wanted to build, she got 17 replies in the first hour, all saying, when can I buy this?

**SPEAKER_2** (1:51)
That's a stronger signal than any survey could give you. 17 people willing to hand over money.

**Fexingo** (1:58)
But she didn't start building right away.
She had a baby who woke up at 3 a.m. every night. She told me her routine was feed the baby, put her back down, and then if she wasn't too tired, code from 3.3 to 5.30. Then she'd sleep for another hour before her day job started at 7

**SPEAKER_2** (2:17)
That's not sustainable for long. How did she avoid crashing?

**Fexingo** (2:22)
She had hard boundaries. The thing that surprised me most when I talked to her was that she only worked on AuditFlow four days a week. Wednesdays were a complete off day.
No code, no emails, no thinking about the business. She said that one day of rest was what kept her from burning out in month six.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:41)
And her day job never found out? Because a lot of founders worry about that.

**Fexingo** (2:47)
She was careful. She never used her work laptop, never accessed company data, but she also didn't hide it. She told her manager she was working on a side project.
Not the specifics, just that she was building something. And her manager was supportive as long as it didn't affect her performance. Sarah made sure it never did.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:10)
So how did she get her first paying customer? Was it from Reddit?

**Fexingo** (3:14)
The first one was actually a former coworker from the bank.
Sarah showed her a prototype, a really rough MVP, and the woman said she'd pay $50 a month just to have something better than spreadsheets. That was in month three. By month six, she had five customers all from that same compliance subreddit.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:33)
And she charged them from day one? No free tier?

**Fexingo** (3:37)
No free tier.
She started at $49 per user per month. She told me she knew her customers were in a regulated industry where free software looks suspicious. Compliance officers don't want to risk their jobs on something that might disappear. A paid product signaled stability.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:57)
That's a smart insight. A lot of SaaS founders default to free because they think it lowers friction. But for certain buyers, price is a signal.

**Fexingo** (4:06)
Exactly. And she kept prices low enough that someone could expense it without needing VP approval.
$49 a month is a line item, not a purchase order. That was deliberate.

**SPEAKER_2** (4:20)
So when did she get to the point where the side project income matched her salary?

**Fexingo** (4:25)
Month 18
She was at about $8,000 in monthly recurring revenue by then. Her salary at the bank was $72,000 a year, so $8,000 a month basically replaced it. But she didn't quit immediately. She waited two more months to build a small cash buffer.

**SPEAKER_2** (4:44)
That discipline is impressive. Most people would have quit the second they hit the number.