How a Solo SaaS Founder Used Social Audio to Find Early Users

**Lucas** (0:01)
If these conversations are useful for what you're building or running, you're in the right place.
Today, we're talking about something a lot of solo founders overlook as a channel, social audio.
I'm talking clubhouse, Twitter spaces, that world.

**Luna** (0:16)
It feels like that wave crested a couple years ago and then faded. But I know some founders quietly kept using it.

**Lucas** (0:24)
Right. And one of them is a founder named Elena Vargas.
She built a project management tool called CollabKit for remote creative teams. Think freelancers, agencies, in-house creative departments. She launched in early 2024, and in six months, she went from zero to $5,000 monthly recurring revenue. Her entire customer acquisition strategy was social audio.

**Luna** (0:50)
Zero ad spend? That's impressive. How did she actually land her first users?

**Lucas** (0:57)
She started by joining clubhouse rooms and Twitter spaces that were already full of her target audience. Rooms about remote work, creative collaboration, freelancing. But she didn't pitch.
She just participated. She'd answer questions about how her team manages projects, share tips about workflows. People would ask what tool she uses, and she'd mention CollabKit. That's it.

**Luna** (1:23)
So, organic inbound, basically. But how do you scale that? You can't be in rooms 8 hours a day.

**Lucas** (1:30)
She didn't have to. She focused on high-value rooms with engaged audiences, not the huge ones.
Rooms with maybe 50 to 100 people where the conversation is deep. She'd attend 2 or 3 a week, and after each one, she'd follow up with people who asked questions, offering a personal demo.

**Luna** (1:50)
I've heard that the conversion rate from demos like that is way higher than cold outreach because there's already trust.

**Lucas** (1:57)
Exactly. She said her demo to paid conversion was about 40%. Compare that to cold email, which is maybe 1 to 3%.
The key is that she built relationships first. People knew her voice, they trusted her advice, so when she showed them collab kit, they were already predisposed to like it.

**Luna** (2:17)
Were there any specific tactics she used that made the demos especially effective?

**Lucas** (2:22)
She did something clever.
Instead of a standard product demo, she'd offer a workflow audit for the person's team. She'd spend 30 minutes looking at how they currently manage projects and then suggest improvements using collab kit where it made sense. That made the demo about their needs, not just her features.

**Luna** (2:42)
That's a great framing. It positions her as a consultant, not a salesperson. Did she ever run into problems with the social audio platforms themselves?

**Lucas** (2:53)
Big one.
She was heavily reliant on Clubhouse in the beginning, but its audience shrank in 2024 So she pivoted to Twitter spaces which had more consistent traffic. She also started hosting her own weekly space called Remote Creative Ops, where she'd invite other founders and freelancers to share tips. That became a lead generation machine.

**Luna** (3:16)
Hosting your own space is a lot of work though. How did she sustain that while building the product?

**Lucas** (3:23)
She kept it to once a week, an hour long, and she rotated guests so she wasn't always the one talking. That built a community around her brand. Eventually, people started inviting her to speak on their spaces, which expanded her reach even more.

**Luna** (3:40)
And this whole time, zero ad spend. That's the dream for bootstrapped founders.

**Lucas** (3:46)
Right. And speaking of supporting bootstrapped projects like this, a couple of dollars a month is genuinely what keeps these conversations going. If you've gotten something out of the podcast, you can toss a few bucks at buymeacoffee.com/fexingo.
It helps us keep the show ad free and focused on real stories like Elena's.

**Luna** (4:06)
Absolutely. Even small amounts add up and make a difference.
Now, back to CollabKit. How did she handle the time commitment?
She was still building the product.

**Lucas** (4:16)
She structured her week.
Mornings were for product development, afternoons for community attending or hosting spaces, following up with leads. She treated the social audio work as a core part of her job, not something extra. And she used a CRM to track every conversation so nothing fell through the cracks.

**Luna** (4:37)
What about the downside? She's essentially trading time for growth. That doesn't scale infinitely.

**Lucas** (4:44)
That's the main trade-off. She capped her social audio time at about 15 hours a week.
Once she hit 5,000 MRR, she started testing other channels like content marketing and referrals. But social audio was her launch pad. Without it, she might not have gotten any traction.

**Luna** (5:03)
Do you think this strategy works for any SaaS? Or is it niche-specific?

**Lucas** (5:08)