// transcript — 351 segments
0:00 Intro
0:02 The number one question I get is, "How do I come up with a good business idea?"
0:07 But the truth is, you don't have to. And this video is proof. Meet Adrian, a solo
0:12 developer from Austin who had a different approach. I copied a
0:15 successful app and now it makes me $20,000 a month. >> A year ago, he saw a successful app for
0:22 sale, but instead of buying it, he rebuilt it himself and now it makes
0:25 $20,000 a month. >> If something is working, you have a
0:30 moral obligation to copy it. I invited Adrian onto the channel to share exactly
0:35 how he did it, including the specific platform he used to find proven ideas,
0:40 his method to validate if an idea is worth copying, and the playbook he would
0:45 use if he had to start over again today. If you've been looking for the right
0:49 business idea, this episode might change everything for you. I'm Pat Walls, and
0:57 Who is Adrian
0:58 All right, Adrian, welcome to the channel. Tell me about who you are, what
1:02 you built, and what's your story. >> Hey, my name is Adrian. I'm a
1:06 soloreneur. I built a SAS to 20K a month. And I found this idea not by
1:10 coming up with something new, but rather I copied a successful app I found on an
1:14 online business brokerage and built it myself. >> Okay, cool. So, you built this API doing
1:19 $20,000 a month. Can you share a little bit more about some of the numbers
1:20 behind it? >> Sure. Yeah, so monthly revenue is about 20,000 a month right now. And it is a
1:27 credit based model. So you just pay for credits and then use them. There's no
1:31 subscription. So right now we have 600 people who have paid but aren't
1:35 necessarily paying on a regular basis. We do almost like 20 million API
1:39 requests a month right now. >> Okay, cool. Before we get into how you
1:42 found this idea and kind of the genius way that I think you did it. I do want
1:45 to understand a little bit more about your background. How do you get to the
1:49 point where you build a SAS like this? >> So I moved to SF wanting to be a part of
1:54 tech, learn how to code at this program called App Academy. It was a code boot
1:58 camp. Then got a job in Utah as an engineer for 3 years, always with the
2:02 goal of starting my own business. Then quit with $30,000 in savings and then
2:09 freelanced, built a course, built some products, but didn't have success until
2:12 I stuck with this one thing, which was scrape creators. And then here we are
2:16 now. All right, Adrian, what I love about your story is how you came up with
2:20 this idea and how you validated that this was something that was worth
2:24 building. Before we get into all that, can you share how you even come across
2:30 the idea to build a web scraping API? >> Absolutely. One of my followers on
2:34 Twitter actually DM'd me telling me to check out this listing for Micro Acquire
2:38 or Acquire.com. And it was a scraping API. And the reason that he DM' me that
2:42 is because I already had a product that had to do with social media. So, he
2:45 thought that I might be interested in checking it out. Once I did, I saw the
2:49 numbers and was completely blown away. I had no confidence myself that a scraping
2:52 API could make that much money. the fact that they were only getting their
2:55 customers through SEO. I thought this is the product for me. I'm going to do this
2:58 exact same thing. >> Okay. So, you see this idea on Micro
3:02 Acquire, which lists business for sale. You can kind of see how much money is
3:05 making or how much the business is worth. How do you know that this is
3:08 something that you could replicate and could potentially be successful?
3:12 >> Well, a couple of different things. One, I had this skill set because I had been
3:16 studying scraping for 3 years. So, I had already kind of built those APIs that
3:21 were hosted on this website. So technically, I had the confidence that I
3:24 could build it. And then the reason that I thought I could make money off of it
3:29 was because they were doing 30,000 monthly recurring. They were around for
3:33 3 years, only got their customers from SEO, and they had less than 100
3:37 customers. So doing that math in my head, I was like, I could probably do
3:40 that. And I have a little bit of a presence on Twitter. So even if I just
3:43 message people on Twitter, I probably could get there even without SEO.
3:47 >> Okay, cool. Well, you find this idea. You think that is something that you
3:49 could potentially replicate. How do you go about building this?
3:52 >> So I am a NodeJS developer. Everything is written in JavaScript. So really it
3:56 was just a matter of hosting the APIs like on a server. So I had them all in
4:01 one of my repos. So put those scrapers on a Node.js server on render.com. So
4:07 then hosted the API there. For the documentation, I just put that actually
4:11 in a notion doc and then a basic website and then that was it. So, it was pretty
4:15 uh bare bones and it probably took uh just a couple of weeks because I had
4:19 built that experience and those scrapers for my previous three years of
4:23 experience and got my first customer a few weeks later. Okay. So, you build
4:26 this, you get your first customer pretty quickly. I think a lot of people
4:30 watching this may be similar to you software developer. They have the skills
4:34 to build something like this. But the hard part is getting customers, growing,
4:38 scaling this and replicating what this business that you sort of cloned had
4:41 already done. So, how did you grow this business? How did you get customers?
4:45 >> Uh, I hang out on Twitter a lot, so people see me there. People have seen my
4:48 content. My first customer was just because I scraped a company's site and
4:53 then the CTO actually commented on that post. So, completely accident. And then
4:56 also, anytime someone has a launch video that has anything to do with scraping
5:01 social media, then I comment saying, "Hey, I'll give you 10K free credits if
5:04 you'll try my API." But the great thing about a scraping API also is that you
5:09 don't have to have a lot of customers to have a decent MR. So I have maybe like
5:14 12 who pay for the majority of that MR. >> I love Adrian's strategy for copying
5:20 successful apps. But here's the thing, he didn't just copy the idea. He got
5:25 creative and made his idea 1% better than the rest. Nowadays, this creative
5:30 edge is what separates winners from everyone else. And this is where the
5:34 HubSpot for Startups Creative AI use cases database comes in handy. It's a
5:39 free database with over 100 creative ways to use AI in your business. These
5:44 aren't the obvious AI apps that everyone's already building. These are
5:48 the creative uses your competitors haven't discovered yet that can give you
5:51 an unfair advantage. My favorite part is the fact that they break down the list
5:56 by difficulty, business impact, and even steps on how to get started with which
5:59 tools. Just find the one that resonates with you and run with it. So, if you're
6:04 ready to join Adrian and start your own SAS business, then download the free AI
6:08 differentiation database at the first link right below in the description.
6:12 Thank you to HubSpot for Startups for sponsoring this video. Now, let's get
6:16 back into it. I want to understand a little bit more about this framework. If
6:21 you were to start over today in 2025 and go to Microacquire and find another
6:25 idea, how would you do that? For people watching, can you break it down step by
6:28 step? All right, this will be my playbook if I was doing this again. Step
6:31 one, you're going to visit the micro acquire marketplace. Step two, filter by
6:37 SAS. And then step three, filter by asking price. So, we're not looking for
6:40 apps that aren't making any money. That's not great. We're looking for
6:43 pre-validated ideas. So, increase that asking price to at least 300,000 or you
6:49 can filter by annual recurring revenue, whatever you want. All right, step four.
6:52 You're going to look for things that you would be good at or a market that you
6:56 would know about. For example, I knew I wanted to build a product that had
6:59 something to do with web scraping. That was my niche. I was niching down for
7:04 that. You would want to build a product that you have some sort of knowledge
7:07 about. All right, step five. We're going to try to find the website. Obviously,
7:12 on Microquire, they don't list what the website is, but we're going to reverse
7:16 engineer and try to find the actual website. So, a lot of these SAS
7:19 businesses are really easy to find because you can just Google what they
7:23 have in their listing. So in the title or description, you can just Google part
7:27 of that and usually they're using like their title or H1 or description
7:32 actually in the micro acquire description. So it's pretty easy to find
7:36 or they actually list competitors if you scroll down. So all you have to do a lot
7:41 of times the website will write blog posts or pages that will say competitor
7:46 name and then alternative. So all you need to Google is the competitor and
7:49 then alternative or alternatives. One of those two ways will get you to the site
7:53 and then you can just view the site and see if the copy is similar. Then boom,
7:57 you got the site. All right, step six. Try to reverse engineer how they
8:00 acquired customers. This is arguably the most important part. Not so hard to
8:03 build the product, but how are they getting customers? So, for example, the
8:07 app that I was copying, I knew that they got their customers mostly from SEO.
8:11 Read everything that you can on the site, any information that they talk
8:15 about how they're acquiring customers. Try to look up like the founder on
8:19 Twitter, LinkedIn. Try to find podcasts or YouTube videos, any way that they
8:22 talk about the product or how to grow the product. Step seven, actually build
8:26 the damn thing. Step eight, yeah, this is just don't copy word for word. Don't
8:31 copy everything literally exactly. You just want to copy the concept, the idea.
8:35 Step nine, don't get distracted with other projects. Do something every
8:39 single day to promote or improve the product. You know that this idea is
8:43 making money. So now you just have to execute. do something every single day
8:48 to build the product or market it and I guarantee you will make money. You will
8:50 be successful. >> Okay. Thanks Adrian for sharing that
8:54 full playbook. I think that's awesome. We haven't really talked yet about what
8:58 your API does specifically. You have this sort of micro SASS API. Can you
9:02 just share what it does, how it works, what type of customers use it?
9:07 >> Yeah, so it scrapes specifically social media that can be Instagram, YouTube,
9:12 Twitter, uh and then we just scrape public data. Got to say that for the
9:15 lawyers out there. We scrape social media as well as like their ad libraries
9:19 as well. So the Facebook ad library, LinkedIn ad library, etc. And this
9:23 obviously helps developers because scraping is a pain in the butt. So we
9:26 scrape so you don't have to. We handle all the infrastructure, proxy rotation,
9:30 etc. And who uses this tool is a lot of like link and bio tools. Anyone who's
9:34 tracking analytics like short form content. Yeah. So it's a credit based
9:38 system. So pay as you go. So we have three payment plans right now. $10 for
9:44 5,000 credits, $50 for 25,000, and then 500,000 credits for $500. I think it
9:49 does well because it works. Like there's a lot of scrapers out there, like social
9:54 media in particular, that break pretty often. So with mine, I think people like
9:58 it because it's reliable and then if it's not reliable, then I'll communicate
10:01 with people pretty frequently as well, as well as it's really easy to get a
10:05 hold of me. Whereas a lot of developers who build these sort of things, you
10:08 don't even have their email or a way to contact them. Um, so I think that is
10:10 Tech stack
10:10 also helpful. >> Okay, let's change topics a little bit.
10:14 I want to understand techstack. You're a developer. You have a scraping pretty
10:18 technical type of product. How did you build this? What's your tech stack?
10:20 >> Yeah, honestly, it's pretty straightforward, pretty easy. So
10:24 everything is written in Node.js JavaScript and it's just a bunch of HTTP
10:29 requests. So one important thing that I use is this package called impit. It's
10:33 developed by ampify. So another scraping framework. So you npm install input use
10:38 that for HTTP requests and then just a lot of proxies. So I have four main ones
10:43 that I use which are Evomi core residential which are the cheapest
10:47 residential out there do webshare and massive and then I host everything on
10:52 render.com or I host subscripts on AWS Lambda obviously I use cursor so that's
10:57 20 bucks a month and then superbase for the database and then the front end is
11:00 Costs & margins
11:00 astro uh plus react >> and on a similar note I'm also curious
11:04 what are the costs to use all these tools what does the profit margin look
11:06 like for your business >> yeah margin is about 80% Most of it is
11:12 spent on proxies. So about $1,500 a month right now is spent on proxies. And
11:16 I hire a developer in the Philippines to monitor the API for outages at night. So
11:21 he's about $500. And then server costs are about $400. Okay, cool. Thank you
11:22 Pick one idea & build it
11:24 for sharing that. Thank you for being transparent about all that. That's
11:28 awesome. Last question that I want to ask. We ask everyone who comes on
11:31 Starter Story, what would be your advice for anyone watching this starting out in
11:35 2025 about how to do something like you've done? Stop bouncing around ideas
11:40 and just pick one thing. Do it every single day. Focus on it every single day
11:44 and you'll make it. Stop getting distracted because that's exactly what
11:46 happened to me. >> Cool. That's amazing. Adrian, thank you
11:50 for coming on. Thank you for sharing all this, being super transparent. I love
11:52 the business you built. Thanks for coming on and sharing everything.
1:14 Numbers behind the business
1:14 online business brokerage and built it myself. >> Okay, cool. So, you built this API doing
1:19 $20,000 a month. Can you share a little bit more about some of the numbers
1:20 behind it? >> Sure. Yeah, so monthly revenue is about 20,000 a month right now. And it is a
1:27 credit based model. So you just pay for credits and then use them. There's no
1:31 subscription. So right now we have 600 people who have paid but aren't
1:35 necessarily paying on a regular basis. We do almost like 20 million API
1:39 Adrian's background
1:39 requests a month right now. >> Okay, cool. Before we get into how you
1:42 found this idea and kind of the genius way that I think you did it. I do want
1:45 to understand a little bit more about your background. How do you get to the
1:49 point where you build a SAS like this? >> So I moved to SF wanting to be a part of
1:54 tech, learn how to code at this program called App Academy. It was a code boot
1:58 camp. Then got a job in Utah as an engineer for 3 years, always with the
2:02 goal of starting my own business. Then quit with $30,000 in savings and then
2:09 freelanced, built a course, built some products, but didn't have success until
2:12 I stuck with this one thing, which was scrape creators. And then here we are
2:15 Idea for Scrape Creators
2:16 now. All right, Adrian, what I love about your story is how you came up with
2:20 this idea and how you validated that this was something that was worth
2:24 building. Before we get into all that, can you share how you even come across
2:30 the idea to build a web scraping API? >> Absolutely. One of my followers on
2:34 Twitter actually DM'd me telling me to check out this listing for Micro Acquire
2:38 or Acquire.com. And it was a scraping API. And the reason that he DM' me that
2:42 is because I already had a product that had to do with social media. So, he
2:45 thought that I might be interested in checking it out. Once I did, I saw the
2:49 numbers and was completely blown away. I had no confidence myself that a scraping
2:52 API could make that much money. the fact that they were only getting their
2:55 customers through SEO. I thought this is the product for me. I'm going to do this
2:58 Validating the idea
2:58 exact same thing. >> Okay. So, you see this idea on Micro
3:02 Acquire, which lists business for sale. You can kind of see how much money is
3:05 making or how much the business is worth. How do you know that this is
3:08 something that you could replicate and could potentially be successful?
3:12 >> Well, a couple of different things. One, I had this skill set because I had been
3:16 studying scraping for 3 years. So, I had already kind of built those APIs that
3:21 were hosted on this website. So technically, I had the confidence that I
3:24 could build it. And then the reason that I thought I could make money off of it
3:29 was because they were doing 30,000 monthly recurring. They were around for
3:33 3 years, only got their customers from SEO, and they had less than 100
3:37 customers. So doing that math in my head, I was like, I could probably do
3:40 that. And I have a little bit of a presence on Twitter. So even if I just
3:43 message people on Twitter, I probably could get there even without SEO.
3:45 Building the business
3:47 >> Okay, cool. Well, you find this idea. You think that is something that you
3:49 could potentially replicate. How do you go about building this?
3:52 >> So I am a NodeJS developer. Everything is written in JavaScript. So really it
3:56 was just a matter of hosting the APIs like on a server. So I had them all in
4:01 one of my repos. So put those scrapers on a Node.js server on render.com. So
4:07 then hosted the API there. For the documentation, I just put that actually
4:11 in a notion doc and then a basic website and then that was it. So, it was pretty
4:15 uh bare bones and it probably took uh just a couple of weeks because I had
4:19 built that experience and those scrapers for my previous three years of
4:23 experience and got my first customer a few weeks later. Okay. So, you build
4:24 Growth & marketing
4:26 this, you get your first customer pretty quickly. I think a lot of people
4:30 watching this may be similar to you software developer. They have the skills
4:34 to build something like this. But the hard part is getting customers, growing,
4:38 scaling this and replicating what this business that you sort of cloned had
4:41 already done. So, how did you grow this business? How did you get customers?
4:45 >> Uh, I hang out on Twitter a lot, so people see me there. People have seen my
4:48 content. My first customer was just because I scraped a company's site and
4:53 then the CTO actually commented on that post. So, completely accident. And then
4:56 also, anytime someone has a launch video that has anything to do with scraping
5:01 social media, then I comment saying, "Hey, I'll give you 10K free credits if
5:04 you'll try my API." But the great thing about a scraping API also is that you
5:09 don't have to have a lot of customers to have a decent MR. So I have maybe like
5:14 12 who pay for the majority of that MR. >> I love Adrian's strategy for copying
5:20 successful apps. But here's the thing, he didn't just copy the idea. He got
5:25 creative and made his idea 1% better than the rest. Nowadays, this creative
5:30 edge is what separates winners from everyone else. And this is where the
5:34 HubSpot for Startups Creative AI use cases database comes in handy. It's a
5:39 free database with over 100 creative ways to use AI in your business. These
5:44 aren't the obvious AI apps that everyone's already building. These are
5:48 the creative uses your competitors haven't discovered yet that can give you
5:51 an unfair advantage. My favorite part is the fact that they break down the list
5:56 by difficulty, business impact, and even steps on how to get started with which
5:59 tools. Just find the one that resonates with you and run with it. So, if you're
6:04 ready to join Adrian and start your own SAS business, then download the free AI
6:08 differentiation database at the first link right below in the description.
6:12 Thank you to HubSpot for Startups for sponsoring this video. Now, let's get
6:15 Adrian's $20K/month framework
6:16 back into it. I want to understand a little bit more about this framework. If
6:21 you were to start over today in 2025 and go to Microacquire and find another
6:25 idea, how would you do that? For people watching, can you break it down step by
6:28 step? All right, this will be my playbook if I was doing this again. Step
6:31 one, you're going to visit the micro acquire marketplace. Step two, filter by
6:37 SAS. And then step three, filter by asking price. So, we're not looking for
6:40 apps that aren't making any money. That's not great. We're looking for
6:43 pre-validated ideas. So, increase that asking price to at least 300,000 or you
6:49 can filter by annual recurring revenue, whatever you want. All right, step four.
6:52 You're going to look for things that you would be good at or a market that you
6:56 would know about. For example, I knew I wanted to build a product that had
6:59 something to do with web scraping. That was my niche. I was niching down for
7:04 that. You would want to build a product that you have some sort of knowledge
7:07 about. All right, step five. We're going to try to find the website. Obviously,
7:12 on Microquire, they don't list what the website is, but we're going to reverse
7:16 engineer and try to find the actual website. So, a lot of these SAS
7:19 businesses are really easy to find because you can just Google what they
7:23 have in their listing. So in the title or description, you can just Google part
7:27 of that and usually they're using like their title or H1 or description
7:32 actually in the micro acquire description. So it's pretty easy to find
7:36 or they actually list competitors if you scroll down. So all you have to do a lot
7:41 of times the website will write blog posts or pages that will say competitor
7:46 name and then alternative. So all you need to Google is the competitor and
7:49 then alternative or alternatives. One of those two ways will get you to the site
7:53 and then you can just view the site and see if the copy is similar. Then boom,
7:57 you got the site. All right, step six. Try to reverse engineer how they
8:00 acquired customers. This is arguably the most important part. Not so hard to
8:03 build the product, but how are they getting customers? So, for example, the
8:07 app that I was copying, I knew that they got their customers mostly from SEO.
8:11 Read everything that you can on the site, any information that they talk
8:15 about how they're acquiring customers. Try to look up like the founder on
8:19 Twitter, LinkedIn. Try to find podcasts or YouTube videos, any way that they
8:22 talk about the product or how to grow the product. Step seven, actually build
8:26 the damn thing. Step eight, yeah, this is just don't copy word for word. Don't
8:31 copy everything literally exactly. You just want to copy the concept, the idea.
8:35 Step nine, don't get distracted with other projects. Do something every
8:39 single day to promote or improve the product. You know that this idea is
8:43 making money. So now you just have to execute. do something every single day
8:48 to build the product or market it and I guarantee you will make money. You will
8:50 What is Scrape Creators
8:50 be successful. >> Okay. Thanks Adrian for sharing that
8:54 full playbook. I think that's awesome. We haven't really talked yet about what
8:58 your API does specifically. You have this sort of micro SASS API. Can you
9:02 just share what it does, how it works, what type of customers use it?
9:07 >> Yeah, so it scrapes specifically social media that can be Instagram, YouTube,
9:12 Twitter, uh and then we just scrape public data. Got to say that for the
9:15 lawyers out there. We scrape social media as well as like their ad libraries
9:19 as well. So the Facebook ad library, LinkedIn ad library, etc. And this
9:23 obviously helps developers because scraping is a pain in the butt. So we
9:26 scrape so you don't have to. We handle all the infrastructure, proxy rotation,
9:30 etc. And who uses this tool is a lot of like link and bio tools. Anyone who's
9:34 tracking analytics like short form content. Yeah. So it's a credit based
9:38 system. So pay as you go. So we have three payment plans right now. $10 for
9:44 5,000 credits, $50 for 25,000, and then 500,000 credits for $500. I think it
9:49 does well because it works. Like there's a lot of scrapers out there, like social
9:54 media in particular, that break pretty often. So with mine, I think people like
9:58 it because it's reliable and then if it's not reliable, then I'll communicate
10:01 with people pretty frequently as well, as well as it's really easy to get a
10:05 hold of me. Whereas a lot of developers who build these sort of things, you
10:08 don't even have their email or a way to contact them. Um, so I think that is
10:10 also helpful. >> Okay, let's change topics a little bit.
10:14 I want to understand techstack. You're a developer. You have a scraping pretty
10:18 technical type of product. How did you build this? What's your tech stack?
10:20 >> Yeah, honestly, it's pretty straightforward, pretty easy. So
10:24 everything is written in Node.js JavaScript and it's just a bunch of HTTP
10:29 requests. So one important thing that I use is this package called impit. It's
10:33 developed by ampify. So another scraping framework. So you npm install input use
10:38 that for HTTP requests and then just a lot of proxies. So I have four main ones
10:43 that I use which are Evomi core residential which are the cheapest
10:47 residential out there do webshare and massive and then I host everything on
10:52 render.com or I host subscripts on AWS Lambda obviously I use cursor so that's
10:57 20 bucks a month and then superbase for the database and then the front end is
11:00 astro uh plus react >> and on a similar note I'm also curious
11:04 what are the costs to use all these tools what does the profit margin look
11:06 like for your business >> yeah margin is about 80% Most of it is
11:12 spent on proxies. So about $1,500 a month right now is spent on proxies. And
11:16 I hire a developer in the Philippines to monitor the API for outages at night. So
11:21 he's about $500. And then server costs are about $400. Okay, cool. Thank you
11:24 for sharing that. Thank you for being transparent about all that. That's
11:28 awesome. Last question that I want to ask. We ask everyone who comes on
11:31 Starter Story, what would be your advice for anyone watching this starting out in
11:35 2025 about how to do something like you've done? Stop bouncing around ideas
11:40 and just pick one thing. Do it every single day. Focus on it every single day
11:44 and you'll make it. Stop getting distracted because that's exactly what
11:46 happened to me. >> Cool. That's amazing. Adrian, thank you
11:50 for coming on. Thank you for sharing all this, being super transparent. I love
11:52 the business you built. Thanks for coming on and sharing everything.
11:55 >> Thanks, man. Appreciate it. >> Big thanks to Adrian for coming on to
11:59 the channel. I love his story because it flips the startup myth on its head.
12:02 Adrien didn't need to invent something brand new. He just saw a model. He
12:07 copied it and he executed better and that turned into a SAS that makes
12:11 $20,000 a month and effectively changed his life. I think the lesson that anyone
12:15 can take from this is stop waiting for that genius idea. Just start, build, and
12:20 keep improving. And you never know what might happen. This is exactly why we
12:23 launched Starter Story Build, where we will show you how to take your idea, use
12:28 AI to build it fast, and launch in just a couple weeks. Even if you're starting
12:33 with no team, no money, and no clear idea, if you want to finally build your
12:37 first app, launch it, and potentially turn it into a profitable business,
12:40 well, head to the first link in the description and check out Starter Story
12:43 Build. That's it for this episode, guys. Thank you for watching. I hope you
12:46 enjoyed it. We'll see you in the next
