The Story
Samuel Rondo runs three apps making $35K/month combined. He taught himself to code on YouTube and built his business by finding successful apps and making them slightly better.
As Samuel explains: "I used to be an optician and I had zero coding experience. At the time I wanted to rebuild a tool I was using for Instagram, but this time I wanted to build it myself using code. I ended up following a 15-hour course on YouTube."
His philosophy: "If it's already successful, I know it's validating."
Key Insights
Learning to Code
"Every time I learn something new in the course, I immediately try to apply it to that tool I was building. So if you just watch a course, most of the time it's not enough because you end up losing yourself in the languages that you will probably never use."
Modern Approach to Learning
"If I were 18 years old now, I don't think I would learn to code the traditional way. I would probably just use AI coding tools. And with AI today, you can literally build like 90% of most apps."
The Clone Strategy
Core Philosophy
"I'm someone a bit lazy and I don't have unlimited energy. So I have one rule that is really crucial for me is to never build something that doesn't already exist and isn't already successful or at least getting some traction. So this way I reduce my chance of failure and I increase my chances of success."
4 Key Filters
- •"I will use it myself"
- •"I can see that it already works"
- •"They are not spending thousands on marketing, meaning there is a true demand"
- •"The product is simple enough to maintain"
Validation Process
"The most important thing I look for is traction. The best signal you can find on Twitter is when founders share their MRR screenshot or Stripe screenshot. It's the ultimate proof that the tool is working and that people are paying for it."
"I use Ahrefs to check their traffic sources. Are they getting customers only from ads or are they also ranking on SEO? If they are growing with both ads and SEO, that's a very good sign because it shows a strong demand and it's usually easier to replicate their success."
Story Short Case Study
"I saw a post from a guy building a tool to automate posting faceless video on YouTube, TikTok, etc. And the numbers were crazy. So I started to investigate - is it hard to build and where is the traffic coming from?"
"The really good thing with this one is all the traffic was from Facebook ads which means I can replicate it literally in a week because Facebook ads you just have to start it and you have the traffic. So I went for it. I built the tool, launched ads and Story Short grew very fast."
The Three Apps
- •Usimus.com - LinkedIn scraping tool
- •$15,000/month
- •~10,000 customers
- •Costs: ~$4,000/month
- •StoryShort.ai - AI video generator for TikTok and YouTube
- •$20,000/month
- •~4,000 customers
- •Costs: ~$5,000/month
- •Capacity.so - AI coding tool
- •$900/month (brand new)
- •~50 users
Growth Stack
Step 1: Start with Ads
"I always start by running ads. It's always the first thing I do. So I do it on Google and Meta depending on the product. It's the fastest way to validate and test the market."
Step 2: Build SEO
"As soon as I get some traction with ads, I move to the second part of the growth, which is SEO. I think too many apps rely only on ads and never got a single visitor from Google. Of course, SEO takes time, but once it works, it's almost free traffic and it compounds."
Step 3: Faceless YouTube Channels
"I even created a feature inside Story Short for this. The idea is that Story Short will automatically publish daily UGC style video about your product on YouTube channels, TikTok and Instagram. You can create multiple channels that talk about your product every day on autopilot."
Step 4: Affiliate Marketing
"Not only does it bring clients at a fixed cost, but it also creates virality because I have many people doing a YouTube video about Story Short, writing articles. So it brings SEO results and people are more likely to share your product if they earn a commission."
Tech Stack
- •Next.js and Node.js (coding)
- •Ahrefs (SEO analysis)
- •Outrank.so (automated article writing)
- •Vercel (deployment)
- •Stripe (payments)
Key Lessons
"What really surprised me is that you don't need to innovate. You just need to see what is working on X, in communities, on forums, and build your own alternative, your own version of a product."
"If you like the product and see that it's working, just clone the idea, build an MVP in two weeks and launch ads immediately. I think people are always over complicating this but simple boring tools are what makes the most money I think."
Advice for Beginners
- •Use AI coding tools
- •Spend time learning Google Ads and Meta Ads
- •Launch as soon as possible - "Skip the boring parts of building a SaaS like the password reset pages, settings pages. Just launch the minimal basic product and run ads to test demand right away."
- •Once you get traction, focus on SEO
- •Automate as much as you can
Resources
- •Usimus: https://usimus.com/
- •Story Short: https://storyshort.ai/
- •Capacity: https://capacity.so/
- •Follow Samuel on Twitter