The Story
Diego built App Alchemy, an AI tool for designing mobile apps, to $17K MRR in just 4 months with less than 100 followers on X. His secret? A killer Reddit marketing playbook.
As Diego explains: "I think anyone can build a successful business without an audience. I got my first $1K MRR and even more purely off Reddit."
The Origin Story
"A few months ago, I actually wanted to build my own mobile app and I paid a designer on Upwork for a decent design and it was hundreds of dollars and every time I wanted to make like a little change, I had to pay him extra."
"I thought that if I could build an AI tool around this, I could save people a lot of time and money."
What App Alchemy Does
"My app is called App Alchemy and it allows you to build mobile app designs very fast using AI. It's like Cursor but for designing mobile apps."
Building Fast
"I built the simplest MVP. I ended up building the MVP in about 2 weeks and I started marketing right away on Reddit."
Tips for Building Quickly
"I don't use the newest libraries or frameworks because AI is always going to be a lot better at the libraries that are the most used on the web."
"I use a lot of UI component libraries like Chakra UI or Ant Design. This allows you to prototype a lot faster and to make your website look nicer, too."
The Reddit Marketing Playbook
"Reddit is probably the most underrated marketing channel for two different reasons. One, you can get a lot of reach for no cost. The other reason is that compared to all the other platforms, you can get very precise targeting."
"In Reddit, there is a subreddit or community for pretty much everything. So, you can choose a lot of different communities that are related to the product you're selling and target the actual users that are interested in what you're building."
Step 1: Become an Active Reddit User
"If you're not using Reddit already, start using it daily. This has two different purposes. The first one is becoming familiar with the platform and seeing what kind of posts do well. The second one is warming up your account because any posts that come from a newly created account will be automatically filtered out by Reddit."
Step 2: Create a List of Subreddits
"This one is very important because you need volume for this to work. The more the better and you can go broad and narrow."
"The one I recommend the most is using a Reddit ads tool, and you don't need to pay for any ads for this. You just go to the Reddit ads page, create a new campaign, and when you go to the targeting section, you can look for communities."
Step 3: Create a Killer Organic Post
"The reason that most people fail on Reddit is that their posts don't feel natural. They feel very pushy and they make it completely around their own product."
"What you want to do instead is provide a little bit of value in your niche and then you can plug or link your product in the middle of the post."
"Every successful post starts with a catchy attention grabbing headline. What most people do instead is that they mention their new product or they announce it like they announced the launch. And this is not what you want to do."
"After the catchy headline, you still don't want to mention the product immediately. You want to provide some value in your niche first."
Step 4: Post on Multiple Subreddits
"Volume here is super important because that increases the chances of one of your posts getting to the Reddit front page and that is going to give you like a lot of traffic."
"Even if that doesn't end up happening, let's say that you post on 10 different subreddits and each of the posts gets on average around 10K views. That's a total of like 100K views already, which is really good."
Step 5: Repeat and Experiment
"You should be trying different types of posts to see what does better in your niche. You can try videos, you can try case studies, and you can try other types of posts as well."
"A good rule of thumb is posting two to three times per week. Anything more than that will probably get you banned."
Pro Tip for Strict Subreddits
"For more stricter subreddits that don't allow you to link your product, I would recommend linking an extra product beside yours. Plug like a complimentary product. So for example, for mine is like a design tool. So Cursor complements it very well because it's for development. So I usually plug that one after mine and that way your chances of getting banned or your post being removed for self advertisement is a lot lower."
Business Numbers
- •$17K MRR
- •1,000+ paying customers
- •20,000+ signups (purely from Reddit)
- •20,000 monthly traffic
- •1 million+ eyes on product
- •$0 spent on marketing
- •~70% profit margins
Tech Stack & Costs
- •Cursor (development) - $20/month
- •Next.js and React (frameworks)
- •Firebase (auth and database)
- •Vercel (hosting) - $40/month
- •AI API backends - ~$2,500/month
Key Lessons
"When it comes to building a SaaS, you should be solving a problem in a growing market. A good example is building a SaaS tool for newspaper owners which like newspapers are in decline, or you can build a tool for vibe coding which only in the last months has been exploding and it's going to keep growing."
"Even at the start, you should be spending a lot of your time marketing instead of adding more features no one asked for."
"As a solo founder or small company, speed is one of your major advantages. So take advantage of that whenever possible."
Advice for Beginners
"Right now is the best time to build. If you have an idea, get a simple MVP out there and start marketing it as soon as possible."
Resources
- •App Alchemy: https://appalchemy.dev/
- •Follow Diego on Twitter