The Story
Jacob built Faceless Video to over $1M ARR using 100% no-code with Bubble. The SaaS automates faceless social media channels - users provide a topic, and the platform writes content, creates videos, and posts daily on autopilot.
As Jacob explains: "My name is Jacob and I built a million-dollar business with no code. I'm a self-taught developer and the co-founder of Faceless Video. It's 100% bootstrapped and I built it from scratch with Bubble and it's now doing over a million dollars a year in ARR."
The Origin Story
Jacob's co-founder Alex explains how they found the idea: "I was getting a lot of faceless videos on my TikTok algorithm. I had seen a lot of these videos go extremely viral, and my goal originally was just to go viral."
"I realized that consistency was a huge problem. Coming up with new ideas, editing every day became something that was actually pretty difficult to stick to."
"I had an idea because I realized with the advancements in tech that were going on, these videos were simple enough that this could be done automatically. I reached out to Jacob and then Jacob had the idea to make this into a SaaS product instead of an internal tool."
"Looking back, I'm really glad that I let the algorithm guide me. We all are on TikTok and Instagram reels and we see these trends in videos and most of the time we scroll past. But if you take a second to actually analyze what's going on, there are plenty of good business ideas in there."
What Faceless Video Does
"It's a SaaS that automates faceless social media channels and the user only needs to provide their channel topic. Our platform writes the video content, creates the video, and posts that video on the user's behalf every single day, entirely on autopilot."
"We're generating thousands of videos every single day for users. Some of which had well over a million views, plenty of which have had hundreds of thousands of views."
Why Bubble Works
"In its simplest form, it translates programming into human language. So you don't need to know how to actually code. You don't need to know code syntax. It's plain English."
"That's the best part of it - anyone can get started and understand the basic frameworks even of programming. Because now that I actually know how to code, I see that it is actually still very much programming just in a more visual human-friendly way."
"They also handle plenty of other important aspects of actually running a web app such as security, scalability, privacy rules, backend management, all these other things that I would not have even known where to begin if I was just coming at it completely fresh or custom."
Why Stay on Bubble at $1M ARR?
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it. It's kind of as simple as that. We haven't run into any issues that would require a dramatic shift."
"Realistically, all the bells and whistles that developers get through custom code is not necessary for building a successful business. All you need is a great idea, a functioning product, and a great go-to-market strategy, and you can validate really quickly and scale based on that."
Growth Strategy
"To have success as a B2C app, you need to have viral potential. Your CAC, customer acquisition costs, is pretty low. And so, to spend a lot on ads or other methods of promotion is not really viable for a B2C app."
"We do all of the usual stuff - SEO, ads, influencers, organic content - but the key is really getting your messaging right. It's nothing fancy. It's just good execution."
The First Viral Moment
"Our first advertisement for Faceless Video was a Twitter thread that we spent like $200 on and we got hundreds of thousands of views and kind of instantly went viral."
"Our biggest growth came when influencers who saw our ads that we'd never even reached out to started promoting Faceless.video on their own because they genuinely believe that their audience would like the product."
"Word of mouth is consistently one of our top five attribution sources. People will just type in 'friend' on our customer attribution thing."
Business Numbers
- •$1M+ ARR
- •1.1M+ total users signed up
- •Videos with millions of views
- •10 months to reach $1M ARR
- •6 failed SaaS ideas before this one
Tech Stack
- •Bubble (100% no-code)
- •APIs for video generation
- •Framer for design
- •Standard payment processing
Key Advice
Build for scale from day one: "Build from day zero optimizing for the best case scenario. If 100,000 people signed up today, could your app handle it? Or would you have to rethink your pricing model and your technical debt when that starts to happen?"
Don't get attached: "If I didn't go through six ideas before Faceless, I probably still would have been trying to make that first idea work, and it just may not have worked at all. Failing fast is a win-win. There's no lose scenario with that."
Stay bootstrapped: "Staying bootstrapped forces you to build lean and really focus on your value. If your idea is valuable to others, then you can scale healthfully. And if it's not, then you can move on and adapt quickly. You have options."
Resources
- •Faceless Video: https://faceless.video/
- •Follow Jacob and Alex on Twitter