00:00:00"I've now scaled two separate products to over 3 million
00:00:02in annual recurring revenue."
00:00:04This is Joseph, and his SaaS makes over $250,000 a month.
00:00:09But this episode is not how to go viral on TikTok
00:00:12or get millions of downloads.
00:00:13Nope, this video is about a foolproof way
00:00:16to get your first 100 paying SaaS customers.
00:00:19Because if you can get 100, you can get thousands.
00:00:22"When it comes to the first 100 customers,
00:00:24capture the low-hanging fruits."
00:00:25I brought Joseph onto the channel
00:00:27to break down his exact steps to go from zero
00:00:30to 100 customers fast.
00:00:31And in this episode, we'll dive into what you can do
00:00:34in the next hour to rank on search engines,
00:00:36why trolling subreddits can actually turn
00:00:39into a million dollar business,
00:00:40and the exact playbook that you can follow
00:00:42if you're starting over with a new SaaS in 2026.
00:00:45If you're building anything in SaaS right now,
00:00:48well, this is an episode you cannot miss.
00:00:50All right, let's get into it.
00:00:51I'm Pat Walls, and this is "Starter Story."
00:00:53All right, Joseph, welcome to the channel.
00:00:56Tell me about who you are,
00:00:57what you built, and what's your story.
00:00:58- Thanks for having me, Pat.
00:00:59I'm Joe, Joseph.
00:01:01I've now scaled two separate products
00:01:03to over 3 million in annual recurring revenue.
00:01:05And I'm currently building a company called SupaDemo,
00:01:07an AI-powered demo automation tool
00:01:09that helps companies create better,
00:01:11more exceptional product demos in minutes instead of hours.
00:01:14We launched SupaDemo around two and a half years ago now.
00:01:17And in that time, we've gone from zero to 150,000-plus users,
00:01:22over 3 million in annual recurring revenue.
00:01:24And we were named G2's number five fastest growing product
00:01:27in 2025.
00:01:28- All right, before we get into how you built the SaaS
00:01:31and how you got all these customers,
00:01:32I want to understand what this product is.
00:01:34Is it a SaaS?
00:01:35What does it do?
00:01:36Can you explain that?
00:01:37- It helps companies create interactive demos,
00:01:39which are kind of guided, clickable,
00:01:41realistic versions of your product
00:01:44that can be embedded anywhere on the web,
00:01:46whether it's on your website or in your documentation.
00:01:48This is an example of a SupaDemo in action.
00:01:51And as you can see,
00:01:51it looks and feels just like your actual product,
00:01:54because it's a clone of your product,
00:01:55but it allows people to experience your aha moment
00:01:58and what your product does
00:01:59without having to sign up for a plan
00:02:01or talk to a salesperson.
00:02:03We are a product-led growth SaaS company.
00:02:05So most of our traffic actually does come from our starter
00:02:09or freemium tier.
00:02:10And we look at that as our number one engine for growth.
00:02:13But as you can see here,
00:02:15if I go back into the metrics tab, here's our ARR.
00:02:17It's slightly over 3 million.
00:02:20You can see the number of demos.
00:02:21Currently we're doing just over 250K in MRR
00:02:25and we are growing every month.
00:02:26So it's a pretty exciting time to be around.
00:02:28- Thanks for showing that.
00:02:29I'm really excited to talk about building a SaaS,
00:02:31getting your first users as a SaaS, especially in B2B.
00:02:34I'm excited.
00:02:35But before we do,
00:02:36I want to understand a little bit more about your background.
00:02:38How do you even get to the point where you have this SaaS
00:02:40that's making multimillion dollars per year?
00:02:42- I've always growing up been a builder by heart.
00:02:45I started my first projects and businesses
00:02:47at the age of 14 and 15,
00:02:49not because I wanted to be a founder,
00:02:51but I was so enamored with the process of building.
00:02:54That started with me buying and selling electronics
00:02:57on Craigslist.
00:02:58I started an organic soy candle business.
00:03:01I also started a clothing company, a digital agency,
00:03:04all the way to running my first venture funded company
00:03:07in college where we built a B2B seafood marketplace.
00:03:11I think throughout all of those endeavors,
00:03:13one constant problem that I ran into over and over again was
00:03:17it's really difficult to demonstrate the value
00:03:21of your product, the benefits.
00:03:23And after doing a lot of video recordings, a lot of looms,
00:03:26having it constantly be out of date
00:03:28and not just watched by the buyers themselves,
00:03:30I figured there had to be a better way.
00:03:31And it was one of those ideas that I kept in my back pocket.
00:03:34And when I left that company,
00:03:35kind of came back to the drawing board.
00:03:36This was the one I settled on.
00:03:38- Going off the topic a little bit,
00:03:40obviously this is a huge business now.
00:03:41It's doing multimillions in revenue.
00:03:43What did that first early validation look like?
00:03:45Was it just good to go, right?
00:03:47When you first built it
00:03:48or what did that early days look like?
00:03:49- The number one thing is I knew that this was a problem
00:03:52that I had as a business builder,
00:03:54having built businesses for a long time.
00:03:56And the next step was do other people face the same concerns
00:04:00and what are they doing as a workaround
00:04:02to try to solve that problem?
00:04:03So I ended up talking to probably a hundred plus founders
00:04:07that were working in the B2B SaaS industry.
00:04:09And I think the unifying concern was, yes,
00:04:13this was a really painful problem.
00:04:15People hated creating product demos.
00:04:17People hated the sound of their own voice.
00:04:19And that's when I realized,
00:04:20hey, there's something to run with here.
00:04:22Let's build the one of an experiment where we could say,
00:04:25hey, can we sell this thing?
00:04:26Are people willing to pay?
00:04:27- Okay, cool.
00:04:28So you have this idea.
00:04:30You know it might be a good problem to solve.
00:04:32And one of the reasons why I wanted to bring you
00:04:33on the channel is you had an interesting strategy
00:04:36on how to get your first hundred customers.
00:04:39In a SaaS, that's so important.
00:04:40If you can find a hundred people that want to use
00:04:42and pay for your product, you're pretty much set.
00:04:43Everything should hopefully keep growing after that.
00:04:46So I want to dive into the actual playbook.
00:04:48If you were to start over today,
00:04:49how would you go about it right now
00:04:51to get those first 100 customers?
00:04:53- So I would say when it comes to the first 100 customers,
00:04:56I'd go back to my first step of the playbook,
00:04:58which is the low hanging fruit,
00:05:00capturing the obvious demand first.
00:05:02So what we did early on is we focused on people
00:05:06that were already searching for a solution.
00:05:08What that meant was crafting valuable content
00:05:11and using that as a main engine across the full funnel.
00:05:13So we ended up creating SEO pieces at the top, middle,
00:05:18as well as the bottom of the funnel.
00:05:20And in practice, what that meant in the bottom of funnel
00:05:22is detailed comparison pages,
00:05:24pitting Superdemo against our competitors.
00:05:27And when I mean competitors,
00:05:28I mean every competitor that you can find in your space,
00:05:31because that's the easiest way
00:05:33to piggyback off of their traffic.
00:05:34And we use that to quickly establish an imperfect,
00:05:38but live version 1.0 of pages that would get us ranked
00:05:42and mentioned in LLMs early on in the market,
00:05:45figuring out which competitor pages are actually being cited
00:05:48and picking up traction.
00:05:50And those are the ones that we would go in and optimize.
00:05:53Then it was all about going to the mid funnel,
00:05:55people that are a little bit higher intent.
00:05:57What we ended up doing is we created dozens and dozens
00:06:00of free tools and adjacent spaces like screenshots, SOPs.
00:06:04Our twist here was instead of back then,
00:06:07when we built these tools, we didn't have cloud code.
00:06:09We made our entire product experience ungated.
00:06:12So people didn't have to sign up for an account
00:06:14or set up a free trial.
00:06:16They could access certain areas or sections of our product
00:06:19that would let people take screenshots or create tutorials.
00:06:22The end result here, customers would land on the page
00:06:26and quickly find value.
00:06:27Today, I think these free tools bring in roughly 20%
00:06:30of all of our traffic and converts like 15 to 20%
00:06:33of all visitors into signup.
00:06:35What I love about Joseph's strategy is that it's not sexy.
00:06:38It's the stuff that actually works
00:06:40if you want to build a successful business.
00:06:41So if you have an idea, but you're still a little stuck
00:06:44on how to turn it into something real,
00:06:45stop building in the dark.
00:06:47Something that Joseph talked about was launching parts
00:06:49of his app for free.
00:06:50I call this free tool marketing.
00:06:52It's one of the eight strategies I wrote about
00:06:55in my million dollar MVP guide.
00:06:56You can download this guide for free right now
00:06:59and inside you will get actionable approaches ranked
00:07:01by how fast you can ship them, over 10 case studies
00:07:05of founders who use these exact methods
00:07:07to hit over a million dollars,
00:07:08and the validation framework you can use
00:07:11so you don't waste months building a product nobody wants.
00:07:14Look, this stuff isn't made up.
00:07:15This is all the stuff that I see from founders
00:07:17who come on this channel who built successful businesses
00:07:20and I put it all in one place for you to check out.
00:07:22This is the exact roadmap I would use to validate my idea
00:07:25and start building in 2026.
00:07:27So click the link in the description
00:07:28to grab the $1 million MVP guide for free.
00:07:31Now back to the episode.
00:07:32- Finally, on the top of funnel, what we ended up doing
00:07:34is we created step-by-step interactive demos using Superdemo
00:07:39of thousands of different workflows and keywords.
00:07:42And we would create SEO-focused, again, programmatic pages
00:07:46with Superdemo's embedded how to export Figma to PDF
00:07:49or how to merge cells on Excel.
00:07:51And our bet was by solving their question
00:07:54in an interactive and engaging way
00:07:56and putting our product front and center,
00:07:58enough of them would be within our ICP to say,
00:08:01"Hey, this is really cool."
00:08:03For step two of our playbook,
00:08:04it was all about as cliche as it sounds,
00:08:06doing things that don't scale to remove friction for buyers.
00:08:10So I personally offered to create free Superdemo
00:08:13for founders on Reddit, as well as indie hackers.
00:08:16And what I asked them to do is post their product URL.
00:08:19I would take that and I would actually go ahead
00:08:20and create the Superdemo of their product for them.
00:08:23Then I would comment in line on their post
00:08:26with the interactive demo so that they can just sign up,
00:08:29duplicate the demo and start using it right away.
00:08:31And the added benefit of doing that publicly
00:08:34was that other people who hadn't even commented
00:08:36would see all of the other products
00:08:38and the links being posted.
00:08:39It would click it, interact with it and say,
00:08:41"Whoa, this is really cool.
00:08:43I'm gonna ask him to create me a demo
00:08:45or I'm just gonna sign up and do it myself
00:08:46'cause it looks easy."
00:08:47We did permutations of that
00:08:49across many, many different channels.
00:08:51- There's something very common that I see
00:08:52with a lot of founders who come on Starter Story.
00:08:54I like to call it hand-to-hand combat,
00:08:56just going in and doing things one by one.
00:08:59Yeah, you don't have to do that forever,
00:09:00but if you can do that a hundred times,
00:09:02a percentage of those likely will turn into customers
00:09:05just by this do things that don't scale.
00:09:06So I really liked that.
00:09:07What's this third step?
00:09:08- Third is just be everywhere where your users are.
00:09:11I think the challenging thing about distribution nowadays
00:09:13in 2026 is there's no magic channel anymore.
00:09:17There's no gotchas.
00:09:18So for us, it was all about
00:09:19how do we get distribution density?
00:09:22So that was SEO and AI, LLMs, as I mentioned,
00:09:25through content, living and breathing in communities,
00:09:28and even doing things like direct outreach
00:09:30through like the product updates,
00:09:31building in public in LinkedIn and on IndieHacker,
00:09:35and just sharing our story and being a megaphone
00:09:37as much as you can in places where founders pay attention,
00:09:41just like here on Starter Story.
00:09:42Roughly 30, 40% of our visitors come from SEO and LLMs.
00:09:47A 30% comes from word of mouth, watermarks, referrals,
00:09:50folks creating super demos and sharing it with other people
00:09:53and that creating a viral loop.
00:09:55And third, 20% building in public on LinkedIn.
00:09:58- Okay, well, thanks for sharing that playbook.
00:09:59That's amazing.
00:10:00I think a lot of people watching this are,
00:10:01hey, I got a SaaS idea.
00:10:03I have an actual SaaS MVP.
00:10:05I have some customers.
00:10:06I'm sure you get a lot of people that reach out to you
00:10:08and go, hey, how did you do it?
00:10:09How'd you do with 3 million ARR?
00:10:11Even if you've given these people some advice,
00:10:13what do you typically see early SaaS founders getting wrong
00:10:17when they start out?
00:10:18- I think the biggest thing that comes to mind for me,
00:10:20I would say it's not launching yesterday
00:10:22and chasing perfection.
00:10:24Earlier you can launch the faster results compound
00:10:28and the faster you find out, do I need to kill this thing?
00:10:31Can we scale this thing with data?
00:10:32Or do we need to pivot and reorient?
00:10:35The cliche advice that a lot of people give is
00:10:38if you're not embarrassed by the first version
00:10:39of your product, you've launched too late.
00:10:41I don't think that holds true in the sense
00:10:43that every product should have great craftsmanship
00:10:45in the AI first era.
00:10:46But as a founder, the only advantage you have
00:10:49over an incumbent is urgency and speed.
00:10:51- Yeah, I like that advice.
00:10:52My first question that comes to mind is like,
00:10:53okay, why would I pay for this if I could just use Loom?
00:10:56And there are a lot of other cool product demo tools
00:10:59out there, but yours is actually crushing it.
00:11:01So I'd love if you could give me just a quick demo
00:11:03how it works.
00:11:04- So I'm gonna go right into this banking app.
00:11:06So you can create a demo in a variety of different ways.
00:11:09The easiest place to start is our Chrome extension.
00:11:11When you click this button,
00:11:12you're gonna get a few different options here
00:11:14that signify different demo types.
00:11:17I'm gonna click the guided HTML here
00:11:19and I'm gonna start the recording.
00:11:20You just need to click through the workflow
00:11:22or the features or the pages
00:11:24that you wanna demonstrate out.
00:11:26Maybe I'm creating for this use case an onboarding demo
00:11:29of how you can go about tagging transactions
00:11:32directly here on Berkeley.
00:11:33I wanna show the customer
00:11:35how to categorize transactions here.
00:11:37So I'm just gonna emulate and walk through that step.
00:11:39And let's, for example, put this under venue rental.
00:11:42Now that it's been categorized,
00:11:44you'll notice that Supa demo is recording
00:11:46all of your clicks and actions.
00:11:48From here, you can choose to stop the recording.
00:11:50It's actually going to clone all of the steps.
00:11:52You'll get things in a modular kind of editable editor
00:11:56that looks and feels like a PowerPoint slide.
00:11:57And you can easily go in and make changes
00:12:00as you go over time.
00:12:01I'll just show you what it looks like to the end viewer.
00:12:03So you'll notice we created this in like two minutes.
00:12:06It cloned the entire front end.
00:12:07So through a link, people can essentially access your app
00:12:10or access your product experience.
00:12:12That's like the super high level TL;DR,
00:12:14but you can obviously go in
00:12:15and do things like adding chapters.
00:12:17You can go in and edit the HTML
00:12:19and use one demo template for hundreds of different leads.
00:12:23You could put in like voiceovers.
00:12:25You can clone your own voice.
00:12:27If you do want like a loom-like experience,
00:12:29you could also record your face and camera here.
00:12:31- Wow, thanks for showing that.
00:12:32Super cool.
00:12:33It's like, instead of a video,
00:12:34it's like actually just saving all the HTML.
00:12:36And that's pretty impressive.
00:12:37How is this built?
00:12:38What's the tech stack here?
00:12:39- We're growing really quickly.
00:12:40So I'd say we're like rotating through
00:12:42like 50 plus different tools every single month.
00:12:45But at a high level, we obviously use Supa demo
00:12:47for demoing our product, for onboarding, for training.
00:12:50We use Cloud Code, Cursor, Codex very, very extensively.
00:12:54So we kind of switch between the three depending
00:12:57on what's the best model or most performant.
00:13:00We use Linear for task management.
00:13:01Linear is also super powerful for like connecting to Slack
00:13:05and also connecting to Cloud.
00:13:06We use AWS for hosting.
00:13:08I use Postmark for transactional emails.
00:13:10We use Intercom for more like triggered workflows
00:13:12and onboarding and for marketing emails and support.
00:13:15A bunch of other tools like Ahrefs, Clay, Zapier
00:13:20for a bunch of GTM and CS efforts.
00:13:22- Well, thanks for sharing that.
00:13:23Last question that we ask everyone who comes
00:13:24on Starter Story or for anyone who's watching this
00:13:27that wants to start a SaaS,
00:13:28what would be your one piece of advice?
00:13:29- I'd say stop obsessing over the competition
00:13:32and the idea and just start building.
00:13:34If you identify the right problem,
00:13:37the world is a very, very big place.
00:13:39There's more than enough market in most places for everyone.
00:13:42Most companies, I would say die.
00:13:45If they do die, buy (beep)
00:13:47and internal combustion then buy or buy competition.
00:13:50So just get going and start building.
00:13:52- Well, thanks Joseph for coming on and sharing all this.
00:13:55It is crazy to see that very niche product
00:13:57can do $3 million a year and I'm sure it's still growing.
00:13:59This is the future, this is building an AI.
00:14:01This is SaaS, it's not going anywhere.
00:14:03So thanks for coming on and sharing everything
00:14:05so transparently and inspiring others.
00:14:07- Cool, thanks for having me, Pat.
00:14:08- If you're watching this far and you want to build a SaaS,
00:14:11I think that his playbook to 100 customers is really good.
00:14:15And it's the right way of thinking
00:14:16when you're starting a SaaS.
00:14:17I don't want to be thinking about
00:14:19how do I get 10,000 customers?
00:14:20How do I get 1,000 customers?
00:14:22How do I get 10 customers?
00:14:23Because if you can get 10 paying customers
00:14:25that don't churn right away for your SaaS,
00:14:27you know you can go get more.
00:14:29Last thing I want to shout out,
00:14:30if you're looking for your SaaS idea and you want to build it
00:14:32and get it in the hands of customers in just a few days,
00:14:34you can do that with AI now.
00:14:36You should check out Starter Story Build,
00:14:37click that link in the description.
00:14:38You can get started,
00:14:39you can build and launch something very quickly.
00:14:41Thank you guys for watching.
00:14:42I'll see you in the next one, peace.