Founder Playbook · Starter Story
9 tactics from Tibo
I Built 4 SaaS Apps to $100K MRR: Here's My Exact Playbook
Watch the full episode“find the five to 10 people that are very relevant to this product that they are your core target audience and you find a way to reach out to them if the person is not relevant like there is absolutely no point in listening to this feedback either positive or negative”
Find the Five to Ten Most Relevant Users Before Going Broad
Validating with random or friendly testers gives false signals — only feedback from people who genuinely have the pain matters. Tibo insists that irrelevant feedback, even positive, actively misleads founders and wastes precious early iteration cycles.
“everyone is just breeding new stuff adding features because they think that it's going to be the thing that people are expecting but what they do not do is what's hard for them which is talking to people people right now on the market who are able to build software are also the most shy people”
Do the Uncomfortable Thing and Talk to Real Users Every Day
Developers default to building because it feels productive and safe, but shipping features without user insight is sophisticated guessing. Tibo credits his entire playbook to one uncomfortable habit: daily conversations with real users. The founders who consistently win are those willing to leave the cave and hear what customers actually need.
“you will have a 90% failure rate it's the same for me it's the same for a lot of people that I know it's very hard to know for sure that you have something that people want and so if you want to take a year and fail 90% of the time it might take like 9 years”
Build Your MVP in Weeks Not Months to Compress Failure Cycles
Builders who spend months on an MVP are dramatically slowing their path to success. By compressing each attempt into days or weeks using no-code tools and boilerplates, you can run through failures fast enough to find a winner within a realistic timeframe.
“until each product is making 10k per month in revenue the supports link on each software is directing people to my Twitter DMs and that creates a daily flow of people that comes to me people feel much much closer from you and it gives you this insane reactivity where if someone tells you about something and you fix it in like 5 to 10 minutes they might be like customers for life”
Route All Support to Your Personal DMs Until You Hit $10K MRR
Tibo deliberately funnels all early support through his personal Twitter DMs to manufacture daily user contact and lightning-fast feedback loops. The direct channel transforms quick fixes — sometimes in five minutes — into lifelong advocates who publicly promote the product.
“if you go broad like if you focus on acquisition and at the same time have a low retention you will spend a lot of energy pushing people to your software and 99% of those people are going to flow away directly after trying your software you need to make sure that your retention is good you need to make sure that you have stickiness”
Prove Product Stickiness Before Spending Anything on Acquisition
Most founders rush to grow their user base before their product is sticky enough to keep anyone. Tibo's playbook demands proving retention — defined as users who cannot live without the software — before opening any acquisition channel. Scaling a leaky bucket wastes money and energy that could be spent making the core product indispensable.
“launching on platkins and talk about my software on socials is always the thing that I do until 10k of revenue”
Launch on Product Platforms and Post in Public Before Scaling
Before investing in paid or scalable channels, Tibo relies entirely on Product Hunt-style launches and social media transparency to reach the critical $10K/month threshold. This keeps customer acquisition cost near zero while testing whether the product has genuine traction.
“at one point a company needs to become a media company either you are good with socials or you are good with SEO or you are good with coating you need to create content you need to build a pipe or workflow that makes you able to ship content that's going to fuel everything that you do”
Become a Media Company to Power Every Acquisition Channel You Run
Tibo frames every SaaS company as a media company first, arguing that content — whether social posts, SEO articles, or case studies — is the engine that powers all downstream growth. Without a repeatable content workflow, scaling acquisition channels like ads or affiliates has no fuel to run on.
“what you want here is do sustainable things that are able to help you scale much further which in my opinion are SEO ads and affiliation you can set up once and can scale to crazy high limits”
Scale Past Social Media Using SEO, Ads, and Affiliates Together
Tibo distinguishes between hustle-dependent channels like social media and build-once-scale-forever channels: SEO, paid ads, and affiliate programs. Outrank grew from $20K to $200K MRR only after layering in all three once social alone stopped sustaining the growth rate.
“if OpenAI release a new feature tomorrow and it kills one of my products which by the way happened when Alon Musk took over X and almost killed Tweet Hunter like while it was making 200k per month if that happens today and OpenAI kills one of our products it's not going to be the end of the world”
Build a Product Portfolio to Survive Any Single AI Disruption
Tibo runs six products simultaneously not for ambition but for resilience — a lesson learned when Twitter changes nearly wiped out Tweet Hunter at $200K/month. In an era where a single AI release can obsolete a business overnight, a diversified portfolio acts as a hedge against catastrophic concentration risk.