$9k MRR for job board SaaS 💰

Hi there,

Thanks for signing up for my founder newsletter. It's been great seeing lots of old faces on Twitter this week! I'm on leave next week so there won't be a newsletter next Friday.

News

$9k MRR for job board SaaS

This guy acquired a SaaS which lets you run a job board without knowing how to code. He's increased the MRR from $1k to $9k over the past year. It just goes to show you don't always have to start a business from scratch.

Saving money by making your own tools

James from LeaveMeAlone has started saving $300 per month by coding his own tools to replace various SaaS he was paying for.

In my opinion, a prime candidate for this type of cost saving is cutting out Framer/Webflow.

- Make a site in Claude with Astro.JS
- Push that to GitHub
- Cloudflare hosts for free and syncs with GitHub

That's what I did for my newsletter directory

I think it comes down to this:

SaaS companies that only serves developers will be in trouble as people like James will code their own solutions.

SaaS companies that make software for non-devs (like my friend Amar from ZenMaid) will be fine.

The X algo is improving

Finally, the X algo has gone back to having a feed that shows people who you actually follow and not just ragebait/AI slop etc.

If you haven't posted on X for a while, now is a good time to come back.

The problem with free tools

A lot of conventional wisdom says add free tools to your website. But what if they have little to do with your core offering and end up confusing Google and LLMs. That's exactly what this guy faced. (I guess I should remove the TimeLeft dinner review from my personal website)

Recovering from Google's helpful content update

Ian did a great deep dive into how a niche website recovered its ranking on Google. A few highlights:

• adding "written by a human" at the top of each page

• adding first hand knowledge, not just generic copy

• the owner of the website got accreditations, which improved his credibility

London events next week

Two good events are coming up in London. Indie Beers, hosted by Charlie, is on next week on the 22nd of July: https://www.meetup.com/indiebeers-london/events/315572064/

And Riccardo is putting on a free 3 hour hackathon for building AI agents for SEO on the 30th of July: