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We are in a micro-SAS boom, and everywhere I look, I see another AI app making millions. So today, I'm going to share five micros that are making $100,000 per month and reveal the genius strategy behind their success, so you can do the same. It doesn't matter if you know how to code or not; you can start a SAS. And just in case you don't believe me, at the end of this video, I'm going to share three micro-SAS tools that went from idea to launching without any code whatsoever.
The first micro-SAS is Link Drip. Link Drip launched with one core feature that lets you track where all of your link clicks come from. For example, I create a new drip link by simply pasting a link to my YouTube podcast. Then I put that new drip link in my bio on my Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. Now this will allow me to track where all of my views come from. Before this tool, I would post a podcast clip on TikTok, and it would get a million views, but I actually had no idea how many of those people would go and watch the full podcast on YouTube. But now, when I post short-form clips from the podcast on other platforms, I can see exactly how many clicks I got and where they came from. The beauty of micro-SAS is that you just need to solve one problem for a specific group of people. Oh, and did I mention this also was built with no code?
Also, I love how the founder actually funded the development of the app instead of spending his own time and money building the app, then releasing it and hoping people buy. Simon Hyberg announced a pre-sale on his YouTube channel and sent people to a simple landing page explaining what the tool would do. Anyone who was interested in using it could just pay $75, and in exchange, they would get lifetime access to the tool once it was complete. This resulted in $70,000 in revenue before he even started developing the app. This is genius because not only does it validate your idea, pay for the entire development upfront, and pretty much eliminate all risk for the founder, but the users who joined early are now saving hundreds of dollars every year. It's a win-win. And the beauty in this product is that it has a great viral loop. Anytime someone uses a drip link, they are publicly displaying the drip link branding since they use a branded URL. When I put a drip link in my bios, now my social media profiles are essentially serving as a linkdrip.com billboard. So anytime someone uses this product, they are also marketing it for the company—AKA, it's free marketing. A viral loop creates product-led growth, which is the most powerful way to grow a SAS.
Now, my micro number two is Study Buddy. Study Buddy is a simple AI tool that automatically fills in college students' homework for them. The problem: lazy college kids have to do homework. The solution: an AI software tool that does it for them. In SAS, you want to make sure your product is a must-have and not just a nice-to-have. So you want to sell a painkiller, not a vitamin. In this case, Study Buddy is the definition of a painkiller because not only does it help them get the answers, but it actually fills it in for them—AKA, it solves the entire problem and it takes away the pain of a college kid having to do their homework entirely. The vitamin version of this tool would be something like Chegg.com, where you still have to search for the answers and then fill them in yourself. And this is why Study Buddy saw exponential growth in their first year. Now we will save the morals of this product for another day, but what stood out to me about this app was the intentionality behind it. The founder is Oliver Bato, and when he came on my podcast last year, he shared his strategy of finding products that are intrinsically viral. This means he chooses products that are so shocking that they go viral on social media again and again. He used this exact same strategy to scale a sex chocolate company to $1 million in revenue, and he recently sold that at just the age of 21 years old. And now he's using the exact same strategy to scale Study Buddy. He got the idea after scrolling TikTok; he saw a video of a similar tool getting millions of views and thought he could do it better. He then hired a single developer and had an MVP out in around two months. Now, once he had a working product, he just started shooting content. These were simple videos showing the AI tool filling in college kids' homework in a library. These simple demos racked up millions of views and resulted in thousands of dollars in monthly recurring revenue. He has since started running TikTok ads, and that's allowed him to scale past $100,000 in MRR in just over 12 months of starting the business. There is a major lesson to take from Oliver's content-first approach to building software. He doesn't choose a product and then figure out how to sell it; no, first he finds a proven content strategy, and then he builds a product around it. This is the new era of SAS.
But now, speaking of content strategies, that leads me to micro-SAS number three: Crayo.do.ai. Crayo is an AI tool that automatically generates short videos for faceless content creators. Crayo uses AI to write a script, generate voiceovers, captions, effects, background, IM, and music for you. The people using this tool are using it to create videos for the TikTok Creativity Program. TikTok now pays you a dollar for every thousand views you get, and so if you get a million views, you make 1,000 bucks. So this is a great tool to sell because people are using it to make money, and it's a lot easier to convince people to pay for your product when your product makes them money. Another great advantage that they have is that this is faceless content, so it doesn't matter if you're a 14-year-old in your mother's basement or a stay-at-home mom; you can get in on the action. This also allows for dynamic pricing because if people are seeing success with the videos that they're making, then they're going to make more and more videos. So Crayo's tiered pricing system charges based on how many videos you're generating. So in theory, the more money their users make, the more money they can charge. Crayo hasn't even been around for six months, and they're already generating over $300,000 in monthly recurring revenue. Oh, and did I mention all three of the founders are teenagers? Okay, so how did they do this? Well, ARB is a recent podcast guest who's going all-in on Creator-led SAS. So ARB is the technical founder—AKA, he is overseeing development. Then he strategically partnered with two creators: Daniel Bitten and Musa. Daniel is the 15-year-old who made $500,000 a month creating short-form videos on Snapchat, and because of this, he gained a large following of short-form video creators. And Musa is the controversial founder of Media Meta, an online community that teaches people how to make clips from popular streamers, repurpose them by adding split-screen footage, and then posting them on TikTok to make money. Since this is a very controversial topic, every video he posts gets millions of views, which leads to thousands of people joining his paid community. He then teaches everyone in his group how to create short-form content like him, and what tool does Musa recommend they use? You guessed it: Crayo. Since Daniel and Musa already had an audience of short-form video creators, this instantly resulted in thousands of customers for Crayo. This strategy is flat-out genius, and that's why my software development agency, WGY Labs, is going all-in on Creator-led SAS. We have already partnered with two large creators and launched their SAS just last month. I'm going to make a full video on Creator-led SAS in just a few weeks, so if you're interested in that, just go ahead and subscribe to the channel.
Now, if you're not friends with any large creators, don't worry; you can still get in on the action, and that leads me to SAS number four, which is Cast Magic. Cast Magic is a tool that turns podcasts into written content for all your social media platforms. It is very similar to other SAS revamped, but they used a cool strategy, and I just want to share it with you. Cast Magic has grown to over $120,000 per month by leveraging UGC creators. So instead of partnering with large creators or paying influencers with millions of followers, Cast Magic took the opposite approach; they just reach out to everyday people and offer them a few hundred to make a video demonstrating their product. This is called UGC content. UGC stands for user-generated content, and these videos can get hundreds of thousands of views if done correctly. Here's an example of a full-time UGC creator that they hired. So the creators actually post these on their own accounts, and so this is a volume game; the more UGC creators you can pay to make videos, the more money your SAS is going to make. One important thing to note here is the type of video you have them make is very important. That example video that I showed is not a video that says how to use Cast Magic; the video is instead how to create content across all platforms, and then Cast Magic is subtly used as a part of that process. So good marketing is focused on helping a viewer achieve a desired outcome. This is a lot like Shopify and dropshipping; a lot of people make videos on how to start a dropshipping business, and then Shopify just happens to be the tool that you use.
Now moving on to the fifth micro-SAS: this is Plug AI. Plug AI is an app in the Apple App Store that helps people have romantic conversations on dating apps—AKA, it helps you talk to girls on Tinder. This AI wingman has generated millions of dollars in revenue, and it is a simple GPT API, but the value here is that it works natively on your phone. This just goes to show that some well-thought-out prompts for a specific niche use case can create a lot of value for people. Plug AI is $15 a month, and it was created by a group of college friends.
Now, if you're watching this and you want to start a SAS but you think it's pretty complicated, I promise you it's not. I know this because we recently hosted a 10-week SAS challenge where we helped complete beginners go from idea to actually launching their app on Product Hunt. 600 people entered; 47 launched; and three of them ended in the top five on Product Hunt. This resulted in hundreds of users for each of them on their very first day. Oh, and all of these apps were built with no code whatsoever.
So last month, we hosted a two-day in-person workshop in our Arizona office for the winners of the challenge. Our first-place team got fourth on Product Hunt, and their app is Ringley.do.io. Ringley provides customer support AI voice agents to help e-commerce companies handle returns, shipping inquiries, FAQs, and automates general customer support tasks over their phone, and their first day they got 130 users, which is pretty insane considering considering they didn't even know what Bubble was six months ago. Our second-place team got 178 users in their first week with their app, Model Muse. Model Muse is an AI app that generates AI fashion models. Sev created Model Muse to help new apparel brands replicate high-end photo shoots without the high costs. With this tool, you can customize the models to fit the look of your brand in any environment that you choose. And our third team created Smart Riser.do.ai. Smart Riser is an AI video editing tool that automatically cuts video footage for talking-head YouTube creators. So basically, if you make content like mine, it will go through your videos and cut it for you. Video editing is very tedious, and this will save you hours. This is a great idea, and it's no wonder that they got third on Product Hunt. Yuki, Smart Riser's founder, is building in public, so if you want to follow his journey, follow him at YukiInTheCut.
All three of these tools were built by people just like you; none of them had any experience going into the challenge. In just 10 weeks, they were able to build and launch fully functional apps without writing any code whatsoever. Most people say they're going to do something and then never take action, but I am extremely proud of the teams that stuck it through, did the work, and are now seeing the rewards that they deserve. So a huge congratulations to each and every one of you who completed the challenge.
If you're watching this and you want to start your own SAS, now is your chance. Our 10-week program is designed to take you from a complete beginner with no coding experience to actually launching and getting your first 100 users. The program guides you from validating your idea, designing the app, building it in Bubble, to your actual launch day. We show you everything you need to do to build your app step-by-step in order. So if you are serious and you want the exact proven blueprint that these teams followed, click the first link in the description below, join the WGMI Academy, and get access to the 10-week program today.