after six failed sas ideas my seventh made millions this is jacob he built a million-dollar sas 100% with no code so you don't need to know how to actually code you don't need to know code syntax the tool he built it with and grew it from 0 to $1 million arr it's not lovable it's not cursor it's that's the best part of it is anyone can get started and understand the basic frameworks even of programming jacob is proof that you don't need any coding experience to build a profitable sas and not knowing how to code might actually be a huge advantage in this video jacob and alex come on to the channel to break down exactly how they bootstrapped their sas to $1 million in just 10 months plus we'll talk about the secret to building mvps with no code the marketing strategy that exploded the business and how you can get started building apps without code today i'm pat walls and this is starter story all right welcome jacob to starter story tell me a little about the business that you built and what's your story 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 wow that's amazing uh can you give me a further breakdown of how faceless works what it does and some of the numbers behind the business it's a sas that automates faceless social media channels and the user only needs to provide their channel topic and 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 total number of users signed up over 1.1 million and they're all hopping on current and relevant trends right now that's an amazing business that you built but i want to go back a little bit uh what's your background and how do you get to the point of building a sas my background started as an artist i uh started as a songwriter producer and i was releasing music on spotify diving full force into that world so when i graduated college i decided to live at home with my mom and go full force into being a songwriter artist producer i started hiring companies to do marketing for me but i i was just repeatedly disappointed by all the different marketing services that i was getting so i just figured okay i got to go do this myself so i took courses online about how to market my music and with very little budget took my music to close to a million streams and thousands of genuine fans that naturally progressed into helping my friends out in the music business and helping them promote their music which turned into my first business domino it's a music marketing agency and while i love that experience what i realized about doing a service-based business is that my income was directly correlated with my time and i just wanted to scale beyond my agency and help more people without sacrificing more of my time and that made me start looking into sas so you caught the bug and then you came upon an idea that kind of changed everything let's talk about that idea and i actually had you bring your co-founder alex on who was a part of coming up with that idea so alex is joining us right now i'd love to hear from you uh how did you come up with the idea for faceless video yeah so thanks for having me i was getting a lot of faceless videos on my tik tok algorithm i had seen a lot of these videos go extremely viral and my goal originally was just to go viral and i thought to myself i can edit these videos you know they look simple enough they're going viral why not do it myself but then i realized that consistency was a huge problem and coming up with new ideas editing every day became something that was actually pretty difficult to stick to so i had an idea because i realized with you know the advancements in tech that were going on these videos were simple enough that this could be done automatically and so i reached out to jacob and then jacob had the idea to make this into a sas product instead of an internal tool so we could make channels together looking back i'm really glad that i let the algorithm guide me and you know we all are on tik tok 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 so you have the idea now it's time to get building tell me how how did you build faceless video it started with bubble and apis and bubble was the infrastructure for bringing everything together and like with anything else it always starts with can this work from a technical perspective at least you know can i actually find a way to type in text and have this web app output a faceless video so for the first month that's really all this mvp was and that eventually migrated into managing users having a uiux flow a payment processing system a pricing model and turning it into a full-fledged web app okay so tell me why bubble is great for non-developers 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 is plain english and that's the best part of it is 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 and 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 you know i talked to a lot of people who will start their app on bubble but then you know once things get too complicated and they really want to scale they have to move off it which ends up being a huge thing but as i understand you your app which is making a million dollars a year right now is still on bubble why have you decided to stay on bubble if it ain't broke don't fix it it's kind of as simple as that you know we haven't run into any issues that would require a dramatic shift i i ran into a scalability issue once but bubble support fixed it and that was really good piece of mind for staying longterm with them and 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 all right let's pause for a quick moment to talk about ai everyone's hyped up right now about using ai to build apps but right now i'm seeing that most people get stuck in what i call a death spiral of prompting they have lots of chats with the ai but the code never actually works and that's exactly why we're partnering with bubble bubble ai doesn't put your idea into a cookie cutter template it actually blows it up into a full stack working app all you have to do is describe your idea and bubble ai will spin up the entire stack in minutes a polished ui a pre-wired database and workflows that are ready to roll i've been poking around with it to build some stuff for starter story and watching it just build everything while i sit there and enjoy my drink is pretty amazing so if you've been sitting on an idea head to the first link in the description sign up for free and tell bubble ai exactly what you want to build if you do that drop your idea in the comments i'll read through them and let you know which ones are my favorite all right let's dive back into jacob and alex story on that note um what would be some of the opportunities that you see right now for ideas that people could build with bubble or other no code tools i think marketplaces are kind of the first thing that comes to mind actually just because it's the easiest way to manage a front end and a backend through no code it's a little bit more generic but honestly you can build anything if you get creative but even if it's no code that doesn't necessarily mean that it's easy uh you still have to get creative you still need to be resourceful but there's plenty of opportunities with no code and it brings down the barrier to entry enough so that you can start and starting is the biggest hurdle well that's awesome so i want to switch gears to marketing distribution how did you take this idea from zero to a million dollars a year to have success as a b2c app you need to have viral potential your cac customer acquisition costs it's pretty low and so to spend a lot on ads or other methods of promotion is not really viable for a a b2c app that's something i learned with faces that my other products really didn't have we didn't reinvent the wheel we do all of the usual stuff you know we do seo we do ads influencers organic content but the key is really getting your messaging right and it's nothing fancy it's just good execution so i come from a film making background and that's a lot about storytelling so if you can crack storytelling then you can really sell a product what you want to do is kickstart telling that story with ads influencer collaborations and other things that's what jacob and i did our first advertisement for faceless video was a twitter thread that we spent i don't know like 200 bucks on and we got hundreds of thousands of views and kind of instantly went viral um and that was very very helpful for us and also 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 and jacob also knows this but word of mouth is consistently one of our top five attribution sources so like on our customer attribution thing people will just type in friend so you know people actually like the product but if you have something that's truly original and solves a pain point especially around an emerging trend people will notice if you're first to market with something so that's what we kind of centered our whole marketing strategy around is showing how are we different from what's out there and then also this is how you can tap into this existing trend in a new way so you can lay the foundation with traditional marketing like ads influencers and all these things but virality happens when the product kind of speaks for itself and you have the proper messaging and all of the incentives are lined up i want to switch gears a little bit and talk about uh this business that you built and how it's impacted you uh you had a lot of failed businesses before then you had this thing kind of take off i'd love to hear more about that experience and how it changed things sas is incredible i think that's kind of the first thing i i have to say i went from a servicebased business into into sas and it just allows you to make more money while getting your time back and that that's huge with a properly running system your business will make money for you while you sleep that doesn't mean it's hands off though while you're awake of course but i i was just amazed by how the system can really work when it connects something else that i realized a little bit maybe more on the personal side is it's important to make sure that what you're pursuing is for the love of doing it because when times get hard it it's easy to quit it also gives us a competitive advantage because jacob and i truly love doing this business and we're obsessed with it we're always thinking about it we're always texting each other about the business and if it's not truly something you love someone who loves doing it they'll always surpass you you have this successful business you get to sit down and work on it every day you're passionate about it what does an actual day in the life look like for you you have a million- dollar business what does that look like every day it kind of sits into two different buckets i'm either looking into ways to cut costs make things more efficient improve the product or bring on completely new features integrations and partnerships that's kind of what a day in the life looks like is just constant optimizations i'm still doing bug reports too so there's of course the mundane side of things as well for me it's more of a balancing act it's just finding new ways to grow while keeping our existing channels running smoothly so you know creative strategy working with our new team as jacob said managing partnerships so it's just figuring out how to scale while also not breaking what's already working thanks for sharing that last question we ask all founders is if you can stand on jacob and alex's shoulders when you're just starting out before the success what would you tell them there's there's three things that come to mind for me the the first is build from day zero optimizing for the best case scenario if a 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 the other thing is to not get too 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 maybe the idea wasn't good enough failing fast is a win-win it there's no lose scenario with that the third thing that comes to mind is to stay bootstrapped cuz staying bootstrapped forces you to build lean and 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 so i've been doing this since i've been young i've always built things but don't watch generic tutorials just pick a project that you're genuinely excited about and then learn everything you need to make that project real you'll learn you know 10 times faster by building something you actually care about and also you can leverage your existing skills that you think might not apply to building a business i don't think our marketing would have been as strong if i didn't have a storytelling background and i don't think that you know a lot of what jacob did you know come to fruition if he didn't have his background in the music industry and the advertising industry thank you alex thank you jacob for coming on the business you guys built is amazing i'm sure it's going to keep growing the fact you built it on bubble is also amazing i haven't heard of that before but i think that's awesome thanks for coming on starter story and have a great day thank you so much for having us thank you i love jacob's story because he went from having basically no coding experience to building a million-dollar app it's unreal to see how these ai tools are turning everyone into a builder and how they're getting better every single day this is why we've been working on something called starter story build it's the place to learn about how to build with ai and how to turn your idea into a simple working production app that gets users and potentially can make money in just 12 days we'll guide you through the basics of building with ai and you'll get the skills to bring your ideas to life if you're interested in checking out starter story build check the link in the description to learn more thank you guys again for watching i'll see you in the next one peace