SaasRock · Alexandro Martinez Garcia

See how Alex turned SaasRock into a $6.5K per month business.

July 22, 2024

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Alexandro Martinez Garcia
SaasRock
Started in 2022
$6.5K MRR
200+ paying customers
Bootstrapped‍
SaasRock

What's your backstory?

I'm from Guadalajara, Mexico, where I studied Computer Science at UNIVA. I was always a step ahead of my classmates because I had a cheat code: my dad is a freelance software developer.

I always admired how my dad worked from home. Occasionally, he travelled to the capital by plane but always tried to return the same day. Subconsciously, I wanted that lifestyle for my future family. When I turned 17 (I'm 29 now), I suggested we migrate his application written in i4GL to Winforms. Though he didn't believe I could do it initially, I proved myself by leading a team for three years in a successful migration. Since then, this has been my day job. My team of three developers left during the pandemic, so now I handle miscellaneous tickets, some taking just a minute and others requiring days of development. This was my team.

I also won a local competition that gave me the boost to be a full-time software engineer.

With my free time, I started developing boilerplates. I began with netcoresaas.com (for . NET), then moved on to saas frontends (for React, Svelte, and Vue), and finally saasrock.com (for Remix).

What does your company do and how did you come up with the idea?

My product: SaasRock, the best production-ready Remix boilerplate for SaaS apps.

I come from a Winforms background, which means I was only targeting window users so I made the decision to move to the web. My first web technology was Vue with Bootstrap (read more about this here). I really liked Vue + .NET combo, so much that I made a boilerplate and called it NetcoreSaas. But I heard all the time that React is the most popular library, and it was only after I tried it that I understood why.

After years of trying a bunch of frameworks and libraries, I found Remix + Tailwind CSS + Prisma ORM to be the best combination for a SaaS starter kit, I called this boilerplate "SaasRock".

How did you get your first 10 customers/subscribers?

I offered my SaaS kit v0.0.1 for free for 24 hours. I got 1,000 downloads/emails there. This helped me as I didn't launch it with 0 prospects.

How did you align your product or service with your target customers' needs?

Remix was trending, it was the Next.js contender, so as with any new good tech tool, everyone wanted to try it. Since Remix is for building websites, a Full-stack SaaS boilerplate made sense.

I initially set the price to a one-time payment of $250, but given that this was not my first boilerplate, it could be abandoned. I made the decision to make it a subscription instead ($200/m for the core edition and $500/m for the enterprise edition), this way I would be motivated to deliver monthly updates.

It was up until I reached 1.0 this year (February 2024) that I switched to one-time payments again ($500 for core and $2,000 for enterprise).

End result: 219 paying customers in 2 years = $497 average customer value.

How did you gain your first 100 customers and what platforms or methods did you use?

1. SEO

My main source of customers is Google (with good SEO), but I got my first 100 customers by publishing articles in dev.to and medium, and by sharing Remix-related stuff on Twitter.

2. Videos

I've published 42 YouTube videos (518 subscribers) where I do guides, quick tutorials, building a SaaS series, and changelog updates.

3. Community

I built a community of 300 members in Discord where I post what I'm doing or want to do.

4. Social proof

I created a Trustpilot account to get reviews (5 stars from 7 reviews so far).

5. Tweets

I've posted 106 times on Twitter (295 followers) where I share updates, revenue or remix-related content.

6. Building in public

I've shared how I built my SaaS apps: DataLang.io, Indexer.so, and EarlyBee.io.

What distribution channels did you try that didn’t work?

1. Newsletter

I tried growing my newsletters but I haven't been able to reach 300 subscribers, I'm stuck at 270. I think my mistake here is sharing what I've done in my paid product, instead of providing free value like coding/design tutorials.

2. ProductHunt

I launched on Product Hunt and got only 175 upvotes. I thought that by not launching pre-1.0 I was doing SaasRock a favor, but it was the other way around. Don't wait too long to launch and don't overthink it.

3. Reddit

I posted a few things in Reddit but they got deleted, marked as self-promotion.

What tools, software, or resources have been crucial in scaling your business?

- Stripe: Subscriptions and Payments.
- Postmark: Transactional Emails.
- ConvertKit: Marketing Emails.
- Crisp Chat: Customer Messaging.
- Loom: quick tutorial/demo videos.
- Canva: Images, Logos and Illustrations.

How did you shift from a side hustle to full-time entrepreneurship?

I've got big job offers (+100k/y) but turned down every single one of them because my goal is to build a SaaS that generates those numbers. I haven't been able to, and although SaasRock is half-way there, I'd love to have a non-technical product at those numbers (such as DataLang.io, my latest SaaS app).

Entrepreneurship is hard, you dedicate thousands of hours in a project that might fail. I tried over and over until it worked. So I've learned to lower my expectations on every new project I launch.

Knowing this, I'm meticulous about the things I'll work on, I don't spend time on a dead project anymore. But I definitely wouldn't have this "permission to fail" if I didn't have a backup job (the ERP I migrated/built with my dad and my team).

The main benefit for me of being my own boss is also my biggest enemy: freedom. Having the ability to decide what to do everyday sometimes leads to spending a whole day playing Rocket League. I often find myself with decision paralysis: too many things I could do that I don't start anything.