How Adrian Grew a Niche SaaS to $10k MRR in 12 Months

In this article, we'll break down how you can grow a very niche SaaS to 5-digit MRR with value-based content, manual outreach, and SEO.

Meet Adrian, 34 years old, a former psychology major who learned to code in his late 20s in an SF bootcamp. He worked at Lyft, then spent 3 years as a software engineer in Utah.

In Feb 2022, he quit his job with $40K in savings to pursue his dream of becoming an entrepreneur.

Now he runs a SaaS that makes over $20k/month.

From the beginning, Adrian chose the harder path. Instead of building a SaaS and trying to sell it from day one, he spent a year growing his online presence, building his reputation, and earning trust.

He wanted to be well-known as the "Web Scraping Guy", so he started posting useful tips, workflows, and information related to scraping.

Because he was consistently providing a bunch of value to people, it was just a matter of time before he got a viral hit, with over 1,400 likes and 500k views:

On top of creating content, he was also freelancing on Upwork to pay the bills.

By the end of 2023, he had grown his X following to 6.4k, mostly thanks to a few viral tweets.

Then, in mid-2024, he decided to monetize his audience by launching a web scraping course:

Since he had an audience and had already built trust, he managed to make over $20k in just 3 days.

But then reality hit.

On the days when his tweets went viral or when he was promoting the course, sales were coming in strong.

But without viral hits, there was silence.

That’s when he realized that relying on the algorithm and constantly promoting a course wasn’t sustainable long-term.

Around that time, one of his followers sent him a micro-acquisition listing for another scraping API that was making over $30k/month using SEO alone.

Since Adrian had experience with scraping, he decided to take inspiration from that idea. That’s how ScrapeCreators was born.

The idea was simple: build an API that scrapes social media platforms and offers it at a lower price than competitors.

So he built the first version, wrote a simple documentation in Notion, and started preparing to grow it.

He ended 2024 with $57k in course sales and a clear goal: grow ScrapeCreators to $10k/month.

The hardest part of building a SaaS is getting the first thousand dollars in revenue. And one of the hardest to scale, but proven to work, ways to get there is manual outreach.

That’s exactly how Adrian got his first paying customer.

He made a post where he scraped someone’s website. The owner reached out, Adrian introduced him to ScrapeCreators, and boom: first sale.

His first two customers were:

- A link-in-bio tool that used his API to pre-load user data like avatars and follower counts.
- An influencer marketing SaaS that used his API to check influencer stats.

After reaching his first $100 from those two customers, Adrian started actively reaching out to people through X DMs and comments.

Whenever he saw someone launching a SaaS that might need social media scraping, he would mention ScrapeCreators.

But instead of simply pitching how great his SaaS was, he used a smarter strategy: he let people try it for free and see the value for themselves.

Here’s the exact DM template he used:

Instead of being pushy, he focused on building a strong product that solved a specific problem. For other SaaS owners, the offer was a no-brainer because building your own scraping infrastructure takes a lot of time and money.

To this day, Adrian isn’t afraid to offer free credits when people want to try the product or when they run into a bug. This kind of attitude builds extra trust with customers and makes them far less likely to consider switching to competitors.

There are endless opportunities, ideas, and shiny objects competing for an entrepreneur’s attention. That’s why focus has become one of the most important skills for any founder.

At the time, Adrian was posting on X, freelancing, building ScrapeCreators, and launching other mini projects.

He was making some money here and there, but he realized that without laser focus, he wouldn’t be able to build something meaningful.

So he decided to focus on promoting and growing one thing: his SaaS. He went back to the same value-driven scraping content that had already worked for him before.

He also started running data giveaways and promoting his SaaS in the first comment under each post.

By combining content with manual outreach, Adrian managed to grow ScrapeCreators to a few thousand dollars in MRR within 6 months.

Since ScrapeCreators is a very niche product, Adrian understood that SEO could become a strong growth channel.

People who need to scrape a specific social media platform will usually search for it on Google or ask an AI tool for help.

So he invested time into creating 70+ blog posts and free tools designed to rank when people search for social media scraping APIs.

For the next 12 months, he stayed focused on just a few things:

- Creating niche content and naturally promoting his API inside it.
- Using DMs and comments to promote his API and let people try it for free.
- Building SEO and GEO pages targeting people already searching for social media scraping APIs.

By staying laser-focused on one product and showing up consistently every day, he grew ScrapeCreators to over $10k MRR in just 12 months.

Today, ScrapeCreators is doing over $20k/month, and Adrian doesn’t plan to stop there.

Before you build the product, build the audience that will care about it.

Adrian didn’t try to become a general “SaaS guy.” He became known for web scraping. He posted useful tips, workflows, examples, and breakdowns around one topic until people started associating him with that problem.

You can do the same in any niche.

- If you are building for recruiters, become known for recruiting workflows.
- If you are building for content creators, become known for building content creation workflows.
- If you are building for Shopify stores, become known for solving e-commerce growth problems.

Your goal is simple: make people think of you when they face a problem your SaaS could solve.

Start posting:

This builds trust and helps you to grow an audience, before you ever ask people to buy.

This process takes time, but statistically, most founders spend years failing before something finally works. So why not spend that time building an audience and earning trust?

Once you understand the market, look for a painful problem people are already spending money on.

Adrian got the idea after seeing another niche product doing serious revenue through SEO. That showed him people were already paying for this type of solution.

You don’t need to invent a completely new category.

Your goal is to find proof that people already spend money or time solving the problem.

Then build a simpler, cheaper, faster, or more focused version.

The first few customers usually won’t come from SEO or a big launch.

They come from manual outreach.

Adrian got his first customers by talking to SaaS founders who need to scrape social media. Then he started reaching out through DMs and comments whenever he saw someone who might need the product.

Do the same.

Be present in the communities where your customers stay.

Then reach out with a simple message:

In the early days, don’t be afraid to give free access.

Adrian offered free usage credits because he knew that once the right customer tried the product, they could understand the value quickly.

This works because early customers are taking a risk on you.

They don’t know if your product is reliable yet. They don’t know if you will keep improving it or if it’s worth the time.

So reduce the risk. Help them get a certain result first for free.

If they get value, turning them into a paid customer becomes much easier.

Adrian created dozens of pages and free tools targeting people who were already searching for solutions.

Don’t write broad educational content for everyone. Write content for people who already have buying intent.

Target searches like:

Create pages like:

Each page should help the reader and naturally point to your product as the easier solution.

You don’t need massive traffic.

For a niche SaaS, even a page that gets 50 qualified visitors per month can be valuable if those visitors are close to buying.

As a starting point, we recommend this free Ahrefs SEO YouTube course.

This is the boring part, but it is where the money comes from.

Adrian stayed focused on ScrapeCreators long enough for it to start working.

For 12 months, keep repeating:

You don’t need 10 marketing channels, 5 AI agents, and 3 YouTube channels to succeed.

You need one painful problem, one clear product, and a few repeatable ways to reach people who already need it.