How Bank K. grew e-commerce SaaS to $10k MRR in 3 months

In this email, we'll break down how you can build a $10k MRR SaaS with a tiny niche newsletter and strategic collaborations.

Meet Bank K., an entrepreneur from Thailand.

Before building a SaaS, Bank was a print-on-demand seller himself. After some time, he noticed one specific workflow that should have been automated.

So he built PODtomatic - print-on-demand automation. It creates and uploads products to Amazon, Walmart, and Shopify.

Before building SaaS Bank worked as a print-on-demand seller himself. Even though this was his main occupation, he was dedicating some of his time to his personal blog, Tiny Marketing Lab.

He was promoting it via Facebook groups. He joined a ton of print-on-demand supplier groups and shared his print-on-demand results inside them. Wins. Numbers. Screenshots. People wanted to know how he did it. They clicked through to the blog. From there, they joined his list.

Today, Facebook group reach is way lower. So now he mainly relies on SEO from blog posts that rank for print-on-demand searches, like this one:

Over a few years, he was sending weekly emails where he documented his journey selling print-on-demand services, his marketing strategies, what worked and what didn't.

On top of that, he was sharing his sales results in active Facebook groups and getting traffic to his blog from there.

You can replicate this strategy in any niche and do the same thing in Skool communities, Discord channels, on X, Reddit, Short and Long Form Content, etc.

Bank K. had to upload every product by hand. It was taking a lot of time, so he hired a VA to scale.

Two problems showed up fast. It was expensive. Paying someone for hours of work each day adds up.

And humans make mistakes. Wrong design. Typos in titles. Wrong descriptions. Each mistake costs a listing or a refund.

So he wrote down the exact process he'd been running for years. Step by step. Then he invited a friend who codes well to join him, and they built PODtomatic around that workflow.

Bank K. didn't really need to validate the idea. He was building the tool for himself. And I knew other print-on-demand sellers were doing the same manual work.

He knew from day one that this is what print-on-demand sellers in his space want.

When the first version of the product was ready, it was time to start selling it.

At that time, his email list was around 1,600 people.

He used the following email sequence for the launch:

The trick that makes it powerful is that he never blasts the launch to the whole list. He uses the presell + reminder to segment people, then only sends the promo to people who actively raised their hand and doesn't spam the whole list.

Here are his stats from that first launch:

The last few emails pull the average down. People stop opening once they've seen the offer many times. The first few post-segment emails ran much higher.

Bank K's list of 1,600 was enough to make the launch profitable, but not enough to get him to $10K MRR on its own. So he reached out to two print-on-demand suppliers. Since he was already working through their platforms, it wasn’t a cold DM, he had some initial trust.

The deal was straightforward: the suppliers would send their users to PODtomatic, and Bank would handle the rest. The fit was perfect on paper. Their users were 100% his ICP.

This collaboration is what got PODtomatic to $10K MRR fast.

But the users coming from partners didn't really understand the Bank's strategy. They tried PODtomatic, didn't see big results in their first month, and churned.

Meanwhile, the people who came from his own email list stuck around for years, as they had been reading his emails for months or years before they bought. They understood how print-on-demand actually works and that it takes time to get results.

That’s why these days, Bank K. mainly focuses on its email list as a source of customers.