How Nicholas went from 0 to $1K MRR in 8 days

Today, we'll break down how a Belgian indie founder launched a product, hit $1K MRR in 8 days and $16.5K MRR in 5 months, by figuring out one specific paywall move that most founders get wrong from day one, plus a few other tricks that turn a 2-day landing page into 242 signups in 24 hours.

Meet Nicholas, a Belgian indie hacker.

Nicholas spent a couple of years before this building his first app, Crumb. He tried to use SEO to grow it, but all existing tools were pretty complex, and he was constantly thinking that there should be a better way.

After he stopped working on Crumb, Nicholas started experimenting a lot with new ideas and vibe coding products really fast. He built a couple of small tools, including one that actually made a few sales, and he was constantly trying SEO-driven growth experiments.

So he built ChatSEO - an AI assistant that connects to your Google Search Console and tells you exactly what to fix on your site, in chat instead of a dashboard.

In this email, we'll break down the exact strategy that took ChatSEO from idea → 242 signups in 24h → $1K MRR in 8 days → $16.5K MRR today.

Even 20% of a successful business is way better than 100% of nothing. Nicholas understands that, so at the beginning he reached out to Paul, someone well known in the French SEO space, and pitched him a few early ideas.

They tested working together on smaller SEO experiments first, just to see if they were compatible, and it went well. Nicholas and Paul had complementary profiles: Nicholas is very fast, creative, and idea-heavy, while Paul is much more structured and consistent.

After that, Nicholas went to France to meet Paul in person, and during that time, the ChatSEO idea really solidified: one product that combines Google Search Console and external SEO data into a conversational interface that makes SEO simpler, faster, and more actionable.

But they needed one more piece of the puzzle - a technical co-founder. They did around 15 calls with developers to find the right one and eventually brought on Leo, starting with a freelance setup to test collaboration. He turned out to be extremely fast and strong technically, so they formalized the team.

After coming back from France, Nicholas built a simple landing page in 2 days, and he and Paul started posting about it on LinkedIn.

Within a week, they collected 242 emails for their waitlist:

That was the first real validation, after which they started looking for a developer and building a product.

The main acquisition channels were their LinkedIn posts. That’s where Paul’s French SEO audience helped a lot.

In about a month and a half, they had a working prototype. They opened the first beta to ~100 people from the waitlist with full access, no limits and for free. Usage was heavy (and AI costs were high), but the signal was clear: people kept coming back.

They fixed some bugs, closed the beta after a few weeks, and added a paywall.

The first paywall was the obvious freemium playbook: 5 credits on day 1, then 3 free credits per day. Two days in, conversion was 0.9%. Brutal.

Instead of guessing, Nicholas went into the data. He took every message users had sent, asked GPT to graph users-vs-messages-sent, and looked for the activation event, the moment users "got it."

The signal was clean: between message 1 and message 5, users were dropping off. But anyone who hit 5 messages stayed.

The fix was one change with two parts: kill the daily free credits, and move the paywall to the 6th message, right after the activation event.

Conversion went from 0.9% → 10% almost overnight. ChatSEO hit $1K MRR in 8 days.

Once ChatSEO was live and generating real revenue, Nicholas built one more growth engine, an outbound system that uses ChatSEO itself to make every cold message hyper-specific.

The pipeline runs automatically:

Here's what a real message looks like:

The link drops the prospect straight into ChatSEO, where they can see the full SEO analysis of their own site. The personalisation isn't fake, it's a real opportunity on their real website, generated by the product they're being sold.

This system pulls a ~30% reply rate.

The big lesson: most "personalised outbound" means "I used your first name."

Real personalisation means the message contains a specific, valuable insight the recipient didn't already know, and your product is what generated it. Build the outbound loop around your product, not separate from it.

While outbound was running in the background, the main growth engine for ChatSEO was Nicholas's LinkedIn content, specifically, tactical posts with a comment-gated lead magnet.

The format is simple: write a genuinely useful post about something Nicholas actually built (like "I just built a full Claude SEO team"), attach a real Notion playbook, and gate the playbook behind a comment.

Comment "RANK" → auto-DM sends the full Notion doc.

By over-delivering with the free content (ex. Claude SEO Squad: 12 Copy-Paste Agents), Nicholas turned LinkedIn into a machine that hit 1M+ views in ~2 months, and it drives most of ChatSEO's paying customers today.

He tested the same format on Reddit, with the same lead magnets, and similar 1M+ views in 2 months, but the conversion to paying users was much weaker, so he mostly shifted focus back to LinkedIn.

Combined, LinkedIn + YouTube (Paul's channel) + word of mouth = ~80% of ChatSEO's paying customers today.

That's it for today! If you have some feedback, questions or future article requests, just reply to this email. We read every message.

See you next week!