How To Build “Boring” SaaS That Cannot Fail: Inside Mike’s 200k MRR Playbook

Most SaaS stories sound the same.

New idea, big market, fresh stack, a flurry of launch posts, then silence when the graph does not do what the founder hoped.

Mike, an Australian founder, runs a completely different playbook.

Right now he has five SaaS products doing a bit over $200,000 in monthly recurring revenue, fully bootstrapped, with a tiny team and no outside capital.

The interesting part is not the revenue, it is the system.

Every app follows almost the same framework. He is so confident in it that he describes his stuff as “ideas that cannot fail”.

This article is about what Mike actually does, where his playbook is genuinely smart for bootstrappers, where the data quietly disagrees (especially around lifetime deals), and how to adapt his framework if you are solo or in a two person team. The aim is not to worship his story. It is to steal what works, shrink it to your size, and dodge the parts that will quietly blow you up.

Mike’s portfolio of boring winners

Mike does not build “next generation AI copilots for creators”.

He builds things like this:

None of these are exotic ideas. They sit in well known categories where businesses already spend money. There are incumbents. The job to be done is boring and clear.

That is not an accident. It is the core of his strategy.

You can summarize his philosophy in one line:

Pick problems that are already proven, then build a simpler, nicer tool around them with a small founding team and a clear profit split.

To see how that works in practice, you need to look at the playbook he repeats.

The 10 step playbook Mike uses for every app

Mike says he follows the same ten step process whenever he launches a new SaaS product. It is built to remove guesswork, bring in cash quickly, and then let recurring revenue take over while the team stays tiny.

1. Pick an idea that has been done before

He does not chase novelty. He deliberately looks for categories where multiple competitors already exist, customers are clearly paying for something, and the tools people use are clunky, dated, or overloaded.

In other words, he wants proven demand plus weak incumbents. The risk is not on “does anyone care about this problem”. The risk is on “can we build a better version and get it in front of people”.

2. Define a “good enough” MVP from competitor data

He works backwards from what is already in the market.

He reads competitor marketing pages and docs, looks at reviews and community posts to see what users complain about, and separates the features customers actually rely on from the ones that are just marketing bullets.

The MVP that comes out of that is the minimum feature set that a real customer could run their workflow on. It is designed to be usable rather than impressive. He does not try to hit feature parity before launch, he tries to hit “I can realistically use this for my job”.

3. Sell a lifetime deal early

Once the MVP is usable, he sells it. Not as a free beta, and not even as a normal subscription at first, but as a lifetime deal.

The shape is usually simple. A one off fee, for example 59 or 100 dollars, in exchange for lifetime access under specific terms.

That gives him two important things very early. First, real users who have put money down and therefore are more likely to set it up properly and complain loudly when it breaks. Second, a chunk of cash to fund hosting, more design, and content.

4. Never give free accounts

Mike is pretty absolute on this point. If people pay for it, they will use it. If they do not pay, they are far more likely to drift away, churn silently, and still take support time if they ever do come back with questions.

He does not have a forever free plan to “get traction”. He is happy to give discounts, lifetime deals, and special early pricing, but every user has to have some skin in the game. When you are small, signal beats vanity metrics.

5. Run private lifetime deals in niche communities

Before going near big marketplaces, he goes niche.

He promotes a private lifetime deal where his target users already hang out. That includes Reddit communities, Facebook groups, X, and dedicated lifetime deal communities. For Frill, this private LTD launch alone brought in around thirty thousand dollars worth of sales and a wave of early users.

This part is very manual. It is a lot of posting, replying, answering questions, and generally being around. The trade is time for learning and a bit of cash, not pure revenue.

6. Use LTD money to start content immediately

The moment there is money in the bank, he starts buying something that compounds over years rather than weeks. That means content.

He invests in landing pages aimed at specific use cases, pages like “alternative to [competitor]” and “[competitor] vs [competitor]”, and blog posts that explain the problem and solution in plain language.

He wants Google, and increasingly AI systems, to have something concrete to index as early as possible. Even if traffic is low at first, this content is infrastructure. The sooner it is live, the sooner it can start working for you.

If you understand the problem and the customer but do not want to live inside keyword tools all day, a product like Outrank manages web content for you.

7. Launch on AppSumo or similar platforms

Once the product is stable and some content is live, he moves to marketplaces such as AppSumo.

There are usually two paths. One is a standard marketplace listing where you pay a lower fee and do most of the promotion yourself. The other is a “select” style launch where the platform promotes you more aggressively in exchange for a bigger cut of each sale.

Either way, the logic is trade. You give up a large chunk of revenue on each lifetime code in return for a big spike in users and cash. That spike, in his model, extends runway and amplifies feedback and reviews.

8. Run one final private LTD and close it forever

After the big marketplace run, he does one more private lifetime deal on his own list.

Prices are higher than the early deals. The positioning is very clear. This is the last chance, it will not be offered again. He promotes it heavily to people who have already seen the tool or sat on the fence.

Then he shuts the door. No more LTDs. From that point on, new customers are subscription only.

9. Turn LTD customers into a review engine

At this point he has a few hundred or a few thousand lifetime users. They are not just customers, they are his review army.

He actively asks them to leave honest reviews on Trustpilot and G2, encourages them to answer questions on Reddit and other forums, and nudges them to share their use cases in public.

Lifetime buyers are often surprisingly willing to help. They are locked in for life, so they have every reason to want the product to succeed and improve. Their reviews and forum posts become a distribution asset.

10. Shift focus fully to MRR

Once the final LTD is closed and the review sites are seeded, everything becomes about recurring revenue.

New users come in on monthly or annual plans. The cash from the LTD phase becomes the runway that pays for content, support, and incremental development. The team stays small, there is no hiring binge, and there is no attempt to pour money into paid ads.

Mike’s model is simple. Keep the founding team small, avoid over hiring, pull profits out as salaries and distributions once MRR is strong enough, and accept that this is a “big salary, not big exit” game.

He has used this to build a portfolio of five boring SaaS apps that together generate over 200k MRR. The question now is what a solo founder or two person team should actually copy from this, and what should be treated with more caution.

What is actually worth copying from Mike’s playbook

Some parts of this framework are almost default best practice if you are bootstrapped. Others are power tools that can do real damage if you mis handle them.

Boring B2B is a feature, not a bug

Mike’s deliberate choice to live in “boring” B2B is not just personal taste. It is a pattern you see again and again in bootstrapped wins.

The products that quietly get to ten or twenty thousand MRR tend to be narrow and specific. A small SaaS that helps a certain kind of contractor get paid. An add on that makes a specific ERP less painful. A simple dashboard that solves one gnarly reporting job inside a niche industry.

If your realistic target is five to fifty thousand MRR, total addressable market is a distraction. You do not need a hundred million potential users. You need a few hundred to a few thousand organizations with a painful recurring problem and a budget to fix it.

A good way to frame niche selection is:

• Start with a big category, for example CRM, analytics, HR, project management
• Drop down to a boring sub category, for example “maintenance scheduling for warehouses”
• Then zoom further into one specific workflow where the pain is highest

You are not trying to convince anyone that the problem exists. You are trying to be the obvious, simple choice for people who already spend money and already complain about the tools they have.

Once you have a hypothesis like “maintenance dashboards for mid sized warehouse operators”, you still need actual humans to talk to. Use
Apollo to find contact details for potential clients and contact them directly.

Category creation is almost never your job

There is a seductive story about “creating a category”. The company that coins a new label, convinces the market to see a problem a new way, and then captures a huge share of the rewards.

Those companies do exist, and they tend to raise a lot of money, burn a lot of money, and spend years on education, events, and content before the economics make sense.

If you are building on your own savings or on a modest runway, that is usually not a game you can afford to play.

Mike’s approach is the opposite of category creation. He steps into categories that already exist, finds segments where incumbents are weak or overcomplicated, and focuses on being the easiest, clearest choice for that specific user.

For a solo or tiny team, that is usually the more rational move. You get to skip the “teaching the world a new concept” part and go straight to “here is a better way to do the thing you already know you have to do”.

Lifetime deals are a scalpel, not a funding round

The most controversial part of Mike’s framework is his heavy use of lifetime deals.

On the surface, the appeal is obvious. You see big sales numbers, you get a rush of early adopters, and you suddenly have cash to play with. It can feel like raising a small round without investors.

Underneath, the trade offs are harsh.

When you sell through marketplaces, you usually give up a large share of the revenue. That means the headline numbers are misleading. A launch that “did six figures” might leave you with thirty or forty percent of that in your own account after commission and refunds.

The customers you pick up are also different. Lifetime buyers are often deal hunters. Some will become power users and advocates, which is great. A lot will try it once and never come back, but still sit in your database and occasionally open support tickets.

The big structural problem is that lifetime customers do not expand. They have already paid you for everything upfront. That means they drag down the one metric that really matters for long term health, which is net revenue retention. They add to your support load and infrastructure costs without adding to revenue anymore.

In contrast, a normal subscription customer may start small and then grow. They might add seats, move up a plan, or buy an add on. Over time, they can generate more and more revenue without any extra acquisition cost.

Here is the core trade off.

So what do you do with this as a bootstrapper who is tempted by LTDs but does not want to sell the future to fund the present?

You treat lifetime deals as a sharp, controlled tool rather than as a default.

You cap the number of lifetime codes you sell. You limit the time window. You consider version locking the deal, for example “lifetime access to everything in v1”, so that you have room to sell future expansions. You reinvest the cash into content, UX, onboarding, and the subscription machine, and you move to normal pricing as soon as you can.

It is completely valid to skip marketplaces entirely and instead run a small “founding member” deal or discounted annual plan directly to your own audience. The key is that LTDs should buy you learning and a bit of runway, not trap you under a mountain of forever users.

Platform risk and AI

Mike has a hard rule that he will not build “AI businesses”. On the surface that sounds extreme. In context it is about control.

Over the last few years, a lot of products have discovered what platform risk actually feels like in practice. Platforms changing API pricing or rules and killing third party apps in a single announcement. AI providers adjusting pricing, rate limits, and output behavior. Costs that scale with compute, not with user count, which wreck seat based pricing models if you do not adjust.

If your whole product is essentially a wrapper over one provider’s API, then your cost base, your margin, and in some cases even your product behavior are out of your hands. That is not a great position to be in if you are not sitting on a huge cash buffer.

Mike avoids that entirely by sticking to boring products that do not depend on any single external model for their core value.

You do not have to be as absolutist as he is to learn from the instinct.

A healthier stance for 2025 is to avoid irreplaceable dependencies. If you use AI, you architect things so that you can switch between models or providers with a reasonable amount of work. You price based on usage in a way that makes sense with your underlying costs. You make sure that part of your value is in your data, workflows, and UX, not just in “what the model spits out”.

The rule of thumb is simple. AI as a feature that amplifies your product is fine. AI as your entire product with a thin UI and no moat is a lot more fragile.

Retention and UX as the quiet growth engine

One of Mike’s strongest beliefs is that good design sells. He always wants a designer on the founding team. He wants developers, designers, and whoever runs the product to think about the user experience as a whole, not just their piece of it.

That is not about pretty screens. It is about retention.

For a bootstrapped SaaS, the ability to keep customers and grow the revenue you get from them over time is more important than clever acquisition tricks. If your existing customers expand a little bit each year and very few leave, your revenue compounds even if your new signups are not impressive.

Bad UX kills that compounding quietly. A confusing onboarding flow, an overloaded settings page, or a dashboard that tries to do everything at once are all small friction points that push people back to whatever they were using before.

A product with clean, obvious flows and fast time to value does the opposite. It makes people feel in control quickly. They see a win, they build a habit, and they stop shopping around.

In practice, that looks like shorter onboarding flows that push people to one clear outcome, less cluttered interfaces with fewer decisions, inline help so people do not have to leave the app to find answers, and small feedback cues that show something is happening when they click a button or submit a form.

One of the easiest wins for UX and marketing is to stop every page change going through a backend developer. With something like Webflow.

If you are building a boring SaaS in a boring niche, UX is your main weapon. You are not going to win by having three more features. You are going to win by making something that does not feel like work to use.

How to adapt Mike’s framework to your own situation

There is a catch with all of this. Mike usually starts each product with four cofounders. A front end developer, a back end developer, a designer, and himself as the product and “everything else” person. They split equity equally and share profits.

Most people reading this will not have that setup.

So the question becomes how to adapt the spirit of the playbook if you are solo or in a tiny team.

If you are a solo technical founder

You can build. You probably do not love marketing.

The parts of Mike’s playbook that fit you well are his idea selection, his insistence on charging from day one, and his obsession with UX. You can absolutely copy the “boring B2B with proven demand” approach, the “no free accounts” mindset, and the early content push.

Where you want to be careful is on the LTD front and the amount of manual community work you commit to.

A realistic version for a solo dev looks like this.

Pick one painful workflow in a boring B2B niche where you already have some understanding. Build a tight MVP based on competitor reviews and conversations with potential users. Launch it as a paid beta or a very small capped lifetime deal to fifty to a hundred users instead of going straight to a big marketplace.

Take the cash from that and spend it on UI cleanup and a handful of strong SEO pages, for example a clear homepage, a feature page, and one or two “alternative to” pages. Spend a disproportionate amount of your time watching early customers use the product and fixing friction. Move new customers onto monthly or annual plans as soon as you can.

You are aiming for something that feels much more like a small stable product with slow but steady growth than like a dramatic launch.

If you are building solo, you are not going to find three permanent cofounders for every project. You will probably rent talent in small chunks. A marketplace like Fiverr

If you are a solo non technical founder

You cannot build the tool yourself, but you probably handle sales, relationships, and content more naturally.

The part of Mike’s approach that maps best to you is his niche discipline. The danger for you is over indexing on branding and content before the product ever works.

Your version of the framework starts with talking to people in a boring niche and validating a specific workflow in public. You write and post about the problem, you talk to potential customers, you see who actually has budget and urgency.

Instead of a big lifetime deal, you sell pre sales or deposits. For example, you presell a founding plan to ten customers at a discount in exchange for their commitment and feedback.

You then hire a freelance developer and designer to build the smallest possible version that can deliver the promised result. You keep the scope brutal. One persona, one core workflow, one main outcome.

You launch with discounted annual plans rather than lifetime deals. Your job is not to chase hundreds of customers. It is to get ten people genuinely using the product, hitting the outcome you promised, and willing to send you a paragraph you can put on the homepage.

You then lean into your strengths. You do sales calls, you write case studies, you use content as both marketing and continuous validation.

If you are a two person team

A developer and a marketer or operator together are probably the closest to Mike’s four founder setup in spirit, just compressed.

You have the ability to build in house and you have someone whose main job can be audience, distribution, and customer relationships.

You can copy most of the framework with some sizing adjustments.

You pick a boring B2B niche and a single workflow to own. You scope a “good enough” MVP based on competitor research. You build it, and you start charging early.

On the LTD side, you might run a small lifetime deal or a “founding member” plan within your own audience or a couple of communities, but you size it carefully. You avoid making AppSumo or similar platforms a central pillar of your strategy unless you are comfortable with the trade offs.

Most of your early effort goes into onboarding, support, reviews, and content. One of you is building, the other is on calls, writing, and hanging out where your customers talk.

The end goal is the same as Mike’s, just on a smaller canvas. A boring app in a boring niche that throws off enough recurring revenue for both of you to have good salaries and optionality.

Where this playbook still goes wrong

Even a well thought out framework can fail. It helps to be explicit about the most common ways it can go off the rails.

You can pick the wrong niche. On paper it looks fine. In reality the customers are happy with spreadsheets, or they do not have budget, or the pain is not quite sharp enough. The safeguard there is boring but effective. Talk to more people before you write much code. Charge at least a few of them something, even a small amount, and see if they actually care enough to pay attention once money is involved.

You can over expose yourself to lifetime users. You have a huge launch, a rush of sales, then months of support burden that you did not staff for, and no recurring revenue base underneath. The safeguard is cap size, caps on features, and a clear switch to subscriptions. Treat LTDs as a one off tool, not a permanent lever.

You can under invest in content. Mike’s whole model depends on content starting early and compounding. If you do the LTDs and skip the content, you run down your cash without replacing it. A simple safeguard is committing upfront to shipping, for example, one meaningful piece of content every week for six months, and treating that as a core part of the work, not an optional extra.

You can ignore platform risk and build on sand. If your entire product depends on a single API or tool, and you have no plan for what happens if that vendor changes pricing or terms, you are one email away from a crisis. The safeguard there is designing for fallback options, even if they are more manual, and avoiding building something whose entire value is the direct output of an external model.

You can treat UX as a garnish instead of the main course. If you focus purely on shipping features and never watch people actually using them, you can end up with something that technically solves the problem in a way that feels painful. The safeguard is simple. Watch customers click around. Sit on calls. Ask where they got stuck. Remove steps. Remove options. Add guidance.

None of these risks are mysterious. They are just easy to ignore in the rush to “launch something”. Mike’s story works largely because he has guardrails around these points, even if he does not frame them that way.

What to take away from Mike’s approach

You do not have to copy Mike’s structure to learn from his habits.

The underlying principles are simple.

Boring B2B is a smart place to be if you are bootstrapped. You want problems that are already proven, with customers who already spend money, and incumbents that annoy people.

Lifetime deals are a powerful but dangerous tool. Used in a small, controlled way they can buy you learning and a bit of runway. Used as your main funding strategy they can load you up with long term obligations.

Platform risk is real, especially in a world where APIs and AI models are shifting fast. The less your core value depends on a single provider, the less likely one external decision is to break your business.

Retention and UX matter more than clever growth hacks. If people get value quickly and do not hate using your product, everything else becomes easier.

If you boil it down, Mike’s playbook is really about building low risk, high persistence SaaS. He picks problems that are already proven. He builds simple tools around them. He gets paid as early as possible so reality can slap the idea around. He uses that money to invest in things that compound, like content and product quality. He keeps the team small, treats profit as the win, and avoids fancy stories about categories and disruption.

You do not need five apps and a four founder structure to use those ideas. You can pick one boring niche, one painful workflow, and design your own stripped down version of this playbook around it.

You do not need a new idea. You need a boring problem, a simple product that is not painful to use, and a plan for getting paid to learn as fast as possible.