At only 20 years old, Wilson Wilson is making $32k/mo from his product, Senja. And while building it, he grew his following from zero to 20k.
He did all this by focusing on building in public, product-led growth, SEO, and affiliate marketing.
I caught up with him to get the details. Here's what he had to say. 👇
I earned my first dollar online when I was 12 years old.
I had begged my dad for a laptop nonstop since learning that anyone could build an app and earn a living if they knew how to code. So once I had it, I built and released a dozen crappy apps using mostly borrowed code from StackOverflow. And I monetized them through display ads.
That was my first taste of entrepreneurship, and I quickly learned that this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. At the time, though, I had no idea how to realistically turn it into a career.
When I was 17, I tore my ACL and had to undergo a surgery that left me mostly immobile for six weeks.
At that point, I was done with secondary school and I had just finished a freelance job so I spent a lot of time pondering what was next for me.
I started looking for people who had done what I wanted to do and I stumbled upon Indie Hackers. Reading stories from people like Jon Yongfook, Tony Dinh, Danny Postmaa, Marie Martens, and loads of others showed me that my goal of having an indie business was completely achievable.
I had no idea how to run a real business — all I knew how to do was code. But the new year was coming up and I knew I wanted to start making something, anything by the time January rolled in.
I looked for what other people were building that I could build with my coding skills of the time. There were a few basic ideas I played around with.
- A blogging tool/website builder
- A social media scheduler
- A video hosting tool
But I ultimately settled on building a testimonial collection tool because there weren't that many players in the space at the time, and most of the tools out there were ugly and a pain to use and I knew I could do much better.
So on Jan 2nd 2022, I go to work with the goal of launching in 30 days.
That product is now Senja, a tool that makes collecting video and text testimonials easy while helping you share them everywhere with hundreds of different widgets, image templates, and Walls of Love.
Senja is a SaaS and we use a freemium model. Anyone can sign up to Senja and get their first 15 text or video testimonials for free and create unlimited Walls of Love. To collect unlimited testimonials, remove Senja branding, and unlock other features, our customers pay us a monthly or annual fee.
We currently have 20,000 users and our MRR is $32k.
When I started, I was still recovering from my knee injury, so I had unlimited time. I also had a few thousand saved up. And I had nearly zero costs.
Because nowadays, you can build and launch a SaaS for virtually nothing. When I launched, my only expenses were the domain name and hosting, totaling $35/mo. And, fortunately for me, I had the safety of my parent's house to work from, so I didn't need to worry about food, electricity, shelter, or anything else.
Soon, we started getting customers, and they took care of the business expenses. So I haven’t taken a freelance job since!
These days, our tech stack is a little more involved — there’s a surprising amount needed in testimonial collection. At our core we're using:
- Sveltekit: People often ask me why Senja is such a polished product. Svelte is our secret. It has everything you need and it has helped us move incredibly fast.
- TailwindCSS for styling
- Postgres + Hasura
- Mux for video storage and delivery
- Cloudflare as our CDN
Making the jump from crappy apps to having a successful SaaS involved a few things.
- The experiences I got from working freelance jobs helped me improve my technical skills. I wouldn't have been able to build as quickly as I had if I hadn't spent all that time working for other people.
- Sharing my work on X was huge.
- Collaborating with my cofounder who had been a part of lots of other businesses in the past helped me start shifting my mindset from being a "builder" to being a business owner.
- Consistency was critical. It took six months before we got our first recurring payment, but we showed up virtually every day.
And it was not without its challenges. I’m from the beautiful city of Port Harcourt, Nigeria. And I wish this wasn't the case, but my biggest disadvantage is definitely being a Nigerian.
There are tons of things that other makers take for granted that just don't exist here.
- Popular tools and services like Stripe, PayPal, Wise, etc. don't support Nigerians.
- I'm constantly put on the high-risk list for everything (even shopping!).
- Our passport is one of the least powerful in the world and getting a visa is very difficult. Meetups and conferences are largely off the table, and I've never met my cofounder in person.
- A stable internet connection is rare and there are multiple power cuts throughout the day.
- Coworking spaces are non-existent in most cities.
At first, I took a lot of the problems that come from working here for granted. These things were absolutely normal and I didn't think they needed to change. But as the business grew and we had more money to spend, I started looking for workarounds to my problems.
- I got a power station to deal with power outages so I could have internet and lights even when the power went out
- I got a 5G router and eventually a Starlink so I wouldn't lose days to bad internet.
- I built an office.
Overall, there is so much I want to do but can't yet because of where I was born. These are definitely difficult to work around, but today, there are endless opportunities available to anyone who's willing to put in the work, regardless of where they come from.
When it came to growth, we initially threw a lot of spaghetti at the wall to see what stuck.
- We built in public.
- We wrote blog posts.
- We posted regularly on Indie Hackers, Reddit, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Quora.
- We listed ourselves on directories like Betalist, Startups.fyi, uneed.best. SaaSHub, and GrowthStash.co.
- We joined founder and creator communities in slack and discord.
- We sponsored dozens of newsletters
- We even played around with cold outreach via email and Reddit.
Each of these helped a bit, but none so much as building in public in the beginning.
Later, our best channels became SEO and product-led growth.
Building in Public
I started building Senja with zero followers and no audience. Literally. When I started Senja, my X account was brand new.
But as I built Senja, I shared daily progress updates and plans for launch, and that helped me slowly build an audience that supported me when we launched! Now I have over 20,000 followers.
"Daily" is key. If I had to give one tip for how to grow your X account, it’s consistency. But there’s a lot more to it that I discussed here.
The greatest benefit to building in public is definitely the community that you become surrounded by.
I tapped into the knowledge of hundreds of founders who were where I wanted to be. Everything I know came from the build-in-public community — that and reading stories on Indie Hackers and Indie Bites.
I also got loads of feedback that helped me improve the product. And I found mentors, lifelong friends, and a cofounder.
It was painstaking, as a very, very small percentage of the people we reached were our ideal customers — unless you're selling to other Indie Hackers, building in public isn't a sustainable or scaleable way to find new customers.
But the folks who signed up from BIP were people who were invested in our journey as founders.
Focusing on SEO
These days, 45% of our traffic comes from SEO. We rank in the top 3 for testimonial related keywords such as "testimonial collection tool" and "collect testimonials."
To get to this point, we've written dozens of blog posts and created a couple of pages that target keywords with a lot of volume and little competition, like "video testimonials" and "testimonial collection software"
We've also created pages targeting alternative keywords for our competitors. And we've created hundreds of pages for programmatic SEO that target hundreds of long tail keywords.
Alternative pages are our highest converting SEO pages, as the people who come from there are already looking for a way out.
Programmatic is something we've spent only a few days doing, but we're getting a good number of signups from a few hundred pages already, so it's currently the SEO effort that's giving us the greatest reward for effort done.
Product-led growth and freemium
It took a long time for it to kick in but now, product-led growth is responsible for about 30% of Senja's growth. In other words, the product itself drives user acquisition, retention, and expansion.
To make this work, Senja has the most generous free tier of any testimonial tool on the market. That's because our free users are our best promoters!
Powered-by badges are displayed on the testimonials of free users, so they're seen tens of thousands of times every month, with hundreds of people signing up each month.
If it wasn’t for this product-led growth and these badges, we'd never have gone freemium. Rob Walling sums up whether or not you should do freemium very nicely.
“If your freemium users aren’t at some level helping push growth of your paid tiers, offering a freemium plan isn’t the right call.” —Rob Walling
Affiliates and influencers
Affiliates are responsible for 16% of new signups.
My cofounder painstakingly reached out to dozens (maybe even hundreds, now) of influencers, like Jay Clouse, Kieran Drew, and Easlo. He spent an insane amount of time building relationships with them and giving them genuinely helpful advice.
Thanks to his efforts, Senja is now the most popular testimonial collection tool among creators!
A lot of those creators have signed up to our affiliate program, and they regularly include us in their newsletters, courses, and blog posts.
We also incentivize affiliates to keep our powered-by badge — even after upgrading — by allowing them to update the badge with their affiliate link.
Affiliates get 30% of the revenue that they bring in,.
Newsletter sponsorships
We've had some success from a few newsletters, but compared to our other channels, the ROI hasn't been that high.
Historically, we've seen that we get the greatest ROI when we sponsor our customers that are already using Senja in their marketing funnels. They know the product really well because they use it daily, so they sell it best!
People buy from people. Great testimonials are the #1 reason why people buy things, and that's definitely why the testimonial space was so interesting to me at first. Everyone needs testimonials!
What most people don't realize, though, is that slapping a testimonial section on your landing page isn't enough. Testimonials really shine once you use them at every stage of your marketing funnel, especially where objections are raised
- In your ads
- In your support emails
- In your sales demos
- On your book a demo page
- In your social profiles
- Etc.
I don’t like the idea of building a portfolio of small bets. In fact, I think that’s a common pitfall.
Too many indie makers launch a dozen products without giving any the attention they need to grow.
Launching a dozen products in a couple months is easy; sticking to one product, learning to grow it, and building a business around it is much, much harder. And working through the challenges is where the real growth happens.
Building a product ≠building a business.
And remember, if your product isn't an instant hit, that doesn't make it a failure. Chances are, if you spend a sizable amount of time improving your product, talking to potential customers, and experimenting with different marketing strategies, things will start to compound.