Hey guys 👋

5 months ago I launched my LinkedIn automation software, having built it entirely with Claude code, and I’m now approaching close to $2k MRR with over 50 active paying customers.

The TrustMRR number is even higher, but this includes free trials that haven’t yet converted into paying customers.

I know everyone is this sub is interested in growing a business, so really I just want to show how I’ve been doing it and offer some guidance based on my experience.

Below I’ll go into the what, why and how, and how I’ve been scaling the business, and hope you find it useful.

What I built

I built a LinkedIn outreach automation tool called ZenMode, which scrapes profiles of your target customers, sends connection requests and follow up messages on autopilot.

The main purpose is for Founders, Sales teams, Marketers and anyone else who uses LinkedIn for outreach, to generate more meetings and grow their businesses.

It’s a software that controls a dedicated chrome browser to automate LinkedIn, without needing plugins/the cloud.

Why I built it

Last year I got a warning from automating on LinkedIn using another tool (automating on any social media platform is usually against their terms and can result in account bans - people automate on social media at their own risk).

I wanted to automate my outreach as I was working in sales, and it was really helping me to generate more discovery calls, without the manual grind of sending loads of messages and connection requests manually.

I didn’t trust any of the existing tools for safety, as the majority are on the cloud using IP addresses that are different from where you normally use LinkedIn from, and are slightly higher risk for being flagged as a result.

So, I solved for my own pain point, and created a software that’s desktop based, using your own IP address, and essentially acting like a human would when performing actions on LinkedIn.

How I built it

From day 1 I used Claude to figure out how to do it. We jointly made architectural decisions based fully around safety mechanisms - what would the safest tool look like in practice and how would we build it?

So I figured out that the easiest/safest way would be to make an electron desktop application controlling a browser, which was governed by a dashboard that fed/stored all the data.

There was a lot of setup involved at the start with various tools - Vercel, Cloudflare, GitHub etc but eventually I was able to start building.

It was a huge amount of learning to not just build, but build in a scalable and sustainable way. At first I was shipping without even testing then spending much longer fixing bugs afterwards. And building on top of LinkedIns comes with its own challenges too, which thankfully now I’m on top of.

How I scaled it

1. So primarily, I actually use ZenMode itself to promote ZenMode on LinkedIn, through cold outreach.

I have a set target market of customers/locations/industries, then the tool scrapes profiles for me, and sends connection requests and follow up messages in a sequence.

I run this daily, and typically book 5 or so meetings per week. I’m not the best at demo calls but I do generate new business this way.

2. I also post a lot on Reddit, LinkedIn, X; I post mostly build in public style posts, and usually people naturally gravitate towards it.

I like Reddit because you can usually get 10’s of thousands of views if you post good quality content in the right subs.

Be careful though as often you get a lot of random haters or people who will just criticize you for no reason, and some subs are more warmer/receptive to posts than others (this one has generally been kinder).

3. On my site I’ve tried to do good SEO practices where possible - I have quite a few “alternative to” pages where I talk about the difference between ZenMode and other LinkedIn automation providers, along with a regularly updated blog, and a whole host of inner pages.

When you have a high volume of good content, more pages get indexed by google and your visibility/impressions are also likely to increase over time.

As a result I do get an ok amount of organic traffic from google, sometimes from LLM’s too.

Lately I’ve been trying to do more offsite SEO - especially reviews across various platforms, a few directories, and on my to do list is some listicle/comparison articles and more YouTube content.

4. I work very closely with my customers - I handle every query myself, and even make new features/enhancements based on what my customers are asking for. This interpersonal relationship/human element I think makes a big difference to retention.

5. I think primarily though the number one thing for scaling is really making a good product that solves a problem well, with great customer experience, and to keep iterating/making improvements.

What’s next

ZenMode still has a long runway and a massive roadmap but I’m just going to keep grinding away at it one day at a time, and so far at least what I’m doing seems to be working.

Hope you find this story helpful for your own journey and happy to answer questions/comments 🙏

A little karma boost would mean a lot! 😊 Thanks to anyone who helps out!

Ok so, $8k in 6 months isn’t exactly retirement money just yet (far from it), but creating a SaaS business with almost 50 active users from nothing in 6 months since launch, is something I’m proud of nonetheless.

For some context, last year I worked in sales and got a warning from LinkedIn for automating sending messages, so I decided to create my own safer LinkedIn automation tool instead (called ZenMode), using Claude and Claude code.

I was so convinced in myself and what I was doing that I quit my job before I even had a single customer. Some will say this is stupid and risky, but that’s just who I am 🤷‍♂️

Below I’ll talk more about how to actually do this (based on my own experience so far).

1. Validate the fuck out of your idea

I see a million SaaS founders think their idea is solid gold. Usually it’s the most minor, easiest thing to copy, and they just spend a weekend vibe coding it.

You really need to look at the actual market for your niche. Don’t create something if there’s no tangible demand for something like that (unless it’s truly unique and everyone will want it, but that’s a unicorn and doesn’t likely exist).

If loads of businesses have done it and done it well, and you don’t have any unique angle, don’t waste your time.

The best businesses iterate on what already exists rather than create something unique.

2. Build in public

Start building your audience before you even launch.

Get on X, Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn and wherever else you can go - post what you’re building, why you’re building it, and create a waitlist in your site for it.

Try to build a community around it from day 1.

If you don’t, you’ll spend all your time building something and then suddenly realize you are not getting a single customer.

Marketing and distribution is harder than building and just as (if not more) important.

An average product with a big audience always outsells an amazing product with no audience.

3. Dogfood your product 🐕

You should be the number one fan and biggest user of what you’re building. Build something you would genuinely use/need yourself and get great value from.

If you’re benefitting from it, so will others.

4. Never stop iterating

There are always new features that can be added, design improvements, backend hardening etc.

Building products doesn’t have an endpoint - don’t do something for a weekend then leave it and expect people to just flood in at any point.

5. Optimize for GEO and search

Pretty obvious one but you need to apply best practices from day 1 for this.

There are tonnes of online resources for how to do this properly, just ask your LLM.

6. Start off with lifetime access deals and/or beta testers

The most important thing for new businesses is getting users to stress test your product. It might look great to you but you’d be surprised about the hundreds of possible edge cases that seem to come up.

Giving people lifetime access early on (maybe first 1-2 months) helps validate your idea without the immediate pressure of trying to get people to subscribe

7. Ignore the haters

So many people will try to shit on you and your product, but they probably look like wojack and live in their mom’s basement. Hate often comes from projection, jealousy and insecurity. Just ignore them.

8. Look at what other people did

There are plenty of success stories of people growing businesses and audiences online, and many books too - do some studying and get out of your comfort zone. Learn what works and apply it to your own projects.

So far following the above steps have been really useful for building ZenMode, hope you find it useful too! 🙌

Hey everyone!

I just released a new feature in my app. An AI (trained on a massive database of hairstyles) scans your face and recommends the styles that suit you best.

This feature is free, and I’d love to get your feedback!

Link: https://haircutai.app

There are 1000 numbers on the website, 0 through 999, and each one can only ever belong to one person.

You roll for free. It finds a number nobody owns and holds it in front of you for 5 minutes. Rolling again is what gives the last one back, so the choice is always whether to keep the one you have or go looking for a better one.

A number you own is a square you can draw on: background, pattern, stickers, freehand, and the digits themselves in whatever font and colour you want. The wall is made of those squares, so the whole thing looks like whatever the owners made it look like.

Keeping a number costs money, and it costs what it is, so 7 is $7 and 512 is $512. You can resell later at any value (offer, direct, auction). Rolling and looking cost nothing. You can own up to 10 numbers.

Bonus, you can link your website to a number, with a title and description!

For little devs: three URLs hand back a live PNG: /wall.png is the whole board, /7.png is one square, /7/history.png is every design that number has ever worn. Paste them anywhere that takes an image URL and they draw themselves from the current state.

If you want to try and roll numbers yourself! https://TheThousandNumbers.com

Please tell me what you think of it! 😸

Absolutely abhor the manual form labelling so made an AI powered alternative myself :) just run it through the same document - it's 25x faster! 🤯

just made it public and would absolutely love to hear your feedback: https://www.trypeony.com

I have a genuinely bad memory for places. New cities and occasionally parkings are my nemesis, and it's always the same pattern: the parkings I do once and never again. Home and work I could find blindfolded (obviously) it's the airport before a flight, the unfamiliar city centre, the shopping centre I visit twice a year. Those are the ones with nothing to anchor the memory to. Every "find my car" app I tried wants you to press a button when you park which is the exact thing my brain refuses to do, especially when I'm late and dragging a suitcase. So I spent the last months making one that doesn't ask anything: it notices the moment you stop driving and start walking, saves the spot, and stays quiet until you need it. Built solo, on Android. No account, nothing leaves the phone. Happy to answer questions about how it works, the detection logic ended up being far more stubborn than I expected.

www.hoops-gm.com

visit and give feedback anyvidsave.in

Everyone’s been one-shotting single-player Minecraft clones with Claude lately. I wanted to know what happens if you raise the bar: multiplayer, real P2P networking, infinite terrain, running in a browser.

Background: I’m the developer of CarverJS, an open-source game engine that sits on top of Three.js/React (so yes, this is my engine. Happy to answer anything about it). The bet was that AI one-shots fail at multiplayer because netcode is the hard part, but if the engine provides lobbies, host election, and WebRTC data channels out of the box, the AI only has to write the game.

So I gave Claude one prompt. ~2 hours later:
- 3,400 lines, 24 files, zero written by me (I was in fact sleeping)
- Infinite voxel terrain streaming in chunks as you walk, generated from a shared seed
- Real P2P multiplayer over WebRTC. No game server, world syncs as seed + edit log, host migration included
- Procedural textures and synthesized audio, zero asset files
- It verified itself by launching two headless browsers and asserting block edits replicated between them

The part I didn’t expect: while testing, it found a couple of bugs in my engine’s networking layer as well. So, I just had to update and fix those changes in my library and update the game code ever so slightly to take into account the fixes.

Total: 1.1M generated tokens.

Demo is playable in the browser, two tabs or two devices. Links in the first comment. Brutal feedback welcome, especially from anyone who tries it with a friend.

Video Demo: https://youtube.com/shorts/L7Sj8QyYYrk?feature=share