Bootstrapped SaaS靠数据库产品月入3.2万：从痛点验证到SEO

I run a portfolio of bootstrapped SaaS companies that generate about $32,000 in MMR today.

This is Rashid, and he's a guy who's built three websites that make him over $30,000 every month.

The reason why they work is because

But, here's the interesting part. These websites are not complicated. They're actually quite simple, [music] and they all kind of do the same thing.

To build a successful database product, I think it's possible in 2026, and the way you can approach it is

So, I asked Rashid to come on to the channel to break all this down, and in this episode, we're going to dive into the exact three websites that he's built and that make him over $30,000 a month, the non-obvious secret to why these websites work and how they make thousands of dollars [music] every month, and we're going to go over his advice for anyone who wants to build websites like these

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right now in 2026. All right, let's dive in. I'm Pat Walls, and this is Starter Story. All right, Rashid, I am pumped to have you on the channel. Tell me about who you are, what websites you built, and what's your story.

Hey, my name is Rashid, and I run a portfolio of bootstrapped SaaS companies that generate about $32,000 in MMR today, and the main product is AngelMatch. It's all-in-one solution that helps startup founders find investors to raise capital. And today, I'm excited to share with you what lessons I learned along the way. Yeah, I'm excited to be here.

Awesome. Well, I'm excited to talk all about these sites you built. I think they're super cool. Explain your three different websites in just a few sentences, how they work, and how they make money.

Let's start with AngelMatch. It's a database of like 125,000 angels and VCs. We primarily focus on helping early-stage startups [music] who are raising capital. The other one is InvestorHunt. It's just an investor database product. And the third one is JournalistHunt. It's a of 200,000 journalists which helps small businesses and media companies find journalists to get press coverage.

I love these kind of websites. Get all this data, put it in one place, make it useful for people that need to raise money or whatever it is. There's so many cool ideas around this. We're going to get into it. But first, show me this is legit. Show me how much money these businesses are making. Could you do that?

Yeah, absolutely. This one is Angel Match. We are at 29,000 MRR as of today. Active subscribers is 360 users. Our trial conversion rate is 33% and as of now Angel Match is bringing about 800 to 1,000 clicks per day across organic, referral, direct, and little bit of paid Facebook ads. The prices for Angel Match starts at $59 per month and we have few thousand dollar prices as well. So, it depends on how many investors you want to reach out per month.

And this is Investor Hunt. It's making 2,800 as of today. For Investor Hunt, we don't do any marketing. It's just an SEO. Also, for Investor Hunt, it's basically $57, $97, $297. And this is Journalist Hunt. It's making $260. For Journalist Hunt, we don't have that many users. But we see that people buy the basic and the middle tier which ranges between $49 to $99 per month.

I personally love Rashid's approach to building and specifically these businesses that he's built. Why? Because these business ideas don't chase some crazy AI trend or something like that. They are just simple websites that actually work and have made money over the course of years. Because I think the real lesson behind this story and these businesses is that these businesses solve a painful problem. And in my opinion, that is the most important thing you can do when you come up with a business idea and you want to make money online.

So, you might be wondering, well, how do I find a painful problem to solve? How do I find my idea and where should I even look for this? Well, we've got something for you. We've been working with the team at HubSpot to put together a free database of over 90 painful problems that are worth solving right now in 2026. Each of these problems and pain points can be turned into real businesses and we'll even show you real businesses that are making money solving these problems right now.

We're going to map out all the data you might need, customers, cost to start, days to launch, everything. So, if you've been searching for business ideas and thinking about this idea of solving problems, then head to the link in the description, download the database and you can get started. Oh, yeah, and it's 100% free. All right, let's get back to the episode. I think these sites are super cool. So, how do you get to this point where you have these three different websites that are crushing it making over $30,000 a month?

So, I'm not the technical founder. I always relied on finding developers to build the websites. I studied finance in college and in my last year of college, me and my college friend decided to build a fintech investment app. We raised $100,000 from family and friends. I maxed out my credit cards, got some personal loans. So, that money was not enough. So, we had to raise capital from like professional investors, so-called angels and VCs.

We decided to manually search through and build like a list of investors to reach out to. And that list actually helped us get into calls with some of the big VC names at that time and big angels. That made me realize that first, cold emailing works, but second, finding the list of investors is such a tedious and time-consuming process. So, yeah.

Yeah. I mean, this is like super common. I see this with a lot of founders is they go to build a business, they experience some sort of problem while they're building this business, and then that problem that they experienced was really painful and annoying like this trying to find investors, that you end up building another business on top of that. So, what did you do next? How did you build it? How did you take the next step after you saw this problem?

That time we were like early stage founders ourselves, so we thought if it takes so much time and effort finding investors, maybe there are other founders out there who face the same problem. So, we decided to test this theory that we had by launching a product and seeing if we can get any traction. So, we built like 40,000 investors with a few people, and then we launched on Product Hunt. That month we made like $4,000, and we saw that a lot of founders actually had that kind of issue that we had.

So, this idea basically happened accidentally, like trying to solve our own problem.

Nice. Obviously, you launched this on Product Hunt. It was a cool new idea, made $4,000. But, how did you actually grow this into a business that now makes over $30,000 a month and has been, you know, a full-time income? What was your marketing strategy for these sites?

So, one day I was sitting in front of my computer, and I was looking at Google Analytics, and I saw that we are getting like 60 clicks per day on Angel Match, and idea hit me. So, I was like thinking, what if I like 10x this traffic? Would that translate into like 10x-ing my MRR? And that's how I came across SEO. We hired six content writers. We started publishing blogs consistently. At the same time, with the tech team, we were building and launching like free tools and all types of valuable content for our users.

By doing that for like 6 months or 8 months, our traffic started to grow. And then, basically, from $3,000 MRR to $20,000 MRR, we grew through SEO and [music] added like Meta Ads. At highest point, we reached 43k in MRR.

Okay, cool. Well, thank you for sharing that. As someone who's been successful in this space, you built three successful sites. What is the secret behind a successful directory database product that you've been so successful with.

The reason why they work is because they all solve a problem for our target audience. We were targeting fr