From reluctant developer to profitable SaaS founder via accidental niche

Executive overview

Jordan Hansen spent years convinced he would never build a SaaS. Corporate experience at Lenovo made it look miserable. By publishing weekly blog posts and unedited YouTube videos about web scraping, he attracted inbound demand from alternative lenders and stumbled into a profitable API business he never planned to build.

The key wasn't the plan — it was consistency long enough for the right customers to find him.

Staying in your lane and shipping consistently beats picking the "right" market upfront.

What Cobalt Intelligence does

• Automates business verification for alternative lenders via API: Secretary of State filings, business standing, age, and court judgments across all 50 states
• Alternative lenders process hundreds of loan applications a day — manual SOS lookups don't scale
• Banks do ~1,000 lookups a year; Cobalt's plans start at 1,000 per month — target customers are high-volume funders
• All data is public: state integrations, purchased state datasets, and Freedom of Information requests
• API-first by design: a portal would just replicate what customers already do manually on state websites

Building an audience before a product

• Started a weekly web scraping blog at Lenovo with no audience and no monetisation plan
• Chose web scraping because it was specialist enough that not every engineer could credibly claim it
• Added YouTube after a year: unedited hour-long coding sessions filmed at 5–6 a.m. before the day job, zero editing
• Audience stayed small — hundreds of readers, 30–50 views per video — but he kept shipping
• Inbound requests from viewers ("I could use this data") revealed the market

Leaving employment and stumbling into SaaS

• Saved two years of living expenses while at Lenovo, then quit in 2021 with no SaaS intention
• Wanted recurring revenue but explicitly not a SaaS: send a CSV daily, invoice monthly, no login
• Retainer clients brought in $10–20k/year; eventually $4,000/month recurring, with only $300 from the actual SaaS
• Applied to TinySeed in spring 2022 on a whim; felt like an imposter with almost no SaaS MRR
• TinySeed funded anyway: recurring revenue, API model, and a defensible vertical with no competing portfolio companies

What TinySeed actually provided

• Primary value was not money — it was having people to sanity-check decisions with
• Solo founder without a co-founder or peer network; his wife couldn't evaluate product decisions
• Acceptance served as external validation that the product was worth focusing on
• Forced focus: without it, Jordan says he would have chased the next inbound request instead
• Revenue has grown 4–6x since joining

The YouTube pivot: choosing revenue over vanity metrics

• A year-old video got algorithm pickup in spring 2023; subscribers jumped from 800 to 8,000+ in two months
• The spike exposed a mismatch: viral content attracted developers, not alternative lenders
• Took ~300 of 350 videos private; refocused the channel entirely on the finance data customer
• Subscriber count fell; Jordan accepted it as the correct business call
• YouTube subscribers behave like Twitter followers — count is high, reliable reach is not
• The rule: content that gets eyeballs is worthless if it doesn't serve the business goal

On product market fit and pricing power

• Jordan resists claiming PMF, but 4–6x growth since TinySeed is the signal
• PMF is a continuum: strong fit with a core ICP doesn't mean the expansion segment is solved
• The tell: sales calls where the customer is already sold before the pitch starts
• High per-customer pricing is a structural advantage — one new customer can add 20% to revenue
• Vertical SaaS: compete against five niche players, not Microsoft or Google