How Rob Hallam grew a SaaS to $13K/month by building in public on X

Executive overview

Five failed products and a year with zero income forced Rob Hallam to post his failures publicly on X. That post went viral, landed his first $3K client, and eventually led to SuperX — a SaaS now at $13K MRR, built entirely through building in public.

Audience is distribution. In an era of AI-generated content, authentic storytelling is the durable advantage for bootstrappers.

Building in public compounds: vulnerability builds trust, trust builds audience, audience builds revenue.

Why five failures became the foundation

• Laid off from software engineering job; vowed to leave corporate
• Built five products over two and a half years — all made zero dollars
• Three lessons learned: distribution matters, monetise from day one, build painkillers not vitamins
• Posting every struggle and failure publicly built trust before any product existed
• A post sharing all failures got 150K views; one comment suggested a dev agency
• First client — $3K — came directly from that viral post via X DMs

The seven-step build-in-public playbook

1. Set your foundation — profile photo (real face, consistent), one-sentence bio, pinned post with your goal or elevator pitch
2. Pick one goal and commit — document the daily process; gives you a storyline people follow and authenticity that builds trust
3. Run the content loop — cycle through four post types in order: entertaining (viral grab) → educational or selling (from goodwill) → inspirational (share what it means to you) → repeat
4. Systemise what works — analyse top posts in your niche, extract the concept not the copy, recreate in your own style with data to back the decision
5. Double down and kill what doesn't work — track every post, find format and topic patterns, remove features or content that went viral but aren't used
6. Build real connections — reply with genuine value to specific people, not AI-generated generic praise; treat it like building friendships
7. Leverage what the platform rewards — currently video on X; switching from text to video gave 10x reach

How SuperX works

• Chrome extension shows any profile's top posts sorted by impressions, likes, etc.
• Web app generates daily post ideas by combining current viral concepts with the user's context
• SuperX Engage helps craft and track intentional replies to build community
• Rob used SuperX to grow SuperX — 34K followers in one year, 100K impressions/day

Tech stack and unit economics

• Stack: Next.js, Node.js, Tailwind, SQLite
• X API: ~$2–3K/month; OpenAI and Claude Sonnet API: ~$1K/month; AWS: ~$200/month
• 450 active subscribers at $29/month; ~30% trial rate; churn ~30% (being reduced)
• Philosophy: pick one stack, learn it deeply, ship — ignore technology chasing