How David's SaaS quickly gained customers in 40+ countries

Meet David Heikka.

David never thought building a businesses and being an entrepreneurs was for him.

His journey into entrepreneurship started when a friend asked him to join a niche project he had started building. David thought it seemed like something fun to do and maybe they would even make some money, so he joined as the marketing/sales founder.

This was the spark that eventually egnited David to build Buildpad. A platform currently hosting more than 8,000 founders, and today his full-time job.

Read David’s story below.

The story told by David Heikka

The early days

My friend and I were clueless when it came to business at the time. We didn’t know what SEO (Search Engine Optimization) was and had no landing page or users. But we worked hard, learned fast, and things took off. We hit our first $5,000 month, then $10,000, and even $30,000 at some point.

While the money was great, the real value came from the business lessons I learned. I could actually build a profitable business.

Things are great until they are not

We had issues scaling further than $30,000/month and the whole project was dependent on one developer. To be fair he was a great developer, but I wanted us to move faster and it was frustrating to be limited to his pace.

In July of 2023 I finally decided to take things into my own hands so I signed up for a course and learned to code. I spent the next 5 months going through the course until I finally had a decent foundation. I was ready to build my first project and was super excited.

My first project

3 months later, early 2024, my first project was finally done. It was an AI form that was meant to help high-ticket businesses qualify their leads. The idea came from a problem we had experienced at my previous business. I thought worst case scenario I’ll build something that we would have use for at least.

At the same time I got a call that would change the trajectory of my life. It was Felix Heikka, my brother, and he was looking for a career change. We had briefly talked about running a business together but it was just talk, until now.

Felix left our home country, Sweden and moved in with me in Budapest, Hungary. Two brothers living together trying to improve their lives and build some great products. It was a dream.

But when we launched the app I had been working on we got a reality check. No one wanted it 😯

Months of doubt

We spent months trying different marketing strategies. Many a fool have tried to run Facebook ads to their unvalidated product, and we were one of them. We wasted $800+ on that.

We also tried changing the landing page a bunch of times, rebrand the app, building out new features, but nothing worked. We couldn’t manage to get users. It was stressful and I felt the dream life slipping away from me.

After 6 months of effort we had to face reality and shut the project down. It was not an easy decision after investing so much in it but I knew it was time.

Learning from failing

There were a lot of lessons to learn here. What was the difference between this failed project compared to my successful one? After reflecting for some time, we started to understand our mistakes.

We also realized that these mistakes are not personal to us. They are mistakes that most entrepreneurs make, especially when starting out. It’s why their products fail. Why they don’t get any users or manage to become profitable.

That’s when the idea was born 💡

Enter Buildpad

We knew more and more people were using AI to get help with their business. But one huge problem with AI was that it would forget your project all the time. Wouldn’t it be great with an AI that learns about your project as you build and actually remembers it?

We also realized that what people really want from the AI is guidance. That’s why they are talking to it. But the guidance you get from general AI was seriously lacking. We wanted to create an experience where the founder is guided through phases of building their product. The kind of guidance that will ensure the founder is building something that people actually want.

And those two principles became the core of Buildpad (watch demo below).

The soft launch

We launched the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) of Buildpad on the 19th of August 2024 with the goal of getting our first 20 users in two weeks. We felt it was an ambitious goal at the time but were proven wrong when two weeks later we had reached 100 users.

Getting the first 100 users

Getting those first 100 users turned out not to be that hard.

First we set a clear goal. It wasn’t about getting customers, we just wanted as much feedback as possible so we would need active users. Understanding how to make the product better is so much more valuable at this point

We set the goal of getting 20 active users in two weeks. Then we asked ourselves where our users hang out and the answer was X and Reddit.

Next step was to set daily volume targets. We decided to do 5 posts and 50 replies each on X every day and on Reddit we would just write a new post when we had something that had worked well on X.

So we knew exactly what to do every day and then we just executed that plan. It was easy, because we just had to take action, no questions asked.

The content we posted was:

• Sharing how our MVP release was going in real time

• Lessons we had learned from previous experience that would relate to our target audience

• Quick helpful tips

Two weeks later we had hit 100 users.

Below are a few of the posts we made on X to get some attention.

The official launch

One month later we had taken in all the feedback and built out the full product. We were ready for the official launch. The early success of the MVP had felt great but we still weren’t sure if people would actually pay for the product.

So we launched on Product Hunt and it went fantastic. People could really relate to the problem we were solving and they loved Buildpad. The launch got a lot of attention and new users started coming in.

Then finally at 7pm the same evening we got our first paying customer. This time we had built something that people actually wanted to pay for.

The business model

The business model of Buildpad is simple.

Buildpad has 7 phases that guide users from idea to building their product. We let users complete the first two phases for free so they get some early validation that they are solving a real problem and get to come up with a good solution for that problem. At this point they trust us because they know that we have a great platform and if they are ready to continue on their idea they can purchase a monthly subscription (starter plan is $20/mo) to continue with the rest of the phases.

We're big believers in having a great product and I think we owe all of Buildpad's success to that. 99% of our time is spent on product and I think that leads to a lot of word of mouth.

The current situation

Now it’s 6 months since the launch and we have paying customers from 40+ countries. It still kind of blows my mind to write that.

Current revenue is $5,800/mo. We're on track to hit $7,000-$8,000 in April 2025.

Right now the platform is hosting more than 8,000 founders.

But we’re not stopping there. We are working more than ever with the goal of making Buildpad a truly great product.

If you wanna reach out to David Heikka, you can find him on X.