Loading page…
A HubSpot for one slice of Australia's disability funding scheme — a vertical CRM built by two people who answered their own phone for two years
~3,500 active users across 1,300 businesses · just over 1,200 subscribed businesses · team of 10 · positive monthly net revenue retention (he cites 2.4%)
Instead of raising prices the 5 to 10% his own terms allowed, he drew a line in the sand: “every new feature from this point on is going to go into the highest tier.” The new tier cost $15 more, 98% of new customers took it, 60% of existing users upgraded, and revenue went up about 30%.
Fewer bars = easier, cheaper, or faster for an AI-assisted solo builder. Editorial judgments based on the case details.
Astalty is an acronym — “a solution that actually listens to you” — and James, who cofounded it with Jonno, describes it as a HubSpot for the NDIS.
The quick-reference card — acquisition channels, replication playbook, and risk map — is members-only.
Join the Unicorn Club — $5/moCancel anytime, in one clickPaste into Claude Code / Codex and get a working version of this product end-to-end.
Two production-grade prompts per idea — a full build spec and an SEO growth plan — plus 10 tailored build specs a week. Members only.
Join the Unicorn Club — $5/moCancel anytime, in one clickEvery claim traces back to a listed source — open any of them and check the number yourself.
Data credibility: Conference talk at MicroConf by cofounder James; every figure is self-reported and unaudited. He showed an MRR chart and a usage chart on slides, but a transcript reader cannot see them, so treat the ~$2.5M ARR, ~3,500 active users, 1,300 businesses and 1,200+ subscribed businesses as founder claims rather than verified data. He visibly corrects himself on the retention number, first saying “net monthly negative churn of minus 2.4%” and then restating it as net revenue retention — we report it as positive monthly net revenue retention at 2.4% because that is the corrected version. The $40,000 a month figure at the October 2023 first hire is hedged in his own delivery (“roughly I don't know 40,000 a month”). The pricing history ($29 introductory, $49 then $59 Professional, +$15 Premium, $64 end state, 98% of new customers on the top tier, 60% upgrade rate, ~30% revenue increase) is stated plainly and consistently. His home town's name is garbled in the auto-captions, so we describe the location rather than name it. Nothing here is third-party verified.
Before there was a product there was a free Chrome extension. The NDIS publishes its price catalogue as a large, painful spreadsheet, and James knew every future customer had to be living inside it because he was living inside it himself while building.
Astalty Professional launched in August 2022, the day before they were due to show it at an in-person industry event, out of a two-bedroom Airbnb with two laptops on a makeshift desk. From then until October 2023 the sales motion was deliberately unscalable.
Two things compounded. The first was Facebook.
The quiet stretch ran from the first commit in September 2021 to the first paid customer in August 2022 — eleven months of code with no revenue, on the back of three years running a freelance software company. What kept it survivable is that they never went dark.
This is a members-only idea. All 10 sections, the quick-reference card, and both build prompts are in the Unicorn Club — with every section of all 1,355 ideas.
Join the Unicorn Club — $5/moCancel anytime, in one click