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They sold the SaaS before they built it — a website that looked automated and a team fulfilling lead lists by hand within 24 hours — then used the cash and the customer feedback to ship the real product and hit $1M ARR in 87 days
1,500+ paying customers · $97/mo entry price · 0 → $1M ARR in 87 days · $150K-$175K/mo total operating cost
"On the front end it looks and feels like a SaaS. On the back end it's fulfilled manually by people." That let them prove the product, learn exactly what to build, and fund the build — all before writing code.
Fewer bars = easier, cheaper, or faster for an AI-assisted solo builder. Editorial judgments based on the case details.
Andre Haykal Jr. started trying to be an entrepreneur at 16 or 17, and like most people with no money he started with a service. He built a lead-generation agency with his cousin Dan and a friend Christian, and grew it to $100,000 a month. Then it stopped. "The problem we ran into is we couldn't scale it really past that." So they partnered with Daniel Fazio and started Client Ascension, a coaching programme teaching other people to do what they had done — take an agency from zero to $100,000 a month using cold email lead generation. That business, he says, cash-flowed nicely. Software was the goal, and he is blunt about why the normal route was closed: "SaaS is really interesting because it takes a lot of startup capital to start." No capital, and no interest in venture money. So they took a different path, described in section 02 — a productized service that looked like software from the outside and was people on the inside. That funded the first attempt to build the real thing, and the first attempt failed completely. They reinvested the $5,000-$10,000 a month the productized service was making into developers and designers, and "all that money was reinvested into developers and designers to build an app that never saw the light of day." His words about that period: "I was pretty much at the point of giving up. I know this idea can work, I just can't find someone to execute on the idea." The rescue came from inside their own coaching programme. Oliver, one of their students, flew to Tampa and said he understood what was needed. Six months later they launched. Eighty-seven days after that launch, ListKit was doing over $1 million a year. At the time of the interview — June 2024, about eleven months after starting — they were about to pass $200,000 in MRR with over 1,500 paying customers.
The first customers bought something that looked like software and was actually people.
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Data credibility: Founder interview on Starter Story, filmed at the founder's house in Tampa, Florida in June 2024. All figures are founder-reported with no dashboard, invoice or third-party data shown: ~$200,000 MRR, 1,500+ paying customers (1,000 within the first six months), $97/month entry pricing, 40 people with over $100,000/month in team cost and $150,000-$175,000/month total cost to operate and grow, offshore pay rates of $1,000-$2,000/month, the prior agency at $100,000/month, and the productized service at $5,000-$10,000/month. The "0 to $1M ARR in 87 days" and "$2.4 million SaaS" figures come from the video's own title and narration; in conversation the founder says they are "about to just surpass $200,000 in MRR" and "over 2 million now," which is consistent but is his own framing rather than an audited number. Location is directly stated: the interview takes place at his house in Tampa, Florida, and he refers to co-founders who live in Tampa; development staff are described as being in countries like Ukraine and customer success in countries like Lebanon.
The first dollars came from the manual version rather than the software. The productized service ran at roughly $5,000 to $10,000 a month, and every dollar of it went straight back into developers and designers.
The launch is where it turned, and it turned because the audience had been assembled years earlier.
The dry spell had two layers. The long one is his own count: seven years in, and he says the first four or five would not qualify as a success by any measure.
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