Solo Founder Builds a B2B AI to $8M ARR in 2+years—Without Raising a Single Dollar
one pain point + one audience + one channel
A few days ago, Arcads’ founder Romain Torres posted a tweet with something interesting.
He said if you started one of these SaaS in 2024-25, it’s almost guaranteed $1M ARR:
AI note-taking
AI UGC tools
AI SEO
AI customer support
Arcads itself has already crossed $10M ARR, with a team of fewer than 10 people. Back in April, the team had only five people, and ARR was $5M.
Among all these categories, the one I believe in the most is the AI note-taker. I’ve written about probably 20+ AI note-taking tools at this point. Many of them show strong revenue and healthy growth.
Just recently, I covered another one: a $10M ARR note-taker built by 2 College dropouts. Even today, I still think there’s room to build a winner in this category.
Take Playbacks, a newly launched AI note-taking tool. In just three months, it reached $20K MRR. The product is extremely minimal, and to be honest, the design feels rough and unpolished.
Functionally, it’s very similar to many competitors. Playbacks positions itself as an “AI voice → text → smart notes” app for meetings, lectures, interviews, and voice memos, offering transcription, summaries, action items, and AI chat to query recordings.
The pitch is simple and powerful:
Never take notes again.
Your workflow — record → transcribe → summarize → organize — is exactly the work the app replaces.
For professionals, students, content creators, journalists, and teams who deal with heavy meeting loads or information-dense lectures/interviews, this is a direct and painful problem.
If you capture users who truly have this need, and position + distribute well, you get a high-ARPU, niche-but-high-quality SaaS model, rather than a mass-market, low-price product.
Playbacks did exactly that. Although the product is simple and downloads are modest (fewer than 5,000 per month), it still hit $20K MRR in three months — purely because of its distribution strategy.
Unlike most AI note-taking tools that market broadly, Playbacks narrowed in on one very specific segment: corporate office workers. And it pushed entirely through TikTok — specifically a niche trend known as CorporateTok.
It’s an extremely focused strategy:
one pain point + one audience + one channel.
The founder runs multiple accounts posting CorporateTok-style videos. Most videos are shot from the POV of an office worker — “HR says…”, “My manager says…”, that kind of workplace role-play.
The structure is always something like:
workplace drama
HR/manager commentary
fake coworker conflict
then subtle app plug-in comments/replies
This mix of storytelling + scenario + relatability + clear need triggers strong emotional resonance and conversion. Compared to traditional ads, this “mini-drama + real context + creator-driven social proof” format builds more trust and immersion. A few creators also made selfie-style videos, collectively driving tens of millions of views.
Because the content is so targeted, the users it attracts are also highly targeted — and conversion rates are incredibly high.
This “high-value, low-volume, high-conversion, high-loyalty” SaaS model — combined with creator marketing, community amplification, and short-form video distribution — is now a common and effective path for many indie developers, small teams, and solo founders.
The Solo Founder Builds a B2B AI to $8M ARR in 2+years, 100% bootstrapped
While Playbacks focuses on consumers, there are also solo founders building AI customer support tools for B2B customers (one of Romain’s recommended categories).
And just hit $8M ARR in 2+ years, without raising a single VC dollar. The founder? Another college dropout.
