The Idea

In June 2025, Filip Panoski was a self-taught developer earning $7k a month from a remote dev job, and had already spent seven years chasing the indie hacker dream on nights and weekends. Five-plus side projects. Total revenue: $100. One failed attempt was a B2C productivity app, killed by low lifetime value and expensive acquisition. Another was a B2B tool built on one-time payments, which meant starting from zero every single month. Both taught him what to avoid next: recurring revenue, a genuine B2B pain point, and a market he already knew from the inside.

Panoski had used Reddit to promote his old projects and noticed a handful of scrappy Reddit marketing tools quietly making money, with no dominant player cornering the niche yet. Before writing a line of code, he built a waitlist landing page and DM'd strangers on Reddit and X until 30 people signed up. That was his validation. He quit his job, committed his savings, and started building. This was the beginning of Bazzly.

The Execution

• June 2025: Panoski quit his $7k/month remote dev job to build Bazzly full time, betting his savings on a Reddit marketing tool for SaaS founders after validating demand with 30 waitlist signups gathered entirely through cold DMs.
• Within a month: Shipped the MVP solo on Next.js, Supabase, and Node.js, leaning on AI tools to avoid the multi-year build cycles that had sunk his previous five products.
• Late 2025: Acquired his first paying customers through 1:1 DMs, but churn hit a brutal 43%. Six months of talking to users daily led to a repositioned core offer that dropped churn to 25% and pushed him past his first $100 MRR.
• March 2026: Hit $1,000 MRR after doubling down on Reddit, X, and Indie Hackers, laid out in his own step-by-step account of the climb, with no ads and no Product Hunt launch.
• Spring 2026: Facing an eight-month slog to $3k MRR alone, Panoski offered a 50% partnership to a bigger name in the space and spent a month repositioning Bazzly from a Reddit-comment tool into a full autopilot acquisition system.
• Two months later: The repositioned offer took Bazzly from $1k to $5k MRR using the same three unpaid channels that had got him to $1k.
• Pricing overhaul: Killed the $19 and $39 tiers and consolidated everything into a single $99/month plan with usage-based credit top-ups, a change Panoski credits for a large chunk of the growth since.
• Today: Bazzly does $7.5k a month in total revenue, $5k subscription MRR plus $2.5k in one-time top-ups and seat upgrades, backed by $17,737 in Stripe-verified all-time revenue and 52 active subscribers just over a year after founding.

The lesson?

Panoski had every reason to chase more distribution: a bigger name behind him, a growing X following, a proven acquisition system he'd built for other people's products. Instead, his biggest lever wasn't a new channel at all. Between January and June 2026, with the same traffic and the same marketing effort, he nearly doubled his trial-to-paid conversion from 31% to 53% just by fixing the funnel he already had. Five failed products taught Panoski what not to build. The sixth taught him that a leaky bucket beats a bigger hose every time.