F2F #50: How We Grew a Bootstrapped AI SaaS From $0 to $350K Without Funding

Guest post by Tanya van Gastel describing her playbook for creating bootstrapped businesses.

Hi all! This week's post is written by Tanya van Gastel (founder of The Multiverse AI, AI Sheets, Ranking on AI...), who has sold a couple of her businesses since I met her at a Startup Grind event not even two years ago.

Learn why.

How We Grew a Bootstrapped AI SaaS From $0 to $350K Without Funding

I started an AI startup with no funding.

I’d worked in tech for years, but VC funding still felt out of reach. Even if it hadn’t, we weren’t going to spend months pitching.

So we built. Three people, one product, and no ads.

We made $350,000 in two years, with +60% profit margins.

Last month, we sold it for six figures.

Why am I sharing this? Most people think you can’t do startups without funding. But you can. Here’s how.

As I’m sitting here writing this (on my fourth cup of coffee), I hope this helps you even in some tiny way.

Cheers,

Tanya Van Gastel

________

Two years ago, I was in a very different place.

I worked 60-hour weeks in tech startups. My calendar was full of meetings. My energy was spent on “alignment,” on shepherding projects through layers of process. I was part of big teams with big budgets — and in marketing, your value is often measured by the size of your spend.

My friend Chris, also a marketer, once said:

“Our careers lived and died by the budget we could get approved.”

I didn’t think much of it at the time. But now, it feels like the perfect starting point for what came next.

Because in April 2023, I started over.

First... Why This Story Matters

Bootstrapping is not just “building without funding.” It’s a completely different mode of operation.

Funding buys you time, talent, and mistakes. Bootstrapping forces you to earn all three. It changes how you think about every dollar, every experiment, every hire.

And ironically, that constraint (if you survive it) can make you much stronger.

Looking back, I see five things that made the difference for us. They aren’t complicated. They aren’t hacks. But they work, because they’re built on the fundamentals of how small, resourceful teams actually win.

1. Relentless Experimentation

When you don’t have budget, experiments are your R&D department.

At first, I didn’t know what would work. So I tested everything:

Reddit → brought our first 50 customers and gave us confidence
LinkedIn → consistent posting produced inbound B2B leads
Testimonials → converted skeptics into paying customers
Paid ads → failed (cart size too small to make the numbers work)
Short video → wrong format for our audience at that time
Outbound email → possible, but too manual to scale at first

The lesson wasn’t just about channels. It was about learning which acquisition methods I enjoyed enough to sustain — because if you hate the process, you won’t do it long enough to see results.

2. Data as a Compass

Most founders know “data matters,” but few track the right data early enough.

I learned that where your customers come from is only half the picture. The other half is how each channel converts.

When we actually measured traffic, sales, and conversion rates per channel, the map was clear:

Website SEO → 44% of traffic, 29% of sales, ~5% conversion
Affiliates → 25% of traffic, 24% of sales, ~14% conversion
Reddit → 10% of traffic, 6% of sales, ~5% conversion
LinkedIn → 10% of traffic, 5% of sales, ~5% conversion

Without that clarity, I might have doubled down on channels that “looked” busy but didn’t convert. Data turned guesswork into allocation.

3. SEO as a Compound Asset

SEO is slow... but once it works, it works while you sleep.

If you needed an AI headshot, how would you find it?

You’d probably search “best AI headshot generator”.

Now imagine you find our article titled “The 10 Best AI Headshot Generators”.

That’s how you discover us.

This approach is revenue-first because it targets warm leads: people already searching for a problem we can solve.

So what is SEO? SEO is making sure people with problems you can solve can find you.

If you rank on the first page of Google, you own that digital real estate. It is yours. You rank slowly but that ranking is also likely to last.

The playbook was basic:

Keywords: start with low-competition niches and expand later
Backlinks: treat them as trust signals, earn them through partnerships, PR, and affiliates
Content: publish with purpose! Avoid getting into the “content black hole” where you publish on LinkedIn every day and your content is only surfaced the next 24 hours.

When you focus on SEO, you create evergreen content that continues to rank over time.

It’s revenue-first because you are directly targeting warm leads - people who are looking for problems you can solve.

We’ve now had over 1.5M people find us through Google. That’s Taylor Swift’s stadium crowd, 20 times over.

Quick note: I’ve always been a huge believer in SEO - and I still am. Now though, everything is shifting to AI SEO, and I’m betting all my money there.

4. Affiliate Marketing for a Double Win

Affiliates are creators who promote your product for a commission. Done right, they deliver:

Revenue from their sales
Backlinks that improve your SEO
Feedback from people who have skin in the game

In the early days, I did all outreach manually: Google → find relevant sites → copy into a sheet → email.

It was slow but free.

Later, we automated with:

Ahrefs (find competitor backlinks)
AI Sheets (scrape emails)
MailMeteor (personalized mass outreach)

And affiliates drove over +$100,000 USD in sales!

5. Tools as Multipliers

In the beginning, we’d spend no money on ANYTHING. We’d literally avoid spending on Notion ($10/month) because we wanted to keep overhead low.

We ended up never spending on Notion (kept everything in Google docs which was messy but got the job done) yet we’d spend +200 USD a month on smart tools.

That’s just to say bootstrapping isn’t about using no tools. Our benchmark for tools was the same as our benchmark for spending money on anything else: what is the ROI?

Ahrefs - SEO intelligence
SurferSEO - Great to help you spot which keywords need to be added
Rewardful - Affiliate program
Zapier - Easy automation

The Biggest Myth: You Need a Budget

When I tell people we built to $350K without ad spend, they assume it’s impossible without luck.

It isn’t.

Bootstrapping forces you to be ruthless about ROI. You spend only on things that can pay for themselves — and that constraint compounds over time.

Would I take $1M in funding tomorrow? Probably. But if I did, I’d still run the business with a bootstrapped mindset.

Recap

If you’re a founder just starting out, here’s what I’d tell you:

Run experiments constantly — and kill the ones that don’t work fast
Track your numbers — traffic, conversion rate, sales per channel
Invest in SEO — learn SEO or hire SEO, it’s slow but it compounds and gets you off ads
Build an affiliate network early — it will accelerate SEO and sales together
Use tools as leverage — but only the ones you’ll actually use

And that is how small, bootstrapped teams win!

☝️ This newsletter was based on a talk I did in front of 200 people at Create With, the biggest AI & no-code conference in the UK.

You can check out that entire presentation here if you’re curious.

What I do now?

I help founders grow revenue through Ranking on AI - my AI SEO agency
I share startup marketing & AI strategies on LinkedIn, YouTube and Instagram
I organize monthly founder hangs in Barcelona. We talk shop over casual drinks with cool founders. DM me if you’d like to join.

Cheers,

Tanya

Tanya is a real force of nature. Check the two episodes we recorded with her on Life on Mars, the MarsBased podcast:

Hope you enjoyed this week's issue, too!