from $0 to $38K in 30 days with a product I could not code

a few people asked me to write the whole story. not the tweet version. the real one, with the boring parts.

so here it is. how I went from a guy who could not write a line of code to spending almost $800 a day on Meta ads and sleeping fine at night.

who I was before this

I am not a developer. I run a small social media and video agency in Romania. I also sold stuff online for years. mostly physical products, cash on delivery, the ugly kind of e-commerce nobody posts about on X.

somewhere along the way I noticed something. everyone was selling digital products. PDFs. guides. planners. ebooks. so I did it too. I wrote them with ChatGPT, designed them in Canva, and sold them.

then clients started asking me to make ebooks for them. some took me days each. days of copy paste, fixing formatting, making a cover, exporting again because the margins were off.

that is the whole origin story. I was the bottleneck, and I got tired of being the bottleneck.

building it without knowing how

beginning of 2025 I opened Lovable with zero coding experience and started describing what I wanted. an app where you type a topic, pick the audience and tone, and it writes the whole book. outline, chapters, cover, export.

it took me 6 months to launch. and the first version was built wrong. messy, broken, held together with tape. it worked in the demo and broke everywhere else.

so I made the hardest decision of that year. I threw it away and rebuilt everything from scratch. the rebuild is what you see today at getebook.ai. you learn more from rebuilding than from building.

the MVP was embarrassing. a plain PDF. text with basic formatting, no design, one cover, one type of book only (non fiction), about 70 pages. that was it.

I launched in July 2025.

the first year was not a success story

let me be honest about this part because most people skip it.

my first 10 customers came from Reddit posts and Google ads. I also tried Meta ads and SEO early on. none of it was profitable. I was paying to learn.

I had a free trial. it got farmed. people created multiple accounts, generated free ebooks, and never paid. I was paying AI costs to serve people who were never going to buy.

and here is the part I have never said out loud. this was a side project. every single month I stopped. I had an agency to run and stores to manage. every month I told myself it was not worth the time.

and every month I came back. because it was the first thing I ever built, and I was in love with it. that is not a strategy. but it is the truth.

it took about a year and a half from the first line of code to the first $5K.

in June 2026, almost a year after launch, I was at $249 MRR.

what actually changed

not one thing. five things, in this order.

1. I killed the free trial. straight to paid. instead of a trial I let you preview the entire book before you pay. you see the value, you just cannot take it home for free. serious buyers still bought. the tourists left. support noise dropped.

2. I changed who I was selling to. for a year I was selling to "people who want to create ebooks."

there is no such person. nobody wakes up wanting to create an ebook.

now I sell to people who want to build an extra income selling ebooks from the comfort of their home. same product. completely different customer. completely different conversion.

people do not want an ebook. they want the income the ebook brings.

3. I rebuilt the landing page and rewrote every line of copy. multiple landing pages, each with a different offer and a different angle. all of them A/B tested.

4. I restructured the whole funnel. upsells, downsells, order bumps. email sequences for every situation: abandoned checkout, bought but did not generate, generated but did not export.

this is the part people miss when they look at my TrustMRR page. MRR is $4,121. revenue in the last 30 days is $38,454. the gap is the funnel.

subscriptions are the base. credit packs and upsells are where most of the money comes from. guides on how to sell what you made, tutorials, other tools that help the same customer get to the same goal. the ebook is the entry point, not the product.

5. I went all in on Meta ads. and this is the part everyone asks about, so let me go deep.

the Meta ads playbook

on June 27 2026 I turned Meta ads back on. $50 a day. two months later I am at almost $800 a day.

zero organic. zero SEO. 100% paid, cold traffic, into a funnel that converts 3% on the landing page with no trial cushion.

creatives are the whole game. with Meta's current algorithm, the creative IS the targeting. the ad itself decides who Meta shows it to. so I stopped touching audience settings and started making ads.

I tested over 100 creatives. AI static images. AI UGC videos. videos of me talking to the camera. videos of my wife talking to the camera. different hooks, different pain points, different styles.

the rhythm: new batch of creatives 3 times per week. every week. no exceptions. launch them, wait a few days, kill everything that does not perform. the winner gets 10 variations and goes into scaling.

scaling: when ROAS is positive I raise the budget 20% every 3 days. never more. bigger jumps reset the algorithm and it sulks for days. that is how $50 became $800 without the account ever blowing up.

the numbers today: CAC is around $29. 70 to 80% of customers are in the US and Canada. profit margin at $800 a day is still around 50-60%.

the tools: I refused to pay for analytics. I built A/B testing and funnel tracking inside the platform myself with Claude Code. my data, my dashboard, zero subscriptions.

the Marc Lou effect (and what it did not do)

three weeks after I hit $1K MRR, Marc Lou quote tweeted my growth post. then again. then a third reply. then a standalone post: "is SaaS dead? this guy made $20K in 30 days with 65% margin."

my X account went from 137 followers to over 2,000. my pinned post got 154K views and 1,500 bookmarks.

here is the honest part. all that X traction brought maybe $50 to $100 in revenue.

the audience did not make the money. the money made the audience. Meta ads built the business. X built the story about the business. both matter, but do not confuse them.

where things are right now

as of today, verified on TrustMRR through my Stripe key:

• $38,454 revenue in the last 30 days
• $4,121 MRR, 93 active subscriptions
• $58,987 all time
• 65% profit margin
• growing 131% month over month
• ranked #638 out of thousands of startups

still no cofounder. still no employees. one person, one laptop, Claude Code, and an ad account.

what I would tell myself a year ago

offer first. then landing page. then creatives. in that order. most people skip straight to creatives, and if the offer is weak no amount of testing saves it.

sell the outcome, not the tool. nobody wants your SaaS. they want what it gets them.

sunk cost is the most expensive thing a founder owns. delete the broken version.

if your free plan is being farmed you do not have a pricing problem. you have permission to charge.

you do not need an audience to make money. you need an offer that converts and creatives that stop the scroll.

and if you keep coming back to the same side project every month for a year, maybe stop calling it a side project.

next stop: $50K MRR.

see you there 🚀