Quitting his job to grow his 5-figure MRR portfolio

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Anatoly Pashias is a self taught developer based in Cyprus, and before Motionvid took off he was already running a five figure business on the side while working full time as a software engineer at a forex company. He was not looking for a new venture. A friend building a course simply needed an easier way to make motion graphics without touching After Effects, and Anatoly offered to help.

He vibe coded a test version in March 2025 using Sonnet 3.7 and Cursor, mostly to see if the idea would actually work. His friend made a YouTube video about the tool, which sent the first real wave of traffic. The name he had picked also happened to be an exact match for what people were searching, so organic search started feeding the same high converting landing page almost immediately. From there, growth kept compounding on its own.

Once he saw the SaaS taking off, the decision was easy. He quit the forex job, took the pay cut, and went all in on Motionvid.ai. While that was happening, he also built Framekit.ai on the side, an AI website builder for creatives now powering more than 200 live sites. The oldest of the three, Sally POS, a point of sale system for restaurants and bars built in React Native, started six years ago and is still running today across more than 400 locations in South Africa, Cyprus, and Australia.

Motionvid ran a highly successful AppSumo campaign that brought in $120k, and the product has grown 40% month over month since, now past 100,000 signups and at $7k MRR. Sally POS brings in a five figure MRR on its own. Framekit sits at $1k MRR. Combined, the portfolio clears more than $18k a month.

Here is how one favor for a friend became the center of a three product portfolio, and why only one of those products found a real distribution channel.

Building the initial version of Motionvid took about three weeks. Anatoly was vibe coding it with Sonnet 3.7 inside Cursor, so the only real cost was a Cursor subscription and roughly $300 in tokens. No team, no outside help, just him testing whether the underlying idea held up.

AI made plenty of mistakes at the time, producing code that was often broken or simply ugly, which meant constant correction on his end. He is quick to note that the tools have improved considerably since then.

The stack has grown well beyond that first version:

Anatoly built his own MCP integration so the team can call video generation programmatically instead of only through the interface. Model routing turned out to be the trickiest part of the whole build, since different tasks need different models, and getting image generation to work well required testing several vision capable models before landing on the current setup.

The biggest technical challenges so far have been cost accuracy and defect hunting as usage scaled. One defect caused scenes to double commit on longer video jobs. Another, more consequential bug meant credit cost estimates were significantly overinflated compared to actual usage. If it had gone unnoticed, it would have quietly eaten into the margin without anyone realizing it.

Both issues were fixed, but Anatoly is direct that problems like these only surface once real users are pushing meaningful volume through the system.

Motionvid charges monthly for video and motion graphics generation, with tiers based on usage and credits. It started free while Anatoly tested the idea, then became paid once YouTube traffic and organic search made clear that people actually wanted it. Growth since then has come from organic search, affiliates, and the AppSumo campaign, which brought in a lump of lifetime deal revenue that the team is now reinvesting into user generated content to keep the organic engine running. Revenue expands through the usage based tiers themselves: as customers generate more videos, they move up a tier, so the pricing scales directly with the value they are getting.

Framekit is also subscription based, but it has been the slowest of the three to grow. The bottleneck has not been the product itself but customer acquisition, and it currently runs with minimal ongoing development rather than active investment.

Sally POS runs differently again. It is B2B software sold directly to hospitality venues, with revenue coming from recurring subscription fees per location rather than per user. Expansion there means adding more venues and more countries, not upselling existing customers on usage.

Motionvid's growth ran on two main tactics. The first was pure luck dressed up as timing: a friend made a YouTube video about the tool right after the MVP was built, generating the first wave of users and proving the idea had real legs. From there, SEO became the primary channel almost by accident. The product name exactly matched what people were already searching for, so it started ranking without much deliberate SEO work behind it. A high converting landing page consistently turned that search traffic into signups.

Once there was real traction, the team ran an AppSumo campaign. It brought in a large batch of new users and, more importantly, significant capital to reinvest, generating six figures in lifetime revenue on its own. That money is now going into UGC content to extend the same organic playbook that already worked, rather than pivoting to paid acquisition. Affiliates picked the product up naturally too, finding it through the same YouTube and search presence rather than through any formal affiliate program.

Framekit and Sally POS took different paths entirely. Framekit's growth has stayed slow because it never found an equivalent channel; customer acquisition remains the bottleneck, not the product. Sally POS grew the old fashioned way, through direct sales into hospitality venues across three countries, expanding location by location rather than through any online channel.

Anatoly's advice on this: do not force distribution before the product has actually earned it. Motionvid grew because a real person made a video about something that genuinely worked for him. That is a stronger channel than any paid campaign would have been at that early stage.

Anatoly is candid that some of what helped him most came from skill, and some came from luck he did not plan for.

Vibe coding with AI tools was the single biggest unlock. Going from idea to working MVP in three weeks, solo, with just Cursor and a few hundred dollars in tokens, let him test ideas without needing a team or real capital up front. That changed the entire risk profile of starting something new.

The exact match product name was pure luck that turned into a genuine advantage. SEO started working almost passively because people search for the name itself. He never planned that as a growth strategy, but it has become one of the strongest channels the product has.

The friend who made the YouTube video, genuinely excited enough about the idea to create it unprompted, was a force entirely outside Anatoly's control. That video brought in the first real users, and no amount of his own hustling would have replicated that kind of organic, third party trust.

On the skill side, being comfortable across several different stacks, React, React Native, Go, and Firebase, let him move quickly on whichever product needed attention without waiting on anyone else. And thinking about monetization before getting deep into building anything has saved him from sinking time into things that would never have worked as a real business.

Anatoly's goal is to hit $100k MRR for Motionvid and then find a strategic acquisition. He is quick to add that he genuinely enjoys building it, so he is not sure yet whether he actually wants to exit when that point arrives.

You can follow along on his personal website, Twitter, or Instagram.