Stuck at $300/mo until revenue skyrocketed to $17k/mo in a month

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Antonio Escudero is 24 and started indie hacking in 2025. In his last year of university he began skipping classes to work on his own projects, and as deep learning advanced faster than he expected, he became convinced it would replace most traditional software engineering jobs. He quit his computer science degree on that conviction.

Three earlier projects failed before this one, each for a different reason: too much upfront capital required, weak marketing, or direct competition against large players in markets that depend on network effects. He was stuck, and the pressure to go back to university and take a normal job was coming from every direction.

The idea for RankInPublic came out of his own obsession with deep learning and language models. He checked LMArena.ai daily and started wondering what the same head to head comparison format would look like applied to startups instead of models: an A versus B matchup where the community votes on the better SaaS product. He built it without thinking of it as a business at first, mostly to see how people would interact with it, and shared it on his X profile. A handful of people joined, and that was enough signal to keep going.

Running low on money and needing revenue quickly to avoid becoming an employee again, he came across a post from Tony Dinh about the Hacker Residency, and after a recommendation from Levelsio, booked a one way ticket to Da Nang, Vietnam. He had $4k left and lived there on roughly $190 a month.

A month after starting RankInPublic, he received his first payment, someone wanting to sponsor a tournament. For a long stretch after that, monthly revenue stayed under $300. Then it jumped to $17k in a single month. The site now has close to 8,000 users and $33k in total revenue, with

monthly income fluctuating between $11k and $17k because one time payments still make up most of it.

He is now also building RankLoop, an AI powered SEO product for automated backlink and content generation, launching soon.

Here is how the first product went from a one day build to that revenue jump, and why the one time payment model pushed him toward building a second, more recurring business.

The first version of RankInPublic was simple: two startups compared side by side, with users voting for the one they preferred. Antonio bought an .xyz domain for a couple of cents and fully vibe coded the site in a single day using Gemini 2.5 Pro. Cloudflare Pages hosted the frontend for free, and Supabase's free tier covered the backend and database.

Because every service he needed offered a free plan, the domain was essentially the only real cost, and the entire initial product launched for almost nothing. That mattered beyond the money saved. It meant failure would not be a big deal, which changed how freely he was willing to experiment.

The stack changed considerably since then. A couple of months in, Antonio rewrote the site entirely to fix issues that had become real constraints: difficulty handling international taxation, a setup that was not server side rendered and therefore weak for SEO, and a desire to move to a more LLM friendly backend. None of the original code survived the rewrite.

The original stack:

The current stack:

RankInPublic runs on a freemium model. Founders can submit their products and take part in the platform for free, while paid options exist for people who want faster results or extra exposure. Most of what sells is a one time purchase: $29 to skip the queue, $199 for a 100 directory submission package, $249 for 140 directories. The main recurring product, a featured landing page spot, runs $29 a week or $99 a month.

The subscription brings in about $1k MRR, but the majority of revenue comes from the directory submission service. Antonio built it by scraping thousands of startup and SaaS directories from across the internet and organizing the most useful ones into a database, then using a mix of freelancers and scripts to actually complete the submissions. That combination lets the service scale without him personally submitting every product to every directory by hand. Margins run around 65%, with freelancers, LLM costs, infrastructure, payment processing, and operating tools as the main expenses.

His early prices were considerably lower than they are now. He noticed some competitors charging almost twice as much while generating significantly more sales, which forced a real reconsideration: low prices can sometimes signal low value rather than a good deal. After raising prices and repositioning the service as a higher value offering, revenue increased.

The structural downside of one time sales is unpredictability. Antonio needs to continuously acquire new customers just to hold steady at the same income level, and that dependency is the direct reason he is building RankLoop. He wants to take RankInPublic's most revenue generating piece, SEO backlink building, and turn it into a more stable, recurring source instead, with the goal of eventually having most future revenue come from recurring sources rather than one time purchases.

Growth for RankInPublic has run on two main strategies. The first is structural: the site is built around a viral loop. Users share their product pages to get more votes and improve their odds of winning the head to head competition, which brings new potential users and customers to the site in the process. Antonio placed share buttons directly next to the matchup cards, making it easy for users to promote their products across platforms. The loop multiplies the effect of any other marketing, because every new participant has a built in incentive to bring more people along.

The second channel has been his own social media presence. While building the product, he shared the entire process on X and LinkedIn: new features, revenue numbers, problems he ran into, lessons learned, and ongoing progress. That openness helped him build an audience of founders and indie hackers, who also happen to be exactly the people RankInPublic serves.

The jump from under $300 a month to $17k, in his own assessment, came mostly from his posts. It happened once he started promoting the site with lead magnets that consistently generated more than 20,000 daily impressions, helped along by a scheduling shift: posting at night in Vietnam, which lands during the daytime in the US and Europe.

He does not run paid advertisements. He tried for a while, found the space extremely saturated, and dropped it after burning a few thousand dollars. Skipping ads keeps customer acquisition cost low, but it also makes the business highly dependent on social media algorithms, and because most customers pay only once, a decline in his own posts' reach can directly affect sales.

His advice for growing something new is to build marketing into the product wherever possible, and to start building an audience before there is anything to sell, sharing the process of creation rather than posting only once something is ready to launch. Consistently showing progress, problems, and results builds trust and makes attracting the first users considerably easier without spending on ads.

Several books, people, and experiences shaped how Antonio thinks about this. Zero to One influenced his thinking on building businesses, while Tony Dinh, Levelsio, Marc Louvion, and Rob Hallam showed him that building independent internet businesses without a traditional career path was actually possible. The Hacker Residency was the push that got him to Vietnam, out of his comfort zone, and fully committed to what he was building.

One of the most useful mental shifts has been going all in and deliberately removing the option to retreat. Stepping outside his comfort zone, ignoring the expected path, and not worrying too much about others' opinions let him make decisions he probably would not have otherwise. He tries to act when uncertain, start conversations with strangers, and hold his goals with enough conviction that temporary setbacks do not change what he believes is possible.

Physical discipline supports that mindset directly. He runs daily while listening to a YouTube channel he follows, practices calisthenics, takes cold showers, and intentionally does physically or emotionally difficult things, which makes it easier to act instead of staying stuck in doubt when friction shows up in the work.

A stable daily schedule rounds it out. He plans goals the night before, wakes up early, and starts with the hardest tasks first. When fear or doubt creeps in, he writes his thoughts down and tries to understand what is actually causing the feeling. He also deliberately curates his surroundings, staying close to people and environments that add energy toward his goals, while avoiding activities that feel good in the moment without moving him closer to them.

Antonio's target is to surpass $1M in ARR in 2027. He would also like to spend a couple of months living in San Francisco and Singapore, and eventually fund a deep tech startup of his own.

You can follow his progress on his X profile, where he is also active in the Build in Public community, a good place for new indie hackers to connect. You can check out both products directly at RankInPublic and RankLoop.