Name: I built a $1M saas 100% with no code
Uploaded: 2025-08-27T20:58:24.000Z
Duration: 14 min 6 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

After six failed SaaS ideas, my seventh made millions.

He built a million-dollar SaaS 100% with no code.

So you don't need to know how to actually code, you don't need to know code syntax.

The tool he built it with and grew it from zero to $1 million ARR, it's not lovable, it's not a cursor, it's...

That's the best part of it, is anyone can get started and understand the basic frameworks even of programming.

Jacob is proof that you don't need any coding experience to build a profitable SaaS, and not knowing how to code might actually be a huge advantage.

In this video, Jacob and Alex come onto the channel to break down exactly how they bootstrapped their SaaS to $1 million in just 10 months.

Plus, we'll talk about the secret to building MVPs with no code, the marketing strategy that exploded the business, and how you can get started building apps without code today.

I'm Pat Walls, and this is Starter Story.

All right, welcome Jacob to Starter Story.

Tell me a little about the business that you built and what's your story?

My name is Jacob and I built a million-dollar business with no code.

I'm a self-taught developer and the co-founder of Faceless Video.

It's 100% bootstrapped and I built it from scratch with Bubble, and it's now doing over a million dollars a year in ARR.

Can you give me a further breakdown of how Faceless works, what it does, and some of the numbers behind the business?

It's a SaaS that automates Faceless social media channels, and the user only needs to provide their channel topic, and our platform writes the video content, creates the video, and posts that video on the user's behalf every single day entirely on autopilot.

We're generating thousands of videos every single day for users, some of which had well over a million views, plenty of which have had hundreds of thousands of views, total number of users signed up over 1.1 million, and they're all hopping on current and relevant trends right now.

That's an amazing business that you built, but I want to go back a little bit.

What's your background and how do you get to the point of building a SaaS?

I started as a songwriter, producer, and I was releasing music on Spotify, diving full force into that world.

So when I graduated college, I decided to live at home with my mom and go full force into being a songwriter, artist, producer.

I started hiring companies to do marketing for me, but I was just repeatedly disappointed by all the different marketing services that I was getting.

So I just figured, okay, I got to go do this myself.

So I took courses online about how to market my music, and with very little budget, took my music to close to a million streams and thousands of genuine fans.

That naturally progressed into helping my friends out in the music business and helping them promote their music, which turned into my first business, Domino.

And while I love that experience, what I realized about doing a service-based business is that my income was directly correlated with my time, and I just wanted to scale beyond my agency and help more people without sacrificing more of my time, and that made me start looking into SaaS.

So you caught the bug, and then you came upon an idea that kind of changed everything.

Let's talk about that idea, and I actually had you bring your co-founder, Alex, on, who was a part of coming up with that idea.

How did you come up with the idea for Faceless Video?

I was getting a lot of faceless videos on my TikTok algorithm.

I had seen a lot of these videos go extremely viral, and my goal originally was just to go viral.

And I thought to myself, I can edit these videos.

You know, they look simple enough, they're going viral, why not do it myself?

But then I realized that consistency was a huge problem, and coming up with new ideas, editing every day became something that was actually pretty difficult to stick to.

So I had an idea because I realized with, you know, the advancements in tech that were going on, these videos were simple enough that this could be done automatically.

And so I reached out to Jacob, and then Jacob had the idea to make this into a SaaS product instead of an internal tool, so we could make channels together.

Looking back, I'm really glad that I let the algorithm guide me, and you know, we all are on TikTok and Instagram reels, and we see these trends in videos, and most of the time we scroll past.

But if you take a second to actually analyze what's going on, there are plenty of good business ideas in there.

So you have the idea, now it's time to get building.

Tell me how, how did you build Faceless Video?

It started with Bubble and APIs, and Bubble was the infrastructure for bringing everything together.

And like with anything else, it always starts with, can this work?

From a technical perspective, at least, you know, can I actually find a way to type in text and have this web app output a Faceless Video?

So for the first month, that's really all this MVP was, and that eventually migrated into managing users, having a UI UX flow, a payment processing system, a pricing model, and turning it into a full-fledged web app.

Okay, so tell me why Bubble is great for non-developers.

In its simplest form, it translates programming into human language.

So you don't need to know how to actually code, you don't need to know code syntax, it's plain English.

And that's the best part of it, is anyone can get started and understand the basic frameworks even of programming.

Because now that I actually know how to code, I see that it is actually still very much programming, just in a more visual, human-friendly way.

And they also handle plenty of other important aspects of actually running a web app, such as security, scalability, privacy rules, backend management, all these other things that I would not have even known where to begin if I was just coming at it completely fresh or custom.

You know, I've talked to a lot of people who will start their app on Bubble, but then, you know, once things get too complicated and they really want to scale, they have to move off it, which ends up being a huge thing.

But as I understand, your app, which is making a million dollars a year right now, is still on Bubble.

You know, we haven't run into any issues that would require a dramatic shift.

I ran into a scalability issue once, but Bubble support fixed it.

And that was really good peace of mind for staying long-term with them.

And realistically, all the bells and whistles that developers get through custom code is not necessary for building a successful business.

All you need is a great idea, a functioning product, and a great go-to-market strategy.

And you can validate really quickly and scale based on that.

All right, let's pause for a quick moment to talk about AI.

Everyone's hyped up right now about using AI to build apps.

But right now, I'm seeing that most people get stuck in what I call a death spiral of prompting.

They have lots of chats with the AI, but the code never actually works.

And that's exactly why we're partnering with Bubble.

Bubble AI doesn't put your idea into a cookie-cutter template.

It actually blows it up into a full-stack working app.

All you have to do is describe your idea, and Bubble AI will spin up the entire stack a polished UI, a pre-wired database, and workflows that are ready to roll.

I've been poking around with it to build some stuff for Starter Story, and watching it just build everything while I sit there and enjoy my drink is pretty amazing.

So if you've been sitting on an idea, head to the first link in the description, sign up for free, and tell Bubble AI exactly what you want to build.

If you do that, drop your idea in the comments, I'll read through them and let you know which ones are my favorite.

Alright, let's dive back into Jacob and Alex's story.

On that note, what would be some of the opportunities that you see right now for ideas that people could build with Bubble or other no-code tools?

I think marketplaces are kind of the first thing that comes to mind actually, just because it's the easiest way to manage a front-end and a back-end through no-code.

It's a little bit more generic, but honestly, you can build anything if you get creative.

But even if it's no-code, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's easy.

You still have to get creative, you still need to be resourceful.

But there's plenty of opportunities with no-code, and it brings down the barrier to entry enough so that you can start.

So I want to switch gears to marketing distribution.

How did you take this idea from zero to a million dollars a year?

To have success as a B2C app, you need to have viral potential.

Your CAC, customer acquisition costs, it's pretty low.

And so to spend a lot on ads or other methods of promotion is not really viable for a B2C app.

That's something I learned with Faces that my other products really didn't have.

You know, we do SEO, we do ads, influencers, organic content.

But the key is really getting your messaging right.

And it's nothing fancy, it's just good execution.

So I come from a filmmaking background, and that's a lot about storytelling.

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I built a $1M saas 100% with no code

scenario

genuinely

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