2014 – Pre revenue start
Craigslist outreach
A friend at Yellow Pages sourced SEO clients for Jackie via Craigslist. Jackie operated as a one-man agency with no formal marketing, relying entirely on this informal referral-and-classifieds pipeline.
→ $450/month initial revenue
MRR $450
2017–2018 – Agency scaling
Word of mouth agency referrals
Grew Indexy SEO agency organically from $10k/month to $55k/month by serving B2B agency clients with high LTV. Kept operations lean as a small team. Average customer LTV reportedly ~$1,000 with massive switching costs.
→ $55k/month by 2018
MRR $55k
2017 – Affiliate arbitrage
Seo affiliate google rankings
Outranked Binance for its own brand keyword ('Binance') for ~3 months by exploiting a technical SEO gap — Binance had no title tags on their homepage. Captured affiliate commission traffic during the 2017 crypto bull run. This Binance affiliate revenue still pays residuals as of 2025.
→ Still generating residual affiliate revenue 7+ years later
COVID 2020–2021 – Diversification sprint
Multi channel diversification
During lockdowns, Jackie worked 16-hour days across day trading (stocks + crypto), watch flipping, private label ecom (Far and Away), and SEO. Treated forced isolation as an opportunity to swing at multiple income streams simultaneously. Revenue went from ~$44k/month to $200k/month.
→ ~$44k to $200k/month; reached 6-figure monthly revenue
MRR $200k
Post dip recovery – Partnership SEO
Partnership seo legacy media
After revenue dropped from ~$200k to ~$75k/month, Jackie discovered 'Partnership SEO': partnering with legacy media brands (old newspapers, established domains) to publish affiliate articles on their blogs and split revenue 50/50. Scaled this aggressively when the opportunity appeared.
→ Revenue went from ~$70–80k/month to $500k/month in ~3 months
MRR $500k
2023 – YouTube daily video launch
Youtube long form daily videos
Started posting daily long-form YouTube videos with minimal editing, modeled after low-production 'journey' style creators (e.g., Sam Sulle). Differentiated from the highly-edited content in his niche. Leveraged an existing 20K Twitter/X following to seed initial views. Averaged ~1K views/video but with extremely high-intent B2B buyers (agency owners).
→ YouTube became primary revenue driver for SaaS launches; 90% of Local Rank SaaS launch revenue attributed to ~1K-view YouTube video
2024 – SaaS pivot (Local Rank + portfolio)
Youtube audience to saas launch
Identified gaps in the local SEO software market through a year of creating local SEO YouTube content. Built Local Rank SaaS with business partner Peter Wang using Cursor (AI coding tool). Launched to existing YouTube audience via a launch video (~1K views) and a launch tweet (~50K impressions). Repeated the same playbook across multiple SaaS products.
→ $20k revenue at launch; majority of current $374k/month gross revenue now comes from SaaS (all within last 12 months)
2024–2025 – Reddit growth hacking for SaaS
Reddit upvote manipulation and seeding
Developed a Reddit promotion playbook: search target keyword on Google (e.g., 'best local rank tracker'), find the Reddit post ranking there, comment your brand, wait 2 weeks, then buy upvotes (as cheap as $0.01/upvote via services like Trackings). If a post is locked, create a new post in the same subreddit asking the question, buy ~500 upvotes to make it go viral, then edit the post to recommend your own product.
→ Drives immediate traffic; posts replace existing Reddit rankings; also feeds LLM citation signals in ChatGPT
2025 – LLM citation strategy (ChatGPT ranking)
Llm listicle link building
To rank #1 in ChatGPT in 10 days: recruited ~20 indie hacker/founder friends, each published a 'best XYZ 2026' listicle on their own blog placing Jackie's product at #1. Consistent #1 placement across multiple domains signals authority to LLMs. ChatGPT cites sites with zero Google traffic, so domain authority is irrelevant — volume of citations matters.
→ Cited by ChatGPT within 24 hours; ranked #1 in ChatGPT within 10 days