how i used my own app to make money online (just reached $100 MRR)

dogfooding they call it, and most times when you find out about this term, you already have an idea that doesn't fit the method and trying to force it won't help lol

early this year i sold a job hunting tool i built for under $10k. MRR was starting to decline and the product had basically no natural growth loop. around the same time i got offered a good job at a Series B startup, so i took it and sold the app.

after that i decided my next idea HAD to have some sort of growth loop i could automate.

i ended up building a tool to solve my own problem of watching long ahh YouTube videos just to find one piece of information. most often some hack about growth

for example, when watching SaaS podcasts i mostly want to know what distribution channels they used. not their stack, background, etc. JUST how they got users.

so this tool watches the videos for me and gives me the summary, transcript, table of contents + a chat where i can ask exactly what im looking for.

turns out a lot of other people had the same problem lol

and eventually i realised using the tool itself could be the growth loop.

i use it to bulk summarise videos/playlists of founders talking about how they built their apps, feed the summaries + transcripts into Claude and turn the interesting stuff into posts for X.

now i dont be posting articles every day cause i also have a job and it consumes a lot of time to not put ai slop out there

i also do the same with AI news. most of my users were researching videos on AI so id find trending videos about a new model, summarise them in bulk, extract what's interesting and write about it.

the content is useful on its own and the tool gets mentioned naturally because that's what i used to research it. much better than constantly posting "hey try my app" lol, i simply say, "this summary/article was created using meetclaras.com " thats it. if the reader has the need to summarise long videos, then they can use the free version, if they want unlimited, then they upgrade. the goal is to get people on the funnel basically

this loop recently helped me hit $100 MRR. it took around 5 months, but most of the growth actually came in the last few weeks when i started doing this consistently.

next im testing the same loop with programmatic SEO. i basically created a new feature that summarises entire playlists. So i summarise entire YouTube playlists and turn useful information buried inside videos into articles that can rank on Google.

tbh the goal isn't really to build this into some $100k MRR company. i want to see how far i can push this organic loop, hopefully get somewhere around $5k MRR and potentially sell it for a 4x multiplier like i did with my last saas

then take everything i learned and build the next one :)

has anyone here done something similar? would love to hear what worked and your exact growth loop