How Two Indie Hackers Built a Successful Micro-SaaS – Senja.io ($1M ARR)

Hello! Let’s jump into this new case study together.

Senja.io is a bootstrapped micro-SaaS that helps creators and businesses collect and display testimonials in minutes. The platform lets users gather text, video, and social proof seamlessly and embed them anywhere, making it a go-to tool for anyone trying to market a new product or increase conversions.

The startup was co-founded by Wilson Wilson (@euboid) and Olly Meakings (@helloitsolly), who met online, built remotely, and followed a true indie hacker approach. With no investors, no big team, and a strong focus on shipping fast, they scaled Senja to over $83,300 MRR and more than 3,000 customers by 2025.

This is the story of how they went from $0 to thousands in recurring revenue by leaning on transparency, product-led growth, and smart indie hacker marketing. A roadmap for anyone wondering how to build a micro-SaaS, how to launch a digital product, and how to get their first paying customers.

Early Days: Finding the Business idea and Shaping the First Micro-SaaS

Senja started with a simple goal: to build something small, useful, and beautiful. Wilson Wilson, a 19-year-old developer from Nigeria, spent the end of 2021 exploring different project ideas he could create with his skills at the time. He experimented with a blogging tool, a social media scheduler, and even a video hosting platform, but none felt right.

What finally caught his attention was how messy and outdated the world of testimonials was. The few tools that existed were clunky, hard to customize, and visually uninspiring. Wilson saw an opportunity to do better. On January 2, 2022, he began coding with one clear goal: launch within 30 days.

That project became Senja, a tool designed to make collecting and sharing testimonials effortless. Users could collect video or text feedback and showcase it with clean widgets, image templates, or full “Walls of Love” From the start, Wilson structured Senja as a freemium SaaS: anyone could collect up to 15 testimonials for free, then upgrade to remove branding and unlock more features.

Around this time, Wilson connected with Olly Meakings, a British marketer known for his writing on growth and authenticity in the indie-hacker space. Olly brought a storytelling and positioning mindset that perfectly complemented Wilson’s product vision. Together, they refined the idea, built an audience through honest sharing, and shaped Senja into something creators actually wanted to use.

By June 2022, just five months after Wilson wrote his first line of code, Senja had its first paying customer. What began as a small side project between two people who had never met in person was starting to look like a real business, one built on simplicity, trust, and persistence.

Growth & Scaling: how to scale a SaaS startup

Senja’s growth was gradual but deliberate. Their first paying customer came in June 2022, just a few weeks after launch. Two months later, they crossed $100 MRR. By December, they reached $1,000 MRR. The numbers were small, but for the two founders, they were proof that the idea worked: strangers were paying for a product built by two people who had never even met in person.

From the start, they chose to build everything in public. Every small win, setback, and new feature was shared openly on Twitter and in their Build in Public blog. There were no marketing tricks or polished PR moments, just honest updates about what was working and what wasn’t. That transparency slowly turned into a growth engine. Their posts attracted early adopters, curious founders, and fans who wanted to see them succeed.

Through the end of 2022, progress was steady but slow. They experimented with pricing and onboarding, and many nights ended in frustration. But each improvement, each new customer, made the next step a little easier. By May 2023, Senja hit $5,000 MRR, and in July, they crossed $7,500, their self-defined “ramen profitability”. For the first time, the business could sustain them both.

That period marked an important shift. They stopped trying to please everyone and started focusing on their most loyal users, creators and indie founders who needed a simple, beautiful way to collect and display testimonials. By narrowing the focus, the product started to click. Growth became predictable.

They didn’t rush to hire or chase funding. Instead, they automated, refined their onboarding, and listened closely to users. Integrating HelpKit to power self-service support cut their incoming tickets in half. The time saved went back into improving the product. By August 2023, they reached $10,000 MRR.

Momentum took over. As users embedded Senja’s testimonial widgets across the internet, each one became a small piece of organic marketing. Growth started compounding: by May 2024 they hit $30k MRR, by October they crossed $50k MRR, and by November 2025 Senja had broken the $1M ARR mark, roughly $83k in monthly recurring revenue.

It wasn’t one viral launch or a lucky break that got them there. It was consistent progress: sharing openly, listening to users, and refining the product again and again. Senja’s story shows what it looks like to build a SaaS the slow, honest way: one customer at a time, one iteration after another, until small wins turn into something much bigger.

Marketing Deep Dive: How senja.io succeeded

In the early days, the founders tried nearly every growth idea they could think of Reddit posts, Indie Hackers updates, Slack communities, startup directories, newsletters, even cold outreach. Most brought small wins but no repeatable traction. Over time, two channels proved to have real compounding power: content visibility (SEO) and product-led growth (PLG).

These became the twin engines of Senja’s growth: one attracting users at scale, the other converting them through the product itself.

What comes next is the part that actually moves the needle: the real strategies behind Senja’s growth. Let’s see how they used SEO, PLG, and three other tactics to scale fast and how you can do it too: