Most people spend months building a product, then cross their fingers and hope customers show up.
Gil did the opposite.
He made $20,000 before he even built his app, then turned that idea into a $30,000 per month SaaS that serves thousands of creators. His playbook is simple enough that a first-time startup founder can copy it.
This guide breaks down Gil’s story and turns it into a clear, practical strategy you can use to pre-sell your own startup idea before you write a single line of code.
You’ll learn:
- How he found a winning idea in an industry he barely knew
- The exact 4-step pre-sale playbook he used to make $20K in a few days
- Why most “idea validation” advice is dangerous
- The simple tech stack and real monthly costs behind his app
- Concrete steps you can take this week to test your own startup
Meet Gil and His $30K/Month AI App
Gil is a developer who “vibe coded” an AI-powered SaaS called Subscribr.
Subscribr is an AI script-writing tool for YouTube creators. It helps YouTubers turn ideas into full scripts, faster and with better structure, without needing to hire expensive writers.
Here are the core numbers Gil shared:
- $30,000 per month in subscription revenue
- Over 4,000 paying customers
- $700,000+ in total sales in the past year
- Subscription plans from $49 to $300 per month
- Profitable from day one
He brings in users through:
- Word of mouth
- Social media
- Programmatic SEO, which drives 30,000+ views per month from Google
You can see the product here: https://subscribr.ai/
Subscribr looks like a classic polished startup. The surprising part is what happened before it even existed.
Gil sold it first.
From Teen Coder To Repeat Founder
Gil did not wake up one day and stumble into a $30K/month SaaS. His path is a mix of early coding, big wins, disaster, and starting over.
Early days: teenage coder to freelancer
- He started coding at 15.
- By college, he was already working as a freelance software developer.
- He dropped out early to keep building software in the real world.
That mix of skill and independence set him up to think like a startup founder long before he had official titles.
Startup success and a forced restart
Then life hit hard.
Gil was a victim of Hurricane Katrina, which forced him to restart his life from scratch. He moved to New York City and co-founded Squidoo, a social publishing platform.
Squidoo grew to:
- Over $10 million in revenue
- A successful acquisition
After Squidoo, Gil did consulting, then jumped into another startup.
The VC-backed crypto startup
Next he helped build an accounting tool for crypto businesses, something he described as “QuickBooks for crypto.”
Key points from that chapter:
- They were one of the first solutions on the market
- They raised millions of dollars from VCs
- They eventually sold the company
On paper, this is the dream startup path: raise money, grow, exit.
Yet after all that, Gil wanted something very different.
Why he walked away to bootstrap
After selling the crypto company, Gil realized he wanted a change from the VC track.
He started:
- Posting videos on YouTube about what he might build next
- Learning more about YouTube itself
- Studying faceless YouTube channels, where creators run channels without showing their face
That curiosity pulled him into a new space, one where he was not yet an expert. It set the stage for Subscribr and a new style of building: bootstrapped, profit-first, and pre-sold.
You can follow him here: https://x.com/gilhildebrand
Finding a Startup Idea in a Space You Don’t Know
Gil did not start Subscribr as a YouTube expert. He started as a curious outsider.
While exploring faceless YouTube channels and building a small team, he noticed a clear pattern.
“I quickly realized that script writing is this huge bottleneck.”
He saw:
- It was hard to find good script writers
- Even when you know what a good YouTube script looks like, it is tough to get it done on time and at scale
He tried using ChatGPT as a shortcut.
It failed.
“I tried using ChatGPT and I saw that it was nowhere near good enough to write the kind of script that I wanted to see.”
Instead of giving up, he made a bet. If he combined his experience as a software developer and founder, maybe he could build an AI-powered tool that actually produced strong scripts.
That bet turned into Subscribr.
The key point:
He entered an industry he did not know deeply, spotted a painful bottleneck, and built an offer around that pain. He did not need to be a YouTube veteran. He needed to understand a problem and commit to solving it.
The Big Shift: Pre-Sell First, Then Build
Here is the part that separates Gil from most builders.
He did not:
- Disappear for six months
- Perfect the product in silence
- Then hope people would care
Instead, he sold it before it existed.
Why standard “validation” is not enough
Gil calls out a common trap for developers and product people.
“The curse of being a software developer is that it's so easy to fall in love with an idea.”
The usual advice looks like this:
- Ask your friends what they think
- Ask potential users, “How much would you pay for this if it existed?”
His take is direct:
“I actually think that that feedback is not good enough. In fact, it's actually quite dangerous because it lets you think you have validation.”
People will say:
- “I’d pay $20 a month if I did not already have this other tool.”
- “I’d pay once I get this check from my old company.”
In other words, lots of polite interest, no money.
Painkillers vs vitamins
Gil uses a classic startup idea:
- A vitamin is nice to have. People say they want it. They can live without it.
- A painkiller solves a real pain. People feel it today. They will pay for relief.
“As an entrepreneur we always want to be selling a painkiller, not a vitamin.”
If people will not pay you now, your product might be a vitamin. Or your offer might be weak.
The only real validation: money
Gil’s rule is simple:
“The only way to really get validation is to collect money from people. And the faster you can get to that, the more likely it is that your startup is going to succeed.”
So he designed a pre-sale that forced real commitment.
- He offered 50 lifetime licenses at an absurdly low price
- The first 10 were super cheap
- Every 10 licenses after that increased in price to build FOMO
- He sold out in 2 or 3 days
- That brought in $20,000 before he had built the product
There was one big catch.
“I told people at any point in time you can ask for your money back. I'm going to deliver this product to you in 60 days and after that you'll have 2 weeks to continue trying it and ask for your money back.”
So he had:
- 60 days to build
- 14 extra days where buyers could still refund
- $20,000 at risk if he failed to deliver
That kind of pre-sale is real validation. People put their money behind the promise, not just their opinion.
Gil’s 4-Step Pre-Sale Playbook
Gil’s approach is not magic. It is a clear, repeatable process that any early startup founder can follow.
Here is his step-by-step playbook, if he had to start again from scratch today.
Step 1: Build an audience before you build the product
If you do not have an audience, you do not have anyone to sell to.
Gil started from zero.
- He created a brand new X (Twitter) account with no followers
- He followed people in the YouTube creator space
- He looked for ways to create small tools and content that were useful for that crowd
He used:
- Free tools and content that took real time to make
- Viral giveaways on X
- Short posts that showed his thinking, wins, and failures in public
This did two things:
- It attracted the right people in his niche
- It built trust, because he was being real, not polished
“Post the raw, build in public type stories of you with your thought process and what you're doing. And that will help establish trust with people.”
Over time, he built an email list of over 1,000 people who knew who he was and why he cared about YouTube tools.
You can adapt this:
- Pick your niche or target user
- Open a fresh account on X or LinkedIn
- Share something useful every day that would save your target user time or money
- Talk openly about what you are trying to build and why
Do this before you have a product. Then when you do have an offer, people are ready to listen.
Step 2: Start an email list and talk every week
Social media is great for reach. Email is where real relationships grow.
Gil set up an email list early and:
- Emailed at least once a week
- Shared his latest findings, insights, small tools, and experiments
- Reached out 1:1 to people on the list to talk about his idea
Email gave him:
- A direct line to people who cared about YouTube
- Constant feedback on his startup ideas
- A deeper level of trust that social alone could not create
“When you start emailing people, they will email you back and you start this dialogue and you can start to talk to them about your idea.”
By the time he was ready to pre-sell, this list was warm and engaged. This is why his launch worked in just a few days.
If you are early in your startup:
- Start a simple email list today
- Send one honest, useful email every week
- Treat replies like gold, and answer every one
- Float early versions of your ideas to see what gets people excited
Step 3: Define your validation target with simple math
Before Gil launched his pre-sale, he decided what success looked like.
He asked:
- How much money do I need to cover my life while I build this full-time?
- How long do I want to buy myself?
His answers:
- He wanted around $20,000
- That would cover about 3 months of focused work
From there, he worked backwards.
- Pick a price point. He chose a set of lifetime licenses at a low price that still made sense.
- Choose a buyer target. At those prices, he aimed for 50 customers.
- Estimate conversions. He then guessed what percentage of his email list might buy, and from that, how large his list needed to be.
This turned “build an audience” into something measurable.
Instead of “I should grow on X,” he had:
- A target list size
- A buyer count that meant real validation
- A clear revenue goal
You can do the same:
- Decide how much money would buy you 2–3 months of focus
- Pick a test offer and price that feels generous but real
- Divide to see how many buyers you need
- Estimate what size list or audience gives you a shot at that
Now you know when you are ready to pre-sell.
Also Read: Loïc Has Co-Founded 3 Successful SaaS Apps Using the Same Playbook
Step 4: Run a focused 7-day pre-sale
Once he had the audience, list, and math, Gil turned on the pre-sale.
He did not send one email and hope. He treated it like a real launch.
Here is the structure he used.
A 7-day hype sequence
For seven days, he emailed daily to build excitement.
Each email focused on:
- Benefits, not just features
- How this tool would change a creator’s daily life
- The emotional payoff of better scripts and faster output
He did not dump every detail in the first email. Instead, he:
- Talked about the problems the app would solve
- Shared more and more about the solution
- Only shared the full pre-sale details near the end
“You've got to get aggressive about this because there's no one who's going to be excited about your product unless you make them excited.”
Strong launch and clear deadline
On launch day, he:
- Sent multiple emails so people knew exactly when it went live
- Reminded them that the pre-sale would end soon
- Posted across all his social channels and engaged with every comment and question
Scarcity was real. There were only 50 licenses. Prices went up after each batch of 10. Once they were gone, they were gone.
An offer people cannot say no to
Gil leaned on the ideas from Alex Hormozi’s book “$100M Offers”.
“A key part of the pre-sale is to have an offer so good that people can't help it but say yes.”
His offer had two powerful pieces:
- Irresistible pricing for early adopters, even if not very profitable
- A strong money-back guarantee that removed risk for buyers
“The entire time in between when the pre-sale happened and when the product was delivered, they could ask for their money back.”
He sold out:
- 50 licenses
- In 2 to 3 days
- For about $20,000 in revenue
All before he built the app.
You can adapt this pattern to your startup:
- Plan a 5–7 day sequence
- Talk about benefits and outcomes
- Use clear scarcity and a real deadline
- Make the offer feel almost unfair in the buyer’s favor
- Offer a risk-reversing guarantee if you can back it up
Tech Stack and Monthly Costs Behind a $30K/Month SaaS
Gil’s tech stack is deliberately simple.
He did not build a huge system. He picked mature tools, wrote code fast with AI help, and focused on the product.
How he built Subscribr
Gil says:
“I use cloud code. Probably 90% of my code is written with cloud code.”
He used AI coding tools to handle most of the boilerplate, then guided and edited the results.
His stack:
- Laravel, a popular PHP framework, for the backend
- Hosting on DigitalOcean
- A handful of external services only where needed
- Several AI model providers on the backend to power the script writing
No fancy microservices, no huge dev team, no massive spend on infrastructure.
Monthly costs to run the business
Gil shared real numbers for his monthly operating costs:
| Expense category | Monthly cost |
|---|---|
| AI compute | $3,500 |
| Ads | $2,000 |
| Other (scraping, hosting, email) | $1,500 |
| Total | $7,000 |
With around $30,000 per month in revenue, that leaves plenty of room for profit and reinvestment.
This is what a healthy bootstrapped startup can look like: simple stack, focused spend, and clear profit.
Builder’s Disease And How To Avoid It
Pat Walls, the host, calls out something many developers and product people face: builder’s disease.
For some people:
- Building is fun
- Writing code feels safe
- Shipping features feels productive
The hard part is:
- Talking to customers
- Building an audience
- Asking for money
Gil’s approach is a cure for builder’s disease.
Instead of hiding in code, he:
- Talked to potential customers early and often
- Built a real audience before the product
- Collected money as validation
- Forced himself into a 60-day window to deliver
If you feel stuck in endless building, his story is a clear reminder:
“Unfortunately, that is what you need to do in 2025 if you want to actually build something.”
The startup that wins is not the one with the most code. It is the one that gets customers, builds distribution, and makes sales.
Gil’s Top Advice For New Bootstrappers
At the end of the interview, Gil shared the advice he would give his younger self, and anyone starting a bootstrapped startup today.
1. Do not fall in love with an idea without a pre-sale
“You cannot fall in love with your idea without validating it by doing some sort of pre-sale, validating that people are willing to pay for it.”
If no one buys your pre-sale, you learned something valuable cheaply.
If people buy, you now have:
- Money
- Proof of demand
- A real reason to build
2. Put profit first, especially as a bootstrapper
“As a bootstrapper, the number one thing that you've got to strive for is profit.”
He warns against:
- Hiring expensive agencies that promise the world
- Chasing every new feature or product direction
- Letting costs creep into your margin without a clear return
If you are bootstrapping, profit is safety. It buys time to improve the product, support customers, and grow at your own pace.
“It's better to have profit than growth if you're in the bootstrap game.”
3. Bootstrapping is more fun
Pat asked Gil one last question: which is more fun, VC-backed or bootstrapped?
His one-word answer:
“Bootstrapping for sure.”
Control, clarity, and real ownership tend to beat stress, dilution, and growth at all costs.
Key Takeaways You Can Apply This Week
You do not have to copy every detail of Gil’s story to benefit from it. Here are concrete actions you can start now for your own startup.
1. Pick a painful problem, not a clever idea.
Look for bottlenecks where people already pay for messy, slow, or manual solutions. That is where pain lives.
2. Start building an audience before you have a product.
Open an account where your target users hang out. Post something helpful every day. Share your thought process.
3. Launch an email list as early as possible.
Offer a simple lead magnet or useful resource. Email your list once a week with honest updates and practical value.
4. Decide your validation number.
Figure out how much money would buy you 2–3 months of focus. Work backwards to a buyer count and list size.
5. Design a small pre-sale offer.
Offer a limited number of spots or licenses at a generous price. Add a real deadline and a clear guarantee.
6. Spend a week selling, not building.
Run a focused 5–7 day campaign to your list and social audience. Talk about outcomes, not features.
7. Let the market decide.
If people buy, you have validation. If they do not, you learned early, and you can adjust the offer, the product, or the target market.
This is how you turn a startup idea from a guess into a real business.
Conclusion: Build Faster, Validate Sooner
Gil’s story is not just about an AI app or YouTube scripts. It is a new default for how to start a startup.
Instead of:
- Hiding in code
- Hoping people show up
- Treating opinions as validation
He:
- Built an audience up front
- Talked to real people every week
- Collected $20,000 before he wrote the full product
- Delivered in 60 days, then grew it into a $30K/month SaaS
You can take the same path.
Start small. Talk to people. Sell first. Build second.
0 Comments