Making $11,000 monthly without doing much running a simple website

This was the exact post made by Angus Cheng, when he just announced that his simple website / SaaS business had just hit the $10,000 MRR.

In just 2 years, Angus has managed to grow a simple website doing just one thing, into a one-man SaaS business bringing in $11,000 in monthly recurring revenue.

Let’s dive in to see how he pulled this off.

Hello! Can you introduce yourself and tell us about your business?

My business is a web application that lets users extract transaction data from PDF bank statements: https://bankstatementconverter.com/ 

It does one simple thing: converts your PDF bank statements from 100s of banks world wide into a clean Excel (XLS) format.

How did you start this business? Take us through the process.

Between 2010 and 2013 I was an indie game developer. After that I got a job as a mobile game developer. Then I moved to mobile app development. After that I worked as a backend developer at an investment bank. After that I joined a crypto exchange.

At the end of 2020 I got frustrated with work and quit my job to work for myself. Soon after I created Bank Statement Converter.

I had just quit my job was looking for something to build. A friend of mine wanted to work with me on something so we were both on the look out for ideas.

One day I wanted to analyse my spending so I logged onto my online banking account in search for a CSV feed. They didn't have one, all they could give me were PDF bank statements.

I downloaded all the statements, then wrote some code to extract the data I wanted. It was incredibly fiddly. I thought it would take about an hour, but I think I spent 10 hours on the script.

I thought "If I have this problem, maybe someone else does".

So I pitched my friend the idea "Let's make a web app that extracts transaction data from PDFs". He was keen. I went over to his place a two or three times and we hacked out an MVP and got it into production.

I think the website was live within a week. The first version had no registration and no payments. I think the only thing we spent money on was the domain ($10) and the Amazon EC2 server ($10 monthly).

How did you get your first initial customers?

If you count a customer as someone who signs up, then the first 100 customers came from Google Search Ads.

Here’s a diary of the ad spend vs revenue from Angus’s blog:

$0 MRR

$200 MRR