A guy in Australia is making over $50,000 a month from a button.
A website widget that lets you book a plumber the way you book a table at a restaurant.
His name is Tom. He built it with his brother. He has no coding background, he left school in what Americans would call freshman year, and his first job paid $4 an hour.
And the growth channel that got him here is the one nobody wants to hear: door to door SaaS sales. Walking into shops with an iPad and a printed brochure, in 2026, while everyone else fights for scraps on Twitter.
Gus from Starter Story found the company through an anonymous tweet claiming $40K+ a month, DM'd the founder, and got him on the channel. The full episode is below, and the playbook inside it is one of the most stealable I've covered.
The product: a booking widget for tradies
The company is called Avenue. It's an embed that sits on the website of a trades business (electricians, mechanics, plumbers) and shows every service they offer in a visual menu. A customer taps through, picks what they need, and either buys or submits an inquiry.
It also plugs into Google. Avenue is partnered with Google directly, so clients get a "Book online" button on their Google Business Profile. Someone finds a mechanic on Google, taps the button, lands in a branded booking flow. If they bail out, they get redirected to the client's website, where the same widget is embedded again.
Every path leads to one place.
Tom's pitch for why this needs to exist is dead simple: "I have money. I want to buy from a service business. Why do I have to call them?"
You've felt this. You needed an electrician, their website was a phone number and a contact form, you gave up and texted a friend for a recommendation instead. That gap is worth $85,000 AUD a month to Tom (roughly $55K USD). His Stripe went from A$597 in August last year to A$63,000 this August.
That took a year.
He hired a full team at zero revenue
Here's the part of the story where Tom does everything backwards.
February last year, a developer friend helped him ship the MVP: proof the widget could embed natively into a client's site. The moment the layout came to life, Tom went all in.
He hired a lead designer. Then a head developer for the backend. Then a front-end developer.
Revenue at the time: zero.
His words: "On paper, terrible idea. Don't recommend it at all."
What made it survivable is the detail most people will skim past. Tom had run a marketing agency for 10 years, and it still had 70+ clients paying for website hosting. That leftover income funded the entire team while Avenue earned nothing. He drained the income he lived on to transition out of the agency and into the product.
So no, this is not "raise nothing, spend nothing" bootstrapping. It's the older pattern I keep seeing on the podcast: a boring cash-flow business quietly funding the ambitious one. If you run an agency right now and hate it, don't kill it. Milk it.
The team-first bet paid off in an unexpected way too. Having real designers and developers gave Tom the confidence to sell into bigger companies that a two-brother side project could never land. That polish is what got the bigger meetings.
The growth tactic: door to door, with iPads
Zero customers, zero audience, zero connections. So Tom and his early team went door knocking.
And the first version failed. They demoed the widget on an iPhone, and shop owners kept asking "so it's an app?" Nobody understood that the thing lived on their own website.
The fix came from one of his early staff: show it on an iPad instead. Bigger screen, looks like a website, and they loaded each demo in the prospect's own branding. They paired it with printed brochures explaining the product.
That one change unlocked everything.
Tom's line on why it works: "When you show someone the problem they have, and you can explain it quite clearly, like, you can't get sales outside of hours and this fixes that, they're very open to trying something new that they're being shown in person."
Then the compounding kicked in. After enough small shops, bigger clients started saying "I've seen you guys everywhere, a lot of people must trust you." The door to door grind became social proof for the enterprise deals. He had no warm intros to big clients, so the small ones became the intro.
Almost every founder on Starter Story grows with TikTok, UGC, building in public. All of that works, I've covered plenty of it. But there's a whole layer of businesses (the ones in your own suburb) that will never see your tweet. Nobody is knocking on their door with software. The channel is empty because everyone decided it was beneath them.
Everyone abandoned door to door at the same time, which is exactly why it still converts.
Why trades? He didn't pick the niche, it picked him
My favorite detail: Avenue wasn't built for trades at first.
When they started door knocking, they didn't skip a single business. Music studios, repair shops, anything with an open door got the iPad demo.
The trades just kept responding. Tom describes them as no-nonsense people: direct feedback, allergic to spending money on anything that doesn't pay for itself. Which sounds like a hard customer, and is exactly why he wanted them. If a tradie keeps paying you month after month, the product is earning its keep, because tradies cancel anything that doesn't.
So they adapted the product to trades and let the niche compound. Even the rejections helped: some shop owners would say "this is useless for me, but you should talk to my friend, this would work so well for his business."
That's the part idea-stage founders overthink. You don't need to pick the perfect niche from your desk. You need enough contact with real businesses that the niche reveals itself. I've watched founders do this with cold calls and customer discovery calls; Tom did it with his feet. It's also a live example of what I wrote about in underserved markets: the least glamorous customers are usually the least served.
The stack: $4,000 a month on Twilio
Tom shared his monthly tool bill on camera, and it tells you what the business actually is:
→ AWS: $150
→ Slack: $120
→ Google Workspace: $130
→ Vapi (AI voice): $500
→ Twilio (SMS): $4,000
→ Claude: "Everyone's using Claude. We're no different. We need it to survive at this point."
Look at that Twilio line. The hosting costs $150 and the SMS costs $4,000.
Avenue makes its money on what happens after the click. The widget captures the inquiry, and the automations behind it (SMS confirmations, AI voice, reminders) make sure the tradie never loses the lead. That backend is what Tom says makes Avenue "fundamentally different" from a booking link. If you want to go deeper on that machinery, this breakdown of lead nurturing strategies covers the same follow-up layer Avenue is quietly charging for.
For a trades business, one missed call is a $400 job gone. Tom charges for making that impossible. The widget is just the visible 10%.
Steal this playbook
→ Sell before you build. Tom's #1 advice. If someone hears the problem you fix, asks the price, and is ready to hand over cash before the product exists, build it. (He validated the demand at the door, not in a survey.)
→ Demo on the customer's turf, in their branding. The iPhone demo confused people; the iPad demo in their own colors closed them. Make the prospect see THEIR business, not your product.
→ Use a boring income stream to fund the ambitious one. The 10-year agency with 70+ hosting clients was the real seed round.
→ Let rejections route you. "Not for me, but talk to my friend" is free qualified outreach.
→ Pick customers who hate wasting money. If price-sensitive tradies keep paying, you've built something real. Like the non-technical founder behind TradeZella, Tom proves you don't need to write the code to own the outcome.
I talk to bootstrapped founders doing $100K to $10M a year every week on the podcast, and the pattern behind Avenue (unsexy niche, in-person distribution, follow-up as the product) comes up more than any growth hack.
Listen to the Profitable Founder Podcast →
FAQ
Does door to door sales still work for SaaS?
Yes, for local service businesses it might be the single least crowded channel. Avenue got its first 10 customers by walking into shops with an iPad demo and printed brochures, and later closed bigger clients because "I've seen you guys everywhere" acted as social proof. It works because owners of trades businesses rarely hang out where SaaS founders market.
How much does Avenue make?
Tom says the business does A$85,000 a month in revenue (over $50K USD). On camera, his Stripe dashboard showed A$597 in August of last year growing to A$63,000 a year later. The company launched its MVP in February of the previous year with help from a developer friend.
Can a non-technical founder build a SaaS like this?
Tom had never coded or designed anything. He had a developer friend build the MVP, then hired a lead designer, a head developer, and a front-end developer before the product made a dollar, funded by his 10-year-old marketing agency's hosting income. He owned the problem and the customers, and paid for the code.
What makes a booking widget worth $50K a month?
The follow-up, not the widget. Avenue spends $4,000 a month on Twilio SMS and $500 on AI voice because the automations that catch, confirm, and chase every inquiry are the real product. For a tradie, never missing a lead is worth a serious subscription.
