"Hey Pat, I just sold my SaaS for millions and I wanted to share the secret with you."
That's the DM Jeremy sent Pat Walls from Starter Story.
Most DMs like that are a course funnel in disguise. This one wasn't. Pat flew to the Hollywood Hills, knocked on Jeremy's door, and got him to whiteboard the whole thing on camera.
The secret has a name: the tentpole strategy. Instead of marketing one product, Jeremy built small, cheap side products that ranked on their own in Google and funneled paying customers into his core SaaS, TaskMagic.
It took TaskMagic to $3 million a year. With one employee. Then he sold it for mid-to-upper seven figures on acquire.com.
Watch the full visit here, then I'll break down the playbook piece by piece:
The numbers first, because they sound fake
Here's TaskMagic on paper:
- 60,000+ users, about 8,000 of them paying
- Months north of $400K in revenue
- Roughly $3M annually at peak
- Inc. 5000 list, with a team of exactly two: Jeremy and his CTO
- Sold in the mid-to-upper seven figures before Jeremy turned 38
Two people. Not two hundred. Two.
And Jeremy started non-technical. His first version, back in 2019, was a no-code app builder that by his own account ran painfully slow. But it made money early, which let him hire his CTO. They rebuilt it, launched in 2020, and got that first product to seven figures.
Then in 2021 they noticed something in the support tickets. Customers kept using the app builder to try to automate things. Zapier existed, sure, but Zapier is limited by APIs. If a tool doesn't have an integration, you're stuck.
So they pivoted into browser automation: record the messy clicking-around a human does in a browser, then replay it automatically. That pivot started from a few hundred grand in revenue and hit $3M within 3 years.
Good pivot. But the pivot isn't the lesson. The distribution is.
What the tentpole strategy actually is
Picture a tent. The tall pole in the middle is your core product. For Jeremy, that was TaskMagic.
Most founders build the pole and then spend all their money shouting about it. Ads, content, cold outreach. The usual grind.
Jeremy did something else. He built more products.
Small ones. Cheap ones. Each solving one specific problem for the exact same customer, and each with a button inside that leads back to TaskMagic.
The old version of this idea is the free lead magnet: an ebook, a template, a checklist. Jeremy's take is that with today's no-code and AI tools, you don't have to give away information anymore. You can sell functionality.
A tiny paid product beats a free PDF for two reasons:
→ It attracts buyers, not freebie collectors. Someone who paid $30 for a small tool has already pulled out their card once.
→ It ranks. A hyper-specific tool page climbs Google way faster than a general homepage, because specificity is what SEO rewards.
His side product MailLead, a dead-simple cold email tool, brought in close to seven figures on its own. That's the "free" marketing channel. It made money while it fed the tentpole.
The 4-step tentpole playbook
Jeremy broke it into four steps. I'm giving them to you straight from the whiteboard.
Step 1: Build for your customer's next problem
TaskMagic's customers were agencies, freelancers, and small business owners. People who need sales.
So the question wasn't "what feature should we add?" It was "what does this person struggle with right after they buy automation software?"
Answer: getting customers. Outbound. Cold email.
Step 2: Build something embarrassingly simple
MailLead was a simple outbound email platform. Nothing fancy. On purpose.
The simpler and more specific the product, the faster it ranks. "Cold email tool" is a page one fight against giants. A narrow tool for a narrow use case can win its keyword on its own, without a single ad dollar.
Step 3: Wire in a natural upgrade path
Inside MailLead there's an automation tab. Click it, and you're in TaskMagic territory. Hit a usage limit, and now you're paying for TaskMagic.
No hard sell. The upgrade is just the obvious next step when the customer's own workflow demands it. People discovered MailLead through search, never having heard of TaskMagic, and ended up as TaskMagic customers.
Step 4: Stack an ecosystem
Then you repeat the question. What do MailLead users need? Leads to email.
So they built LeadQuest.ai, a lead search tool. LeadQuest feeds MailLead. MailLead feeds TaskMagic. Every product cross-sells the others.
Jeremy is blunt about the framing: these aren't separate side hustles. They serve one ecosystem, one customer, one core product. That's the difference between the tentpole strategy and the indie hacker habit of launching 12 unrelated apps and watching all 12 stall.
I wrote about a related pattern in apps that market themselves. Jeremy's version is that pattern, industrialized.
The pricing unlock nobody copies
One detail from the video that deserves its own section: TaskMagic didn't start on subscriptions.
Early customers hated the idea of another monthly charge. So Jeremy sold lifetime deals plus usage-based pricing. Pay once for access, then pay as you consume.
The lifetime deals bankrolled the early build (an AppSumo award sits on his shelf next to the Product Hunt Golden Kitty). The usage pricing meant heavy users still paid like heavy users.
Purists will tell you lifetime deals kill SaaS businesses. Jeremy's counter is sitting in his driveway with a Mercedes badge on it. The nuance: lifetime deals as a launch financing tool, not a forever model, with usage fees underneath so revenue still scales. If you're rethinking how you charge, I broke down the main options in this piece on SaaS business models.
The part of the exit story nobody posts about
This is where the video gets real, and it's why I trust the rest of it.
From the outside, Jeremy's exit looks clean. Listed on acquire.com, over 100 buyers messaged him, sold for seven figures, moved into the dream house. Six or seven months, start to finish.
From the inside, it looked like this:
He bought out his investors first, which drained the company account and his personal account. His mortgage was $9,000 a month. He put $50K on his Amex Platinum and went another $200K into personal debt just to pay his bills while the deal dragged on.
His words: back against the wall. The only thing that calmed him down was sitting in his daughter's room.
Then it closed, and millions landed in his account, and everyone who saw the announcement assumed it had been easy.
His advice to founders came straight out of that stretch: everyone online is toxically positive. Everyone's crushing it, right up until their company quietly disappears. Have your bad day. Share it. Focus on the problems, because the problems are the actual work.
I've been there (the 10pm panic math, not the G Wagon), and I'd rather hear one honest exit story like this than fifty "we're just getting started" threads.
Would the tentpole strategy still work in 2026?
Pat opens the video asking if SaaS is dead. Everyone's asking it, because AI coding tools mean anyone can clone anything in a weekend.
Jeremy's answer: if he started over today, he'd run the exact same playbook. And AI makes it stronger, not weaker.
The tentpole strategy always had one bottleneck: building the side products. In 2019 that took Jeremy and his CTO months per tool. In 2026 you can vibe-code a MailLead-sized product in weeks, maybe days.
Pat's take on it stuck with me: Jeremy treats products like content. Small, fast, specific, shipped often, and every one of them pointing back at the core.
If cloning is easy, a single product is a fragile position. But an ecosystem of five products that cross-sell each other, each ranking for its own keyword? Someone can clone your app in a weekend. They can't clone five ranking pages and the upgrade paths between them.
FAQ
What is the tentpole strategy in SaaS?
You pick one core product (the tentpole), then build small, cheap, narrowly focused side products for the same customer. Each side product ranks in search on its own, makes its own money, and contains a natural upgrade path into the core product. Jeremy used it to grow TaskMagic to about $3M a year with side products like MailLead and LeadQuest.ai.
What is TaskMagic and how big did it get?
TaskMagic is a browser automation tool: it records what a human does in a browser and replays it automatically, covering the gaps where Zapier's API-based approach can't reach. It grew past 60,000 users and roughly 8,000 paying customers, with peak months over $400K, and made the Inc. 5000 list with just Jeremy and his CTO on the team.
How much did TaskMagic sell for?
Jeremy says mid-to-upper seven figures, sold through the acquire.com marketplace after more than 100 interested buyers reached out. The process took around 6 to 7 months, during which he put $50K on a credit card and went $200K into personal debt to stay afloat after buying out his investors.
Can a solo founder use the tentpole strategy today?
It's arguably easier now than when Jeremy did it. AI coding tools compress the build time for simple side products from months to days. Start with one core product that has paying customers, find the next problem those customers have, ship the smallest paid tool that solves it, and wire the upgrade path back to your core.
Steal playbooks like this every week
Jeremy shared his numbers because someone shared theirs with him first. That's how this game actually works.
Every week on the Profitable Founder Podcast, I sit down with bootstrapped founders doing $100K to $10M a year and pull apart exactly how they built it. The debt, the dark months, and the playbooks that worked.
