How we built a SaaS to $8M a year (at 24yo)

About this episode

🔹 Are we friends on Instagram? https://www.instagram.com/florian.darroman/ My guest today is Nick Lawton. He grew SideShift to $8M ARR with his 2 co-founders. In this episode, you'll discover: - How Nick and his co-founders built an $8M ARR startup - How to use UGC for promote your product - His complete playbook to build a $1M startup in 2026 Find Nick on X: https://x.com/nicholasnlawton Try SideShift: https://sideshift.app/?utm_source=florian Chapters: 0:00 - Intro 1:03 - Breaking Into College Dorms 2:27 - The Door-to-Door Grind 3:01 - Expanding to 10+ Campuses 4:46 - Tech Twitter Changed Everything 6:13 - The Unexpected Pivot 8:40 - The #1 Lesson That Scaled Us 11:03 - Managing Two Businesses at Once 13:35 - B2C vs B2B: What Actually Works 15:48 - Are We Profitable? 16:55 - How $8M Changed My Life 18:28 - Bootstrapped vs Funded 21:09 - Our First Round 22:15 - The UGC Money Machine 26:04 - Why Niche Creators Are Wrong 29:35 - $0 Budget? Start Here 31:59 - The New Creator Role 32:36 - The Hidden Bottleneck 34:15 - 90M Views in 30 Days 36:34 - The Real Starting Budget 39:23 - How I would build a $1M Startup in 2026 43:29 - Personal Brand vs Product 44:51 - What Kind of Founder? 46:14 - Finding Your Technical Partner 48:43 - Stop Doing This 50:24 - Nothing Beats This