How I’m earning real money by going against the grain My brother and I have been building, using, and promoting our micro-SaaS for the past 8 months. He builds it, I promote it. Some of what I’ve done has worked better than I expected. A lot of what I’ve done has been a total waste of time. My 8-year-old son even feels sorry for me because he found out our SaaS YouTube channel has only 46 subscribers — funny story below… Here are the 3 most important and surprising things I’ve learned. 1. Having your own website is a bigger deal than I thought. Starting a new website sucks. Google doesn’t know who you are and you have a domain authority of 0. You also get absolutely zero organic traffic for quite a while. To be honest, we’re still not getting much organic traffic, but it’s finally starting to show signs of life. Here is a screenshot of our last 3 months of Google Search Console. Podsplice Google Search Console Traffic — Last 3 Months — April 2026 You can see an increasing number of both clicks and impressions. But as I’ll explain later, most of these clicks are for our product name, “ Podsplice ”. It’s not hard to show up number one for your own brand name, so I’m not going to make a big deal about it. However, over the past week or so, I can see that the impressions for related search terms have been exponentially increasing. But the reason that having our own website is a big deal is that it gets us past a growing number of gatekeepers. AI slop isn’t just a problem for Medium and YouTube. It’s a problem everywhere. There are millions of new micro SaaS projects popping up all the time. People are vibe coding their own software project and trying to get people to find it. If you want to get listed on the biggest software directories, you now need both a website and an “@your_brand” email address to be allowed to be listed. You can’t just list your vibe-coded Vercel link. We’re also starting to get random, but high-quality, backlinks pointing to our website. I think AI is scraping both our website and the SaaS directories. A lot of bloggers are then using AI to help with research and writing. Because we’re in these directories, we’re being listed in new lists and articles. The more times our brand is listed, the more likely it is to be picked up in future articles. It’s easy to see how it is a positive feedback loop, like a snowball. It’s also easier to reach out and get a response from potential partners. If I email from my “@podsplice” email address and link to the website, I’m much more likely to get a positive response. 2. AI is driving brand recognition more than SEO Remember when I said most of my Google clicks came for the word “Podsplice”? I’m 99% sure that the reason people are Googling it is because of ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google’s own “AI mode” mentioning it. I often open up Google in a separate browser in “incognito mode”. That means I’m not logged in so Google doesn’t give me skewed search results. I see what a typical person sees. When I search for keywords like, “best screen recording software for capturing system audio 2026” I get this in Google AI mode. Podsplice Showing Up in Google AI Mode You can see that Podsplice is the number 1 recommendation. I’m also not logged in, as you see in the screenshot. This is the case with many long tail keywords. I know because I test them all the time in incognito mode. A lot of the AI search results also come from some of the screen recording and reaction videos I made with Podsplice. Because my brand isn’t linked in AI mode (sometimes it is, but not always), people need to search Google for Podsplice to find out more. 3. I’m getting more sales than fans (bonus surprise) I’m pleasantly surprised to be having such a high conversion rate. Here is a screenshot of our new paying customers from just the past few days. It’s pretty good considering we’re new, not paying for ads, and not getting a ton of traffic. These are all monthly recurring payments as well. Podsplice Recent Sales — April 2026 My 8-year-old son was feeling sorry for me the other day because he found out our Podsplice YouTube channel only has 46 subscribers! He said, “Dad, guess how many subs so and so has? 3 million. And you only have 46?” He told me not to feel too sad, and he offered to subscribe to my channel if I wanted. I had to lol on that one. I told him that while I do really appreciate the thoughtfulness, I don’t care that much about subscribers; I care about helping people. I actually use Podsplice on different channels that are going very well , but my official account isn’t really about subscriber growth. It’s more about targeting “pain points”. If you’re a builder like us, you know that the biggest hurdle isn’t just coding — it’s getting people to actually see what you’ve made. I’ve found that making authentic screen recording videos is the best way to cut through the noise in 2026. If you need a way to record your product demos or reaction videos without fighting with Mac audio settings, give Podsplice a try. It’s the tool we’re using to build the very growth I just described. Feel free to follow me on LinkedIn . A message from our Founder Hey, Sunil here. I wanted to take a moment to thank you for reading until the end and for being a part of this community. Did you know that our team run these publications as a volunteer effort to over 3.5m monthly readers? We don’t receive any funding, we do this to support the community. If you want to show some love, please take a moment to follow me on LinkedIn , TikTok , Instagram . You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter . And before you go, don’t forget to clap and follow the writer️! 3 Counter-Intuitive Things I Learned Promoting my Micro-SaaS was originally published in Artificial Intelligence in Plain English on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.