024 The Gregory and Paul Show - How to Scale from Zero to a Million in ARR as a Solo Founder

On the Gregory and Paul Show, we break down the latest in startups, SaaS, AI, and whatever the internet is fighting about this week.

🔗 Connect with Gregory & Paul

Gregory Kennedy
🌐 Website – https://www.vibeyoursaas.com
💼 LinkedIn –   / gregorykennedy  
🐦X (Twitter) –   / gregorykennedy  

Paul
🌐 Website – https://karmic.buzz
💼 LinkedIn –   / pxue  
🐦 X (Twitter) –   / pxue  

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🎙️ Episode 024 – How to Scale from Zero to a Million in ARR as a Solo Founder

Gregory and Paul walk through how they both went from solo freelancers to running real businesses. Paul explains how AI nuked his MVP dev agency and pushed him into Reddit marketing just as Google started boosting threads. Gregory breaks down how Vibe Your SaaS went from two experimental clients to a full portfolio by treating services like a product and never stopping the pipeline work. They compare work styles, talk honestly about pricing, churn, and boundaries.

🦃 Canadian Thanksgiving, Rice Stuffing, and Vibes (0:00)
They open with Canadian Thanksgiving timing, discuss Asian Canadian families doing rice-stuffed turkey, and why rice plus mushrooms beats bread as stuffing. It sets the relaxed tone before they switch into business mode.

💼 From Layoffs to Freelance Life on Black Friday (1:38)
Gregory explains why this episode is for people who were just laid off or want out of corporate. The theme is simple: how to go from zero to one million in revenue by turning your skill into a freelance agency.

👨‍💻 When AI Crashed MVP Dev Pricing (3:17)
Paul tells the story of running a dev agency as GPT 3.5 landed. MVP projects that used to pay one hundred thousand dropped to fifty thousand, then ten thousand, as founders realized they could vibe code an early product instead of hiring a full team.

📈 Pivoting Into Reddit and AEO While Demand Spiked (8:53)
As Google started boosting Reddit in search and more non-Reddit users used it for product research, Paul saw a new opportunity. He had already gone viral with several posts and knew how to write long-form threads that both rank in Google and pull real traffic.

🤝 First Clients, Spec Work, and Low Pricing (13:08)
Paul shares exactly how he closed his first Reddit clients. He posted case studies, wrote sample threads on spec, showed screenshots of rankings, and priced the first retainers at around five hundred dollars a month so that saying yes felt easy.

💵 Raising Prices and Managing Ten Clients at Once (17:52)
Once demand picked up, he pushed retainers toward one thousand to one thousand five hundred per month and ended up with about ten clients paying six to seven thousand total. It was enough to live on but a lot of work, which forced him to confront his capacity and start raising prices again.

📆 Two Different Ways to Run the Week (26:10)
Gregory and Paul compare operating styles. Gregory lives by a structured calendar with specific days for calls, content, and in-person meetings, and even blocks Fridays as founder time. Paul works from a short daily list of two or three must-do tasks and accepts that everything else is chaos.

🧱 Productized Services vs One-Off Projects (32:04)
They explain why repeatable work beats one-time projects if you want a real business. Design sprints, websites, and random one-offs churn fast. Content, social, and ongoing go-to-market support can be packaged as a monthly service that compounds over time.

📊 Pricing Bands and the Path to One Million (36:40)
Together, they map out the math. Most healthy retainers sit between one thousand and eight thousand a month, where hiring a contractor is still cheaper than a full-time hire. With productized services and clean delivery, twenty to thirty clients at those levels get you to a million in annual revenue.

🧩 Low Ticket Churn, High Ticket Calm, and Letting Go (40:24)
Paul points out that low-paying clients often demand the most, while larger retainers usually know what they want and need fewer experiments. Gregory adds that you should never stop marketing, so you can comfortably let misaligned clients churn and keep the ones who fit.

🏗️ Brand, Trust, and When to Hire Operators (51:00)
They underline that early sales are founder-led. The founder’s credibility is the product. To go beyond half a million, you need productized offers, better systems, and eventually operators who handle delivery while you focus on brand and pipeline.

🤣 Stripe Support Replies to a Joke (59:51)
They close with a Stripe meme. Stripe’s support team replied earnestly, offering to help him investigate, which feels like a strange but satisfying milestone in his meme career.