How MarsX.dev CEO John Rush grew MarsX.dev to $3.5M revenue with a 15 person team in 2025.

Transcript Yeah. So I'm I'm doing around 3.5 million AR now with all these agents and I started I launched the first one a bit more than a year ago. So this is is is SEO bot the biggest revenue earner? Yeah, this one is doing almost 120 uh K MR now and been doubling month over month after the launch. And how many folks are on the team working on SEO bot? It's just me and one more person. Are you can I put on Are you open to screen sharing your Stripe account and showing us the tiny ads growth just from zero to 5K? Yeah, of course. Hey folks, my guest today is John Rush and he is building all kinds of tools in the SEO space. He's updated on all the latest AI tactics, whether it's agentic workflows or anything like that related to growth. Really prolific on X as well. And one of his posts caught my eye where he basically showed a screenshot of one of his agents getting a job on a job board. His specifically listing bot uh paid 499 bucks to do a SEO job that uh someone named Caleb Pepper uh put together for their startup Fire called Dev. So I wanted to talk to John about how he's building these agents, how much revenue he's doing, how he's growing, and just how he's thinking about building you know 20 plus startups all at one time. John, you ready to take us to the top? Yeah. So I'm all in building AI agents and I think I bet uh everything on the future of AI agents and I think uh the future is uh founders plus AI agents and that will be the new normal that will be the new corporations run by very few people in some cases like in my case almost no people and the AI that's wild so your bio here I run the most automated org on earth using AI agents that you build like unicorn platform index rusher listing bot SEO bot tiny ads, etc. We're going to jump into all of these today, but John, I don't want to bury the lead. Can you share anything from a growth perspective? Are you comfortable sharing sort of how much revenue all these things do together? Yeah. Yeah. So, um I'm doing around 3.5 million AR now with all these agents and I started I launched the first one a bit more than a year ago. So, before that, I was in the trenches just experimenting and building stuff. So it's uh several of them making the most of the revenue like SEO bot, listing bot, unicorn platform and a few others are accounting for most of the revenue and the other products are either free uh or they're um just starting out. So this is is SEO bot the biggest revenue earner? Yeah, this one is doing almost 120 uh KM MR now and been doubling month over month after the launch. So, it's doing really really well and I think uh it has the one the it has done really good job at making the whole AI agent on autopilot popular on Twitter at least. Mhm. No, this this is this is fascinating. So, 120k a month right now in revenue. You're charging 19 bucks a month. When did you launch the platform? It was uh a bit more than a year ago. So I launched in a internal beta for like six months with people I know and they've been using it for 6 months and after that I launched for the public uh around 12 months ago or maybe 14 months ago. Okay. So maybe like like April February of 2024. Yeah. Yeah. That's when it was kind of public. Until that I had the six months of uh closed beta where I would invite people to try it. Uh-huh. And how many folks are on the team working on SEO bot? It's just me and one more person. So, all my teams are the same. It's me who comes up with the idea and who builds usually the first MVP and tests out and does the pre-sale and and ideates and builds up the UX and everything. And then I find a co-maker uh usually on Twitter or in my network uh who joins in to build the thing and we build it together. So, uh, the other person is building and I'm promoting and then I help him to build. He helps me to promote. So, it's kind of a team of two people. So, that's you and Vitalic on SEO bot, right? Yeah. Yeah. Just two people. That's like, can I ask what do you do? Do you just split equity 50/50 or how do you have that conversation? 50/50. Yeah, exactly. So, it's 50/50 split just like co-founders in the startup and he is the CTO and I'm CEO, but we do a lot of things together, too. This is wild. Okay. So, so I love how you're building. You're obviously building in public. You know, this is this does very these kind of screenshots obviously do very well on Twitter. Actually, you see them all here, which is great. Uh are you're using testimonial.io for this wall of love. No, I think this one is from Sanja, just the competitor. Spell that. San like as Yeah, exactly. Okay. Okay. Sa.io. Okay, cool. All right. So, you've got this you've got this great wall of love going here. Okay. So, help us understand your price point's 19 bucks a month. Um, and so I guess so what does that mean? 120,000 divided by 19. Does that mean we have about 6 6,000 paying customers? Uh, a bit less than that because we have 49, we have 199, we have 499. So, we have a lot more inside there. And right now, I'm seeing a lot of uh people moving for higher tiers and higher plans. And and we haven't even uh started working with bigger customers. But u the end goal here is to go of course for the bigger customers. So I usually start with smaller check just that my first customers are the builders because I like to build product for builders first because they give me good feedback and they actually become part of my product team and once I get to a place where they love it then I increase the price and then it goes more for teams and we see fives companies and corporations. Okay. Okay. So, sorry. How many customers do you have today? About I think it's like 5K or 4K between four and 5K. That's great. How are you driving like this obviously does all the selling for you, right? Getting your users to tag you and post a screenshot of their growth. Is this all happening organically or are you sort of softly prompting folks, hey, you should put a screenshot up. Tag us. You're crushing it. Yeah. So surprisingly I've never asked anyone to do that and I think if I did that I would maybe 10x my revenue over a few months. So people do it on their own and uh it's just I spend time to listen to the users and I have chats going on with a lot of the users. I don't think anyone on earth has more chats than me. I think I have almost like 1,000 chats going on with users and and they love it because I listen directly and I come back with fixes and with improvements and usually that kind of makes them uh loyal and then they become like ambassadors of the product. Mhm. That makes tons of sense. So it's just two of you guys building it. So like that's really high revenue per employee, right? $60,000 per month in revenue per employee or $720,000 a year in revenue per employee. Um, walk us through. So, and you mentioned um what what's growth strategy here? I mean, is it really just almost purely social? I mean, are you I'm going to go into your back end here. Are you running your own SEO play for SEO bot? Yeah. So, basically I have very simple strategy. So, number one, I show everybody how the tool is helping myself, right? So uh in case of SEO bot I use it for all my other products and then I share the results and that helps a lot both the products I share the results for and the those I used then I do a lot of SEO using SEO bot list and bot index index rusher so that brings around 30% of my uh traffic and then the other 30% comes as cross promo so all the tools are targeting the same audience right and if somebody joins one of my products as a customer, then they end up using all of my other products eventually. So that's like a big chunk of the growth. So 30% SEO, 30% crossromo, and 30% is social media where I build in public and other people share uh that they use my product too. So it just come from social media. And 10% is all the other things, all the small. And here's an example of you using your own dog food, right? You launch your own SEO tool lmodels.org. You go up from zero to this many clicks per month. And you're saying, "Hey, I used SEO uh I use my own tools to do this." Yeah, exactly. And I do a lot of products. So, uh since I keep doing 0 to one over and over again, uh then I can reiterate on that again. So, I I'm not sharing the same product, the same thing over and over again. So I start new product from zero and in month I get somewhere and I use my own tools and then when it works I share and it brings users. Mhm. This is great. Okay. So that's the story of SEO bot. You said the next biggest tool that you run in terms of revenue is listing bot. Yeah listing bot is it's very simple tool. So it does only two things. Uh so one part of the tool is deep research it does on the internet to find all the web directories for a particular product and and it's really hard work because you want to find everything on the internet and then you want to rank it by the relevance and domain rating etc. And the other thing it does it actually lists you there. So it's a web automation that registers on the directory and adds...