How MarsX.dev CEO John Rush grew 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 your product there and does all the form filling etc. John this is crazy. Are there really over 10,000 directories that people can apply to? Oh, there there are more actually. This is hardcoded numbers. So, there are a lot more now. I think this is from a year ago. So, now a lot more. Uh, I would say that every month we add at least 500 new directories into database. And when I say directories, people think this typical AI directories, but in fact there are a lot of directories in the world for niche products too for for e-commerce stores, for mobile apps, for for pet shops like there are a lot of directories there. I think there are 100,000 directories in the world and probably we have around 20k of them now and my goal to you know find them all and also there are new directories popping up every day so we can find them too. Mhm. And are you comfortable sharing revenue here? Yeah. So, this one is doing uh over 50k a month and it's onetime payment. So, it's basically uh thousand people buying it every month. Wow. Okay. So, thousand people got it's got So, there's no recurring thing. You have to get new new traffic, new buyers every month. Exactly. And this very interesting like when I started that everybody said that you must have recurring plans and you know it just worked and it's actually uh was an experiment where I have one-time payment and also I have strap link so you have to pay first to see the next step. It's really high bar, right? Like I think a like very tiny number of people actually go through this and even that brings quite a lot of users and I'm launching the version two very soon where it will be lower bar where you can actually pay $50 a month and get 20 directories listed every month and then I enter this wider game. But my goal was to start just like Tesla started with Roadster like expensive car really good service in my case like like right now it's expensive but it's really good because I have the AI stuff working on but also I have actual people who review everything and then it's just really good job at the end and the next step is to reduce the human labor there and have it fully autonomous and drop the price and let people to uh can moderate the whole thing themselves. but pay less. Yeah. Yeah. And now is this are you building this one yourself or do you have a co-founder here as well? Yeah, this one is just me but I have a uh so I built myself but I have a co-founder who is doing all the moderation work. So a guy who just you know watches the AI do the thing and then corrects all the mistakes and make sure there's no hallucinations and things like that. That's cool. And do you do 50-50 split there as well or is he more like a paid contractor? Uh, it Yeah, it's not 50. So, it's also split, but not 50/50. It's like 9010. I see. I see. I see. You're 90, he's 10. Yeah. Are you a Are you a Warren Buffett, Mark Leonard kind of guy? You You build and hold forever, or is the goal here to build these, sell them, then do it again? Build it and sell and build and sell. No, I hold it forever. So, I only buy, I don't sell. And be because I don't see any reason to sell. In my case, every product is not just a product itself, but also it's a part of my ecosystem where it drives people into my other tools. So even if the product is not doing that well, it's not a problem for me. Like I have some products for example, I have uh like few products that are doing people are not moving from free to pay tier. Basically, I'm not making money there, but people still discover my other tools from those products and I'm happy because it's still a good so they act as marketing channels for me. Like I have directories. I have like 25 or 35 directories right now. Like a lot of them and most of them make no revenue. Some of them do pretty good, but but most of them don't. But they drive traffic to all my other tools. So, I'm happy to keep them. and and I don't sell because uh I actually want to end up having this full ecosystem where I have every single tool that a typical busy founder or like a bootstrap founder would ever need starting from uh tools for building products, tools for operating, tools for growing and tools for monetizing. So like the whole stack that's my endgame here. Really interesting. I'm just trying to get a sense of your background here so I can understand like your DNA, your genes, right? So you were in uh look UIUX QA here. Yeah, I studied computer science and AI and then UX. So my first 10 years were in VC back companies. So I started seven VC back companies as a CTO with other co-founders in Norway. Then I went to US to San Francisco to 500 startups to Altimus. So I've been in this typical VC bag game for 10 years and at the end basically I felt like my whole game is to serve investors and to chase the exits where what I really wanted is to serve my users and chase like a legacy. So chase generational company where it will kind of be there even after me. And that's why I made a pivot from VC back world into the bootstrap world where I'm my own boss and I don't have to optimize for exit or for the next round. I just own the whole thing. I have good profits. I use profits to fund myself. So now that's my life. So basically some products are making pretty good money. I use that to build the next products and just spinning around the the same blueprint. Is tiny ads your company as well? Yeah, this is my latest product. Really cool one. So, so far I've been only doing organic growth or non-paid growth. And every time I tried paid growth using Google or Facebook, it never worked. So I built my own ad network for B2B for small B2B startups uh just so that I could actually spend money on growth and it works really well. So now after 35 days we reach 5K MR and 10K in revenue and almost 1,000 publishers have joined the platform to serve the ads. So it's going really well. John, are you are you can I put you on the Are you open to screen sharing your Stripe account and showing us the tiny ads growth just from zero to 5K? Yeah, of course. Just give me Let's go. This is going to be great. People People love seeing the proof behind the story. You know what I mean? Yeah. So guys, this is this is I think just to give some context while John's bringing that up, I think this is the future. I mean, he's got a holding company. I believe you call it Mars, right? Marsx.dev, John. Yeah. Yep. Is his holding is his holding company. He's building all these tools for himself, right? He's generating profit. Um, you use Marsx.dev and all these this basically Micros concept. These are all you built are part of this, right? Yeah. I will show you how I build it using Mars X. Okay. So, I will take Let me turn the screen over to you. Yeah. Let me stop sharing. Go ahead. Have to make sure I don't share any emails of the people. Yeah. Don't don't click don't click customers. Yes. But there's your MR graph there. You can see. So, hover over that zero. Where was it? Zero. You can see it this way. Yeah. So it started like where is it? I launched that on April 15th. So Uhhuh. exactly month ago and then it went like up up up. Yeah. That's awesome. You know it was like crazy because everybody said like you are crazy launching an ad network. That's a dream for big guys. But you know I I had people telling me that everything I do not going to work ever because like you know in 2022 I was building AI coding tool like Morse X is a AI coding tool and people said like developers will never switch because there's VS code and everybody going to use VS code for the next decades and now we are in a world where everybody's using something else for that right I will show you and look look all these all these L yeah by by the way if you have listing bot like we'd love to if and Stripe SEO bot listing, but we'd love to just see the growth on those too if you're comfortable sharing those in Stripe. Um, but I mean guys, to John's point just now, I actually think the ad space is very interesting because Google has an innovator's dilemma, right? They're going to have to cannibalize their ad revenue to go make sure that, you know, the LM search and the chat function stays with Google versus chat GPT winning that space. And if that's the case, tools like what John's building, like new creative ways to do ads, there's going to be a big big big market for that if Google takes a step back there. So eager to see how tiny ads grows over time. John. Yeah. I mean I I think like one thing people don't realize that uh the whole game the Google is playing is is basically uh running on a lot of VC money because people are fine in the VC world to uh spend $10 and get back $5, right? Uh and but in my case I actually I thought like why it should be that way? Why? Why can't we make a system where where you pay $1 and you get two back and also the other side makes money on that? And I thought and people said like no the the math won't work. Like somebody has to lose. I'm like why? Like you serve the ads you get paid. The other side just pays for the traffic. It should work. I will share some more stuff. Just give me Yeah. I mean while you're loading that we're seeing very creative new ad networks, right? I mean you look at what Tyler's done at Beehive, right? where you subscribe to a newsletter and then at the end of the first subscription it recommends three other newsletters and those other new other newsletters pay per new subscriber right as you're growing like so these new like tiny ads beehive there's all these new creative ad networks I think they're going to pop off exactly exactly all right what are we looking at so this is SEO bot and uh so I have two channels one is uh the stripe and one is the enterprise with invoices so I have here like most of the revenue is here actually like over 100k a you know have already five six do you have do you have the MR graph here if you scroll down a little bit yeah so and I I sell uh credits so basically the way it works is that people pay for people load the whole thing with credits and they spend credits on the articles I see I see so the reason we see the dip there is because that month is it's that's this month May 16th it's only halfway done yeah so it it basically reached around 100k and that's my system. Basically the way I do it is I start I get to uh 50k then I pose then I come back I get to 100k then I pose and go to other tools and I basically don't want to go farther than 100k because then it becomes a product that will require me to work a lot on the product because now you have to move up on the audience you have to move up to more serious clients to enterprise clients they want demo calls and they want you know spend your time and I don't want that. So I want to have like fully as async and and then I come back once I know how I can automate that part so that I can go further like for example uh two bottlenecks now and bot for me uh one is support. So it's it's a lot of support because it's a lot of customers and they have to connect their CMS and everything just falls apart all the time with all those CMS. So I want to automate the support part. So I'm building support agent that will not just answer like all the others but it will act it will try to fix the problem and get into the database and change things and and get the whole fix done for you and because now like almost 80% of our time go for support. So we're not building anything new. We're not I'm not marketing. We're just doing support. And once we fix that, we're going to go to the next because otherwise we just uh can't free our hands. And I will show you. So, well, hold on. Before we leave here, can you scroll down a little bit so we can see the y-axis on the gross volume chart, the bottom axis, the x-axis, the time stamps? It's cut off on my screen. Can you just scroll down a bit? Yeah, there we go. Okay, got it. So, you get going. I'm going to scroll farther because there are emails of the customers. No, no, you're good. You're good. You're good. Well, click click view more under gross under gross volume. Click view more on that graph. Then, it will just show that graph. Actually, you see the view more. Yeah. That way there's no risk of us hitting sensitive customer information. Oh, but that see it looks exactly the opposite happened. I open in the other tub. So, it brought me to the list of customers that with email. Okay, enough sharing. Enough sharing stripe. Tell us about Mars. Is Mars is Mars holding the holding company or uh Yeah. So, I show I will show you Mars. share this tab. So it's an interesting story. So it all started with me in 2020 where I want to build this ecosystem of 100 tools and run it with almost no people. So I had this vision from the start. That was my goal because I I knew that I love building stuff and I knew that um I want to do it on my own terms with no VC funding. It means I have to be efficient. So we're looking at it here on my screen, right? Yeah, exactly. So number one step there in my game plan was to build AI coding tool that will simplify the the whole building process for me because I have to build 100 products and just for that you need thousands of people right and back then even more. So my first job was to build that. So I I spent like two three years building it just myself uh while I had my other VC back startup running and I was running that too. But this was my help project basically in the weekends and evenings and by 2022 I built the first version that was working and then I start using Mars X to build all my next products using Mars X. So that's kind of makes a lot you know. So, first I built the SAS producing tool and then I built the SAS tools using this. Yeah. Very cool. Well, hey, look, as we wrap up, are you game to critique my SEO for five minutes and give me some live feedback? Yeah, sure. All right. So, let's do this. We're going to do it for for for GitLack. All right. So, this is when I record podcast interviews like this, right? Right. And then I come list the companies on my site with all the all the audio data that you just gave. Right. So the CEO say we do a million of revenue and okay boom then it's a million of revenue. And our SEO strategy here uh John is we know that we rank really really well many times the number one spot for the keyword combination. So programmatic SEO of company name plus the word revenue because our data source is the audio. So it's a really good strong data source. However, you can see here over so like notion revenue for example, right? 1,200 clicks, 18K impressions. You see what's happening here though, right? Which is like we used to get 4,000 organic clicks per day on those impressions. And now with AI results, we're showing up in more impressions, 190K a day, but our clicks have gone down by about 50% on average per day, right? Are you seeing this across a lot of your tools? Yeah. Yeah. So basically as AI made it easier to enter the game uh there are so many more people playing SEO game compared to the year or two ago. So now uh it's much harder to win traffic but at the same time uh I think what you're doing is pretty cool and actually I saw your website when I was searching for the revenue of these companies some other stuff and and you have this Yeah. Yeah. You you have this reports. So I like first time I landed on your site from reports where it was like wider re report about something. So I think yeah yeah it was probably report there's a lot we do we do thousands of reports but like where I'm struggling is we're trying to figure out so like okay this is z this is the page for zapier revenue and so like what I do John like once a once a week is I'll go in and open up all the LLMs and I'll just say something like hey what is Zapier's revenue because this is the new homepage of the internet right so I ask I I just ask every LLM what's Zapier's revenue and I want to How many of them site get Lata now? Like I don't understand how all these work, but I imagine a lot of these are using content that they scraped when they launched the models like eight, you know, eight months ago. So they're not going to have our most up-to-date data on Git Lata, right? Well, not anymore. So now almost all of them use live search. So most of them use Bing search, but just closing down their API now, by the way. it until they do it. Uh if you're presented on a bank first page, then you'll be presented in most of the LLMs too because almost everybody who's using LM now uses LLM with the internet search enabled and that's why like in the old days you would have to be in a training set but now you don't have to be in training set. So now basically the SEO game is also LLM game at the same time. Yes. Yeah. Well, this is what confuses me like we dominate in perplexity. You can see up our logo, we come up number one, right? And we get a lot like people click in, they see my interview with Wade, right? And it's great data. We've also structured all of this in a way so that the LMS can easily read it, right? That's how they rebuild these charts sort of inside the results here. So, we get like a ton a ton of clicks from this. But what's interesting here is if I go back into like Claude, right, and we look at the sources here, like we're not we're not it's like they don't even see us. We're not cited at all or or sorry, we're cited number two. Yeah, that's not bad, I think. Yeah, but they don't but they don't link to it here. Like no one's going to click the no one's going to actually click that drop down. They're going to hover over these and if we don't get quoted here, we're not going to get traffic from Claude for that keyword. Yeah, that's true. But I I think actually is a long-term game and I think you should bet on one um thing that all LM will end up searching internet before they produce any results and they will end up searching internet in a very similar way. Uh so basically as long so if you think that Google is the best search on the internet and everybody's trying to be like Google some use Google some are building their own engines like that's similar to Google I think uh just focusing on being on top of Google in the long term will actually solve all the other problems maybe in the short term this is this is interesting yeah it's interesting though right because look like Zapier revenue right if you put this in here okay I I got it okay interesting so tap twice revenue is now in that top spot. We're in the second spot. So like maybe that's why they recently changed. But what like I don't understand is like if you come in here like this is clearly like an SEO written article like it's really not but like we have it's back it's the backlinks. So the anchor uh text that's used in the search, you have to take that text and add back links to your URL using that exact but how do you know but how do you know that they have more backlinks than we do? I guess if if you actually test this uh URL for backlinks, not the site but exactly the URL, you will see the anchors and the back links. Mhm. Yeah, I don't know. Let me see here. Let me just do the main website. Tap twice digital. I guess where I see, look, they have such a low domain rating of 28. This is what I don't understand. We we have better for someone looking for Zapier revenue. Would you rather look at a blog post like this or an actual interview where the source is the CEO's voice? Like, see, we actually have better data, but we're getting our butts kicked by some of these other tools that just like aggregate the data, you know, and I need to figure out because of the backlinks. So uh basically even a website with really poor domain domain rating can have high rating on a specific page and the page rating is more important than the domain rating because Google actually looks at the page rating first. How do I look up the page rating in ah refs? Uh you like do I just type in that full page like this? Yeah. Yeah. But see like there's not like this shows up almost with like Yeah. It's it's this UR I guess that's the URL rating, but I would say that like it's so it's so bad compared to us. I wouldn't trust this data because most likely that's something they done recently and it's not shown here because there's no chance Google would bring it to the top if there were no a lot of backlinks on the same search query you just put there coming from other websites. Look at ours. Look at our page compared to what we just saw. Like 72 domain rating, 24 backlinks. Like, see, that's what I don't understand. But we're getting less organic traffic now. Yeah. So, your URL rating is 12, right? And Mhm. I think Oh, that's for thems Well, that matters for Google, right? Because uh you know when when Google is trying to present something uh the way it thinks is that if somebody has linked to this URL from other blog using zero there is zero I think it's just lack of data on uh hrefs for their website and that happens very often like for example my websites a lot of them have almost nothing on hrefs and the reality is is is different. So, so you think it's back? You don't think you don't think it's how they structure this like how they structure the bullet points, the H1 tags, the charts, the graphs. You don't think it's the actual structure of the HTML here? I think it...