How did RankInPublic go from $300 to $17K/month?

Did RankInPublic really go from $300 to $17K/month?

Yes, RankInPublic really did go from making less than $300 a month to a $17,000 month, but calling that $17,000 of SaaS MRR gives the wrong picture of the business.

In a newly published Indie Hackers interview, founder Antonio Escudero says RankInPublic stayed below $300 per month for a long stretch before reaching $17,000 in one month. He says the business currently moves between roughly $11,000 and $17,000 per month, has close to 8,000 users and has generated about $33,000 in total revenue.

That last figure shows how sudden the jump was. A $17,000 month alone equals more than half of the total revenue RankInPublic says it has made so far. We are looking at a business where most of the money arrived recently, rather than a SaaS that slowly compounded from $300 to $17,000 over many months.

There is also a big difference between revenue and recurring revenue here. Escudero says only around $1,000 comes from the main subscription. Most RankInPublic revenue currently comes from one-time purchases, especially its directory-submission service.

The exact intermediate monthly sequence is harder to pin down. Earlier public accounts mention a roughly $13,500 month, while different case studies place the intermediate figures slightly differently. We would rather keep the part we can verify: RankInPublic spent a long time below $300, broke into five figures quickly, reached $17,000 at the high end and is still reporting five-figure months now.

RankInPublic metric	Latest reported figure	What it tells us
Revenue before the jump	Under $300/month	The original model barely monetized
Best reported month	$17,000	Roughly 57x the earlier monthly level
Current monthly range	$11,000–$17,000	The growth survived beyond one exceptional day
Subscription MRR	About $1,000	Most revenue has to be sold again
Total revenue so far	About $33,000	A large share of lifetime revenue arrived very recently
Users	Nearly 8,000	RankInPublic built an audience before it built a strong business

What was RankInPublic selling when it was stuck below $300/month?

RankInPublic was originally a free startup tournament with a few small paid upgrades, and founders clearly enjoyed using it more than they enjoyed paying for it.

Escudero built the first version after seeing the head-to-head format used by LMArena. RankInPublic applied the same basic idea to startups: two products compete, users vote, winners advance and founders share their matchup to attract votes.

The first version was tiny. Escudero says he built it in a day with Gemini 2.5 Pro, Vite, React and Supabase. Cloudflare Pages and free infrastructure tiers kept the initial cost close to zero. The first person who paid wanted to sponsor a tournament.

Then revenue stalled below $300 per month.

That early period is useful because the product itself was attracting the right people. RankInPublic had founders submitting products, asking for votes and trying to get more exposure. The missing piece was a paid offer valuable enough to turn those founders into meaningful revenue.

Low personal costs gave Escudero time to keep looking for it. He had moved to Da Nang with roughly $4,000 left and said he was living on about $190 a month during the lean period. Cheap experimentation helped RankInPublic survive, although it does not explain why customers eventually started buying.

The real change came from what RankInPublic sold those founders.

What changed when RankInPublic started making real money?

RankInPublic's revenue took off after Escudero added a done-for-you directory-submission service and made that service the main paid offer.

RankInPublic currently charges $199 to submit a startup to 100 directories and $249 for 140 directories. Founders provide their product information once, then RankInPublic handles the repetitive submission work with a mix of scripts and freelancers.

Compare that with the smaller products around the tournament. Skipping the launch queue costs $29. A featured placement costs $29 per week or $99 per month.

The difference in customer value is huge. One $249 directory order produces as much revenue upfront as roughly eight $29 queue skips. It also addresses a much clearer problem.

RankInPublic already had people coming to the site because they wanted to promote a startup. Directory submissions simply moved further down that same need. Instead of selling another place to get seen, RankInPublic offered to do a tedious piece of startup promotion for the founder.

Escudero says the directory service now produces most of RankInPublic's revenue.

So the jump came with a real change in what people were buying. The tournament kept attracting founders, while the directory service finally gave RankInPublic something expensive enough to build a business around.

Why do founders pay RankInPublic hundreds of dollars for directory submissions?

Founders pay RankInPublic because directory submission is simple work that can still consume tens of hours when someone has to do it across 100 or more sites.

The current market gives us a useful reality check. Uneed charges $249 for submissions to more than 100 directories and says the service saves customers more than 50 hours. TinyLaunch currently charges $279 for 110 directories. ListingBott charges $499 for a campaign covering 100 hand-picked listings.

RankInPublic sits comfortably inside an existing price range. The $199–$249 offer looks quite normal once we compare it with those alternatives.

Even using a much more conservative assumption than Uneed's 50-hour estimate, the economics are easy to understand. If 100 to 140 submissions take a founder 20 hours, paying $249 values the time saved at about $12.45 an hour. A founder who considers an hour of their own time worth $50 would already be trading roughly $1,000 of time for a $249 service.

The SEO outcome is less certain than the time saving, and we should separate the two. Nobody can guarantee that 100 directory links will create a specific amount of Google traffic.

The labor saving is concrete, though. The customer hands over the startup information and gets the repetitive work done.

That made RankInPublic's paid offer much easier to understand than sponsorships, votes or generic exposure.

Did RankInPublic build the directory service by using it on itself?

Yes, RankInPublic turned its own backlink work into the database and process it later started selling to other founders.

The team initially wanted more backlinks for RankInPublic itself. Pablo Santana, who worked on its early growth, described going through directories, tracking which sites offered useful links and keeping information such as Domain Rating, pricing and link type in a spreadsheet.

That research gradually became reusable infrastructure.

RankInPublic could research thousands of directories once, keep the useful ones in a database and apply the same process to many customers. A repetitive internal growth task had become something other founders were willing to outsource.

RankInPublic also had a convenient public case study: RankInPublic.

Santana reported moving the domain from DR 0 into the 40s. Escudero later shared publicly that RankInPublic had reached DR 50 and posted a list of backlinks he planned to use next.

We should be careful with what that proves. Ahrefs Domain Rating measures the strength of a site's backlink profile. Google does not use DR as a ranking factor, and RankInPublic itself acknowledges that third-party authority scores are separate from Google's ranking system.

Still, founders buying backlinks could see that the seller had started from a new domain and built a much stronger backlink profile using the process being sold.

For a $249 purchase, that was useful proof.

How did RankInPublic's free tournament help sell the paid SEO service?

RankInPublic's free tournament created a steady pool of founders who were unusually likely to need the directory service later.

Someone submitting a startup to RankInPublic has already revealed a lot about what they want. The founder has something new to promote, wants attention for it and is willing to spend time getting distribution.

Those are exactly the people most likely to care about startup directories and backlinks.

The tournament adds another useful behavior. Founders have a reason to share their RankInPublic matchup because more visitors can mean more votes. Every participant can therefore bring more founders into RankInPublic without being asked to promote RankInPublic for its own sake.

That loop helped the site reach close to 8,000 users while keeping the core tournament free.

The free and paid products also sit close together. Someone comes to RankInPublic to launch a SaaS, discovers that distribution is hard, sees SEO and backlink material from the same company and can then pay to outsource part of that work.

That is a much stronger funnel than attracting a huge generic audience and hoping some tiny percentage happens to need an unrelated paid product.

RankInPublic's audience was valuable mainly because it contained thousands of people with the same distribution problem.

Why did Antonio Escudero's X posts suddenly drive so many RankInPublic sales?

Escudero's X posts started working when he focused on practical SEO giveaways that attracted people already interested in the problem RankInPublic was selling.

In the recent Indie Hackers interview, Escudero directly attributes most of the jump from below $300 toward $17,000 to his posts. He says lead-magnet posts were consistently producing more than 20,000 daily impressions during the acceleration.

The content was unusually close to the transaction.

One widely shared post announced that RankInPublic had reached DR 50 and then gave away the list of backlinks Escudero planned to use to reach DR 60. Other posts shared free backlink opportunities and the results RankInPublic had seen from them.

Someone who reads a founder's revenue update may enjoy the story without wanting the product. Someone saving a list of SaaS directories has already shown an interest in the exact work RankInPublic sells.

Escudero also changed when he posted. From Vietnam, he began publishing at night so his posts would land during daytime hours in the US and Europe, where much of his founder audience was active.

The useful lesson from those 20,000-plus impressions is more specific than “build in public.”

RankInPublic found content where the free takeaway and the paid service solved the same problem. Readers could take the directory list and do the work themselves, or pay RankInPublic to do it for them.

Did raising RankInPublic's prices really help sales?

Yes, Escudero says RankInPublic started making more money after he raised prices, and today's competitor pricing makes that result believable.

Escudero initially priced the service much lower. He then noticed competitors charging considerably more while apparently selling more, which made him question whether being cheap was helping at all.

He raised the price and positioned the directory service as a higher-value purchase. Revenue improved afterward.

We cannot isolate the price increase from the other changes happening around the same period, especially the stronger X distribution, so claiming that price alone caused the jump would go too far.

What we can check is whether RankInPublic now looks overpriced.

It does not.

Uneed currently asks $249 for 100-plus directory submissions. TinyLaunch asks $279 for 110. ListingBott's current one-time package is $499 for 100 listings. RankInPublic's two packages remain at $199 and $249 according to Escudero's latest public breakdown.

That places RankInPublic toward the cheaper end of the serious done-for-you services we checked.

Higher pricing also changed the math of the business quickly. Moving from a very cheap promotion product toward a purchase worth a few hundred dollars means RankInPublic needs far fewer customers to produce a five-figure month.

The company did not suddenly need an enormous market. It needed a modest number of founder customers willing to outsource an annoying task.

How many customers does RankInPublic need to make $17K in one month?

RankInPublic can get close to a $17,000 month with only about two or three directory customers per day.

Escudero currently reports about $1,000 of recurring subscription MRR. If we use the $17,000 peak and remove that $1,000, roughly $16,000 remains to be explained by one-time purchases.

As seen above, RankInPublic charges $199 for 100 directory submissions and $249 for 140.

If every remaining dollar came from the $199 package, $16,000 would require about 80 orders. At $249, it would take about 64 orders. Using $224 as a simple midpoint gives us roughly 71 orders.

Across a 30-day month, that works out to about 2.4 directory customers per day.

The real order count could be somewhat higher because RankInPublic also sells cheaper $29 products. Other one-time revenue can also change the mix. The calculation is meant to show the scale required, rather than recreate the company's private payment ledger.

Going from $300 to $17,000 sounds as though RankInPublic suddenly found thousands of paying customers.

It may have needed only a few dozen high-value buyers.

Simplified scenario	Revenue to explain	Price per directory order	Orders needed	Orders per day
Lower package only	$16,000	$199	About 80	2.7
Roughly even mix	$16,000	~$224	About 71	2.4
Higher package only	$16,000	$249	About 64	2.1

Where does RankInPublic get customers today?

RankInPublic still depends heavily on organic founder distribution, especially X, while paid advertising has already failed as an alternative.

Escudero says he tested ads, burned a few thousand dollars and stopped because the market was too saturated. That leaves RankInPublic with very low acquisition costs when organic posts work, but a clear dependence on social reach.

The tournament helps reduce that dependence a little because founders bring visitors when they share matchups. Search content and backlinks can also bring people after the original social post disappears.

There is some early evidence that AI search can send particularly valuable visitors too. A research-based MRR Story case study reported 41 ChatGPT visitors during one measured period, with four of them purchasing $249 packages for $996 in revenue.

We would treat the 9.8% conversion rate cautiously because 41 visitors is a tiny sample. Four sales are enough to show that the traffic had commercial value, but nowhere near enough to assume a stable 10% conversion rate.

The more interesting point is why those visitors might convert. Someone asking an AI assistant how to build backlinks or where to submit a SaaS is often much closer to paying than someone casually seeing a founder post.

For now, X provides the big bursts of reach. The tournament adds sharing. Search and AI referrals can capture people with stronger intent.

Paid ads have yet to prove useful for RankInPublic.

Can RankInPublic handle dozens of manual directory orders without becoming an agency?

Yes, RankInPublic can handle a meaningful number of directory orders because the service has been turned into a repeatable production job rather than custom SEO consulting.

Customers buy a defined outcome. They submit their startup information, RankInPublic selects the directories, the submissions get completed and the customer receives the result.

Escudero says RankInPublic scraped thousands of startup and SaaS directories and organized the useful ones into its database. Scripts handle parts of the process, while freelancers complete work that still needs a person.

That approach gives the business much better economics than having Escudero personally research and submit every customer's startup from scratch.

RankInPublic currently reports margins of around 65%. Escudero says the main costs include freelancers, LLM usage, infrastructure, payment processing and the other software required to run the service.

At $17,000 of revenue, a 65% margin would imply roughly $11,050 left after the costs included in that margin calculation.

We should not call that $11,050 of net profit because we do not have audited accounts or a detailed definition of the margin. It does show that RankInPublic can pay for human fulfillment without consuming all the revenue.

The service works at this size because most customers are buying the same job.

Do RankInPublic's directory backlinks actually improve SEO?

RankInPublic has good evidence that its directory work can improve backlink metrics, but the evidence that those links reliably create Google traffic or sales is still much thinner.

RankInPublic's own domain is the clearest case. Its reported Domain Rating moved from zero into the 40s and later reached 50 after the team systematically built links.

Customer examples published around RankInPublic show similar DR jumps. One testimonial describes a domain reaching DR 26 shortly after the work and getting two organic sign-ups. Santana has also shared examples of domains moving from around DR 20 to 28 and from very low DR into the 20s.

Current competitors are using almost identical proof. TinyLaunch shows customers moving from DR 7 to 30 and DR 1 to 31. ListingBott currently guarantees a move to at least DR 15 for qualifying new domains or says it will continue working on the listings.

That tells us the category is heavily sold on Domain Rating improvement.

We should be much more cautious once the claim moves from DR to business results.

Ahrefs explicitly says Domain Rating is not a Google ranking factor. A directory backlink can help a site's backlink profile, get a page discovered or send referral traffic, but increasing DR does not guarantee higher rankings. RankInPublic's own blog even argues that quality and relevance matter more than simply collecting large numbers of links.

The evidence supports a narrower claim: RankInPublic has found a repeatable way to help many new sites acquire backlinks and raise third-party authority metrics.

We do not yet have enough independent customer data to say a typical $249 RankInPublic order produces a predictable amount of search traffic or revenue.

Is RankInPublic really a SaaS business?

RankInPublic currently behaves more like a productized SEO service wrapped inside a software product than a conventional SaaS company.

The software part is real. RankInPublic has accounts, tournaments, voting, product pages, rankings, free tools and recurring featured placements.

Most of the money comes from work performed for customers.

Escudero says the main subscription generates around $1,000 MRR, while directory submissions produce the majority of the business's monthly revenue. Those submissions are fulfilled with scripts and freelancers.

That distinction changes which growth lessons are useful.

A SaaS going from $300 MRR to $17,000 MRR might imply a major improvement in activation, retention, expansion revenue or subscription conversion.

RankInPublic's jump came largely from increasing the price of the job it sold, finding much stronger organic distribution and fulfilling many one-time orders.

The software still plays an important role because it attracts the audience and creates sharing. Economically, though, the company currently makes its money much like a highly standardized service business.

That is also why Escudero is already working on another product.

Can RankInPublic keep making $11K to $17K per month?

RankInPublic can probably keep producing five-figure months while its organic distribution remains strong, although the current revenue mix makes those months much less predictable than SaaS MRR.

The latest founder numbers are encouraging. RankInPublic is currently reporting a monthly range of $11,000 to $17,000 rather than describing the $17,000 peak as a single lucky month.

The weak spot is recurrence.

As pointed out above, only about $1,000 is currently subscription MRR. Against an $11,000 to $17,000 monthly range, that means roughly 6% to 9% of revenue is recurring before we account for any other nuances in the payment mix.

RankInPublic therefore has to keep finding new buyers for most of its revenue.

Escudero openly identifies that problem himself. He says a drop in social reach can directly affect sales because most customers buy once. His failed paid-ad experiment also means RankInPublic does not currently have an obvious channel where it can simply spend more money whenever organic reach weakens.

His response is RankLoop, a new SEO product designed around recurring backlink and content work. RankLoop is still very early. In a recent public update, Escudero said it had 24 sign-ups, so we should not assume the new product has already fixed RankInPublic's recurrence problem.

For now, RankInPublic has proven demand much more convincingly than it has proven predictable recurring revenue.

Question	RankInPublic today	Our read
Can it make five figures in a month?	Yes, reported range is $11K–$17K	Already demonstrated
Is most revenue recurring?	No	Main weakness
Does it have cheap distribution?	Yes, mainly organic	Excellent while reach holds
Can paid ads replace organic reach?	So far, no	Important risk
Can fulfillment scale beyond one founder?	Yes, scripts + freelancers	Works at current size
Has RankLoop solved recurrence already?	No, still very early	Too soon to count on it

What should founders actually copy from RankInPublic?

The best thing to copy from RankInPublic is the way a free product exposes a more expensive job that the same users would rather pay someone else to do.

The tournament attracts founders when they are actively trying to distribute a new product. Those founders promote their own matchups and bring more people into RankInPublic. RankInPublic then teaches the same audience about backlinks and directories. A founder can use that free information manually or pay to skip the work.

Everything stays inside the same problem.

That is much more useful than copying superficial parts of the story such as moving somewhere cheap, building an MVP in one day or posting revenue screenshots.

The same pattern could work in many categories. A free website audit can reveal fixes that a customer pays to have implemented. A free grant database can expose an application process a company pays to have completed. A free compliance checker can uncover paperwork someone wants handled.

The important part is that the free product attracts people right when the paid pain becomes visible.

RankInPublic happened to discover that pain after launching. Once it did, the economics of the whole business changed.

So how did RankInPublic go from $300 to $17K/month?

RankInPublic went from under $300 to a $17,000 month because it paired an existing founder audience with a much better paid offer, then found organic content capable of bringing that offer a steady flow of qualified buyers.

The first version had already solved the audience problem. Startup tournaments attracted founders, and the voting mechanic encouraged those founders to share RankInPublic with other people.

What it had failed to solve was how to make much money from them.

The directory-submission service changed that. Founders who wanted distribution could now pay a few hundred dollars to avoid hours of repetitive work. Competitor pricing today confirms that RankInPublic is selling into a real category where several services charge similar or higher amounts.

Then distribution clicked. Escudero started sharing highly practical backlink content on X, including the exact directories and links he was using himself. As seen above, those lead magnets were generating more than 20,000 daily impressions during the revenue acceleration. The readers attracted by that material were unusually close to RankInPublic's paid service.

A higher price increased the amount earned from each customer. Scripts, a reusable directory database and freelancers made fulfillment manageable. The free tournament kept supplying founders without forcing RankInPublic to buy every visitor.

The result looks dramatic because very few extra buyers are needed at these prices. A $17,000 month can be roughly reconciled with only two or three directory customers per day, plus RankInPublic's smaller revenue streams.

So the headline is basically true, but the mechanism is more interesting than “a SaaS went viral.”

RankInPublic found a $200-plus manual problem hiding inside an audience it had already built for free, then became very good at putting that problem in front of founders who wanted it solved.

That is what turned a sub-$300 project into a five-figure monthly business.