Episode 794 | From Struggling Side Project to Life-Changing SaaS Exit

Startups For the Rest of Us

Rob Walling

Entrepreneurship, Management, Business, Marketing

4.9 • 819 Ratings

🗓️ 9 September 2025

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

B2C, low price point, one-time payments… not the typical recipe for a life-changing exit. In this episode, Rob Walling talks with longtime listener Zamir Khan, founder of VidHug (now Memento). Zamir’s story broke a lot of SaaS “rules”: B2C, low price point, one-time payments, and years of slow growth. He shares how he nearly gave up, the pandemic surge that changed everything, and the emotional ride that led to a life-changing exit. Episode Sponsor: AI is completely changing how people discover brands and content online, and Ahrefs has built a full-blown SaaS marketing platform to help you stay ahead. With over 15 years of real-world web data, and AI that actually understands marketing, Ahrefs helps you measure your brand presence, build authority, and monitor reputation across search, social, and AI platforms like ChatGPT, Google AIOs, Perplexity, and more. You can also dig into what’s driving your competitors’ visibility and spot market gaps before they do, helping you create content that ranks and drive new traffic to your business. There's no need to juggle a bunch of disconnected tools- get Ahref’s all-in-one platform to make your brand unmissable in a fast-moving world. Try it free at ahrefs.com/awt. Topics we cover: (3:47) — From podcast listener to SaaS founder (7:59) — The role of luck, timing, and the pandemic in growth (18:37) — A birthday gift becomes a product (23:54) — Charging early and surviving slow growth (30:47) — From $1k a month to 80k daily users (39:58) — Support load, stress, and the edge of burnout (48:58) — Deciding to sell (and why timing mattered) (52:57) — Life after the exit: slowing down and finding balance Links from the Show: TinySeed – Applications close tonight! MicroConf Connect – The community for SaaS founders The SaaS Playbook Memento (formerly VidHug) Zamir Khan (@zam1rkhan) | X Zamir Khan | LinkedIn If you have questions about starting or scaling a software business that you’d like for us to cover, please submit your question for an upcoming episode. We’d love to hear from you! Subscribe & Review: iTunes | Spotify

Transcript

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0:00.0	AI is completely changing how people discover brands and content online, and HREFs has built a full-blown SaaS marketing platform to help you stay ahead.
0:12.0	With over 15 years of real-world web data, an AI that actually understands marketing,
0:17.8	HRFs helps you measure your brand presence, build authority, and monitor
0:21.9	reputation across search, social, and AI platforms like chat GPT, Google AI overviews,
0:28.3	perplexity, and more. You can also dig into what's driving your competitors' visibility and
0:33.5	spot market gaps before they do, helping you create content that ranks
0:37.5	and drive new traffic to your business.
0:39.6	There's no need to juggle a bunch of disconnected tools. Get H-R-R-N-1 platform to make your brand unmissable in a fast-moving world. Try it free at A-A-A-R-R-E-F-S-com slash A-W-T. That's the letter A, h efs dot com slash a w t you're listening to start up to the rest of us i'm
1:05.0	rob walling in this episode i sit down with a long time podcast listener named z Zamir Khan, the founder of Vidhug.
1:14.1	And as you'll hear in this episode, there have been many touch points on this very show
1:19.4	where Zamir has sent in a voice message or I wound up chatting with him back in 2021
1:26.7	when I did my call for anyone going through an exit
1:30.6	and I'll talk to you for 20 minutes.
1:32.9	And so you'll hear us recount this in this episode, but it is a pretty incredible story
1:38.1	of a founder who started a B to C SaaS company and was really struggling, was struggling to get traction, was
1:46.3	struggling to grow it and spent years facing the headwinds that we talk about on this podcast.
1:52.4	Hi, churn, it's hard to charge a subscription. I believe it was a one-time fee at the time,
1:56.6	and it's just really hard to get momentum in a business where the numbers are against you.
2:04.2	And then if you listen to this episode, you'll find out what caused his revenue to explode
2:09.0	more than 100x per month and an eventual offer to buy the company for an amount that we don't disclose on the show,
2:19.4	but it's an amount that means he never has to work again. And you, dear listener, get to hear
2:24.8	the whole show and learn whether he took that offer or not. It's quite a journey. And in the
	...

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