The storyHow they got there
Vasco Monteiro built Vettted from his parents' basement in Portugal, documenting every step on YouTube. Not polished marketing content — real videos about building a marketplace from zero, the mistakes, the pivots, the numbers. The channel attracted exactly the right audience: founders and marketers who needed SEO services.
The YouTube-first strategy solved the chicken-and-egg marketplace problem. Buyers came because the educational content built trust. Sellers came because buyers were already there. Transparency about revenue and process created a flywheel.
$300K+ in revenue in the first 12 months without paid acquisition. Vasco later sold Vettted and applied the same YouTube-first playbook to Journalist AI, where he scaled to $70K MRR within a year.
Channel MixWhere the growth actually came from
Most case studies hand-wave channels. Here's the rough allocation — not in dollars spent, but in users acquired — across the routes that actually mattered.