My SaaS Journey to 3 Million Won Monthly Revenue

It Started Because I Was Annoyed

September 2024. I started building a side project on weekends. A dashboard that aggregated deployment logs and incident records for dev teams in one place. I was sick of constantly switching between Slack, Jira, Grafana, and PagerDuty. Built it for myself. No grand vision.

That thing now makes 3 million won per month.

It Took 4 Months to Get the First Dollar

The first 3 months were pure development. Built the MVP with Next.js and Supabase — about 10 hours every weekend, roughly 120 hours total. Since I was building it for myself, the features were simple. GitHub Actions deployment log collection, Slack notification integration, auto-generated weekly reports. Just those three things.

My first mistake was building alone for too long. I didn't post it to a tech community until month 4, and it got over 30 comments saying "our team needs this too." (Should've posted it sooner.)

Launched in January 2025 with a 20,000 won/month subscription model. First month: 3 paying users. Revenue: 60,000 won. Not even enough for coffee, but the fact that someone paid for my code gave me chills.

From 60K to 1 Million Was All About Content

I blogged about the development process and shared weekly updates on Twitter. The "build in public" strategy — the development process itself becomes content, making for natural promotion. The turning point came when an international newsletter featured it. Free trial signups spiked to over 50 per day, with about 10% converting to paid.

By April 2025, monthly revenue crossed 1 million won. About 50 paying users.

An important lesson from this period: new feature releases didn't necessarily grow the user base. What actually reduced churn was fixing existing bugs and improving speed. Lower churn means MRR grows naturally.

From 1 Million to 3 Million Was Harder

The early adopter word-of-mouth had limits. After crossing 100 paid users, growth stalled for 3 months. This was the hardest stretch.

The breakthrough was team plans. I'd only had individual subscriptions, but adding a team plan (100,000 won/month for up to 10 users) caused MRR to jump. One company on a team plan equaled five individual subscribers. The power of B2B. Hit 3 million won monthly revenue in December 2025.

Everyone Says SaaS Is Great for Developers

But development is only about 30% of the total work. Customer support takes 5 hours per week, marketing 3 hours, infrastructure management 2 hours, finance/taxes 1 hour. I spend more time dealing with people and looking at numbers than writing code. (That was unexpected.)

It's also important to note that 3 million won isn't net profit. Server costs are 350K won per month, various SaaS subscriptions 200K, taxes roughly 30%. Real take-home is about 1.5 million won. Not bad, but not enough to quit my day job.

The Most Important Lesson

Start small, ship fast, and grow with user feedback. Letting go of the "perfect product before launch" mindset is step one. I regret the 3 months I spent trapped in perfectionism while building alone.

It took 15 months to reach 3 million won. There were countless moments I wanted to give up, but the reason I kept going was simple: real people were actually using what I built. Whether it can grow to 10 million won, or plateaus here — I honestly don't know yet.