From TikTok Trend to $15k ARR
How Reddify started as a quick automation prototype for a content trend and turned into a product with real revenue.
Reddify started with me scrolling TikTok.
At the time, Reddit story videos were everywhere. They had text-to-speech narration over Minecraft parkour, Subway Surfers, GTA clips, or other gameplay designed to keep people watching. What I first noticed was how repetitive the creation process was. It was as simple as taking a reddit post and background gameplay, then merging them.
Creators at the time were manually finding stories, generating narration, collecting gameplay footage, adding captions, editing everything together, and exporting the final video. A single video could easily take around 20 minutes to make.
So I built a prototype to automate it.
Building for myself first
The first version of Reddify wasn't a SaaS. It was a tool I built for myself.
I created a pipeline that could take the pieces and turn them into a finished short-form video automatically. Then I started posting the Reddit story videos to my own social accounts.
The videos began getting views and engagement.
That was the first moment where I understood what it could become. Instead of starting with an idea and trying to convince people they needed it, I had built something for a workflow that already existed and watched it work in the exact environment it was designed for.
That made me realize there were plenty of other creators doing the same thing manually who could benefit from the tool.
Turning a prototype into a product
I brought in my two brothers, both software engineers, to help turn the prototype into something other people could actually use.
One took on more of the frontend and UI/UX work, while the other helped with infrastructure and scaling. I owned the backend and the core video-generation pipeline, which involved taking a request from the frontend, running the processing required to assemble the video, and returning the finished output to the user.
Video processing also introduced a problem I hadn't dealt with much in smaller side projects: compute cost.
Rendering and processing video is memory-intensive, and supporting multiple users required significantly more infrastructure than running a prototype locally. We raised a small friends-and-family round to help cover the early AWS costs while we figured out whether there was enough demand to justify scaling the product.
Distribution mattered just as much as code
Building the platform was only half the problem. We still needed to find people who already had the pain Reddify solved.
Instead of broadly advertising to anyone interested in content creation, we went directly to communities where Reddit-story creators were already spending time. We promoted Reddify in relevant Discord servers and sponsored TikTok creators who were manually producing the exact type of videos our platform automated.
For creators, a workflow that could take roughly 20 minutes manually could now take around 30 seconds. That helped Reddify eventually grow past 50 users and reach roughly $15,000 in annual recurring revenue.
What I learned
The biggest lesson was to pay attention to what people are already doing. Some of the best product opportunities aren't completely new ideas. They're existing workflows that are unnecessarily slow, repetitive, or expensive.
I also learned that distribution is part of building the product. Writing the backend, improving the pipeline, and scaling the infrastructure mattered, but none of it meant much if we couldn't get Reddify in front of the right users.
Finally, I learned how important timing can be.
Reddify started because I noticed a trend, built something for it quickly, tested it myself, and acted on the signal when it worked. Had I spent months planning the perfect version before shipping anything, the opportunity could have looked completely different by the time we launched.