Real-revenue cases
Join It is a SaaS that lets small organizations — fitness trainers, local libraries, beekeeping clubs — sell and manage memberships; founder Mitch Colleran started it in January 2017 and it reached $40K/month with three full-time employees.
01
These organizations already sold memberships before Join It — via spreadsheets, email and offline payments — so the product replaces an existing workflow rather than inventing demand. Revenue more than doubled since the previous interview, which points to real retention and expansion.
Subscription SaaS fees paid by organizations that sell memberships, billed monthly; exact pricing tiers are not given in the source.
Manual membership management through spreadsheets, email and offline payments.
02
The founder scheduled calls with prospects who reached out through the site's Intercom chat widget, iterated on the MVP from those conversations, and closed the first few customers.
03
The category-page play transfers directly to AI apps: instead of generic AI blog posts, build a dedicated page for each concrete use case (e.g. 'membership management for fitness studios') to capture search intent. The chat-widget-to-phone-call loop for shaping an MVP also applies to AI tools.
04
Revenue basis · Founder self-reported, unaudited (see source page)
The $40K/month figure is founder self-reported and unaudited; the Starter Story page shows no verification source.
No pricing, customer count, churn or MRR growth curve is disclosed, so revenue quality can't be judged.
The source doesn't explain how partner marketing actually works, nor the results of the new-channel tests.