Marketing seeds that led to $5k MRR with Tiiny.host
Phil built Tiiny.host to be a developer tool. When he marketed it that way, developers just compared it to what they already knew how to configure and shrugged. The people who never once questioned its value turned out to be non-technical users who'd never heard of cPanel or FTP.
Phil is the founder of Tiiny.host, a simple web hosting tool for quickly sharing files and small sites.
We get into why he thinks improving an existing, already-validated product beats inventing something groundbreaking from scratch, why hosting is 'stuck in the 90s' and still gatekept by technical complexity, and how watching what people actually uploaded, not what he originally built the tool for, revealed the real audience.
The Q&A below is experimental — extracted from the episode transcript with AI. If you spot a mistake, let us know at jack@scalingdevtools.com.
Tiiny.host is now at $5k MRR. What has that growth journey actually looked like?
A complete rollercoaster, honestly — the classic SaaS trajectory of an early valley of doubt before things start to snowball. We launched within three to four weeks of development with very few features, purely to get something out, which I think a lot of people struggle to do. We didn't even have login or payments for the first four to five months — you could only use it for free — but that period was genuinely valuable for learning what people were actually using it for and why. You go in with a roadmap in mind, but it's crucial to stay open to your users redirecting that roadmap for you.
How did that early user feedback actually translate into what you built next?
One strategy that's worked well across products I've launched is getting close feedback from users immediately after launch. You start noticing that different people are asking for the same thing in different words — for us that was custom domains and the ability to log in. That tells you what to build next, and putting it behind a paywall is what actually lets you start generating revenue: people use the free product, but once enough of them share the same need, some will pay to upgrade.
How did you figure out which marketing channels actually worked?
I think of it as sprinkling marketing seeds across the internet and seeing which ones actually grow — there's no shortcut, you just have to try a genuinely wide spread of channels. For us it turned out to be SEO, but it took a long time to discover that. We were on Reddit, YouTube, Slack communities, building SEO landing pages, on Twitter — some of those seeds grew faster than others, and once you see that, you double down on what's actually working and drop the rest, because you can't spread limited resources that thin. Roughly speaking, if you split your time, maybe 15-20% goes into building the product early on, and the other 80% has to go into marketing, because there are so many products being released now that you genuinely have to shout to be heard. You can have the best product in the world, but if nobody knows it exists, you'll fail regardless — and it's far easier to shift and adapt a product based on user feedback than to build features in a vacuum with no users at all.
Hosting is a category that's existed for decades. Why does the world need another hosting provider?
A lot of aspiring founders think a new product needs to be something groundbreaking nobody's ever seen — that's genuinely hard, because the market isn't validated yet and you have to educate people from scratch just to get traction. Taking an existing, already-validated product and modernizing it for how the web actually looks today is a much more tractable path. Hosting specifically feels stuck in the 90s — cPanel, FTP setups, WordPress being used as a general website builder even though it was originally a blogging platform. There's always room to disrupt something like that, because the market already understands what it is; you're improving it, not inventing demand for it from zero.
How did you land on the specific niche Tiiny.host now serves?
We stumbled into hosting specifically for non-technical users. As the creator economy grows, more people want to put content online but have no interest in learning cPanel, FTP, or fighting with WordPress — they just want something live in seconds. Big platforms like AWS, Netlify, and Vercel are excellent, but they're built for developers and technical founders with heavy configuration. There wasn't really a simple tool for someone who just wants to put a PDF or a small microsite online instantly. We've since expanded across a surprisingly broad range of use cases — designers, real estate and hospitality menus, e-learning, crypto landing pages and whitepapers, digital artists sharing 3D visualizations, and students just learning to code who've never touched GitHub and want to show their work to someone.
You've talked about saving people time or money as the underlying value. How does that actually play out?
A developer could absolutely build what Tiiny.host does themselves in a few hours by following a tutorial. But the same logic that makes a smart developer buy a $15 template instead of spending three hours building one from scratch applies here — it comes down to how much you value your own time. If you can genuinely save someone time or money, or help them make more money, people will pay for that, and that's the foundation of a profitable business.
Is there a risk in always defaulting to 'improve something that already exists' rather than trying to invent something new?
It doesn't mean you can never innovate or disrupt something at a larger scale eventually — but as a bootstrapped founder without funding, you need resources first, and building on top of something already validated is the fastest way to build those resources. Amazon started as an online bookshop and only much later became a cloud infrastructure giant reshaping e-commerce entirely — but that came after they'd built the audience and resources to unlock it. Starting with something that already exists, done better, and positioned toward a different market, isn't as glamorous as chasing something totally novel like VR or NFTs, but it's the more realistic path — and you can still eventually build toward something more ambitious once you have that base audience and resources behind you.
You initially built Tiiny.host with developers in mind, but non-technical users became a much bigger audience. How did that shift happen?
Naturally, being a developer myself, I marketed it to my own demographic first. But developers kept comparing us to tools they already knew how to configure, so they didn't see much value in something that specifically required very little configuration. Meanwhile, looking closely at every site people were actually uploading, something we still do today, it became clear a lot of non-technical users were using the product and never once questioned its value the way developers did. That was the signal to lean into that direction, because they clearly appreciated it far more than the audience I'd originally targeted.
What's the broader lesson from that pivot for other founders?
Before writing off something you've built as not working, see if it can be repackaged and repositioned for a different market entirely. It's tempting to always chase a brand-new idea, but the developer market specifically is well-served, and often saturated, because developers naturally build tools for other developers. There are entire industries — construction, publishing, e-learning — that nobody builds dedicated tools for, often simply because builders don't have the background or context to think about them. Even something imperfect can be genuinely loved there, purely because nobody else is serving that space. You only really discover this by launching early with minimal fixed assumptions, just getting the word out, and paying close attention to who actually gravitates toward the product and finds real value in it — your users will point you in a direction, but you still need the conviction and strategic instinct to actually commit to building further in that direction once they do.