Pod Insights SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders AI Tool Hits $3.2m Revenue in 18 Months Using 7 Growth Tactics (Copy!) About this episode Ricardo Ghekiere bootstrapped BetterPic.io from $3,000 to $270,000 monthly revenue in just 12 months, building a $3.2M revenue AI headshot empire with 13 people and zero churn using a one-time purchase model. His affiliate program converts at 12% (versus the industry standard of 0.5-1%) with just 7 top performers driving $77,000 monthly revenue, while generating $230,000 revenue per employee. In this episode, Ricardo screen-shares his actual affiliate dashboard and revenue metrics, revealing his 7-channel growth system that compounds SEO, affiliates, and free tools to capture 500 daily leads from a hidden page most competitors can't find.
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 Do you want $270,000 of a month in revenue as a new founder? Well, you're about to meet Ricardo at Better Pick, a tool that enables you to create headshots and other content just from images of your headshot. He's scaled from $0 to $3.2 million, totally bootstrapped. He's kept full control, but here's the secret. He did this all using three specific growth channels. SEO, affiliates, and free tools. And I said, Ricardo, I want my audience to learn all of this. Tell me how you did it. That's what you're about to learn over the next 20 minutes. Stick around for an unfair advantage and let's find out how Ricardo added so much revenue so quickly. Hey folks, my guest today is Ricardo from Better Pick. These guys are on to something special.
0:44 Speaker 00 They are building in public at betterpic.io, helping you get the most beautiful headshot you've ever seen. I mean, people see this headshot, they fall in love with you, they send you money, they just PayPal you money the second they see your Better Pick headshot. That's what I hear. 28 mil, over almost 30 million headshots already created. Very cool tool. We're going to jump into all their growth tactics today. Ricardo, are you ready to take us to the top?
1:05 Speaker 01 Yes, sir.
1:06 Speaker 00 All right. Is everything I said true? These headshots are the best they can find anywhere online?
1:11 Speaker 01 Oh, that's what we aim for, I would say. But yes, I would say yes. Oh, look at these beauties.
1:18 Speaker 00 Take us through the product, right? What's the most, what's the most popular feature here use case wise?
1:24 Speaker 01 And the use case, the biggest use case we've seen is people using them for their CVs. So anything that they're applying for jobs, that would be the biggest use case right now. Second one is social media. So that's where the user's the second most for LinkedIn, anything related to like showcasing in public. And third use case is the, what we call the about us sections. So if you're building up a new website or you want to showcase your face on a website, that would be the third biggest use case.
1:51 Speaker 00 Interesting. And you guys are seeing the use cases here on their site. This is their pricing today. Ricardo, let's not bury the lead. What's revenue today?
1:59 Speaker 01 So this, we're about 270 in, 270K per month so far in April 2025.
2:08 Speaker 00 Okay. And what does that look like in terms of growth rate? So if you're 275K today, where were you like a month or a year ago?
2:14 Speaker 01 So a year ago, I can actually quickly pull up the numbers. So a year ago, we would be doing about 3K per month, somewhere around that. That would be where we're at about a year ago in that sense.
2:27 Speaker 00 A lot of growth. What is driven? Let's start from the beginning, right? So in 2024, around April, you're getting your first 5, 10, 20 grand a month in revenue. Where did that original traffic and customers come from?
2:38 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think the first original was we were testing a few channels, but you know, they were too expensive. Google asked, we've tried to burn through some money. I think from the beginning, we did invest a lot in SEO. So from the get go, so when we started December 2023, we said SEO first because with the average order value that we have, which is about $44, we need to be SEO first because otherwise we would never get to profitability. So that's basically where we fight. Yes.
3:06 Speaker 00 Let's look at that here. So we're seeing the metrics from AH Refs, right? So basically, nothing in 2023, pretty explosive growth. Domain rating, you know, grew pretty darn quick, up to 57. What are you optimizing for right now? Backlinks, domain rating, site traffic, top pages? Where are you focusing?
3:22 Speaker 01 So I think there's a couple of things. So we're doing a lot of backlinking. We're even buying backlinking to that. One is one of the strategies. We're doing a lot of PR at the moment as well. That's where we're focusing on in this quarter as well. And before it was still a lot of blogging in that sense. I think we hit like five to 10 blogs per week. That's basically what we're pushing out right now.
3:43 Speaker 00 Who are you? How are you buying? A lot of people say, we've tried to buy backlinks. They're always crappy backlinks. How are you buying backlinks? Did you hire an agency to do it or are you doing it yourself?
3:50 Speaker 01 Yeah, we got a couple of them. So we have an agency that suggested some backlinks. We will say yes or no, depending on our research in that sense. We have like three agencies supporting us on that side. It's like a pay as you go model. If we don't pay, you know, they don't get paid. So that helps as well. And then of course, on the free PR things, that's mostly where we do more of the stunts or we go on podcasts and stuff like that.
4:12 Speaker 00 I love it. Stunts. We'll get into stunts here in a second. Are you comfortable sharing maybe one or two of those agencies that you think give good backlinks?
4:19 Speaker 01 Yeah, but I would need to dig them up, I would say, because that's the SEO manager that is responsible for that. I'm a big believer of outsourcing where I don't have the knowledge, so I just trust the team.
4:30 Speaker 00 What is the team size today?
4:32 Speaker 01 So we're at, you know, Better Pick itself is about 13 people. And then the new company, Better Studios, is around four. So in total, 17 people.
4:41 Speaker 00 What's the? Hold on, I didn't know about the new company. What's the URL?
4:44 Speaker 01 Better Studio.io
4:48 Speaker 00 Okay, tell me about this. This is your second, this is officially your second product?
4:51 Speaker 01 That's the second product basically that we're launching. We're using the same technology we know at Betterpick. We're applying that to the fashion market, which is more occurring and a much larger market in that sense.
5:02 Speaker 00 How much of, so forgive, forgive the sort of direct question here, but a lot of times like I'm not a technologist. So I, when someone tells me we're using fancy technology to do this stuff, I can't tell if they're really deep technologists and there really is a moat there. Or if it's like a fancy wrapper on an LM or something else. What are you? Are you a fancy wrapper or is there like deep proprietary tech?
5:19 Speaker 01 There is deep proprietary tech in that sense. And we don't rely on any wrapper or base model is still flux. It's about 30% of our core model in that sense, but the rest is the, is the model that we've created in that sense.
5:31 Speaker 00 Okay. So you've built your own, is it like a rag database with a frontier model in front of it or a chat interface in front of it? What's, what's the actual tech stack look like there? The proprietary data set?
5:40 Speaker 01 Yeah, there's a lot about processing data. So how we, how we get pictures in, how we transform them, how we put them onto models. Like there's different data sets, I would say from Betterpick and Betterpick, it's mostly about how we rank pictures, how we upload pictures, how we guide you to that. Then it's how we, you know, label them, how we rank them, how we, you know, use data of people that like pictures and dislike pictures in order to generate new batches. So I think that's more of the wrapper, I would say that you put on top, but I think that's a good picture as well. So that's actually a growth. Yes.
6:13 Speaker 00 Yeah, this is, this is the money slide here. Okay. So again, you're telling us about what you did about a year ago to drive growth. These early months, it looks like it was heavy SEO focused. What else were you doing in the early days, growth wise?
6:24 Speaker 01 Yeah, growth wise, we were doing a lot of affiliate marketing. That is also where I think this last month, we did about 77K through affiliate marketing. A hundred K projected this month. So we're doing a lot of affiliate marketing. The reason why is because most affiliate managers there used to like, you know, conversion rates of 0.5 to 1%. Our program actually allows you to go from nine to 12%. Our best performer is about 12%, but we take an average of nine.
6:49 Speaker 00 So just to be clear, when you say in April, quote, "We're going to do $77,000 of affiliate marketing," that's the new MRR or the new ARR, like the new annual contract, like just the dollar
6:57 Speaker 01 That's in months, basically. So they, affiliates drove 77K of a revenue in total in that month.
7:05 Speaker 00 Oh, wow. Okay. So of the $275,000 you did in MRR last month, April 2025, 77,000 of that are almost 30% was affiliates?
7:13 Speaker 01 Yes.
7:14 Speaker 00 Wow. Okay. That's pretty impressive. How many affiliates drove that 77K?
7:19 Speaker 01 Uh, I can quickly pull that up. Uh, but that would be, I think in affiliate marketing, you mostly have like, at anything, you have like the top 10% and then you have the 90%. So I would say 10% is actually driven by the, you know, 100%, like 90% of the revenue is driven by 10% of the performers, basically.
7:38 Speaker 00 Which, how many is that on a, on a, just a number for you? What is 10% of your affiliates? Is that five affiliates, 30 affiliates, 39 affiliates?
7:45 Speaker 01 I think the top 10, I would say yes. I would say even seven in that sense. Seven, seven of them drove all that revenue.
7:53 Speaker 00 Wow. So let me ask you a question. I would obviously ask you to share your, I mean, are you open to sharing your screen and showing me your affiliate backend at Coaches there? Or is that like something you don't want to share?
8:01 Speaker 01 No, we, we're quite comfortable with sharing pretty much everything. So I can quickly share if you want.
8:07 Speaker 00 People struggle this, Ricardo. It's like, as you guys are listening to this, a lot of you guys, when you try to launch your affiliate program, you'll ask me questions like, well, Nathan, what commission structure do we set? How do we go recruit affiliates? Where do we get them from? So Ricardo, you're doing it. You're doing it. I mean, it's working. Teach us.
8:20 Speaker 01 Yeah. So we got a dashboard here. This is just for this month so far. So give you an A D. But that's basically how we track. We kind of see what the revenue is coming in, what the average order value is, what the purchases, what the weekly sales are. So that's basically what we're tracking. And that's why I say like, we keep track of like the top 10% because those are mostly what drive up all the, all the revenue, basically.
8:41 Speaker 00 And so what, I mean, can we dive into the red one here, Ananga Almeyan? Who, like, who is that? Are they a YouTube influencer? Or they have a big email list? Are they a podcaster? What is that?
8:51 Speaker 01 So this is actually, funny enough, so she's, um, she's a big YouTuber in that sense, but she also has a big Medium following. So when she posts something on Medium, it actually ranks up because Medium has a big authority. Basically, if you type in like past AI hatchet generators, in most countries, you will find her blog. She's the one backlinking to us.
9:11 Speaker 00 Interesting. Interesting. Now, what did you build your affiliate program on top of? You used Rewardful?
9:16 Speaker 01 Yes.
9:18 Speaker 00 And so why aren't you screen sharing your rewardful dashboard right now? Why do you feel like you have to go customize it in data box?
9:24 Speaker 01 Because we're basically have all our data in there. So we were quite, you know, we have all our data coming in. So affiliate performance, revenue split per source. So we kind of like centralized everything there. I don't like to go back and forth to do like different tools in that sense. So we kind of like have everything in data box.
9:41 Speaker 00 I see. Really interesting. What is global revenue split in that chart? Is that an important chart that you look at every day? The first one?
9:48 Speaker 01 This one? Not really. I think more we have like the source. So we kind of see like where is the money coming from? Where is like the attribution coming from? So that's mostly what it is. Mostly my marketing manager actually looks at this. I kind of look at it from a global perspective. So we kind of have our financial models. I kind of more look at it from a, from a general perspective where I think this is basically for reporting. So we kind of see like what's the user growth? What's the gross revenue, net revenue, average customer spend from a product perspective? If I look at the refund rate, process to download rate for us is important because you, there's a moment you process the images and then you actually download them, which is the aha moment, which is you drive value from the product.
10:27 Speaker 00 Wait, Carter, you have to dive deeper on that. You have to say that one more time because there's a lot of founders, again, that we work with where they don't understand why churn's bad, or they don't understand how to price on their pricing page on what utilization metric. And it's always about finding the aha moment. What is the dopamine hit? You just like said that. So go deeper on that. How did you define the aha moment and point to the chart here? Which, which of these squares measures that aha moment?
10:49 Speaker 01 Yeah, that is for us, this one, basically. So we look at the process to download rate on a monthly basis, meaning the download or the process is like you're processing your AI headshots. That's like you press the button is like, I want to do this. And then the download is like, I've actually driven value from the download. It has two flip sides. One is because once you download something, it means you're satisfied most of the time. Second thing is also, we have a policy in place that once you download them, we only refund you 10% of it. Otherwise, it's 90%. So that is also something we play around with and it's important for us because we know how high the metric is. Well, the last refunds are gonna take place.
11:26 Speaker 00 Wild. Let's talk about you. You know, we've talked a little bit about growth. We've talked about the technology bit, but what about you as a Warren Buffett, as a capital allocator? When you have 50,000 a month in profits, you have to start deciding, hmm, where do we reinvest this money? How do you think about that?
11:39 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think there's two things, basically. So we're moving into a space where now we're having a deal with Amazon and we're also reducing our cost of goods. You can see it's like 82% right now. We're moving that to 97% in the coming weeks, basically. So we're going to have huge amount of cash that is coming free in order to generate. So that is one thing. So on the marketing side, I pushed them to say, spend more. I want you to spend a lot more and make strategic investments. That is more like a long-term game. Like, I want you to start buying up blogs. I want you to start, you know, doing these crazy things that we have the cash for right now. So that's like one part. Second thing is now we're launching Better Studio. You know, we don't even have revenue yet, but we have, you know, already a team of four to five people that are walking in, building this next big thing. So I look at it from what's
12:23 Speaker 01 the next big thing that I have to use this cash for?
12:27 Speaker 00 Interesting. But Better Pick and Better Studio both feed up to the same parent company?
12:31 Speaker 01 Exactly. That's actually what we're raising capital for right now. So we're bootstrapped until now, but we're raising capital probably in the coming four weeks.
12:39 Speaker 00 How much are you looking to raise?
12:41 Speaker 01 So we're doing a first 500K angel investment ticket, very small. We already have a commitment of 310K. And then the rest is going to be 2 million in September and then another 10 million the year after. We're gonna structure it in a nice way in that sense.
12:55 Speaker 00 Interesting. So a question for you. Why, you have enough revenue where, I guess, what's the dilution you think you're going to take on the 500K you're raising?
13:04 Speaker 01 That's going to be about 5%. We're doing a pre-safe 9.5 mil, so that's going to be about 5%.
13:10 Speaker 00 Okay, 5%, 9 mil cap. If there was a way to get the 500K without having to give up 5%, would you, like, is that something you'd look at?
13:19 Speaker 01 Definitely open. I think there's two ways of doing it. One is the small rounds we're doing is more for strategic investors, angel tickets that we appreciate. So that's one part. The rest is definitely open for negotiation.
13:32 Speaker 00 Interesting. Look, I'm obviously operating out of our fund. It's a $200 million fund, but it's all debt, right? So because you're already doing 275,000 bucks a month, we could do an extra 200K there really easily and let you pay it back over three years. We would take no equity. But let me, I have to prove myself to you first. You have to believe, you have to believe, you have to believe that I can become one of your largest affiliates, I think, before you give me a spot in your round. But I'm loving, I mean, the focus on metrics, the bootstrapping, 13 people with 275 a month. What is that? So 3 million divided by 13, what is that? 230,000 revenue per employee. You're hiring a little ahead of growth though, right?
14:09 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly. I mean, also think about it from a perspective that we have for on customer success, depending on how you, you know, put that into perspective, but like the core team is about eight to nine in that sense.
14:21 Speaker 00 Eight to nine. Yeah, no, it's, it makes a ton of sense. Okay, got it. So bootstrap to this point, you've basically gone from zero to 3 million of revenue over the past 12 months. You're 13 people. We talked about backlinks. We talked about affiliates. We talked about what you measure and what you care about. Let's go back to that revenue graph, if you don't mind, the EBITDA one.
14:37 Speaker 01 Yeah, sure. This one, right?
14:39 Speaker 00 Yeah, exactly. Yep. Okay, so 255. God, I mean, what, Jan to Feb was pretty flat and then Feb to March really spiked. Why is that?
14:50 Speaker 01 I think there's two parts. There's a few couple of parts. One is that Feb actually has more days. So it has actually, Feb has less days. So those three days actually make a big difference for us in that sense, even though the salaries remain the same. So this three days actually does count. Second is we had a huge affiliate boost coming in. So our affiliate marketing is like kicking in. SEO also grew a big time. So I think the funny thing is that we don't have like one channel that is performing better in that sense. It's just like all of them are like coming together in that sense. I think we have like seven channels right now and they're all compounding against each other.
15:24 Speaker 00 Hmm. No, that makes a ton of sense. I'm gonna, I'm gonna steal the screen back here really quick. Share screen. If we look at
15:34 Speaker 00 If we look at your data here, because you mentioned SEO drives a lot of traffic. I see you guys have used free tools and that generates about 8,000 clicks per month to your website. Which is your most successful free tool? And was that an intentional strategy? Do you go look up the term and then go build the free tool or was this all by accident?
15:52 Speaker 01 We built, we looked at the term and we reverse engineered where we were supposed to go, basically. So profile picture, there is just an SEO play. That is basically something we build overnight, actually works pretty nicely as well, but gives like, you know, a way, a tool to help you, actually. So that was more of an SEO play. The real play was like the free AI hedge generator. You won't find it actually on the website. You actually have to really find a true SEO. We don't even link to it to the website and that's basically our way to capture data. We have about 400 to 500 people doing this. Yes, we, we have about 400 to 500 people doing this every single day, basically. So that's the crazy part. And so this also allows us to upsell to some people because if you
16:36 Speaker 01 get there, there's going to be a waiting list of about, I think it's three months right now. If you want it faster, you can do it like at a discounted price.
16:44 Speaker 00 Oh, I see. So you do it, you give them the result and say, hey, there's a delay. If you want it immediately pay. What's the conversion rate free to paid on that?
16:52 Speaker 01 I looked at it two days ago. It was not super high, but we did make, I think last month about seven extra K because of that.
17:01 Speaker 00 That's awesome. And how much, walk me through the SEO strategy on this page. The H1 title is obviously important, but is this like an FAQ schema? Do you think this plays well with the LLMs? And take us through that strategy.
17:11 Speaker 01 Exactly. So we are ranking really high when it comes to free AI hedge generator, which is also the case. The goal is really for us to be seen for Google and the LLMs as AI hedge generator. That is basically the, the main term that is, that we're going for. Oh, interesting. I haven't actually seen it on cloud.
17:30 Speaker 00 Yeah, I always like doing this. I just, I just have a safe browser with all of them open just to see what happens. But you've optimized for this is what you're saying.
17:39 Speaker 01 Yes, not for this specific keyword than the L L Ms, but for the for S E O. Yes, we've optimized a lot. Canvas both basically going to always be the first, which I think is great because there you go. So there that's number five. That's so that's pretty cool. And kind of a number one, and I think it's great because they're actually driving us the most B to B revenue is coming from Conva. They people use it, they hate it, and then they come to us.
18:07 Speaker 00 Interesting, interesting. Argon, Magic, Canva, better. Oh, you're here to better pick. They say you don't have a free version.
18:17 Speaker 00 Interesting.
18:17 Speaker 01 Well, we don't, if you look at it from that perspective, but yes.
18:22 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah. No, it's just fun. Like, look, no one really has the answer yet to like how to show up in these L M results. People will say, well, it's all about like keyword clustering and semantic search and blah, blah, blah. No one really knows, but it's cool to see. I mean, look, the numbers don't lie, right? You're getting 20. I mean, you're getting a lot thousands of clicks per month into your free tools. Is there anything else we missed before I let you go? We, I mean, we talked a lot about different things of growth. Anything I should be asking you about that I just completely missed?
18:47 Speaker 01 Um, I would say I'm just looking at the metrics in that sense.
18:54 Speaker 01 No, I think that's I think that's most of the metric I have like a lot of magic. I think what helps with sharing metrics is that one you you draw a lot of attention, but also like our team also has a very deep insight into what's happening, how much revenue we're making, where is it spending and allows them to operate at scale without me being there. And I think that's what people misunderstand when like you're sharing in the open. It's not just open towards the, you know, the world, but it's also to your team, which allows them to operate at scale. And I think that's the beauty of like building in the open, I would say.
19:24 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah, no, I agree. I mean, you guys, and obviously it's a good content marketing strategy for you guys as well. All your stuff gets tons of engagement. So this is great. And I didn't ask 275,000 a month in revenue. How many total customers is that?
19:36 Speaker 01 That's about five, 6000, I would say, that would be it. So let me pull that exact number up right now. We got 5974.
19:49 Speaker 00 Okay, do you guys have? I mean, what's the monthly logo churn look like?
19:53 Speaker 01 The monthly what?
19:55 Speaker 00 Logo churn.
19:57 Speaker 01 Oh, we don't have term because it's a one time purchase, basically. So that's
20:01 Speaker 00 Oh, interesting. Oh, gosh, I didn't even realize that.
20:06 Speaker 01 No worries, because you kind of just need a hedge one time. We don't like if you want to add some fluffy things. So yes, you can probably do that recurring, but for the hedge, you mostly just need it once. So we bank a lot on that.
20:20 Speaker 00 I see. Oh, yeah, of course. It's right here on your pricing page. Now, that being said, you can use the same technology. And you start selling it to like businesses, right? So these are our ones per person, but Better Studio, I bet you you have recurring pricing here. Yeah, there we go. Got it. So this is the SAS play.
20:37 Speaker 01 That's the SAS play. So we're using that cash of the bootstrap business, which is actually quite nice to generate cash. It allows us to build the recurring business. Got a lot more coming up for this one. We are building a Chrome extension for consumers as well. To go shopping to kind of like just upload an image of themselves, click on a picture that they want to kind of see on them. And allows them to try before they buy, basically. So that's also the B to C playbook we're playing for these guys.
21:01 Speaker 00 It's wild recorded to see just the the blending of B to C and B to B. I mean, your technologies basically can be used on both. And sort of this idea of, okay, it starts off as B to C, then maybe morphs into B to B, but then goes back to B to C with a Chrome extension. It's sort of interesting.
21:14 Speaker 01 Yes, it's, I mean, the technology is there, right? The underlying technology is there. We have a competitive advantage source. I mean, we have a whole slide deck on us comparing to OpenAI, the biggest competitors on how we're better, like we have that, like it's crazy to see. And now that we have the technology, we're like, we can just build crazy things with it. And why just limit ourselves to one thing?
21:34 Speaker 00 Yeah, no, it makes a ton of sense. Well, look, this is awesome. I appreciate you coming on being so transparent. If people want to learn more about your tried the tool out, where can they find you online?
21:41 Speaker 01 Yeah, Better Pick, I would say my LinkedIn is where I post most of the things. I have a personal website, but I haven't looked at it for a while. So I think LinkedIn is like the best case, I would say.
21:53 Speaker 00 Guys, there you have it. betterpic.io, launched, called in 2024. They had about like no revenue exactly 12 months ago. Now they're at $275,000 a month in April of 2025. Over 5,900 customers paid. They're 13 people full-time with four new folks working on their new sort of SaaS product. What's crazy about their growth, they started off with a lot of SEO. $77,000 of their revenue last month came from affiliates. Specifically, seven of their top 10 affiliates drove that revenue. Their bootstrap so far now fundraising, targeting 500,000 bucks, 9 million cap, giving up about 5% of the business. We'll see what happens next, but Ricardo, thanks for taking us to the top.
22:26 Speaker 01 No worries. Thanks for having me.
Previous How I Built It: $6M/Year Email AI Platform (Bootstrapped) Next My Agent Army Brings Me $500,000 Per Month (Exploding SaaS) Page updated November 7, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
