From Internal Tool to $3M ARR: Agency’s External Go-to-Market

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Lav turned his 15-person software company’s internal time-off tracking headaches into a SaaS product called Vacation Tracker. He cold-started it by collecting a waitlist on a landing page for 18 months and now runs at $3M ARR. The core opportunity: enterprise HR systems are too expensive, and small teams lack a lightweight alternative. This is worth validating if you have a technical background or B2B services experience. The biggest pitfall is rising customer acquisition costs and attention being diverted by new AI-native tools.

• Path from internal tool to product: Build it for yourself first, validate that the pain point is real, then bring it to market.
• Cold-start strategy: Put up a landing page to collect waitlist emails—no complex marketing needed to test demand.
• Pitfall to avoid: Stay away from Red Ocean enterprise competitors…

1. What kind of opportunity is this?

Former developer Lav Crnobrnja and his partner productized an employee time-off and attendance tracker they’d been using internally at their own 15-person software shop, Cloud Horizon. Vacation Tracker targets small and mid-sized teams that can’t afford big HR platforms and are tired of the chaos caused by shared Excel sheets. Charged on a subscription basis, it has already hit $3 million in ARR (over $25,000 a month).

2. Independent take

It’s worth doing, but the window is narrowing. The logic holds: mid-market companies with 10–50 people sit in a gap—Excel stops working, while big HR suites are too pricey and heavy. The pain is real and frequent.
Why it works: Lav’s success comes from the “internal tool sold externally” path. He had a paying scenario first, then opened it up to the market, which massively cuts the risk of chasing a fake demand.
Risks: As AI agents and a new wave of lightweight HR SaaS tools (like simplified versions from Rippling or Deel) flood the space, acquisition costs are climbing. A pure feature set is no longer a strong moat.

3. Cold-start playbook

First validation move: Build a rough V1.0 during an internal hackathon, launch a simple landing page to collect email waitlist signups, and don’t rush a public release.
Cost: Minimal. You only spend internal dev time—no extra marketing budget required.
Timeline: A long “silent collection” phase of up to 18 months. Those 18 months aren’t just for polishing the tech; they’re for confirming demand. Only when someone went out of their way to find Lav and asked when it was launching did he see a strong market signal.

4. Biggest risk and how to sidestep it

1. Premature public launch leads to wasted resources: Pushing a launch before the waitlist is validated can kill the project if traffic overwhelms you or feedback turns sharply negative.
Response: Stay low-key. Test inside your network or a tiny circle, and treat landing-page metrics (conversion rate, waitlist size) as your sole decision basis.
2. Falling into the “build everything” trap: Trying to copy Workday or SAP feature sets.
Response: Hold the “lightweight” line. Solve only the core pain—“who’s off and when, and how approvals flow”—and refuse to overcomplicate it.

5. Case recap (what others did)

• Background and product shape: Lav holds degrees in finance and engineering and founded software shop Cloud Horizon 10 years ago. Once headcount passed 15, managing vacation, sick leave, and parental leave in Excel became painful because of editing conflicts and managers’ inability to see attendance in real time. So he built his own tool. (Fact)
• How V1.0 was built: During an internal hackathon, the existing dev team quickly assembled a rough but usable prototype. (Fact)
• Cold-start strategy (the key part): After launching, the team didn’t push hard. Instead, they quietly kept a landing page collecting waitlist signups. This lasted 18 months. Not a single dollar was spent on ads—just organic traffic and word of mouth. (Fact)
• Demand-validation signal: Eighteen months later, a waitlist user went through hoops—using GitHub and other technical routes—to find Lav’s personal contact and urgently asked when the product would go live. Lav took that as a strong market signal confirming both the reality and urgency of the need. (Fact)
• Monetization path: After validating demand, Lav officially spun Vacation Tracker out of an internal tool into an external SaaS product, focusing on SMBs that found big HR platforms too expensive and complex. (Fact)
• Current state and expansion: The product has now stabilized and grown to $3 million ARR. Lav notes that the startup environment differs from 2018. The team is experimenting with AI agent projects in its lab and has launched a competitor-tracking tool, Competitor Tracker, signaling a shift from a single product toward a multi-product lineup. (Fact)

6. Dual-track feasibility

Cross-border: Feasible. SMBs in North America and Europe are willing to pay for lightweight, privacy-conscious internal tools. The market is far enough from the monopolized core that indie developers can enter through SEO and Product Hunt.
China domestic: Not feasible. DingTalk, Feishu, and WeCom already cover 90 percent of lightweight attendance needs for free, and users prefer all-in-one platforms over single-purpose SaaS. The survival space for niche standalone tools is extremely narrow.

Original post · Indie Hackers · Case recap: Read original →

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