Alexander Belogubov, a solo developer based in Ukraine, spent roughly nine months building Refgrow before he wrote publicly about getting his first 33 paying customers. Refgrow is a tool that lets a SaaS company drop an affiliate or referral program straight into its own product, so founders do not have to build that infrastructure themselves. He is not a first-time builder, and that shows in how methodical the customer acquisition was.

The single biggest lever was affiliates combined with lifetime deals. A meaningful chunk of his early sales traced back to one affiliate who shared a lifetime deal inside a Facebook group. He repeated the pattern himself, posting deals in relevant niche groups where SaaS founders already hang out. Because Refgrow is itself an affiliate tool, letting other people promote it was both a sales channel and a product demonstration.

He stacked several smaller channels on top of that. He ran his third Product Hunt launch, which did not go viral but still surfaced him to paying customers and to more affiliates. He posted consistently on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Threads, sent cold DMs that landed better once people already recognized his name, and answered anyone who hinted at wanting affiliate features. He even manually wired demo affiliate programs into prospects' own sites to show the value directly.

Some experiments returned little. Small Google and Facebook ad tests behaved, in his words, more like donations than acquisition, since he did not have a tight funnel behind them. SEO and direct traffic trickled in slowly, and a number of people who first saw Refgrow only converted later when they actually needed it. The honest takeaway he shared was that early growth came from steady, unglamorous effort across many small surfaces rather than one breakout event.

By mid-2026 his publicly listed, Stripe-connected revenue sat around $2,900 in monthly recurring revenue across roughly 75 active subscriptions, a continuation of the same slow-build approach he documented at 33 customers.