Vasco Monteiro was not a first-time founder when he started Journalist AI. He had already grown an SEO developer marketplace called Vettted to roughly $300k in revenue and sold it, and he had spent years building a personal brand around SEO under the name "Vasco's SEO Tips" on YouTube. So when AI writing tools became good enough to build a real product around, he already understood both the audience and the channel he would use to reach them. Journalist AI, an SEO article writer and automatic blogging tool, was a deliberate next move rather than a first guess.

Co-founded with Afonso Matos, the product is a straightforward subscription SaaS that writes and publishes search-optimized articles. What sets the story apart is not the software itself but the distribution. Vasco describes growth as almost entirely YouTube, with some building in public on X early on. He documented the entire first year on video, treating each upload less as marketing and more as a money-making asset that keeps pulling in buyers long after it is published.

His approach broke into three video formats: evergreen tutorials that earn views indefinitely, fast click-driven videos with a high viewer-to-buyer ratio, and news-based videos that ride trending search topics. Each video pointed viewers to a simple landing page offering either free educational material or a direct offer to try Journalist AI. Once that funnel was clearly working, he scaled it instead of chasing new tactics: hiring in-house creators, running multiple channels like a small media company, and then pouring money into ads that look native in YouTube search and home feeds to buy distribution on top of organic reach.

By his own account in a January 2025 Indie Hackers writeup, Journalist AI passed $70k in monthly recurring revenue within a year, with the broader business crossing seven figures. The numbers are self-reported and not independently audited, so they should be read as the founder's claim rather than verified financials. Vasco's stated next goal is to scale Journalist AI toward $1M MRR, still leaning on the same founder-led content engine that got him this far.