On February 14, 2020, Alex West launched CyberLeads on Product Hunt. There was no product. There was a landing page promising a monthly list of newly funded startups for agencies to pitch, at $29 a month, with the first list to be delivered two weeks later. The launch finished fourth product of the day, made $87 in day-one revenue, and within about two weeks he had ten paying customers and $290 in monthly recurring revenue, against about $79 a month in costs.
This is a first-customers story with an unusually complete paper trail, because West wrote everything down in public, including the ending: CyberLeads later peaked around $53,700 a month and has since fallen to a fraction of that, with West saying he is winding it down. Both halves are instructive. Here is the sequence as his own posts record it.
Nineteen failures and a 5 a.m. schedule
CyberLeads was not a first attempt. In his own retrospective, West counts the run-up precisely: "It took me two years, twenty products and nineteen failures to find Cyberleads." The failed projects have names, among them Scrapcat, Birdleads, Telemonetize, GitGardener and EpilepsyBlocker, and the failed years have revenue figures: roughly $100 a month in 2018, $200 in 2019, per a profile of his public numbers.
He built all of it around a day job in Milan: "I woke up every day at 05:00AM and worked on my own stuff until 08:00AM." Out of the failures came a rule he kept repeating: "true work" is cold outreach, promotion and launching with minimal features; "pretend work" is refactoring, redesigning, and optimizing things for zero users. The distinction decided everything he did next.
Twenty-five cold DMs a day did not sell
The obvious channel for a lead-list business is cold outreach, and West tried it first. Per a detailed case study of his growth, he committed to sending 25 LinkedIn messages a day to agency owners. Responses faded over time and he struggled to convert any into a sale. The channel that worked for Laura Lopuch's freelance pitches did nothing for his subscription; a stranger's DM asks a busy person to stop and evaluate, and he had no reputation to lean on.
Product Hunt inverted the dynamic. People browsing a launch site are actively shopping for new tools; he did not interrupt anyone. The first ten customers came from the launch plus Reddit, Quora and his personal network, at a total marketing spend of zero.
Selling a promise with a delivery date
The other inversion was selling before building, a harder-edged version of Buffer's landing page test: Buffer collected emails, West collected $29 subscriptions. What made it honest was a concrete deadline, the first list would arrive at the start of March, and what made it feasible was that the product was research, not software. His build notes from the time record the mechanics: an email-finder service where more than 80 percent of lookups returned an address, of which about 80 percent were valid, assembled into a list and delivered. Transactions ran through Gumroad. Total fixed costs, those $79 a month for data services.
Two weeks of selling a promise told him more than two years of building had: ten strangers paying $29 meant the pain was real. Compare that with the classic route of first customers arriving from communities and audiences: same destination, but West got the revenue signal before the product existed.
The accidental tweet that doubled everything
On April 21, 2020, West tweeted "Got my first $50/mo customer!" It went viral among startup Twitter. His journal entry the next day, "CHAOS," records the aftermath with the numbers still moving: his follower count doubled, his MRR roughly doubled, a $100-a-month customer signed up, and, as he noted at the time, "I hardly even have 10 customers." The tweet cost nothing and outperformed every deliberate marketing effort he had made.
From there, building in public became the channel. The arc his public numbers trace: about $3,000 a month by the end of 2020, $8,000 through 2021, $30,000 in 2022, $40,000-plus in 2023, with a peak around $53,700 a month per Starter Story's breakdown. Pricing moved far above the launch offer; cyberleads.com today lists a Basic plan at $197 a month and a $1,997 lifetime Agency tier.
The ledger, including the way down
West's transparency did not stop when the graph turned. The book series on his personal site titles the recent chapters plainly: $20,000 a month in year seven ("CyberLeads is dying") and $8,000 a month in year eight ("I am actually shutting down CyberLeads"). As of early August 2026 the site is still selling subscriptions, but the founder's own account says the business peaked years ago. Lead-list subscriptions churn hard: customers who get value extract it and leave, and the lists themselves age fast.
So take the two lessons together. What transfers: sell the promise with a hard delivery date before you build; pick channels where buyers are browsing rather than being interrupted; and narrate your real numbers, because the cheapest distribution he ever got was one honest tweet. What does not transfer: finishing fourth on Product Hunt is not a plan, and a business model where every customer is trying to graduate out of needing you has a shape, up fast, down slow, that no launch tactic fixes. West got six years of income, a public education, and an audience that outlived the product. The ten $29 customers were the cheapest part of the whole story, and the most repeatable.
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