From Weekend Project to $4K MRR: How Alex Built ScanQueue Without a Co-founder

Tell us what ScanQueue is and the moment you decided to build it.

ScanQueue is a virtual queuing system. Businesses put a QR code at the door; customers scan it, join the queue, and get SMS or WhatsApp updates so they can wait anywhere instead of standing in line.

The moment was sitting at a small café on a Saturday morning, watching people cluster outside because there was no way to know when a table was free. The owner had a paper list and was shouting names. I thought — this is software. It’s not a hard problem. Why hasn’t someone built a good small-business version?

I looked around for ten minutes and found tools that either cost $500 a month or required hardware installations. So I built a prototype over the next two weekends.

What did the first version look like?

Embarrassing, honestly. It was a shared Google Form and a spreadsheet that I was manually refreshing and sending texts from my phone. I charged nothing. I just wanted to see if businesses would use it.

Three cafés signed up in the first week. None of them asked me to change anything fundamental. That was the signal I needed to write real code.

How long from “real code” to your first paying customer?

About six weeks. I used Next.js because I knew it, Supabase for the database, and Twilio for SMS. The hardest part wasn’t the code — it was figuring out how to price it.

I sent a plain-text email to my early users asking what they’d pay. Most said “something like $30 a month seems fair.” I launched at $29/month, felt immediately like I’d underpriced, and moved to $49 a month three weeks later. Nobody churned.

What does your customer acquisition look like today?

About 60% is word of mouth between business owners. The other 40% comes from local business Facebook groups — I answer questions about queuing and customer flow honestly, without pitching, and people come to the profile, see ScanQueue, and sign up.

I’ve spent almost nothing on ads. The one Google Ads experiment I ran cost me $400 and got zero paying customers. I stopped immediately.

What’s the hardest part of building solo?

The context switching. I am the product manager, the support person, the engineer, and the sales person. On a bad day I’m handling a bug, answering a support ticket, and worrying about a feature someone asked for — all at the same time.

I’ve gotten better at batching. Support only at 9am. Code only in uninterrupted blocks of at least two hours. It sounds obvious but it took me four months to actually do it.

What would you tell someone starting a similar micro-SaaS today?

Talk to businesses before you write code. Not friends — actual paying-business owners. I wasted two weeks building a feature that not a single customer had asked for. The people who pay you will tell you exactly what they want if you ask clearly.

And don’t be afraid of simple. ScanQueue’s competitive advantage is that it takes 90 seconds to set up. That simplicity is the product.

What’s next?

I’m working on a WhatsApp-first version for markets where SMS is expensive. And I’m considering pricing for chains — ten locations paying a single flat rate. That’s the next growth lever.