Simon Høiberg Turned His Social Media Habit into a Software Business

Simon Høiberg is the founder of FeedHive, which helps people compose, schedule, and manage social media posts. Launched in public beta in February 2021, the product focused on reducing the repetitive work of people who publish consistently on established platforms. Its starting point was the working method Høiberg himself learned while building an audience online.

What a Failed First Product Taught Him

The attempts before FeedHive did not go smoothly. He began developing his first SaaS in February 2020 and launched it that June, but it drew almost no attention, he recalled. He had around 250 Twitter followers at the time, and a wide gap separated the expectation that people would show up once a product existed from the reality of winning customers.

He then focused on gathering an audience and developed the habit of publishing useful content consistently. The method he shared in 2021 was to spend three to four hours each Sunday writing and scheduling a week's worth of posts, save ideas as drafts when they came to mind, and recycle earlier posts where it made sense. FeedHive was built to make exactly these tasks easier.

The initial development scope was small. By his account, building the minimum viable product took about ten days, and he first invited twenty people into a private beta. He combined the first two months with freelance consulting before devoting himself to the product.

He announced FeedHive publicly on January 3, 2021, and launched the public beta on February 6. By then he had roughly 32,000 Twitter followers, and he said he gained fifty paying users within hours of launch and reached $250 in MRR within forty-eight hours. Behind those fast early sales were the audience and the trust he had built before the product.

Beyond Scheduled Posting: Productizing Content Operations

Early FeedHive was a Twitter-centered tool. The official guide from May 2021 described creating posting slots by day and time and filling those slots with labeled posts that matched a topic. It also offered automatic draft saving, recycling of earlier posts, auto-retweets, and performance analytics, while LinkedIn and Instagram integrations were listed as upcoming. The current support for multiple platforms should be distinguished from the product's scope at launch.

The value of this structure was not limited to pressing the publish button on someone's behalf. A user could decide, for example, to post industry news on Mondays and usage tips on Wednesdays, then write posts in a batch and fill the slots whenever there was time. Instead of interrupting work each day to hit a posting time, writing and publishing were separated and the operating cycle became steady.

In 2021 the company presented AI as a differentiator. In a development post published on November 3, he explained that he built a performance prediction feature using more than 100,000 posts that users had published through FeedHive along with their engagement data. It looked at engagement relative to impressions rather than raw “like” counts, tried to reduce the bias that comes with account size, and showed a post's expected performance as a score from 0 to 9.

A team without dedicated machine learning staff fine-tuned the existing GPT-3 Curie model and connected it to the product. The public post did not present a controlled performance evaluation or independent verification, so the prediction accuracy cannot be accepted as established. The significance of the attempt is that a small team combined an existing AI model with the data accumulated inside its service to add value to a scheduling tool.

What the Business Behind $8,500 in MRR Actually Looked Like

In November 2021, about nine months after launch, he disclosed $8,500 in monthly recurring revenue (MRR) and $65,000 in cumulative revenue. There were more than 3,000 users and around 600 on paid plans, and he described monthly growth at roughly 20 percent at the time. These are the founder's self-reported figures, and they mean monthly recurring revenue and cumulative revenue only, not net profit or current revenue.

By then it was no longer a business run alone. He described a four-person team working with a junior full-stack developer, a social media marketing consultant, and a graphic designer. Rather than full-time employees, he used contract workers, and the team size varied between two and six people depending on the period. It was an operation centered on contract labor, with work and labor costs beyond the founder.

Customers came from the founder's social media, search and content, and paid advertising, with the personal channel the most effective. He still wanted to increase the share of search and advertising over the long term. The goal was to make customer acquisition costs predictable and to make the business less dependent on the founder's personal account if it were ever sold. He also recognized that a personal brand that helps early sales can become a lasting point of dependency for the business.

The $400,000 First Year Included a Lifetime Deal

A selling method other than subscriptions also drove much of the later revenue increase. In a retrospective published on July 5, 2022, he said first-year revenue exceeded $400,000, and more than $300,000 of that came in under two months. The key was a lifetime deal sold through AppSumo in November 2021.

The important distinction here is that $300,000 was the gross sales of the AppSumo campaign. In the revenue split he described at the time, FeedHive's share was 30 percent, so the full sales amount was not cash or profit that came into the company. Lifetime deal sales are also not recurring subscription revenue, so presenting this case as “$400,000 in first-year ARR” would be inaccurate.

He viewed the lifetime deal as a way to raise initial funds without giving up equity, but it also brought an operational burden. Customer inquiries surged and the team could not keep up, and his explanation that he could not promise every future feature would be included in the lifetime deal drew pushback from some buyers. Money received once came with a long-term operating and support obligation. He therefore stressed that the funds raised should be spent on building sustainable subscription revenue.

The Platform Dependency Risk That Emerged After Growth

In 2023, the risk of a business that depends on an external platform became clear. On May 12 he said that keeping the existing form of support after Twitter's API price change would cost $42,000 per month. That does not mean he actually spent that amount every month. In a comment on the same post, he explained that he chose a different connection method and was paying $0 to Twitter at the time.

The response was to offer existing customers an alternative that used per-user API keys. He added, however, that even free developer accounts can be restricted at any time, so he would not recommend starting a new product on the premise of that approach. Owning the product's code and its customers did not mean controlling the access terms of the platform its core feature depended on.

In the same 2023 post he also said he would no longer disclose MRR. So the 2021 growth rate should not be carried forward, and lifetime deal sales should not be used to estimate later subscription revenue. The verifiable early performance and the business's later, current scale should be treated separately.

From a Personal Posting Habit to a Team's Working Tool

The official product description checked on October 1, 2026 presents not only personal scheduling but also a team review and approval process as an important feature. Several people can edit a draft and leave comments, and an owner is designated to approve it before posting. Previews can be shared without giving a client full access to the workspace, which supports collaboration within brands and agencies.

The current plans are Creator, Brand, Business, and Agency, with monthly and annual subscriptions and a seven-day free trial. They differ in the number of connected accounts, the number of workspaces, scheduling scope, automation runs, and AI usage. The structure suggests that what FeedHive sells is the ability to manage content operations across multiple accounts and people.

FeedHive is a case of building small while preparing the channel to meet customers in advance, and turning repetitive work into a paid product. Understanding an initial development period of about ten days also requires looking at the audience built beforehand and the team operations that followed. The large revenue numbers include the settlement structure of the lifetime deal and the support obligation attached to it. It was a small software business that started from the founder's experience and trust and then assembled the product, the team, and the sales channel in sequence.