Lancer: 16 Questions Answered From the Starter Story Interview, With Timestamps

Lancer automates finding, qualifying and bidding on Upwork jobs for freelancers and agencies, and it reached a self-reported $10,000 a month in its third or fourth month without a cent of paid ads. Founder Ivan skipped building an audience: he recruited Upwork coaches, people who already sell to his exact customer, as affiliates on a lifetime commission. Two coaches drove most of the growth.

We transcribed the interview with transcribe.so and asked it the same questions we ask every episode. Each answer below is written in our own words and points to who said it and the exact second, so you can check it in the video. All figures are self-reported by the founder and we have not audited them. We are not affiliated with Starter Story, and we sell a transcription service.

What does Lancer do and how does it make money?

Lancer is an agent that finds jobs on Upwork, judges whether they fit, and writes and sends the bids (Founder, 01:20). The pitch to customers is an automated lead channel worth five to six figures a month to them, plus more than ten hours a week of dull work saved (Founder, 01:52). It makes money from subscriptions, which he calls premium pricing for SaaS (Founder, 02:11).

What numbers does the founder share?

$10,000 a month by the third or fourth month after launch (Founder, 00:00; again at 01:52). His plan prices are in the pricing answer below. He gives no user or subscriber counts. About Upwork itself, he says around 200,000 jobs are posted each month and each takes about 10 minutes to qualify and answer by hand (Founder, 03:06).

Who is the founder?

For five years he ran NB Masters, a software development agency that did over seven figures and grew to almost 20 full-time staff, with Upwork as its main source of clients (Founder, 02:50). The host introduces him as a builder from Macedonia (Host, 00:06). The host also points out that Lancer is a side project next to the agency (Host, 15:01).

Where did the idea come from?

From his own agency's bidding work.

"I just made a solution for a problem that I had." (Founder, 02:50)

Jobs are posted around the clock and each one needs a read and a tailored proposal, so he saw a task where software could beat a person many times over. He built it as an internal tool first; then agency-owner friends in a beta closed three five-figure clients between them (Founder, 03:06) within two weeks, which is when he decided to launch it as its own product (Founder, 03:34).

How long did it take to build, and with what?

He put the internal version together himself over a weekend, far from ready to sell, and the team then built the first sellable version over the next three months on the web stack the agency already used (Founder, 05:04). Language models do two jobs in the product: qualifying jobs and writing proposals (Founder, 05:28). Later he adds proxies for connecting to Upwork accounts (Founder, 12:57), a search index for job data and an affiliate tracking tool (Founder, 13:25).

Who is the customer?

Freelancers and agencies on Upwork, but the best fit turned out to be agencies rather than freelancers, sending proposals in high volume (Founder, 10:00). He defines a good customer as one who onboards with little friction and stays without churning, and says you only learn who that is once people are paying (Founder, 10:00). A public marketplace helps, because the customers are visible on the platform (Founder, 04:06).

How did Lancer get its customers through partners who already had them?

Instead of ads or cold email at scale, he went one level up the chain.

"I identified the layer above them, basically a profile of user who has access to them." (Founder, 07:10)

He calls these people connectors and signs them as affiliates. Winning one connector is a single high-value sales call instead of hundreds of calls to sell a $200 a month product (Founder, 07:10). For Lancer the connectors are Upwork coaches, who each take on roughly five to twenty new paying clients a month (Founder, 07:38) and already have strong Upwork profiles, so recommending a bidding tool is an easy upsell for them (Founder, 08:05).

How did it get from zero to $10,000 a month?

With zero paid ads (Founder, 00:31) and, in practice, two partners:

"Most of our growth came from actually just two Upwork coaches." (Founder, 08:49)

1. Coach one, by introduction. A beta user had worked with a coach and introduced him; a single demo was enough, and the coach has referred every client since (Founder, 08:49).
2. Coach two, by cold outreach. He messaged the second coach on LinkedIn and offered $1,000 just to get on a call, in effect paying him to become a user (Founder, 09:05).
3. Commission. 30% for life if the coach signs, onboards and sets up the client; 20% for a plain referral (Founder, 09:05).

The interview names no other channel.

What single thing moved the numbers most?

The first coach. He came through a warm introduction, needed only a demo, and has sent every client since (Founder, 08:49). It worked because the coach's clients were already Lancer's ideal customer and already trusted him.

What is the start-over playbook?

Five steps, in his order:

1. Define the ideal customer: people with the problem who are ready to pay, onboard easily and stay (Founder, 09:46).
2. Find the people one level above them, who have a wide network of that customer and their trust (Founder, 10:27).
3. Send each one a heavily researched, personal pitch, even a long video walkthrough, since one affiliate is worth the effort (Founder, 10:54).
4. Agree terms: 20 to 30% lifetime commission as the standard, adjusted for network size, sometimes with money up front (Founder, 11:22).
5. Track affiliates and automate monthly payouts (Founder, 11:50). He says this is exactly what he would repeat today (Founder, 11:55).

Why does it win?

The founder frames the advantage as distribution, not features: connectors bring trust that ads cannot buy, and one deal reaches many customers at once (Founder, 07:10). He also argues that any platform with a huge user base is something you can automate and build on (Founder, 04:34). The interview does not compare Lancer with named rivals or free alternatives.

How is it priced, and why?

Three plans (Founder, 02:11):

• Pay as you go: $79 for 30 proposals, then $2 per extra proposal.
• Light: $300 for 250 proposals, then $1.50 per extra proposal.
• Top plan: $500 a month, first offered as the launch deal.

He calls it a premium price tier for SaaS, which fits a product sold on the revenue it brings in. He does not say how he set the prices or whether a change made a difference.

What does it cost to run?

The clearest costs are on the growth side: zero ad spend, lifetime affiliate commissions of 20 to 30%, and one $1,000 payment to get a coach on a call (Founder, 09:05). He lists the hosting, search, proxy and affiliate tools he pays for without giving amounts (Founder, 12:57). The interview does not discuss team costs or margins.

What went wrong?

No failed launch comes up. His regret is waiting: he and his co-founder debated going all in on AI products as soon as the first public model APIs appeared, chose to keep growing the agency, and he now thinks that was probably the wrong call (Founder, 14:20).

What is the founder's advice?

"it would be to actually start building software products right there and then" (Founder, 13:54)

He argues the skills you learn growing a software product are worth more than a year or two of income, even a six-figure salary (Founder, 14:20), and tells anyone still undecided to go for it, because there are decades of opportunity ahead (Founder, 14:47).

What did the host take away?

His own points: the coach strategy lets a builder skip years of audience building.

"Why not go straight to the source and find the coaches, the experts?" (Host, 08:21)

He suggests viewers look for other platforms with tedious manual work where an agent could save time (Host, 12:30), and closes on the same theme: similar apps could exist for Fiverr, LinkedIn and other platforms full of repetitive work (Host, 15:23).

What to copy

• Sell to the person your customer already pays. A coach, consultant or community owner with your buyers turns hundreds of small sales into one big one.
• Spend on the partner, not the ad. A large personal effort, or even a paid call, is cheap when one signed partner keeps sending customers for years.
• Build on a public platform you already work in. The pain was his own, and the customers were visible on the marketplace before the product existed.

More from this series: the partner audiences playbook for SaaS, every Starter Story episode answered, and our free YouTube transcript tool if you want to run the same questions on any interview.