He Turned His Own Agency's 7-Year Problem Into a Product — How Ivan Nedelkovski's Upwork AI Agent Lancer Reached $19K+ MRR

Background & product

Lancer is an AI agent that watches new Upwork job postings around the clock, judges which ones fit, and automatically writes and sends a personalized proposal for each. One of its selling points is speed: it aims to get a proposal out within 10 minutes of a job going live, which is designed to lift reply rates from clients. It claims to free users of up to 10 hours a week otherwise spent monitoring jobs and drafting proposals.

It was built by Ivan Nedelkovski, from Skopje, North Macedonia, who dropped out of university twice (studying computer engineering) before co-founding a dev agency, MVP Masters, with Naum Shapkarovski in 2020. That agency grew to seven-figure revenue and around 15 employees, but the one problem Ivan never cracked was making Upwork lead generation for his own agency reliable.

In June 2025, Ivan launched Lancer as a tool to solve that exact pain for himself. It turned profitable within three months, and — as the title of his own Indie Hackers post states — reached $10,000 in monthly recurring revenue (MRR) within 60 days of launch. It's now run by a two-person team, and independent Stripe-connected tracker TrustMRR shows it has since grown to $19,000 MRR with $25,107 in trailing-30-day revenue (as of August 2026). It relies on no outside funding and no paid ads, growing bootstrapped.

The repeatable playbook

1. 1Turn a problem you personally never solved into the product (start from lived pain, not market research)
2. 2Before selling the paid tool, build a free, inherently viral 'front door' tool that doubles as a precise outbound target list
3. 3Demo directly to a handful of trusted niche insiders — not high-follower influencers — and turn them into referrers
4. 4Embed yourself inside the platform where your buyers already are, and turn the platform itself into the channel
5. 5Price around outcomes (replies/leads), not usage, to remove the fear of 'paying more without results'

Deep dive

【Deep dive】Here's how Lancer grew from zero to $19K+ MRR without TikTok virality or paid ads — a reproducible playbook built for a narrow B2B niche.

■ Turn a problem you never solved yourself into the product For nearly seven years running his dev agency MVP Masters, Ivan never cracked one problem: making Upwork lead generation reliable. Watching new postings and writing proposals by hand doesn't scale, and speed decides who wins the best jobs. Lancer's starting point wasn't market research — it was his own unsolved pain, which is exactly why he built the product around raw speed: get a proposal out within 10 minutes of a job going live.

■ Build a free front door before you sell anything (UpworkMRR) The most distinctive move in Lancer's growth was building a free sister tool, UpworkMRR, before running a single ad. It ranks the earnings of 300,000+ Upwork freelancers — a free, inherently shareable database. Rather than pitching a paid tool cold, Ivan first gave the community something worth looking at for its own sake, which generated buzz and traffic. That same dataset doubled as a target list: it let him identify exactly which freelancers and agencies were actually earning on Upwork, turning one free product into both a growth engine and a precision cold-outreach list.

■ Demo directly to 'Upwork Experts' and turn them into referrers Next, instead of chasing broad-reach influencers, Ivan targeted a specific role inside the Upwork ecosystem: 'Upwork Experts,' consultants who help other freelancers and agencies win work on the platform. They're trusted, high-leverage nodes in the niche. After live demos, several started recommending Lancer to their own clients as a bidding solution. The repeatable lesson is narrowing to a handful of trusted insiders in a niche, not chasing follower counts.

■ Turn the platform itself into the acquisition channel Taking that further, Ivan created a new Upwork freelancer profile specialized as an 'Upwork bidding' service, then applied to jobs from clients looking for someone to handle their manual bidding — and used those conversations to introduce Lancer. Instead of advertising on social media, he went directly to where his buyers were already gathered: inside Upwork itself.

■ Price around outcomes, not usage The pricing philosophy is consistent with everything else. Most competing Upwork tools charge by volume — job scans, proposals sent, AI tokens burned — meters that run whether or not you land a client. Lancer instead prices around leads that actually got a client reply. That removes the fear of 'paying more the more I use it without results,' lowering the bar to try it.

■ Read the numbers conservatively In the Starter Story interview, Ivan said he hit $10K MRR within two months of launch and is now around $20K. Independently, Stripe-connected tracker TrustMRR shows $19,000 in monthly recurring revenue and $25,107 in trailing-30-day revenue at last check. The self-reported figure and the independent tracker land in a similar range, which is reassuring net of normal month-to-month swings. That's roughly 14 months after a June 2025 launch, run by a two-person team with zero outside funding.