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How John Rush Built $3.5M ARR With AI Agents and Two-Person Teams

John Rush explains how SEO Bot, ListingBot and Tiny Ads grew under his MarsX holding company without VC money or large teams.

John Rush · MarsX

Published June 12, 2025
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What you’ll learn

Nathan Latka interviews John Rush, who says he runs about $3.5M ARR across AI agent products under his MarsX holding company, with tiny teams and no VC money. John breaks down SEO Bot at almost $120K MRR, ListingBot's one-time payments and the Tiny Ads network, then gives Nathan backlink and internal link advice for GetLatka's SEO.

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Three-way growth channel split

“So that's like a big chunk of the growth of 30% SEO, 30% cross promo, and 30% is social media where I build in public and other people share that they use my product too.”
Watch at 07:43

Listening to users at scale

“I spend time to listen to the users and have chats going on with a lot of the users. I don't think anyone on Earth has more chats than me. I think I have almost, like, 1,000 chats going on with users.”
Watch at 06:10

ListingBot one-time payment revenue

“So this one is doing over 50 k a month, and it's a one time payment. So it's basically a thousand people buying it every month.”
Watch at 10:23

Why he pauses at $100K

“The way I do it is I start, I get to 50 k, then I pause, then I come back, I get to 100 k, then I pause and go to other tools.”
Watch at 20:23

Winning rankings with anchor backlinks

“So few times I saw somebody on top of me on Google search results, and I just picked the query and I did this backlinks to the URL with anchor text, and eventually, I took the number one spot.”
Watch at 31:46

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About the speaker

John Rush

Founder · MarsX

Company revenue
$3.5M

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