// mix weights are our estimate from detected signal volume
A failed screenwriter turned Chinese indie developer: viral consumer apps (the AI diet app 胃之书 — ~30 investor meetings, funding declined) funded the startup and built a 40k+ X audience → Laper founded Sep 2025 (HK), v0.0.1 that October, invite-code beta distributed via founder-written essays Dec 2025 → aggressive English pSEO buildout through 2026 (screenplay library, alternatives pages, comparison blog). MRR nearly doubled (+94.7%) in the 30 days before capture — a genuinely young product, not a window artifact: Stripe tracking began at its first $200 transaction.
Launches ran through the founder's 41.7k-follower X audience (built from prior viral indie apps) and long-form Chinese essays that doubled as invite-code drops — the Dec 2025 beta essay literally embeds the invitation entrance ("open laper.ai/w …").
155 sitemap URLs built out in under a year: a 54-page /screenplays library (titanic, inception, fight-club…) capturing "X screenplay" queries, 6 /alternatives pages (final-draft, writerduet…), 34 docs pages and an llms.txt for AI crawlers.
23 posts published Nov 2025–Jul 2026, heavily buyer-intent targeted: "Final Draft vs Laper", "Best Script Writing Software 2026", "Free AI Screenplay Editor" — plus craft guides (Save the Cat, three-act structure) for top-of-funnel.
A Discord server and an "Open Screenplay Community" where writers publish scripts publicly (a UGC loop), Xiaohongshu presence for the Chinese market, plus third-party discovery via Toolify, TheresAnAIForThat and a Baidu Baike encyclopedia entry.
One email a week on how SaaS actually gets users — the new teardowns, what changed, and the founder claims our crawl just caught out. No fluff, unsubscribe anytime.