How Qi Cao Bootstrapped Chargeblast to $1M in Revenue in Just 12 Months

My name is Qi Cao, and I’m the co-founder of Chargeblast, a fintech SaaS company that helps eCommerce and high-risk merchants prevent chargebacks and resolve disputes before they happen.

We didn’t raise money. We didn’t have a fancy launch. But within 12 months of going all in, we crossed our first $1 million in revenue—completely bootstrapped.

I’m sharing our journey to show what’s possible when you start with a real pain point, build with purpose, and prioritize trust over hype.

The Chargeback Mess That Made Us Founders

When we launched Chargeblast, we didn’t set out to build an 8-figure SaaS company—we set out to solve a painful problem we had experienced firsthand. My co-founders Steven, Patrick, and I previously ran a company that targeted students as our primary customer base.

The nature of that market brought a wave of chargebacks: students would dispute charges regularly, whether by accident, misunderstanding, or intent. At the time, there were very few proactive tools available to prevent or manage these disputes. So, we built one ourselves.

That tool eventually evolved into Chargeblast, a chargeback prevention platform that helps merchants detect and resolve disputes in real time using pre-dispute alerts and automation. We bootstrapped the entire business and, through grit, feedback, and focused iteration, hit our first $1 million in revenue in just about a year.

What Chargeblast Does and Who We Serve

Chargeblast is a B2B SaaS product focused on chargeback prevention and dispute resolution. Our core customers are eCommerce merchants and high-risk businesses who face a high volume of chargebacks and fraud-related disputes.

We offer them real-time pre-dispute alerts (Visa and Mastercard), plus AI-powered workflows that help automate responses and reduce dispute losses.

Our pricing model is subscription-based, with some tiered pricing depending on monthly dispute volume. For larger merchants, we offer dedicated onboarding, integrations, and support.

We didn’t raise capital. We used personal savings and cash flow from our previous project to launch Chargeblast and focused on generating revenue from day one.

From Problem to Product

We never set out to build a fintech product. Our previous company served students, and we quickly found ourselves buried in chargebacks—often unjustified, always costly. There weren’t effective tools to deal with them at the time.

So we started simple: we built an internal tool to monitor transactions, flag high-risk payments, and manually intervene before disputes happened. That evolved into an alert-based system using early-access Visa and Mastercard pre-dispute data. Once we realized this could help other businesses, especially in the high-risk space, we decided to go all in.

We talked to other founders, merchants, and payment processors. The validation was clear: no one wanted to deal with chargebacks, and everyone needed a faster, smarter way to prevent them.

Our Breakthrough Moment: The Partnership That Changed Everything 🚀

The turning point came when we onboarded our first major merchant partner through a payment processor who loved our prototype. That initial success not only brought in revenue but also gave us credibility.

We doubled down on partnerships. Payment processors, CRMs, and chargeback mitigation consultants became part of our extended network. Our product filled a gap they couldn’t solve internally, and we built an integration layer to make onboarding fast.

Within 3 months of launch, we were doing thousands in monthly recurring revenue (MRR). Within 6 months, we had passed six figures. At around the 12-month mark, we crossed $1 million in total revenue.

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Our No-Hype Approach to SaaS Marketing 📣

We used a mix of organic and paid marketing efforts to grow.

Organic Growth: We started with our own network—people who had worked with us before, former customers, and communities we belonged to. We got into eCommerce, SaaS, and fintech forums. We answered questions. We DM’d people. We offered beta access.

Conferences: We attended fintech, eCommerce, and payment industry conferences worldwide. We didn’t always get a booth; sometimes we just showed up, met people, and demoed our product on laptops in cafes.

Paid Ads: Once we validated our messaging, we launched targeted ads—mostly on LinkedIn and Google. These were guided by our dedicated account managers who helped us refine audiences and ad creatives.

Partner Referrals: Some of our strongest leads came from partners who embedded us into their onboarding stack or recommended us to clients needing chargeback help.

We focused on the problem, not the features. Our messaging was clear: chargebacks cost you money; Chargeblast stops them before they happen.

⚠️Challenges We Faced While Scaling Chargeblast

Like any startup, we hit several roadblocks. Some of the most pressing included:

1. Technical Complexity

Integrating with Visa and Mastercard’s real-time alert systems wasn’t easy. Their documentation was outdated, and response times were slow. We had to iterate rapidly while managing uptime and reliability.

2. Merchant Education

Many merchants didn’t know what pre-dispute alerts were or how they worked. We had to become educators first, product sellers second. We created guides, walkthroughs, and 1:1 onboarding sessions.

3. Scaling Customer Support

As our client base grew, we had to scale support while remaining lean. We invested in helpdesk automation and created a rich FAQ knowledge base early.

4. Risk & Compliance

Being in fintech means dealing with data security, PCI compliance, and legal scrutiny. We made this a priority early on, ensuring our infrastructure was secure and our terms were solid.

⏱️We Hit $1M in Just 12 Months—Bootstrapped

It took about 12 months from the launch of Chargeblast to reach $1 million in total revenue.

We were lucky to hit product-market fit quickly thanks to our own experience in the problem space. The urgency of chargebacks meant that merchants were willing to try something new—especially if it worked.

Real Lessons from Our First Million in Revenue

Looking back, several things helped us succeed early:

Start with a real pain point: We built Chargeblast because we needed it. That gave us an edge in understanding the problem deeply.
Sales > Scale early on: We didn’t try to automate too much at first. Founder-led sales and onboarding gave us direct feedback and higher conversions.
Don’t overbuild: We launched with a simple MVP. We didn’t need fancy dashboards or AI from day one. We only added what people asked for.
Stay close to the customer: Every email, complaint, and bug report helped us iterate. We still obsess over customer feedback.

These are lessons we now share regularly on our Instagram Reels for other founders.

💡The Best Advice I Can Give to Early-Stage Founders

One thing we always tell early-stage founders: “Build trust before you try to scale.“

Especially in fintech, trust is everything. We didn’t run ads before we had testimonials. We didn’t automate onboarding until we knew it worked manually. Word-of-mouth and reputation carried us a long way.

Chargeblast was built by people who had been burned by chargebacks. We knew what it felt like, and we built something real to solve it. If you’re solving a real, painful problem for a defined group of people, you’re already halfway there.

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Wrapping Up

Reaching our first $1M wasn’t the goal—but it was a major milestone that validated the years of struggle, iteration, and problem-solving. Now, as we grow beyond eight figures in ARR, we’re still grounded in the same principle:

Solve a real problem. Make it easy to say yes. Earn trust every day.

Thanks for reading our story.

Inspired by Qi Cao’s journey to bootstrapping Chargeblast to $1 million in revenue? Drop a comment below or share this story with a fellow founder—it might be the push they need to build something real.

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