Summary:
26-year-old Vahe Baghdasaryan built a $1M business using X (formerly Twitter) as his primary customer acquisition channel
His viral post offering paywall design services with a 100% money-back guarantee generated thousands in sales within 24 hours despite having only 1,000 followers
Strategic content creation on X helped him understand what attracts potential customers, with some posts converting 2-3 clients from just 2,000 views
Pro bono work for notable founders led to powerful referrals, with 70% of clients now coming through founder recommendations
Tangent's revenue model evolved from $700 paywall designs to subscription packages costing up to $20,000 per month
When Vahe Baghdasaryan launched his paywall and monetization consultancy last year, he had no idea how to acquire customers. So the 26-year-old did what any Gen-Z entrepreneur might: he turned to social media.
"I've built 100+ paywalls generating over $50M across 20 different industry-leading apps," Baghdasaryan wrote on X. "To help you do the same I'm launching the @PaywallsDesign."
The founder, who has since renamed his New York City-based company Tangent, then offered to design high-converting paywalls for $700 apiece with a 100 percent money-back guarantee. "If our paywalls don't outperform your current ones," he wrote, "we'll refund your entire payment."
Baghdasaryan says he only had about 1,000 followers on the social media platform at the time, so he was surprised when the post went viral. After seeing it rack up 14,000 views and—more importantly—help Tangent make thousands of dollars in sales in just one day, the founder recalls thinking, "OK, this is working."
Doubling Down on X Strategy
He doubled down on X, starting to post everything from side-by-side paywall comparisons to photos of his girlfriend, Evelin Herrera (who also happens to be a founder). By doing this, Baghdasaryan says he developed an acute understanding of which kind of content gets the most views and which attracts the most potential customers.
An X post that showcases a successful experiment he conducted for a client, for example, "might get 2,000 views, but five or six people would book a call from that one post," he says, "and I would close two of them."
The Breakthrough Partnership
In March 2025, Baghdasaryan made another big breakthrough on X. Using the social media platform's direct messaging feature, he reached out to Will Kent, the co-founder of the fast-growing recipe app ReciMe, and offered to create a paywall for his app at no cost.
Kent agreed, and Tangent's resulting design worked "really, really well," according to Baghdasaryan. Kent then started to recommend Tangent's services to other entrepreneurs in the app-building community.
Baghdasaryan sensed this was another strategy worth investing in. "I tried to develop similar relationships with other founder customers we have that have very notable networks, and the same thing happened," he says. "They started to tell their friends who work at other companies, 'Hey, you need to work with this person.'"
Scaling the Business
Tangent now charges $800 for one paywall design and offers additional monetization services through two different subscription packages that cost $5,000 and $20,000 per month, respectively.
By using X to build a sales pipeline, Baghdasaryan has gained more than 100 clients in less than a year—70 percent of which discovered Tangent through founder referrals and 30 percent of which found it through the founder's social media posts. The company's annual recurring revenue is in the seven figures, according to Baghdasaryan, and it'll make more than $1 million in revenue this year.
"In my posts, I used to be like, 'DM me to know how to do this,' but I [stopped saying] that—I don't want to be too salesy," he says. "I just put it there and people automatically DM me."
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