My little SaaS just hit $1000 MRR this week.
5 months ago I was working on a vitamin idea, building an AI stock photo library.
One day randomly, a viral tweet about getting free PR from HARO popped up in my feed.
Underneath, a startup CEO was complaining about not having time to read those HARO emails.
That struck me as my next pain killer idea.
I decided to build it in public as a big experiment.
And here's how it went:
- Built a prototype over 20 days
- Cold DM'd 15 people to get my first free user
- Launched on Hacker News, 3 views
- Launched on Reddit, went viral, 30 signups, 5 customers
- Made a typo with trial expiration date, converted 0 of the remaining 30 signups.
- Black Friday sale to get 2 more customers
- Attracted the wrong customer, all 2 of them churned
- Cold DM'd 10 influencers, 0 interest
- Holiday, no growth for a month
- Increased price, 0 new customer (surprise right?!)
- Experimented with 3 marketing channels
- Had mild success with one of them
- Doubled down and grew to $200MRR
- Hired my full time VA (best decision ever)
- Realized my conversion rate is s**t
- Fixed conversion rate by redesigning onboarding
- Added a cheaper tier, added 120MRR overnight.
- Added annual plan, 3 customers first week
- Grew to $400MRR
- Got yelled at by a customer
- Started having meetings with agency
- Realized their needs are much more sophisticated
- Received 4 investor offers
- Lost 2 of the first 3 customers
- One of them suggested a DFY service
- Sold $237 DFY productized link building service x5
- Hired a team to deliver the service
- Almost got scammed
- Starting to get inbound traffic from word of mouth
- Got 8 testimonials
- Grew to $600MRR
- Learned running an agency is hard
- Learned to run an agency
- Delivered 21 backlinks to 7 clients
- Sold $1k DFY packages to 3 customers
- Demo'd to 4 agencies, in talks with 2
- Got a user featured on Forbes
- Made $7k in revenue
- Crossed 1k MRR
My next goal? $5k MRR.
Let's go!
5 months ago I was working on a vitamin idea, building an AI stock photo library.
One day randomly, a viral tweet about getting free PR from HARO popped up in my feed.
Underneath, a startup CEO was complaining about not having time to read those HARO emails.
That struck me as my next pain killer idea.
I decided to build it in public as a big experiment.
And here's how it went:
- Built a prototype over 20 days
- Cold DM'd 15 people to get my first free user
- Launched on Hacker News, 3 views
- Launched on Reddit, went viral, 30 signups, 5 customers
- Made a typo with trial expiration date, converted 0 of the remaining 30 signups.
- Black Friday sale to get 2 more customers
- Attracted the wrong customer, all 2 of them churned
- Cold DM'd 10 influencers, 0 interest
- Holiday, no growth for a month
- Increased price, 0 new customer (surprise right?!)
- Experimented with 3 marketing channels
- Had mild success with one of them
- Doubled down and grew to $200MRR
- Hired my full time VA (best decision ever)
- Realized my conversion rate is s**t
- Fixed conversion rate by redesigning onboarding
- Added a cheaper tier, added 120MRR overnight.
- Added annual plan, 3 customers first week
- Grew to $400MRR
- Got yelled at by a customer
- Started having meetings with agency
- Realized their needs are much more sophisticated
- Received 4 investor offers
- Lost 2 of the first 3 customers
- One of them suggested a DFY service
- Sold $237 DFY productized link building service x5
- Hired a team to deliver the service
- Almost got scammed
- Starting to get inbound traffic from word of mouth
- Got 8 testimonials
- Grew to $600MRR
- Learned running an agency is hard
- Learned to run an agency
- Delivered 21 backlinks to 7 clients
- Sold $1k DFY packages to 3 customers
- Demo'd to 4 agencies, in talks with 2
- Got a user featured on Forbes
- Made $7k in revenue
- Crossed 1k MRR
My next goal? $5k MRR.
Let's go!
Congrats
