Building a $74k MRR product as a rookie coder

Tim Bennetto started Pallyy four years ago. In that time, he plateaued for over two years, pivoted twice, rebranded, got serious about marketing, acquired products for SEO, found hockey-stick growth, expanded his team, and hit $74k MRR.

And he didn't even know how to code when he got started.

I caught up with him to learn how he did it. 👇

A slow start

James: Pallyy is making $74k MRR now, but it had a slow start.

Tim: The product was stalled for the first 2 years. I was just so focused on building that I wasn't doing much marketing at all. It was a big mistake.

James: So just building alone doesn't cut it?

Tim: Building the product and adding all the features is vital, but you should also be marketing at the same time, which I wasn't.

Pallyy only started to grow after 2 years when I realized that its days were numbered and I needed to do SOME marketing — I could only live off of $2K MRR for so long.

You don't need an audience

James: How did you grow it?

Tim: I had zero audience, but I was looking at Indie Hackers and Twitter getting ideas for marketing, SEO, etc. Seeing what other people were doing.

So I started an affiliate program and did some SEO.

James: Do you think indie hackers should build an audience before they build a product?

Tim: It helps if you do have one - but it's absolutely not required to get started. Probably the majority of successful companies start without an audience.

It's also much easier to build an audience once you've actually started doing things to talk about.

Affiliate programs are about more than new users

James: How did the affiliate program work out?

Tim: It started off pretty slow but now contributes about 20% of Pallyy's MRR.

James: How did you find affiliates?

Tim: Once the program was added, I started to compile a list of people to contact by searching Google for blogs related to social media marketing.

For example, I'd search for "Top Instagram analytics tools", then go through the first few pages, opening up every single post. I'd check the articles to see if they had any affiliate links, and then the ones that did I'd add to my list and email the owner directly.

James: What was the response rate?

Tim: Very low, but it got me the top affiliates that I have today.

Tim: I also added a link directly to the program from Pallyy's dashboard so that my users could join easily. This works pretty well, although the affiliates will usually be smaller.

James: What's the affiliate setup?

Tim: Currently, we give 40% lifetime commissions to our affiliates, which is more than most programs I've seen. The reason is just simply to attract the best.

James: Why does the quality of the affiliate matter so much?

Tim: Affiliates add to your platform in many ways other than just MRR. They also publish blog posts, which drive targeted traffic and help with your SEO too.

Blowing up SEO by acquiring tools

James: Makes sense. Speaking of SEO, has that been a big driver for you?

Tim: SEO drives about 95% of Pallyy's traffic and conversions these days, so it's been the most effective marketing I've done.

James: It tends to be a long game — when did you start?

Tim: I started to double down on SEO two years ago. These things take time to rank and drive traffic, so it's best to do them as early as you can.

James: That's pretty quick to be getting so much traffic. How did you pull that off?

Tim: My process is simply to put out a lot of free, high-quality resources. And of course, I target a keyword for each one.

That said, I don't let SEO overshadow the fact that they are useful. You have to make sure everything you do provides some value to the target user that you're trying to attract.

James: That's it?

Tim: More or less. The things I've done for SEO are:

• SEO optimization: Making the site fast, optimizing images, titles, descriptions, etc.
• Posting lots of blog posts (around 80+ so far)
• Building free tools like image editors, caption generators, etc.
• Acquiring free tools (same as above)
• Creating "compare" or "alternative" pages to get people who are looking to switch from a competitor
• Building a page for each main feature of the product

James: Tell me more about these free tools.

Tim: So far I've acquired about 7 free tools. They've been really good for driving traffic and boosting our SEO.

Basically, when I buy a tool, I'll build the exact same tool onto Pallyy's website, then 301 redirect the original product there. Doing this gives me almost the same SEO benefits. I get their keyword rankings and also their backlinks, if they have any. Some of the tools I've acquired have had amazing backlinks that the owners probably had no idea about.

James: That's super interesting. What's an example of a tool you've acquired?

Tim: Recently, I acquired a free tool called image-to-caption.io. I'd been searching AHREFS for keywords of tools in my niche and came across "image caption generator" which was a low-difficulty keyword with decent traffic.

Image-to-caption.io was in 1st place, so I reached out to them and asked to buy it. There was no response for months. In the end, I decided to build one anyway and it actually ranked up in 1st/2nd position quite quickly, getting about 2K clicks/day.

After another month or so, the owner of image-to-caption replied and ended up selling it to me for $2K USD. It was getting about 4-5K clicks per day!

As with the others, I redirected it to Pallyy and now my tool is firmly placed in #1 position.

Maybe charge more

James: Another thing that helped you grow was increasing your pricing by $3/mo. That alone increased your MRR by over $10k/mo. Fair to say that you agree with the "charge more" maxim?

Tim: No, I don't agree with that entirely, I think it really depends on your market and positioning.

In the social media management niche, there are a lot of players, so being more affordable is a good option for someone new to the game. And that's what I did.

Now, three years down the track from when I set the initial price, it seemed like the right time to increase it. But I didn't take this lightly.

James: So what did you do?

Tim: Before increasing it, I compared Pallyy's pricing to 10 others in our niche. We were very close to the bottom. I found that increasing the price by $3 wouldn't change where we sat in that comparison, so it seemed like we could do it without any issues.

James: Smart. What then?

Tim: Then, I sent out an email to 10-20 of my paying users (of all sizes) to see what they would think if I increased it. The response was that I should do it. Nobody said I shouldn't. Some even said it wasn't enough of an increase.

James: So you went ahead and did it. Did a lot of users churn?

Tim: We've had no increase in churn or lower conversion rates, which is amazing.

Crowded markets are good

James: You mentioned that the market was crowded. Why didn't you choose a less crowded market?

Tim: You don't need to come up with a unique idea to build a successful business.

Just find an existing niche you have even a tiny interest in, join it, and build something. Make sure it works really well and it's affordable. And then provide great support.

Diversify your platform risk

James: Fair enough. Platform risk has been a big topic ever since X increased its API pricing to $42k/mo. Has it been a worry for you?

Tim: Yes, platform risk is always an issue. However, Pallyy isn't just an Instagram scheduler, we support 7 social platforms now - so the risk is less although still not ideal.

James: Is X one of those platforms?

Tim: Yes, we support X; however, after the price increase we had to change how we use it.

Prior to the change, we had Twitter scheduling, analytics, and inbox. After the price change, we had to remove the analytics and inbox. We simply don't have enough API calls to make it work.

So we pay $100/mo which is enough to support the scheduling side of things.

James: Heck of a lot cheaper than $42k/mo.

Accept (almost) every feature request

James: Tell me about some advice that you ignore.

Tim: A common thing that I've seen is people saying you shouldn't listen to every customer in the early days. They say to stick to your vision.

In my case, in the early days, I listened to almost every single feature request and 99% of the time built it. Listening to those early users helped me gain direction and build a platform that's useful.

James: What about your own vision?

Tim: If I stuck to my own vision, it would have gone out of business quickly.

James: How so?

Tim: My initial MVP main "feature" was that you could share your Instagram analytics. This was something I thought, "Yeah, everyone wants this!"

But I was very wrong. No one wanted it, and they let me know. I quickly pivoted and started building the features people were talking about.

James: You mentioned that you were building too much in the beginning, which created a slow start. Was it wise to implement every feature request?

Tim: The reason I plateaued wasn't that I was building too many features, but because I did it for 2 years while doing almost zero marketing. If I were to start over again I'd be at least doing 75% building, 25% marketing even in those early days.

Learning to code in 6 months

James: Speaking of the early days, you didn't know how to code. How did you learn so fast?

Tim: I spent six months or so learning HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Nuxt. I started by just doing a few hours learning on codecademy each night until I got to the point that I could build something very very basic. Then I started building websites or random little tools - anything to get experience.

Once I'd built a few little things, I learned about auth and how dashboards work, so put that into practice too and started building simple login systems.

James: Then you got to work on Pallyy – how did it turn out initially?

Tim: The first version of Pallyy was extremely simple. It didn't have much functionality. It had a ton of bugs. And it looked bad.

James: So what did you do?

Tim: During the next couple of years, I worked on it every single day. I changed it so many times that people started to say, "If you change it again I'm leaving." But every time I changed it, it got better — even if just by a small amount.

Over 4 years, this really adds up, and you learn a lot about coding by being put in the deep end.

James: Do you feel like a pro now?

Tim: I'm still a beginner and this is becoming even more obvious now that I've hired a developer with much more experience than me.

Hiring as a solo founder

James: Has it been a big adjustment working with someone else after four years of flying solo?

Tim: One of the issues of being self-taught is that you never learn how to build in a team environment. You're just adding features as quick as you can think about them, not thinking into the future.

James: How did that affect the product?

Tim: After a few hours of my new dev starting, he said, "This isn't scalable past one person."

James: How so?

Tim: Essentially, the way I was building the project was fine when it was just me, but hiring anyone else was going to be very risky.

For example, I don't use things like dev environments (yes I push straight to production, haha).

This was fine for a while. I was able to ship faster than most of the big players. But I did stack up that tech debt which has to be repaid sometime later down the track.

James: So you don't regret the technical debt?

Tim: No. In my mind, this is the best way to do it. It means you don't waste time on things that aren't 100% needed in case the project doesn't work out. If it does work out, and you start to grow - you can hire someone to take care of it.

James: Which is what you're doing now.

Tim: Yeah, building it by myself for the last 4 years has been good, but I haven't been thinking about how the code side of things would scale.

Hiring someone far more experienced than me will help us get to a point where we can hire other people if we need, without having any big issues.

James: So what's your initial feeling on having a (2-person) team?

Tim: It's amazing. I'm only just over a week into the process and I'm already learning an incredible amount.

They're focusing on rebuilding the whole backend into a single monolith, using a separation of concerns concept.

They are also going to build out a whole user role system so that if I'm hiring in the future we can just give the developer access to the things they need access to, with minimal to no security issues.

James: Sounds like you're really gearing up for some big changes and growth! Where can folks watch your journey?

Tim: Check out X or pallyy

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