My first win as an indie hacker, $100 MRR to $4k sale on autopilot: full
breakdown
I just had my first (small) win as an indie hacker, selling my project blocs.me for $4,000. Blocs is a suite of Notion widgets for habit building.
It's not a life changing amount but I've learned a lot from the process of going from 0–30,000 signups and $100 MRR this past year. I have a few ideas about how I would advance my new ideas to scale apps to a larger MRR. I'll share them in this post.
Here are my key takeaways, including insights from mistakes made:
What I learned
Trends
When I launched blocs, there was a ton of buzz around Notion and I was a big fan of the app. When I discovered Notion embeds I saw an opportunity. Also, while using Notion I wasn't super happy with the habit tracker setup I had. Voila! The idea of blocs was born.
I strongly believe that it's a good idea for indie hackers to be aware of trendy scenes and try to innovate in there. In my opinion, because of the hype it's easier to market to people and I can say first hand from my successful Reddit post that got 1.7K upvotes on the official r/Notion subreddit. This converted to 1,000s of early signups. (I was pretty shocked.)
At this point I didn't have a product at all. I just designed SVGs in Figma, animated them with React, made a video, and posted it to Reddit to validate the idea.
Here's a great post by Traf who made nearly $100K in a week by riding on the wave of an iOS trend.
SEO
I know I'm not the only who says this on Indie Hackers, but just to re-iterate: SEO can be a great long-term strategy to acquire new customers. Before the sale, blocs was getting 1,000–2,000 visits just from Google, and still ranks #1 for the search "Notion habit widgets".
I did all my keyword research using the free ahrefs seo tools, created relevant copywriting and optimizing HTML semantics. Ahrefs has a great course on the fundamentals of SEO. This is what I referenced and learned from to get to this ranking.
My Mistakes
Executing Slow
This first mistake I made was not executing the idea faster. I created a lot of buzz around blocs which died out because I took too long to execute the idea.
Make sure to master your tech stack so you know how to execute quickly. This flows perfectly into the next point…
Burning Out
Although I was comfortable in my stack (FaunaDB & Next.js) I was trying to grind too hard on blocs and sacrificing social interaction for long periods of time to get the project done. Definitely don't do this!
I would say: pace yourself, just go a couple hours a day and it's easier to make progress like this over a month or so to finish the project. If you can finish it in a week or on a weekend, then that's a great idea.
Continual Growth & Marketing
Once I launched blocs, it was more or less the same (apart from a few bug fixes) until I sold it. I let the buzz come to blocs from google and other Notion sites that backlinked, and just let it be as I thought it wouldn't really go into the thousands of dollars of MRR.
Avoid this thought pattern! There's a lot you can learn by taking a product from $100–$500MRR. Towards the end I started experimenting with TikTok and realised I really missed out on the potential of social media to expand the revenue. In a day I got almost 1,000 views on Tik-Tok! If I spent a whole month, that would've definitely resulted a bunch of conversions. So even starting with no following there is definitely bound to be some results by posting regularly on social media platforms.
Note: don't fixate on TikTok specifically, but I'm just highlighting that it's an important step to keep pushing your product out there in different ways.
Being proactive with customer feedback
Blocs was a product that the customers really loved and often had requests for new widgets or features, which had a lot of overlap. For reasons mentioned before, I didn't see the point in working on it if I only got to say $500 MRR, so I kept a note of it, but didn't really act on their ideas.
If you have an app at the early stages I would recommend talking to your customers to see where you can make improvements or add killer features that can move you closer to product-market fit.
What I'm building next
What I'm building next will follow all of that I've mentioned above, and another couple of other bets I'm making.
Here's what my next products are going to be like:
- Something in a trendy space (probably in AI)
- Something super useful for large audiences that will pay more
- Something niche : solving problems in niche spaces like macOS apps with big audiences
- A proxy idea. For example, Taking an idea from another country and applying it where I am. The model has been proven and I'd just be re-creating it with a twist.
To follow my shenanigans and tech content 👉 twitter @__moniet.
Thanks for sharing! I like your point about making something in a trendy space so that its easier to market to people. 100% agree with this.
Thank you for sharing . It really inspired me. I have just started my own software agency and target to get 2k.
Glad you liked the post, and hope you reach your goal soon! 😊
You have put in so much hard work to get this to where it is today and your efforts have paid off in a big way. Congratulations on your incredible journey!
Thanks a ton!
I'm super new to the IndieHacker space. It's fascinating to me you can build something and sell it for like $4k just like that.
great buddy, now waiting to see your new product
Hi 👋
How was the process of selling the project? Did they come to you and offer to sell you, or did you place an ad on some site?
Good question, definitely a whole post in itself.
But in a nutshell, someone reached out to me, then we made a contractual agreement, and completed the transaction using escrow.com.
Since the project was on vercel and supabase it was easy to ask him to add my account to his projects and make the transfer with 0 downtime. So again with infrastructure that’s something to think about as well. Namecheap also allowed for quick transfer with 0 downtime.
Thank you so much for sharing your experiences, and congrats on your win! Building a product within a trendy market is a smart thing to do. You just need to be fast, I think. Building a product that is a part of an evolution, not only a trend, is even more promising, I think. In my humble opinion, AI is not only a trend but a long-term evolution that will change everything (or at least a lot).
Thank you, and I agree AI is definitely here to stay for the long term.
Congratulations on your indie hacker win with blocs. me! Your journey from 0 to 30,000 signups and $100 MRR in a year is impressive. The learning experience is invaluable. Excited to hear your ideas for scaling and advancing new projects. I wish you continued success!
Super cool.
Do you have a link to the TikTok, and did you think of paid habit-building / productivity influencer campaigns ?
This is the tik-tok https://vm.tiktok.com/ZGeLTMx9R/ video.
Didn't think of influencer campaigns, think it would get quite expensive and not sure what the conversion there would be.
Thanks for sharing this experience! What was your operational cost? UI seems excellent and spending 1 year (even if you work on it 1 hour a day) deserves more than 4k to me. Can you please share why didn't you spend more time on marketing?
I felt that the ROI for spending time on marketing wasn't worth it and made more sense to start something else more lucrative. But in hindsight, if I got it to something like $500 MRR I could've sold it for $10-15,000
Hi Moniet, that's an incredible accomplishment! You should be proud of your hard work and dedication for making this happen. Kudos to you!
Thank you for the write-up and for sharing your experience! Congrats on the sale.
Were you getting 1-2k uniques from Google per month or simply over the lifetime of the product?
I was getting 1-2K unique visits from Google search every month because of the SEO
Hey Moniet, thanks for the great insights!
I understand that you wanted to capitalize on a buzz wave, where being fast is critical but I'm curious about your definition of executing slow. What kind of timeframe did you have for Blocs? Were you able to measure actual drop in interest or was it more of a natural plateau?
Congrats on the exit and good luck with your upcoming endeavours!
If you try to enter into a B2B market next or have a product where a high-touch sales funnel is appropriate, consider checking out Bloombeaver, my latest project. You can find the link to it on my profile.
I wanted to build it in a month or two, but I kept putting it off for almost a year 😅.
As for drop in interest I think there was a plateau in visits, which resulted in a plateau in MRR as well.
Will check out your product, thanks for sharing!
Thanks for the helpful information you also learned and for sharing the links you used to learn as well!
Thanks for reading! Hope the links help out 🙏
Great article!
Thanks a lot!
Thanks for sharing
Appreciate it!
Congratulations on your successful journey from $100 MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue) to a $4k sale on autopilot as an indie-hacker! That's a remarkable achievement. A breakdown of your success story could be immensely insightful for others aiming to follow a similar path.
Could you provide a breakdown of the key steps, strategies, or elements that contributed to scaling your MRR and eventually achieving a $4k sale on autopilot? This could include aspects like product development, marketing strategies, user acquisition, monetization models, or any specific tactics that were instrumental in your success. Sharing your experiences could be immensely beneficial for aspiring indie-h
Great article and experience, thanks for sharing!
thanks a ton!
Thanks for sharing. I liked how your mistake list is bigger than the achievement.
That's how we grow.
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