Hi! I'm AJ, maker of Carrd and ... after 2.5M sites, $1M ARR, and a funding round, probably time for an AMA!

Shockingly yes!

love this question! love the answer.

:)

The best questions of all !

Sure, so the first 10-100 definitely came from Twitter. I'd been involved in a relatively similar space prior to launching Carrd (site template/theme design) so the followers I'd gained from that translated pretty well to Carrd. First 1000 (and then some) came from launching on Product Hunt and ... yeah, that was interesting :) Gave me a real taste of some of the scale issues I'd face months later.

With respect to impactful actions, I guess there were three:

• Making sure onboarding had as little friction as possible (which culminated in the signup-free flow you see at carrd.co/build). This really helped when Carrd launched on Product Hunt.

• Going with free + paid upgrades. Not always an option, but I think this gives you a longer timeline during which you can "win" over users with a value-add they'll want to pay for (as opposed to a limited trial which is, well, limited).

• Just being ... chill I guess? I've used products that come on way too strong in the user acquisition and especially retention departments (which was a major turnoff) so I figured not doing that would be the right way to go. So far I think I've been proven right.

Doh, my bad. Totally missed the revenue question:

First $100 came from Twitter and mostly from folks who were already customers of mine from elsewhere (like HTML5 UP/Pixelarity) so that was a nice edge. Hit the $1000 mark during the Product Hunt launch (thanks to the sheer volume of traffic they sent my way), and post-launch it took several months of slow and steady growth to eventually get up to $10000 in cumulative revenue -- a milestone I probably wouldn't have reached had I not made the conscious effort to rapidly respond to any and all user feedback during that crucial period.

Guess you could say I was in denial about Carrd's growth and what it was becoming. I still thought of it as a side project even as recently as a couple of years ago, but a combination of events in 2020 (COVID-19 and protests in the US being the most significant) crazy accelerated growth and made it very, very clear that was no longer the case and I needed to treat Carrd -- and, more importantly, the users who relied on it every day -- with the importance it deserved.

Which was all well and good, but WTF do I do next? Do I spin up "Carrd Inc"? Do I begin hiring? If so, who do I hire? What sort of business/legal shit do I need to know about given how much user content is being generated literally every second? Questions I was reasonably confident I could figure out in time, but as growth continued to accelerate -- we went from adding hundreds of sites a day to literally thousands within the course of just a few months -- I realized there was a good chance by the time I did figure it all out, it'd be too little too late.

And that's where the idea of the raise came in. As something of a solo bootstrapper I've always been pretty insistent on doing everything myself so the thought of getting others involved (let alone taking their money) wasn't exactly appealing especially since we were profitable and didn't actually need the money. However, I knew from talking to others there was a lot more to VC than just being cut a check, and that the network, expertise, and connections I'd gain would go a long way to address the issues I was facing at that moment as well as better equip us for taking Carrd into the future.

... which I guess is what it comes down to: doing what's best for the product -- even if it does bruise your ego a bit :)

April 6, 2021, 12AM-3AM CT

AKA the moment I migrated Carrd plus 2M live user sites to AWS :)

1. Honestly at an early stage it doesn't really matter because if it works, it works. How much it matters past that point, however, definitely scales linearly with growth.

2. Ship a small feature set to validate, and then if you gain traction be prepared to respond very quickly to user feedback so you can keep that momentum going (since much of it will be telling you all the important stuff you probably missed).

3. Fix everything and ship (which is easier with a small feature set). You may miss some stuff, but it's a hell of a lot better than shipping something that's cool but routinely screws up and pisses off users.

4. Nope, but not because I have anything against people doing that. I just make a point to avoid using or even looking at competing products so I can approach solving problems in my own way (vs. always falling back on what I remember from elsewhere).

5. Still figuring that one out :)

Hey! So Carrd weirdly gets by entirely by word of mouth. I've done zero advertising or marketing (outside of the occasional podcast or stuff like this AMA) and instead just focus on working on and improving the product.

Having said that, I realize this strategy isn't for everyone and I had the luxury of doing this (as opposed to focusing on revenue) because I had other stuff going on to support me financially.

Hey Madhuri! :) For now the plan is to catch up on all the features, fixes, etc. I had to backburner due to the raise, migration, etc. but once that's through we'll be working out our roadmap and how to tackle it (= probably hiring :)

Let's just say a LOT of JS :) But interestingly not a whole has changed stack-wise since Carrd launched, but as we just moved to AWS that's set to change since I'll finally be able to unload a ton of legacy crap.

No worries!

Backend = Dramatically. Started out as a single bare metal server at IBM Cloud for everything (Carrd itself, hosted sites, etc). Now the whole thing is spread out across a number of different services at AWS (with some Cloudflare sprinkled in there). So, quite the evolution :)

Cost = Aside from Carrd's built-in constraints (which kept and continues to keep costs down), in the very early days I opted for relatively inexpensive servers that came with a flat monthly price tag as opposed to a usage-based one. Kept costs low, predictable, and IMO most importantly came with a high enough ceiling to where when things did begin to take off, my costs didn't skyrocket along with it.

Hey, I checked out QKDRC some thoughts:

• your name is not memorable and it's cryptic. Consider changing.

• your site doesn't properly explain what you do. (Show an example of how it works. And have an "upload a GIF" or "paste Gif link here" to find the source video.)

• the two links you have on your site go to NextJS. This makes no sense. Is QKDRC only for developers who use NextJS? Is this a left ofter link from what you built it in?

• maybe I'm viewing an old version of your site, because it doesn't seem to do anything.

Happened to check out your site, just some initial thoughts -

1. The GIF on your landing page that shows the site looks exactly like a Google Ad. When I first saw the page, before I realised what the GIF was showing, I assumed it was an Ad cause of the placement, size and look. You might want to replace the GIF for either a better one, or a good looking screenshot. I love the way https://plausible.io/ does it

2. The site design itself looks barebones, and while there's nothing wrong with that, It doesn't seem like the site I'd trust with for keeping my site up, much less paying for it.

3. Sometimes the load times were slow. If that's cause of something, you might want to fix that. If you're loading some data from the backend, show a progress indicator or something.

4. Show examples of how I'd use it. My first thought was you're competing with Google Forms or Typeform, and if you are, you have a tough ask ahead. If you're not, then give some example sites or tell me what kind of a problem I would have that you solve cause at the moment I can't think of any.

Just some of my thoughts. You definitely don't have to agree with them. I think you have an interesting idea, so feel free to reach out to me on my Twitter if you wanna talk

Hard to say as the variables in my case may have been different from yours (eg. already had something of a following on Twitter so that gave me some initial momentum).

Dramatically different. Carrd originally launched with just a single server hosting everything (app, sites, etc) but very quickly traded up to a (fixed) pool of servers and later (ie. now) a flexible pool of instances we can easily scale up/down as needed.

As to the why/how: both were previously driven entirely by immediate scaling issues, but lately it's been more about predicting our future scaling needs and actually getting ahead of it.

Twitter and other social platforms for sure as it's gained traction as an "extended profile" sort of thing.

As to hiring: probably dev since I think bettering the product is marketing in itself.

1. Went into this a bit in my original The Making Of post but it was 50% intentional (I figured there was enough room for my particular take on this problem) and 50% accidental (the one-page thing came from me realizing I couldn't build a Squarespace so I had to reduce my scope, which ended up being one of Carrd's biggest differentiators).

2. Twitter for sure. I already had a bit of a following on there in the early days so that helped give me a bit of a boost. Following that, I got a massive boost from Product Hunt when I launched on there.

3. With respect to I guess "formal" testimonials I'm not sure since I haven't really sought to collect these. However, Carrd's growth has come entirely from word of mouth so I'd say person-to-person testimonials are a huge deal.

1. Not really a pseudonym, but I suppose the underlying question is what are the pros/cons of sharing nothing vs. sharing everything online, in which case I don't really know since being a relatively boring person renders it moot :)

2. Varies depending on what's going on, but usually 8-10hrs/day.

Product/market fit was pretty much guesswork based on my previous gig (which was basically just designing site templates and themes). Saw quite a bit of uptake on the one-page templates I'd designed, and since I couldn't solo a full-fledged site builder I figured focus on those would make my job easier.

As to gaining my first customers: much of my initial traction came from Twitter (on which I already had a decent following for the template/theme work) and then Product Hunt.

Haha, I wish :) For now it's just Doni handling the basic/intermediate tickets and me handling the advanced stuff (eg. shit that's broken that I need to fix). I suspect we'll outgrow this in the coming months, at which point we'll look to hire someone in-house to run that (and likely other things like community).

Sort of, but per my Making Of picking a name for this very specific use case was ... not exactly easy.

More info here but I recall it taking about 9 months in all (from concept to launch).

Same (mix of automation and actual human moderation).

Really appreciate that, thank you 🙏

It used to be fairly straightforward (ie. more business-oriented use cases went Pro, more personal-oriented generally didn't) but lately it seems to be happening across all use cases. Not quite sure what to chalk that up to other than perhaps reaching the point where Pro adds enough value across the board to justify it.

Good chunk of resources were at IBM Cloud and while that worked (mostly) well in the early days, it became apparent over the last year our scaling needs necessitated a move to something more conducive to that (and it's hard to beat AWS in that department).

Thanks! Credit that to my general dislike of writing copy :)

I pretty much just launched it on Twitter and figured by at least offering an upgraded (paid) experience, some of the folks who'd take to the product would decide to go that route. I honestly didn't set any milestones beyond the thing being able to pay for itself since it really was just a side project back then.

Definitely would have given scalability more weight in my decision making. Some of my choices turned out to be very conducive to scale (static sites ftw) but others ... not so much. I guess some of that came from not knowing Carrd would eventually gain traction let alone grow to millions of sites, but I think having just a little more confidence that maybe this thing might end up going somewhere would have made a world of difference.

Thank you and I agree wholeheartedly! The space is HUGE.

That's awesome! Thank you for using it!

Thank you and that's super cool!

Really appreciate that, thank you 🙏

Pleasantly surprised! Like I played a small part in answering my own question.

1. Interestingly it wasn't any one person or company, but rather the daily onslaught of cool shit I'd see on Product Hunt. I'd fallen into something of a rut doing site template/theme design and figured it was time for something more challenging, and seeing the insanely cool stuff popping up on Product Hunt really inspired me to give it a shot myself. Turned out alright :)

2. This

You're welcome! And yes, much more than I have in the past now that I have a clear understanding of what it is I'm actually dealing with now (per my reply above). Also I suppose literally taking someone else's money has a way of forcing you to focus :)

Mostly profits, fewer losses :)

You're welcome, and that's totally fine :)

Thank you! Relied almost entirely on word of mouth although that wasn't really intentional. Carrd was just a side project when it started so the thought of turning it into a business wasn't exactly on my radar, and I figured if I did a good enough job on the product, it would (over time) gain traction.

Yes! It's actually made me a bit lazy.

Thanks for that Steve! 🙏 I touched on this above, but I really went out of my way to approach solving this particular problem my own way, and while that was obviously a risky way to go feedback like this confirms I might have gotten this one right :)

PS: I suspect we haven't seen the last of flaming logo gifs ...

Pretty much entirely based on user requests so if enough people request something, I'll research it and see if it's a good fit.