How long did it take you to reach $1/MRR?
How long did it take you to reach $1/MRR?
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Roughly 10 years, lol (but I wasn't laughing then). If only I had a resource as good as IH back in 2010, I probably wouldn't have wasted that much time on building useless products and features.
I was close to a mental breakdown at one point in 2017. I even started looking for a new job when I was almost convinced to give up on the indie hacker lifestyle. I didn't even know there were so many people like me. I thought I was crazy for trying to build a business on my own.
It is almost unbelievable how long it can actually take to figure it out. I remember when I first started about 4 years ago, I was filled with unshakeable confidence and optimism that if I put in the work over the long-term then (obviously) a sustainable product or business would emerge.. I mean people are making money on products they created within 2-3 months. If I spent 2-3 years I'm practically guaranteed.
.. 4 years on: $0 revenue. Failed project after failed project. Not quite on the verge of a "mental breakdown" but my resolve is seriously being tested, esp. when I have a rewarding career on standby.
When thinking about the odds I used to say: "show me someone who has been trying this for 10 years and still not found success. They don't exist". Now I'm not so sure.
It would seem some of us are destined to take the long way round and skip all the shortcuts.
Very happy to hear you finally broke through! The only thing that keeps me hanging on is my insistence on finding a way. I'm afraid I can't take no for an answer.
EDIT: incredibly, while writing this I just got my first subscription on Patreon for $37! WOW.
Wow. So good to hear this " I just got my first subscription on Patreon for $37!" .. One thing I learnt from your post is "Never Give up attitude you have".. Wish you all the best bud. Cheers.
Wow - congrats! Sending you all the positive energy and wishes for many more signups and paid subscribers to come!
I think it depends on what you're trying to build - some products can take less time, others may need years of work before they are even close to what the customers need. If you are stuck try pivoting/changing the product. I originally thought I would be making a B2C product for other developers but it turned out that I found more success by focusing on a B2B product instead. I think B2B is the easier way to go.
I checked out Para. It's awesome. I wish the cloud pricing was comparable to Firebase. Is there a referral program?
Thank you! There's no referral program at the moment. Para is pretty basic in terms of functionality when compared to Firebase.
I like multi-tenancy feature that Para offers. I would prefer a starter plan with 2GB storage for $5/month. A referral program and above pricing will help me refer my users to Para Cloud.
This comment was deleted 3 years ago.
Wow. Congratulations!!! That edit feed me confidence.
Glad you held on!
Still at $0/MRR after 7 months for my SaaS and it took me 5 months to build it. Totally failed.
Hopefully, still make some income with Next.js Theme, but it isn't recurring... One time purchase
In couples of weeks, I'll build another SaaS, hope this time, it will be successful. I also hope it will take less time. Definitively I'll repurpose some code from my first SaaS.
Any reason you don’t try to validate the SaaS idea first before building the next one?
The SaaS is something I needed myself for my own project. So, I didn't try to validate it before building one.
So in worst case, the MRR stays at $0 and at the end, the SaaS is still useful to me and I use it myself. A mistake to not validate a minimum.
This worst case become reality...
I see. I looked it up. Is there a reason you don't offer some sort of demo? I personally probably wouldn't ever spend $700 on a SaaS template when many can be found online for much less, but maybe having a demo would make me more likely to consider it.
It's strange you didn't find the demo. Actually, there is two demo available: one, Todo App in testing mode and another one, a real SaaS in production mode. Here is one of the demo: https://demo.nextlessjs.com/
It's a 100% Serverless from database to frontend through backend: no/low server management, highly scalable, pay-as-you-go, etc.
I just had a look. Did you ever show this to a fellow developer and ask for feedback? It's crazy to assume (sorry for the word) that someone would just drop 700$ on a template, without any proof that is has its worth. How would I know the code is any good? What it actually offers (a list of features is far too vague…)?
You can make claims all you want that it is worth it… you need to proof it in some way. First proof would be show that anyone besides you actually uses it, even if it's for free…
In Ruby on Rails there are several successful SaaS templates, have a look there:
More importantly both authors are very visible and active in the Rails community, so people know to trust them.
I don't know you, so maybe you do some of it, but on the landing page, I just see: 700$, I got a lot of features, trust me…
What is the underlying technology, philosophy, how will I use it, what kind of stack am I buying into, what serverless services is it depending on…
So maybe your product is worth it, but you need to do way more work to show/proof it.
Thank you for taking the time to provide feedback and it's a good learning for me to improve. I'll continue to work hard!
The two projects you have mention are role model for me. I just started 8 months ago, so my visibility in the community is definitively not at the same level as them. Hope one day I'm as much as successful as them.
I'm also trying to get visibility in Next.js community by building several open source project. Here is one of example:
A project who will soon reach 1500+ stars on GitHub.
Recently, it has reached 500+ stars on GitHub
I also take time to write several blog posts to explain the value of Next.js SaaS Boilerplate:
Hope it gives some proof of the value. I know it's definitively not enough but I hope I'm moving forward to the right direction.
The landing page you see, it's only the first version. So, there is a lot of room for improvement, it isn't perfect. I'll keep continue working hard and iterate based on your feedback. I'll continue trying to show/proof by writing more blog post and doing some open source.
Would you like to join another startup as a cofounder?
A little feedback for Nextless:
I get it. It has a lot of features... But show me the 3 that make you stand out. Have a dedicated page for features where you list all of them. There are at least 10 features I see right away that I don't care about as a business and they seem to be a mix of technology features.
Looking at it I got confused. How much do I need to code myself to launch a SaaS with it? If I can code... why do I need your product to launch my SaaS?
Maybe a video of you going through the product, and how you can launch within a day with your product vs a month of development by yourself would convince more.
How do I know that it actually does what you say? Did anyone else build a SaaS with it and was successful? Did anyone else look at it and tell you it's what they need? Would anyone who has built a SaaS in the past say: "Aw man, I wish this was there before I build my SaaS by hand."
If NO... find someone. Nobody will pay this price tag blindly.
All the above combined with no money-back guarantee just means... too much risk for me = pass. It means if I have a problem, I cannot rely on you helping out, because you already have my money.
That's why I recommend giving a 100% money-back guarantee (at least for a limited time like 30 days). It costs you nothing and most decent customers will never use it, but you get their trust almost for free. What do you have to lose if you have no customers?
---
These are just my quick observations. A lot of it is based on the first gut reaction to the product.
Cheers
Thank you for this in depth feedback. I really mean a lot to me.
I confirm I need to do some work on the landing page and I'll improve it by doing as you suggested:
The idea to have a 100% money-back guarantee is great for physical product but for digital product... I'm not really confident how to implement it.
I understand that it's hard to think about putting so much work into something and then basically risking to give it away for FREE because people will abuse the money-back system.
The most important thing, in the beginning, is to win the TRUST of your customer. It is more important than the other way around.
You have to trust your customer AND your product. (A malicious customer will find a way to make some damage even without a money-back guarantee).
If you TRUST your product you can offer a 30-day or 14-day money-back guarantee. Your product has to prove in that time that it is worth that money. If it cannot prove its worth, then your product is doomed anyway.
Most people and customers are honest people. If they paid for something, and that thing is delivering value, they will be happy to have paid for it. They will not ask for their money back. (Some people will not even ask for their money back when they are not happy. Simply out of laziness, depending on the cost).
Once they bought the product you will get valuable feedback... which when handled correctly will help you improve the product and make it more valuable.
Another thing is — people don't like to be BETA users of something at full price. If you never had a customer for an expensive product then essentially your first customers are BETA users. They have the risk, but they don't get any advantage of being your first users. They might have a disadvantage because they will be the first to run into problems... and there is no community to help yet.
Trust is definitively a huge advantage. So, I confirm it's extremely important. I was building trust using other techniques than money-back guarantee.
Thank you for persuading me. I'll make a test and see the results.
For your information, I use Nextless.js for building my own SaaS product. So, the product isn't in BETA. I was using this stack before making this SaaS Boilerplate. Currently, several products available in production use this boilerplate.
It took me several years to build it, I learn the mistakes: what work and what doesn't before launching Nextless.js. It was product coming from an iterative process. Nextless.js isn't my first product. I have already build several SaaS product before launching this React SaaS Boilerplate.
Yes, I'm also thinking to create a discord/slack for the community where people can help each other. Currently, I respond myself to the all support and I usually respond in less in 24 hours. Of course, the support is included.
These are all good points and would be good to incorporate somehow.
Maybe by writing articles how you came up with this boilerplate, why it's better compared to X and so on :)
Thank you! I'll incorporate your suggestion. It'll take some time but I also think it's worth the try.
I was very fortunate. I made $1 MRR before launch day when I showed it to my parents. =)
Quite my job in May 2019.
First dollar in revenue in August 2020.
$1k MRR in February 2021.
Start sooner and play the long game.
Just after got an Adsense approval.
I've a free-to-use online toolbox project, 10015.io, which relies on ad revenue. It took some time to get positioned on search engines and get an Adsense approval. But, just after getting the approval, I started to earn some money. Now, I have around $300 MRR. Not much, but I love spending time for coding tools.
Very beautiful site! I made a more basic one with some programming tools a few years ago, but I only made $1.50 from it 😅
It's nice-converter.com
how many visits per day?
Just 5 or 6 per day
Hi Bruno. It looks really nice, but it is harder to rank on Google than making the tools. It is crucial to take some of your time on search engine optimization and marketing of the website.
I agree, ranking on Google is pretty hard. I didn’t worry too much about SEO and marketing, I just finished the site and moved on to another project. But it’s nice to know it’s possible to make real money with it 😁
amazing, does the source of the traffic come from SEO?
Actually, there are different sources for the traffic. ~15% come from social media shares & blog posts, ~5% comes from Chrome & Mozilla extensions of the website, ~10% comes from direct traffic and ~70% comes from search engines.
how do you research keywords for an online tool? Is it harder than blogging?
I'm mostly using autocomplete feature of Google and Alexa keyword results of competitor tools.
nice, how much do you spend on servers in a month? 😁
10$ :)
I check your site get about 4k backlinks, how is your trick to get that many backlinks?
Will be interesting to see what makers have to say. Just launched a beta for my SaaS and looking at monetization next week
16 months from inception to the first sale (only $36 AUD). 22 months in now and am at $1.8K MRR AUD.
My first SaaS product took 3 months AFTER launch to get the first customer and make $1/MRR.
But they dropped after the first month...it was another month before we picked up a longer-term customer and truly had $1/MRR.
So it was 4 months post-launch and 7 months including the MVP build.
My current project has been in beta for about a month and I have $0/MRR
Still not there yet but I love the question. $1 is a huge milestone – it might sound ridiculous but you cannot underestimate what it takes to even get there. I've been dreaming, talking, and trying to build a SaaS for 8 years but haven't managed to actually pull it off. To get to a point where you have something you can sell is really hard.
If you’ve made something… anything… it probably has value to someone. You can sell pretty much anything. Happy to have a look at what you’re making and give a deeper opinion if you’d like some constructive advice :)
It took me 5 months to reach a consistent $1 MRR
$1, or $1k?
Definitely $1! :)
Spent 3 months from March 2020 doing nothing but learning to code - courtesy of covid.
Started freelancing in mostly nocode in Aug 2020 and building a client base. In Nov 2020, brought on some team members to assist with workload - soon after we started calling ourself an agency.
We spent the next 12 months building out our systems and increasing our delivery leverage. I was always on the hunt for how I was going to move away from consulting though. I had a past life in doing this at a much bigger firm.
At the start of 2022, started working on tightening up our broad offering into a tighter one that we could offer as a subscription - now we only build busops tools and integrate systems. One month ago we broke the infamous $1/MRR. I expect this coming month we will break $7kMRR, then aim to double that in the following month.
We are continuing to build out our infrastructure and bolting on products to our subscription to crank up the value provided to our customers.
I cannot understate the elation of moving from proposals and justifying every dollar to a standard offering that customers can come to us, find out about we can do themselves and then pay upfront!
So to answer the question - it's been 3 years in the making....
it took me 10 days to get the first $1.
We started our agency in May 2018. At the time we called ourselves freelancers.
For that year we'd chase clients down at the end of the month for our editing work. Until one day we just had enough.
We saw how SaaS companies had one flat monthly fee, paid up-front and we decided to try it. We Simplified our services down to less than a handful, and only did monthly subscriptions.
In 2019 we approached all our clients to switch over. Some hopped off, but the ones who've stayed have been with us ever since. In that first month, we broke past 1k/MRR.
It's such a dream to get paid before you do the work, consistently, and it's never a conversation. We have the positive cash flow to forecast and make plans as a business.
One day soon I'll build a true SaaS company fingers crossed
I'm at 0$ yet but I know the SaaS I'm building is validated by the market (there are several SaaS like mine), but I don't know how to handle the process, it's my first SaaS, I've been coding for 20 days and I already have a working MVP and I opened the beta to the public, I just can't get enough users to try it, but I'm confident I will get some in the next days, maybe I'm going to fast
I had developed a Shopify App during the COVID Lockdown period just to learn the micro SaaS businesses.
It was completely free for a year.
I improved the product based on user's feedback, enhance UI/UX, and launched with a freemium model.
The free plan was just for acquiring free users and it has very less features and usage limits.
There were 2 plans Along with the free one.
It's been a year and I'm very close to $1k MRR.
My first SaaS product got its first sale a few weeks after launch in October 2017. It's been a slow, steady climb since, but that's better than a fast, sudden drop! :)
Still at $0/mrr. Over 6 weeks since the launch of Leansence
Looking for any feedback.
It depends on the what kind of product you have developed. We need to ask these questions to ourself, is it a right product market fit? What is the target group or Total addressable market? Is my product solving the genuine problem? If you are clear about these Quaestions then, next step is how are you planning your marketing and awareness of your product.
If you have laser sharp focus on the product (tech side), price, promotion then you are good to take off your business very fast. To answer your specific question, $1MRR can be achieved by just getting 20 prospects for a trail for 15days, so they get use to your product and atleast one of them will definitely pay for it. I got my first paid customer in 1st month of my product launch through the above method..
All the best for your business.
Haha take too long for me
On the first day after launch, with three months of building behind it, we had our first subscriber, and it was an annual. That was very motivating!
A year in and just cracked $1,000/MRR.
A couple of years, although thats mainly because we ran our service for free as essentially a beta.
Once we introduced a paid plan we had our first paying customer about 2 months later (at this point we'd done zero marketing so were pretty happy with this result).
Thats the story for ServerAuth anyway...prior to that a good 10 years of hobby projects that weren't seriously being done as a business.
I started online in 2014. Didn't make a dime until 2016 (almost cried when that first $7 came in lol), but it wasn't stable. It wasn't until 2019 ish that I had stable income. It's a long process but worth it. The time will pass anyways. Excited to see where I and many others on this site will be in 10 years.
10 years. I had only recently begun making money. My efforts previously were all futile but built me along the way. I realized I wasn't in it for the money back then or else the goal of $1/MRR would've been fairly easy. I was in it for myself. The curiosity I had. The friends I built stuff with, and the feeling of failing often.
idea for a Mac app in Oct 2020. never opened Xcode before, or built anything in Swift. proof of concept done by Nov 2020. more learning, building libraries etc to gain knowledge until March 2021. since then full-time on the app. beta released in Nov 2021. stable mid-Feb 2021. price is USD$3.69 per month. currently making ~$USD33 per month :p (after taxes).
Still working on it, started a month ago
For my project, it was roughly 1 and a half years. 15 months to build an audience. 3 months to start monetizing it and make the first subscription sale.
I'm happy that people are replying and sharing their timelines.
Beware the data might be misguiding.
Because it's kinda hard to identify the real "start" moment.
Especially, if you use your social capital, connections, or existing audience.
3 months, also maybe the same time it took for the SEO to kick in during that time
it would be take some time :(
Never. I don’t do subscriptions.
3 years. I strated making money with a few months. However it took me years to make a consistent cash flow.
The money I made intially all went into reinvestment. So I would say it took me 3+ years to make a profit out of my business.
In my opinion, it'll take years to get profit from startups. And you must have investments to keep moving forward.
After almost 2 months of being live with payments, I'm at $300 MRR. It's a B2C product.
First dollar came in the same week of launch.
If I count development, then almost two years if I start counting from the time we started selling then only one month.
Still yet to reach $1 MRR , launched about 3 months ago..took about 6 months to build. My biggest problem is sales and retention
4 months
I've had many projects over the years that have made $1/MRR (or a tad more).
But growing them beyond pocket money is the bit I struggle with.
A ....... kkkkk
For me, it was almost instantly, but that 100% didn't mean that growth was imminent.
I was writing a guide to procrastination, posted it on Medium (back when Medium was mostly free articles), and then posted it on Reddit, and it went viral in r/Motivation.
Now, that didn't make me $1/MRR, but it set the stage by giving me a few hundred followers. 3 to 4 months later, I decided to write my first premium article, a part of the Medium Partner Program, about my social media addiction.
Low and behold, it got about $20-ish the first month, and his since wait, let me check made me $108, not fantastic, but the sheer act of publishing it made me get to $1/MRR.
Since then, I've had load more successful articles, my top getting me about ~$3.1k to date.
But it really is about that first dollar - then boom, it's suddenly all real.
I've built 2-3 failed SaaS products over the last couple years, so you count that time, quite a bit haha. With that said, StandupWizard passed $1/MRR about 3 months after launch and has been steadily climbing since. I would definitely say this is the first SaaS product where I'm truly seeing MRR and learning how to grow it.
I built a free MVP. Over about 18 months I was doing little bits and pieces on and off. The occasional weekend, maybe a few days during a holiday.
Eventually I added a paid tier. my first customer was 1 day after that.
Didn't build anything! Let's see in future.
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