I bootstrapped my SaaS to $15,000 MRR over 3 years AMA!

yes!

I lived in Singapore for about 10 years. During that time, in addition to my day job I did some commercial modeling. I did shoots for Singapore Airlines, Singapore Zoo, a number of condo developments, that type of thing. I was always the "young father figure".

If you have a "commercial" face (which I don't think I particularly have, but hey) and are willing to work hard, you can actually make good money from this. I remember one shoot was a couple of days and I got paid about $3000 USD. There are models doing multiple shoots a month like this, and getting paid a lot more than I was.

The downside of this type of work is that it can be infrequent / unstable, and it's a constant grind - you are always running to castings, and the majority of the time the casting director will look you over for a few minutes and then say thanks, and you know you haven't got the gig. After traveling all across town to be there on a hot day, that can really wear you down after the 3rd... 4th... 5th call like that in a week.

We have this stereotypical view of models as being paid to do nothing, but no-joke, it is bloody hard work. It's a hustle to get the gigs, and then on the day of the shoot you'll usually have some horribly early call time, sit there while wardrobe and makeup has their way with you, and then just as you're getting bored and frustrated you have to smile / act on demand, when the director or photographer needs you to. I have total respect for anyone working in this industry, now that I've experienced it myself!

A very interesting life experience but I don't think I'd do it again :)

This is hilarious!

LOOOOOOOL!!!!!!!!!!!

I am by no means an expert here, I always end my marketing weeks feeling that I didn't do enough.

At a high level, in my marketing week I'm asking myself "how can I better communicate what I currently have?".

This distills down into tasks like:

• adding feature pages to the marketing site
• writing blog posts or tutorials
• planning the next piece of "hero" content*
• creating more interactive demos
• improving the docs

I also make community part of my marketing week. When I'm in a coding week I tend to not tweet as much, or look at IH as much. But in a marketing week I allow myself to tweet more, post on IH more, etc.

*by hero content I mean longer, more creative pieces of marketing content that will (hopefully) net you a wider distribution. These take longer to write than a regular blog post. An example of this is my $10k MRR timeline which took a couple of days to put together.

I will be first to admit that I find it very difficult to balance my work life with a relationship.

I've posted this on IG before but I'll repost it here:

I believe as a man you have 3 things to master, your body, your mind and your heart. You’re only truly a man when you have mastered all 3.

I’ve always been good at the first two. At 41 I work out 5 times a week and am in the best health of my life. Over the last few years I’ve built up a business from scratch that now pays me a decent income. Body and mind.

But I’ve always been terrible at relationships. I’ve been called a workaholic. I just find it hard to give people the time they need, when my mind is mostly consumed with work-related problems / opportunities. It must be horrible to be on the other side of a relationship with me.

I greatly admire men who can balance all 3 of these areas of life. But I am not one of them yet.

This is my goal for my 40s.

Right before I became an indiehacker I was part of an org that ran a large number of scrum teams.

Living and breathing scrum for a couple of years has definitely influenced the way I work. I basically use scrum methodology but in a team of one person (me).

So I do things like:

• timebox everything into 2 week sprints
• have a backlog that I routinely re-prioritise
• assign points to all my user stories
• run everything from a kanban
• have a sprint retrospective

If you're subscribed to my bi-weekly newsletter, you're actually part of the sprint retrospective - my newsletter is basically me looking back at the last 2 weeks of work.

1. Monday to Friday, 8am to 4pm

2. Burnout happens when you work hard and don't see results. I haven't experienced burnout much because in the first year TBH I didn't really work hard. In the 2nd year I worked a little harder and saw some small results. In the 3rd year I worked much harder and saw good results. I guess if you're not seeing the results you want and you're working really hard, you need to hit pause and ask why.

3. I've always been a "do it myself" sort of guy so actually I enjoy this!

4. Churning customers hit me really hard in the beginning. When you only have a few customers it feels like such a personal rejection when you lose one. You feel like your product isn't good enough. Over time, you realise that your product isn't for everyone. People sign up and decide it's not for them, and that's fine. As long as you have long-term customers or even better, customers who upgrade their plans over time, you know that you have some semblance of market fit and the challenge should be finding more customers like them, and not worrying about the ones who cancelled.

5. Absolutely! I just wish I had the time to really sit down and think who I need to hire and then spend the time to look at candidates etc. That's a full time job by itself. Maybe I need to hire someone to help me hire people.

I think broadly speaking you have to just pick a problem you're passionate about. Then it doesn't feel like "marketing", it's just "telling people about the cool thing you're building". Authentic enthusiasm is infectious and there's no substitute for it.

That's a great space to be in.

I would treat the next few big features almost like they are self-contained products and make sure you market the hell out of them with their own launch day etc.

Create separate landing pages on your website, post them to PH, and anywhere else you can think of. Even create "notify me" pages for features that are upcoming.

Basically anything you can do to show you have momentum and a product roadmap - it will show you're not a flash in the pan and also attract more serious customers.

I had people flat out say in the beginning that they wouldn't sign up for my service as I was so new. So some of this traction just takes time to build.

1. totally non-scientific, I just focused on the one I enjoyed the most. none of them had made any money at that point so it was really the only compass bearing I had. That said, I think it's a good indicator.

2. I built them one after the other, spending 1 month on each

3. Time to MVP. The whole thing had to be built and launched in a month. I did this about 7 times before getting a bit burned out, then I started to focus on one particular area.

1. I was already an experienced full stack developer, and had built many, many failed projects in the past :)
2. Sales. I still don't have this skill, so I don't do any outbound sales.
3. The ones that failed were trying to solve a big problem. The ones that got used solved small, discrete problems.
4. I wrote about that in a blog post here

It's pretty much all custom with a few dependencies and I'm about to roll out a version that's 100% custom.

It's actually very simple as an application, basically there is a render() function that puts everything where it is supposed to go, resizes things if needed etc, and that render() function is called every time you edit something.

Fun fact. In February / March 2020 I started to apply to jobs. I wasn't running out of cash yet, but I was worn down and I thought I was going to fail at being an indiehacker.

I didn't get hired for anything. And then covid happened, tanking the job market - I know many friends who lost their jobs back then. And all the news reports at that time were saying it would last for a year or more (and hey, they were right!).

So I thought to myself, well shit, now I have to make this work.

I think that mental switch was important. Getting a job was no longer an option, it was Bannerbear or bust.

I'm not saying you need some kind of existential threat to motivate you... but I think for me I always work a bit better under pressure :D

Good question. I think I tried to be way too scientific about it. I even had an excel sheet with a scoring system for ideas and a dozen or so columns like "market size", "defensibility", etc etc.

I think it's a decent thought exercise to run ideas through a filter like this, but it's not how I would pick ideas in the future.

I think it's much more important to pick something you're passionate about, that you think is really cool, and that you can see as a T-shaped challenge - lots of simple useful features to build but some really challenging stuff too that you can imagine working on for years.

The old trope of "find a customer and solve their problem" has had its day I reckon. By the time you've found that customer, 20 other startups are offering them the same solution. Just take a look at ProductHunt, there are literally dozens of new SaaS startups launching every day. It's nuts.

The only way you are going to rise above all that noise is via execution, and the simplest way to do your best work, is to just be really passionate about it.

MRR is only useful as a metric once you're more established.

Before that, there are other metrics / indicators you can use:

• are you getting signups?
• are people looking at the pricing page?
• are people making it to step X in your onboarding flow?
• are you happy? do you believe in this?
• are users giving you feedback?
• are users coming back after their first session?

etc

If you look at my MRR chart it looks like I did something suddenly to change things, but that's not the case. I was just using other types of metrics to track my progress, and those were showing positive signs, so that's why I kept going. And then over time, after many improvements, release cycles etc - it starts to reflect in your MRR.

Good question, really hard to answer.

Essentially we don't know what the impact will be, we can only guess. This is the challenge of product management and there are whole books dedicated to this topic.

If you're too much of a "reactive" product manager, essentially just building things people ask for, you end up with a mish mash of features and not an actual product. This can limit your growth and make it hard to communicate to customers what you actually do well.

If you're too much of a "proactive" product manager, building things you think people want, you might end up with a highly-polished product that nobody actually needs.

I'm not smart enough to parse all this, so I just make sure that I do some of both. I listen to customers, build things they ask for, but at the same time I hold a "big picture" of where I want Bannerbear to go in my head and build other features that support this vision - and hopefully the two should roughly align in the same direction.

This applies to marketing too - I think it's good to do a mix of reactive / proactive e.g.:

• tutorials that directly help a specific type of user
• bigger-picture more creative stuff that says who you are a business

I've also built a bunch of things that went absolutely nowhere... so no, I don't think it's a pattern :)

?? Are you replying to the right post?

There’s nothing clickbaity in the title. It’s a neutral statement of my current revenue and how long it has taken to get there. MRR means monthly recurring revenue and it is a common measure of business progress used by SaaS companies.

I admire the persistence but...

I've been a member of IH for a long time and see this AMA as an organic action as a member of the community. I'm personally invested here, so doing things like this is just part of getting to know each other.

/r/SaaS I have no personal connection to, really. I hope you can understand 👍🏻

Nope! I use ExpressVPN.

Didn't know about Tunnelbear until a few months in. They go really heavy on the bear branding, with an entire character that has a personality / humour. I love it.

Not looking to emulate that though.

Be part of a community where people are achieving what you want to achieve.

That can be on Twitter, on IH or in real life.

When you're around people who are succeeding, you know it's possible to succeed yourself.

I think if you look at my growth chart the point where you see consistent growth for the first time is when I'm in a rhythm of 1 week product, 1 week marketing - for an extended period of time (6 months or so).

I think it's something that you should start from the very beginning.

Hmm there's a few ways to look at this.

Firstly I think the gap between a "basic" Rails developer and an "decent" Rails developer is smaller than you think. If I think back to the apps I built when I was first learning Rails, they really aren't that much different to what I build now. There's just a few things I've learned along the way that makes them more efficient, faster, able to do more etc. Probably for me the biggest leap forward from basic to decent is learning about background jobs - that will take your Rails app from something that does everything inline (slow) to something that will handle everything asynchronously and can pretty much handle anything you can throw at it.

Secondly, everyone has exciting ideas that they can't execute - I have them all the time! The challenge then is defining a version of your idea that you can execute. Remove features, make make it less flashy, but solve the core problem. You can always expand on it once you have learned how to add the extra stuff.

Thirdly, I left my job because I had no future there. If I could have stayed in a well paid job that I enjoyed, but be allowed to scratch my entrepreneur itch by launching side projects (in a way that is contractually allowed / agreed upon) I would have! Best of both worlds. I'm glad things worked out the way they did, and that I'm now fully independent, but I took a gamble to get here. There are probably safer ways to do what I did.

My product is an API, so without knowing how to code I think it would be difficult or impossible to build otherwise.

If I was starting out today from scratch with no coding skills I would probably try to learn no-code tools as a starter to grok some fundamental concepts but would try to quickly migrate to a programming language like Node / Ruby / etc

When I was working in a job I had a bunch of my net worth tied up in index funds.

Liquidated most of it to provide me with runway.

Probably not super smart, definitely wouldn't recommend it if you have a family. But for me, it's just me, so I was willing to take on the risk. Worked out in the end. (thankfully)

Thank you 🙏

It never really occurred to me TBH.

Yup Bannerbear has a built in proxy feature.

Ruby on Rails

My Heroku bill is about $400 per month
My AWS bill is about $200 per month

There's maybe another $200 or so in monthly SaaS products that I use

Right at the very beginning of Bannerbear's life, in like January 2020, I reached out to some "dream" companies who I thought were a perfect fit for Bannerbear.

None of them replied.

That made me feel a bit crappy, so I decided that type of customer acquisition channel is not for me.

Since then it has been all "inbound" marketing: creating tools, creating blog posts etc.

I just went straight into building - not saying I recommend that, but part of the reason I did a rapid-fire MVP approach was because I wanted to exercise my coding muscle again. At that point I had not touched any code for years.

It's hard to remember specifics, but I launched about 7 projects one after the other over the course of 7 months - launching at the end of each month. I would track the metrics loosely over the course of all this. Some showed a bit more promise than others.

In the end, I think the biggest lesson from this was to unveil my areas of interest. Image generation / automated design was definitely something that interested me, whereas the areas of some of the other products I made (e.g. team productivity) I found I had low interest in.

So a year later I thought "hmmm what could I do in the image generation space that would be really cool... what would be my dream product". And I got thinking about APIs.

That's really how it all came about! Very unscientific.

I had an obscure Rails question once (google/SO did not help) and I reached out to https://twitter.com/nateberkopec on Twitter as I've been following him for a while. He was very kind enough to answer my questions.

Had I not known him, I'm not sure where I would have turned to. Once you're past all the usual problems that are easily searchable on Stackoverflow, you're left with the niche stuff that only the veterans can answer after looking at your code or getting more context. Difficult to find those folks.

Up until now it's been manageable by myself so I haven't re-invested.

But it would be nice to take some of the load off my plate, so I'll be looking into this next by making some contract hires. Haven't really thought of how much I'd spent on this though, TBH.

no plans to raise at this time!

I could definitely do things with the money, but at this stage I am fiercely protective over my time / productivity / independence.

I was already quite an experienced developer (20+ years of coding) so that wasn't an obstacle for me.

That said, these days I think it's getting easier and easier to build and deploy an MVP! I even know entrepreneurs in my social circles who have built entire SaaS apps with no-code tools.

Hmmm difficult to say, I just tried anything and everything, really.

I made a list here of the things I can remember doing.

Pricing. Takes seconds to change it, but it can massively affect your trajectory.