Hello everyone,
I launched a product called Feather (feather. so) on Twitter on 18th May 2022, and grew it to $25k ARR in 8 months.
Feather is a blogging platform that uses Notion as your CMS. You write all your articles on Notion and Feather automatically publishes them to a SEO-friendly blog.
Right now, Feather has 138 paid customers and has $2090 MRR.
My main channel of customer acquisition is still Twitter and word of mouth.
I have also been getting a few customers recently through Google.
AMA!
What was your Twitter follower count when you launched Feather ?
Asking the right questions. Completely different ball game when building from scratch without an audience.
It's worthwhile building an audience before you launch, but it doesn't have to be huge. 1000 email subscribers is a great start and very doable.
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-to-grow-a-newsletter-to-1000-readers-in-30-days-f21aec06fe?commentId=-NLgLy1DHo3eEUCMruht
Nice to see some numbers! Thanks for sharing I'll have a look.
3225
Congrats!
Some questions from my side...
Thanks!
I am using Remix + Cloudflare Workers
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It took more than 2 months
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It's my 4th product.
Later we parted ways and started to work on our own things.
From there onwards, I started to work solo.
That is also a notion-based blogging platform very similar to Feather.
But my server costs became super high. One month, I got a $10k server bill and I only had around 20 paying customers and ~$200 MRR
So, it was not sustainable at all. So, I closed off signups and started figuring out ways to optimize the infrastructure.
My next product came as a result of my optimization work. This product is still live at https://usenotioncms.com. This product right now only has two users. So even this did not go anywhere.
Finally, comes Feather. Feather is a complete rebrand and rewrite of my first solo product MDX.one. I made it in such a way that it can scale easily without super high server costs and redesigned and rewrote everything from scratch.
The end product became so different from MDX.one that I decided to rebrand it to Feather and launch it as a completely new product.
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May be. May not be. I don't know yet.
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I built it for my own use case. So I did not do any kind of validation. I just put up a waiting list and started building it in public.
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Not sure what you mean by that hashtag. But if you are asking if I built this product in public, then yes, I did. I shared my journey of building it on Twitter.
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I don't think I am the right person to answer this question. But one thing that worked for me is I always try to include my product URL in every tweet I make about the product. Every tweet will have a link to feather.so
It helped me to get some eyeballs on my product.
Wow congratulations on your milestone!
Do you mind sharing about infrastructure cost optimizations? What drove your costs as high as 10K? Compute, Egress, Managed database etc?
It appears that rewriting & moving to serverless platform on Cloudflare helped you reduce cost? And so if you didn't have to rewrite - which cloud platform + product could have been an ideal choice for reducing costs?
I was using Vercel and the Notion API was very slow sometimes especially when there are a lot of blocks and subpages on a page.
So, my Serverless Functions execution times skyrocketed. That's the main reason why my costs were high. I think it's about $40 or $50 per GB-HR of Vercel.
At that time, Vercel didn’t have Edge Functions which are super cheap compared to Serverless Functions. So, it may not cost that much today even if I use Vercel.
Thank you for sharing!
Thanks Bhanu. Got answer for my every question in detail... Best of luck for your next journey and congrats again! ❤️
Hi bhanu, Have you ever considered going back to work? What advice would you give to young software engineers considering going full time into indiehacking?
I don't think I can give any advice to anyone. Each person's case is different.
But for me, I never want to go back to work. There is a reason why I quit even though I am relatively earning a lot in my previous job.
I am just not cut out for the 9-5 job. I want to work on my own terms and work for myself. It's something inbuilt into me. So, I had to make this indie hacking thing work. That was the only way for me. There was no backup option. In the worst case, I would just take up freelancing/contract work for 1 or 2 months, earn money and with that money, continue indie hacking for another 12 months.
But I don't think I would ever go back to traditional 9-5 job again.
If this isn't the most relatable sentiment ever...
Just watched the podcast that Bhanu appeared on with @AntCas
I think you guys would love it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bj-rRr1ehtw
Thanks for the share
The AMA questions cleared almost all my doubts but wanted to ask you why did you chose umami and how did you reached to a conclusion on it also can you please elaborate more on the self hosting part or point to some good resources for it.
Also thanks for doing the AMA :)
I don't exactly remember why I chose Umami. I think I saw a few others who were using Umami for their apps. So, I just thought it must be good and used it. So far, I am fine with it. No major complaints.
For self-hosting, Umami docs have a detailed guide on how to self-host.
This guide is the one I used to host on Railway.
https://umami.is/docs/running-on-railway
Congrats, you deserve it for all your hard work.
Congratulations! Have been following your journey for some time now, it's commendable at the least!
I saw your reply where you said you're using self hosted umami for analytics. Is that analytics for your tool, or/and also for analytics for customers if you're providing it for them?
Yes, I am self hosting Umami and providing analytics to the blogs of all the customers.
So, every blog created on Feather will automatically have its own analytics dashboard.
I'd like to know more about this if you have some time, have sent you a DM on Twitter.
An easy IH post idea - I'm interested in learning more about your Umami setup. Any major pros to a hosted product like Plausible?
Eager to know your stack, and how you automated the SSL part.
It’s all Cloudflare. Even ssl certificates are generated by Cloudflare.
Did you have to become Cloudflare partners to get automatic ssl generation?
Nope. Anyone can use their “ssl for saas” product. No need to become partners for this.
I’ve completely missed it while I was researching. I already have a solution up and running but might change over to cloudflare. Thanks heaps!
Thats great.
Hi @pbteja1998, congrats on such a milestone. I do follow you on Twitter, and your tweets were very inspiring. I would love to know the answers to the following questions:
How did you come up with the idea? Was it something you needed for yourself, or did you conduct market research?
How long it took you to build your first MVP?
What's the tech stack of feather.so?
If you had to start again, what would you change or do differently in a similar journey?
Can you share an insight about the Notion ecosystem that people might don't know and that can be used to make a saas for Notion?
Thanks!
The first year after I quit my job, I was working on some other product with someone else I know.
It was the first time I was building an entire product from scratch. So, I learned a lot during that first year.
I started blogging all of it during that time on my blog at that time.
My workflow for publishing posts at that time was:
It used to take some good 20-30 mins to do this process everytime.
So, I made Feather to just sort of simplify this process. I wanted to create a blogging platform. But a blogging platform needs an editor. I really like Notion editor and I know whatever editor I build won't even be close to what Notion has.
So, I started exploring if there was a way to directly use Notion as the editor.
That's primarily how I came up with the idea.
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It took 2-3 months.
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Tech stack is React / Remix + Cloudflare Workers
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I think I will start monetizing it sooner. In the case of Feather, after I got my first customer, everything became simpler (relatively).
Instead of building blindly, I started to build things that first user needed. Then came the second user, the third and so on.
So, I think if I had to start over, I will try to quickly get that first paying user who actually wants to use the product.
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These days, there are so many notion website builders. When I was building it, there weren't as many. I don't have any particular insight to share. But instead of creating a generic website builder, I would probably niche down. In my case, my whole SaaS is around blogs. So, I could only build things that made sense for a blog.
Congrats! That’s amazing to see this type of things.
Looking great. I would love to hear:
what was the most time consuming activities regarding building the sass - programming, marketing, sales, something else?
do you have an estimation on how many hours totally you spent building this product
give us 3 tips on solo entrepreneurship and building a product
Congrats on that amazing achievement, this kind of story is super inspiring.
I hope to get there one day too.
Congrats Bhanu! That's amazing.
I have two questions.
What is the best traffic source for the site?
What is the best acquisition channel for the site?
50-60% of my traffic comes from Twitter.
The rest of the traffic is spread up from various sources every month.
I think Twitter is still the best acquisition channel for Feather. It's not like I am forcefully trying to get customers through Twitter by outreaching out via DMs or anything.
It's just that every time I ask a customer where they have come from, they will usually reply back saying that they have come from Twitter.
That's awesome! Congrats!
Congratulations 🎉 👏
Congrats bhanu! 🥳
Thanks Dago 😀
Wow congrats man thats a great start. How did you get your first 5 paying customers? I would appreciate some guidance on this as we are also working on launching our code collaboration platform soon.
You can check the previous AMA I did a few months back. Someone asked the exact same question.
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/i-reached-10k-arr-843-mrr-in-2-5-months-ama-f8f004d910
Hihi, have briefly visited your website. I am planning to write some blogs for my startup. Does your product help get more exposure for our blog?
Curious to know your 8 months including the product building or not ? Thanks.
Feather is a blogging platform where you can create your own blogs.
There is no community feed right now where all the published articles are posted. Your blog will be your own and will be on your own domain.
Feather just takes care of optimizing everything for SEO - things like setting proper meta tags, canonical links, generating a dynamic sitemap, adding relevant JSON LD schema markup, etc.
But in the end, you have to write content that is useful to get exposure. Feather just lets you focus on content and takes care of all the technical things.
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It's 8 months since the launch. I built the product for another 2-3 months before launching.
Wow, amazing progress, and congrats. What inspired you to build a blogging platform built on top of Notion?
I was blogging a lot during my first year of building things after I quit my job. I have used Notion to blog and then export it to markdown and upload it to the blogging platform that I was using. It took a good 20-30 mins to do that every time.
So, when I wanted to build something new, I thought to build a blogging platform. A blogging platform needs an editor to write blog posts. But I really like using Notion. There is no way I can build an editor that is as good as Notion editor. So, I decided to directly use Notion as the editor for the blogging platform.
That's how it all started.
That makes sense. I have a similar project but is built on top of Netlify CMS. So I was curious how you got so many, users. Awesome progress!
Wow, congratulations on growing Feather to $25k ARR in such a short amount of time! That's quite an accomplishment!
Can you share more about your Twitter marketing strategy?
What specific tactics did you use to acquire customers and grow your user base?
And How did you optimize your conversion rate?
To be honest, there is no strategy.
I just share what I do every day in the form of tweets, and people like it and visit the website to see what I am talking about every day on Twitter.
They then discover that Feather is a blogging platform and they can create blogs with it.
Then when they actually have a need for a blog, they remember me and then go sign up.
It's all kinda organic.
Now, I am trying to intentionally get visitors to my site through SEO. Started to focus on SEO more. But my twitter account and tweets will still be me just sharing what I am doing.
Haven't done any optimizations yet. The conversion rate for visitor -> trial is terrible right now at 0.3%
Congrats!
Quick Questions:
I want to break into 2023 with the idea of creating a new scheduling micro-saas to help small businesses enter into their technological phase and provide a professional look. This software will be used by barbers, nail technicians, salon owners etc. I will write all the code from scratch and enlist in the help of a data modeling expert and a business analyst. I wanted to know of any tips and tricks to hit the ground running and market to upcoming customers.
Any Tips?
Thank You.
In my case, after building the minimum usable product, I tried to find a potential user who wants to use the product.
Then I started building the product for them. They eventually ended up becoming a customer.
My point is the work became so much simpler and the direction became so clear once I had the actual customers who are using the product. I stopped guessing what to build and started building what they wanted.
Congrats!
Would you consider your conversion rate low?
And what other channels besides twitter are you using to get the word out?
I think my Trial -> Paid is not low. It's a good conversion rate.
But I feel like my visitor -> trial conversion rate is low.
Currently, Twitter is the only place where I am active. But I am slowly starting to focus on SEO. That's my next big bet.
Interesting. Your landing page looks great and seems like it is hitting all the major advice out there to convert users.
Do you have any insight or data you'd be willing to share into your visitor conversions?
The landing page that you see currently is still pretty new. So need a few months to correctly get the conversion rate for this.
But my visitor -> trial conversion rate will usually be around 0.3% to 0.5%. For products with cc upfront trial, if the conversion rate is more than 0.75%, then I think that means the landing page is converting well. So, mine is still not performing as well as it should. So, that's why I added the new landing page.
What are your experience with offering free trials, free plans, with CC or without CC, Have you ever switched between these pricing strategies and which one was proved to be best for feather ?
I tried the free plan thing before. Had a very bad experience with it. Same with free trials without cc.
Now, the only thing I want to do is a free trial with cc. That's why even for Feather, it was a free trial with cc right from the start.
This way, I get sign-ups from only those who really have a need for a blog.
Visitor -> Trial will get affected a lot because of upfront cc.
My visitor -> trial conversion rate is around 0.3-0.5%
But my trial -> paid conversion rate is around 40-60%.
Did you launch on producthunt and if you did, How did it go and what was the strategy for it ?
I haven't launched it on PH yet. Will launch it in a month or two.
Congratulations Bhanu! I learnt few important things from your journey.
Congratulations Bhanu,
Are you one man army or hired/outsourced different roles for this project?
Like UI thing, frontend, backend, etc
I’m one man team. But I hire a contractor occasionally for designs. Other than that, it’s all me currently.
Inspiring man 🙂
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That's awesome! How long did it take to get to the first paying customer and what kind of distribution channel worked best? I often think my lack of Twitter audience or digital presence, in general, is a roadblock and it feels tricky not knowing how to grow the audience while SIMULTANEOUSLY getting users to try out Geeks and Experts.
For Feather, I got my first customer even before I launched it (officially).
But Feather is not my first product. It's my 4th one. I have been doing this for 3 years now, and there are some people who have been following my journey from the first year.
So, even though technically it took 0 days to get my first customer, it's zero because of all the things that I did in the past 3 years.
Got it, put in the work, consistently! Really great to hear it paid off :)
Hi, thanks for sharing. It is very inspiring.
I wonder if it is a good idea to have some product made first and then try to build an audience on Twitter.
I have been struggling with building an audience there, but I am at a stage where I am not sharing any concrete product and wondering if it is not a good strategy to spend time being active and engaging with users when I do not have any accomplishment yet.
Please let me know your thoughts on audience building on Twitter.
I don't know if it's a good idea or not, but that's exactly what I did.
I did not build an audience.
Instead, I just shared my journey of building in public.
Right from the idea stage, to creating a landing page, adding waitlist, getting waitlist users, finalizing features, working on features, fixing bugs, getting some visitors, getting some users, getting some customers, handling churn, checking retention, ...
I did everything in public. That's how I got an audience on Twitter. I did not try to build an audience and then started working on a product. Both went hand in hand to me.
I don't know if this is what you have to do. But this is what I did.
I see your approach as being quite organic and very effective too. You already have quality content you are sharing (your journey stages) when you do that as opposed to having to just create quality Twitter content.
It gave me something to think about. Appreciate your input :)
How long have you been into making stuff?
I wrote my first line of code in 2015.
Is this your full-time project or side project? How many hours do you spend on it per week. Feels like 24 hours is never enough when you have an actual full-time job. Thanks.
Yeah, this is my full time thing. I quit my software dev job exactly 3 years ago.
I don’t spend crazy amount of times on it. Maybe 10-15 hours per week. Most of the time is spent doing customer support.
Apart from building in public on twitter do you also try and engage frequently with your audience? Are there any other tools you use to target users on twitter or is it all organic?
Congratulations and thank you for sharing :)
It’s all organic. I haven’t used any special tools.
Congrats, awesome project
$250/y for blogging seems like a lot, I wonder who is your target audience
What do you use for analytics? It looks as it could be launched as separate project
People are paying for it. So I assume it’s not a lot…
Right now, I’m still trying to figure out who my target audience is. It’s still a little broad at the moment.
For analytics, I just use self hosted Umami.
Wow!
Bhanu, how did you get your first set of customers when your product was new?
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/i-reached-10k-arr-843-mrr-in-2-5-months-ama-f8f004d910
I did another AMA a few months back. You can go there and read through my replies.
In short, I got interest from many Wordpress users wanting to migrate to feather, but they said the only thing stopping them to migrate to feather is that there are so many posts to move to Notion. So I spent hours and hours just copy pasting each post from their Wordpress to Notion and created a blog for them. The first few customers have been a lot of hard work. But it all paid off in the end now.
Nice! How do you gain users via twitter? Do you have a special content?
No. I just build everything in public. They then go and visit Feather through one of my tweets. If they need a blog, they will sign up and convert to a customer.
Also, many of my customers tweet about Feather on Twitter all on their own. So people discover it through those tweets too.
Also, when someone asks for recommendations about a blogging platform, many of my twitter friends and customers reply to those tweets asking them to check out Feather.
That is another way how I get customers through Twitter.
Bhanu what is the OPEX for managing Feather?
Had to Google what you meant by OPEX haha. Right now, the costs are around $500/month I think. I have to check again.
👍
How do you handle content distribution?
Not sure what you mean? Whose content?
Feather is a blogging platform. People can login, connect their Notion, create their blog, assign their custom domain to it.
They will then get an optimised blog with everything they ever need.
All the content/articles they write, they still do it on their own Notion docs. Feather automatically fetches those Notion pages and publishes them to their blog that they created.
We meant to ask that apart from Twitter where do you publish content to get visitors but got the answer from the below replies!
Ah... Got it. Yes, I am only active on Twitter. Nowhere else.
How's your experience with Cloudflare workers in terms of performance and cost? Do you have any tutorials/docs that you followed and would like to share?
I tried deploying Next.js but found guides saying that SSR is not supported yet.(Not sure if its outdated info)
Cloudflare is awesome. I am really liking it. I use Remix, not Nextjs. Remix has an official cloudflare adapter. So it was very easy for me to use Remix and deploy on Cloudflare.
Congrats! How do customers find you? Is it really all on Twitter? In addition, have you considered any adjacent markets apart from blogs like newsletter writing for example?
I’m active only on Twitter. My majority of traffic is coming from Twitter. So I’m sure a lot of people are atleast discovering Feather through Twitter.
But I can’t exactly say if all the customers are also coming from Twitter.
I’m not doing any kind of outbound marketing.
So, that’s why I said it’s through Twitter, word of mouth and Google.
I see many people recommend Feather to others all on their own on Twitter. That helps a lot too.
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It is already possible to collect emails with Feather. On top of that, people can also embed their own newsletter form on their feather blog (from whatever platform they are using like substack, covert kit, Beehiiv etc) even today.
But yeah, eventually I have plans to have a complete newsletter functionality where people can send emails through Notion itself. That’s the logical next step for Feather.
Congrats!👍🔥
Hey congrats for this milestone ! i'm new here, one question regarding the UI, did you use some template ?
Great performance!
who build the dashbaord for you? I want to hire him
That's awesome! Twitter and Indiehackers has been a great channel for Githired too :)
Githired is a Chrome Extension that connects startups/founders directly to their dream developers on Github: those who are ALREADY working on projects similar to theirs.
https://bit.ly/githired_devs
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