I reached $50k ARR ($4180 MRR) in 9.5 months. AMA
Hello everyone,
I launched a product called Feather (feather. so) on Twitter on 18th May 2022, and grew it to $50k ARR in 9.5 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 an SEO-friendly blog.
Right now, Feather has 191 paid customers and has $4180 MRR.
I am mainly getting customers from Twitter, word of mouth, and Google.
AMA!
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Congratulations Bhanu..
No questions, just came here to say that Feather is an amazing product and I am a happy customer.
Onward to $100K ARR 🚀
Thank you Ayush 😀
Congrats, how did you come up with the idea?
I was solving my own problem of writing in Notion and then copying it to somewhere else every time it’s time to publish. So I thought to directly use Notion itself as the CMS.
I'm a big fan of you from Twitter.
Can you tell me more about what are your customer acquisition channels and how you build them?
Thank you!
Amazing, congratulations on that milestone! My question is: Did you have a Twitter audience before launching? Or did you build that audience alongside the launch?
I quit my job more than 3 years ago. At that time, I didn't have any Twitter audience. But as I built and launched products, I gradually started to get some audience.
By the time I launched Feather (in May 2022), I have 3k+ followers on Twitter.
How did you manage that?
how did you get your first users? Did you had strong community? Is this the first product you’re making?
My initial users are actually WordPress users. I tweeted about Feather like I usually do while I was building it. Some of the WordPress users were replying to my tweets saying that the only thing stopping them from using Feather is the migration process. It takes a lot of time to migrate all their content from WordPress to Notion.
So I told them I would do it for them for free. They agreed. I then spent hours and hours copying stuff from WordPress to Notion, created their blogs, and showed them. They liked it and they converted into a customer.
---
This is not my first product. This is my 4th product.
You did exactly what they call 'do things that don't scale'. That's awesome! Your story is really inspiring.
What were the last three products about?
So, it took 3 years of full time efforts to get here?
I have no questions for you my good sir, only applause 👏
What is your full tech stack? Thanks
Remix + Cloudflare Workers.
Congrats! I was a little surprised when you wrote you only had 191 paid customers to get there, but it looks like you priced your product really well. You know the value and didn't go cheap in the name of that maybe bringing more customers. This is good to see for me and reinforces charging appropriately for the overall success of your business instead of racing to the bottom of price as a means to compete.
You mentioned most of your customers come from Twitter. Is this you reaching out actively to users based on keywords they may tweet, or something else?
My price was not always like this. I started at very low. I think it was $9/month at the start. I gradually increased price over many months as I kept on improving the product.
In Twitter, I don’t do any outreach, I just tweet about my business and people find out about the product based on my tweets and also my customers tweet about Feather too on their own. So people find out about Feather that way too.
Thanks for the details!
Congratulations and amazing work Bhanu, I have followed your journey on Twitter and I have recommended your product to my friends.
Congratulations
Amazing!
Congrats, man! Keep up the good work.
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Congrats. By Twitter what do you mean? Direct messaging or are you running ads?
Neither of them. I just tweet about my business.
That's great, congratulations. 50k ARR is a very good achievement :)
I'm a big fan, Bhanu. Keep on pushing and inspiring.
With this level of consistency, 1 year from now we will see a post "I reached $500k ARR ($41,800 MRR)".
Onwards and upwards!
Haha, that's too far-fetched.
I would be super happy if I can get to $10k MRR by the end of the year.
Did you think about "business side" of product, like economics, marketing budget, etc, or you were totally focused on delivering a product to customer? Or both?
I'm interested in this question, because I work as a product manager, and my problem is focusing on the business side like financial modelling, using product frameworks too much. Just want to know the other side of the building.
I usually look at the MRR, monthly churn, monthly revenue, number of trials weekly, monthly visitor -> trial conversion rate, and monthly trial -> paid conversion rate.
These are the metrics that I mostly focus on. I already know what these metrics usually would be. For example, I know off the top of my head that my trial -> paid conversion rate would usually be around 50%. So if on any month, that is significantly lesser or higher than that 50%, I try to reason about it. Similarly I do it for the other mentioned metrics.
Other than this, I just focus on the product and the customers.
Hello @pbteja1998
Congratulations.
I am wondering if you acquired any early users to help you shape your product features. What was your procedure to acquire them?
I am planning to launch my product. But I need some beta users to help me decide which features are useful to create a paid version of it.
Yeah, I reached out to a few users on Twitter asking them to try the beta. That helped to fix some of the early bugs before launching the product. But once I launched it and got actual customers using the product, they defined the product roadmap. I was able to improve and evolve the product based on their needs.
Congratulations Bhanu! Not much to talk about, but I was there the whole time. So nice to see how things are going.
Was following on Twitter from the beginning, great to see this
Congratulations
Congratulations Bhanu! 50K in 9 months is crazy growth. The differentiation play of only focusing on blogs is a live example of how market positioning should be done.
Congratulations Bhanu! I would love to know How did you get idea to build feather and are you working as solopreneur in feather?
I was solving my own problem and luckily it ended up solving the problem of many others. Yeah I’m a solo founder.
Great! we are in same city so would like to meet you in person.
Congratulations! for your product growth... Keep up your great work i have a question what is your customer churn rate for your product?
What is the ratio of your product customers who shift from free to paid version?
It’s between 5-10% churn.
There is no free version in Feather. There is a 7 day free trial and my conversion rate from trial to paid is 40-60%.
Great your churn rate is not so much high but you can try to reduce it. I suggest you try a customer retention tool like Churnfree.com which can help you to retain your customer and reduces the churn rate.
Congrats! Very proud. Great design and a beautiful website.
That's pretty cool! Great job!
Congrats! I feel like I remember reading your post about hitting 25k ARR just yesterday!
Your consistency and growth is impressive. Keep it up!!
congratulations bhanu, i recently asked you a few questions in the live chat an your support was next level. No wonder customers love it!
Thank you Dago 😀
What was your curve in customer acquisition? How many in 1 month, 2 months, etc
0 to $1k MRR in 3 months
$1k to $2k MRR in 4.5 months
$2k to $3k MRR in 1 month
$3k to $4k MRR in 3 weeks
Amazing! Any recommendations on getting my first customer? I’m trying to launch https://deepdivedata.agency
this is incredible, are you a technical founder and how did you grow your twitter before starting feather?
Yeah I’m a technical founder. I grew my Twitter by sharing about the SaaS products I’m working on (including Feather).
It’s not like I was trying to build an audience. But it happened as I was building and sharing about my product.
Hi Bhanu, amazing work. I do wonder. Who designed & built your website?
Hey, how did you decide on the pricing of your offer?
I didn’t. I started at the low price and gradually increased in through out many months and I’m still experimenting.
Amazing! Keep it up :)
This is truly an achievement. I do not want to ask anything. I want to say, "Bravo"👏
Hi Bhanu, its very inspiring to see your journey 🔥
Will you be open to mentor people (like me) who are just starting out on building SaaS products? I know how much valuable your time is, so I would not expect it to come for free.
I am not asking this without a reason. It's been very difficult to do Support work, Marketing, Building new features, Fixing bugs. That too with UI, Backend, Infra issues. So I think getting mentorship from a person who is doing great in all these areas would be really beneficial.
Trust me when I say this. I’m not doing great. I’m still figuring out all these things. I am not in a position yet where I can mentor someone. I’m just like you still figuring things out. But fortunately things worked out for me until now. But I don’t have some vast knowledge that I can mentor and transfer to someone else.
Sure. I am sure soon you will find a pattern that works for building products and a need to pass on that knowledge.
But anyways it's an awesome product. Keep rocking 🔥
Hi Bhanu, I've been following you on Twitter since November. It's a great progress you achieved with Feather!
In which month did you get your first paid customer? If you had to start a new project from scratch, how long would you wait to get your first customer?
Which do you think is better? Improving one project until it get's successful or starting many different MVPs and working only on what get's the best results instantly?
I got my first paying customer even before I launched it.
I don’t think there is any right or wrong. Do what works best for you.
That's great! Yes, every project and founder is different, so there is no right answer to my questions! Thank you!
Very cool!
How do you decide what to focus on right now? Do you have a strategy and focus on a particular thing for like marketing or building new features or do you go with the flow?
I have been following you on twitter and will continue to do so, thanks for building in public.
Wouter
No. I don’t have any strategy yet. I just do what I feel like doing that particular day.
Huge congrats! How long did it take you to build the MVP (rough number of hours over what timeframe)?
3-4 months. Don’t know the hours. Some days I didn’t work at all and some other days I worked for more than 10 hours.
These are great numbers, Bhanu!
You've done a fantastic job, keep it up 🚀
My question is:
How much of this goes for the expenses in maintaining the entire setup? ( Don't include marketing or promotions, if there's any expense involved). Breakdown is appreciated if possible :)
If we are talking about just servers and databases, it will be around $500 I think. But then I subscribe to lot of other SaaS too some I use personally, some I might use for Feather. If we include all those costs, it will quickly add up to a significant amount (don’t know the exact figure)
So it means, $500/year probably?
I think it's great!
Haha, it’s $500/month
Oh, this looks more to me.
What all optimizations have you tried to reduce resources?
I think the end pages are static, that can be served from CDN, so how this much?
Congrats!! that's an amazing milestone, my only question is how did you get so many clients?
That's my question too :)
Congrats Bhanu!
Feather is really on fire🔥 I would like to listen to the non paid marketing behind the success in such a short time.
I’m not sure what you mean by that. All my marketing is non paid marketing at the moment.
Yes, I know. I would like to listen that. I built my newest product and I need marketing advices.
Congratulations on achieving this milestone. I have a couple of questions
3.How much does buildin public help ?
No it’s not my first SaaS product. It’s my 4th one. I just tried to solve my own problem and it ended up solving the problem for many other people. I did not validate it. I just launched it.
I try to ignore them and turn my focus on to my customers instead.
I decided to go full time even before I had an idea. It took more than 3 years to finally get some traction with one of my products.
“Build it and they will come” will not work. I needed to actively market my product every day to get customers. My customers are my advocates. So I always try to provide the best customer support for everyone. In turn, they will share their experience and promote the product all on their own.
Congratulations on reaching $50k ARR, Bhanu! I'm following your journey from the right beginning and it's really inspiring & motivating!
So my question is,
What has been your biggest challenge while growing Feather to $50k ARR?
The biggest challenge has been not having a strategy.
I still do not have a consistent acquisition channel.
What I mean by that is that I cannot yet confidently say that if I do these tasks this month, I will most probably get this result.
I still don’t have that one thing. It’s like it’s happening organically and that’s scary to think how long it will continue to work like that.
That’s why I’m starting to focus on SEO and try to get some more consistent, reliable organic traffic to the website.
First things first, congratulations on passing a milestone that most entrepreneurs struggle to pass.
Anyone reading this should take note of the fact that, as you put it in a previous reply, you market your product every single day. Marketing is the key to growing any business regardless of how good it is. The world is too noisy for you to succeed without a lot of promotion.
Secondly, to address your acquisition channel problem, let me offer the following advice.
You're having trouble finding acquisition channels for the very simple reason that the only thing you're selling a product.
Why?
Because when the only thing you are selling is your product, the only people that your marketing & sales efforts work on are those who are actively looking to buy the solution that you sell - "active buyers".
The problem is that these "active buyers" are very hard to find. They aren't exactly hanging out in one place - there's no forum/facebook group/subreddit for those looking to buy a tool to help them use notion to publish a blog.
Now, doing SEO is certainly a good strategy to get in front of these "active buyers" because they will be using search engines to find solutions.
However, everybody knows this. It isn't the early 2000s anymore. Ranking for competitive keywords is incredibly difficult. Your competitors are also doing it and, even if you succeed, there's another problem - "active buyers" are only a tiny percentage of your target audience.
The fact that "active buyers" are only a tiny percentage of your total target audience (around 1%) means that you'll hit a revenue ceiling that you won't be able to get past.
And the more entrepreneurs see your success with your product, the quicker you'll hit that ceiling. Why? Because they'll copy your solution and start competing with you for the same small % of active buyers. And the more competitors you have, the smaller the piece of that pie you'll be able to get.
This doesn't mean that you shouldn't target active buyers by doing things like SEO, but it means that you should also target those not actively looking to buy your solution.
If you're able to effectively sell to those in your target audience (creators and entrepreneurs it seems like to me?) not actively looking to buy right now then every place you find them hanging out online (or offline) can be an effective acquisition channel.
The question is then, how do you do this?
There's tons of different ways that people have come up with but the one I find most effective is the one that I advocate - selling something more than your product, selling a new belief system. Rather than detail the whole thing here (this reply is already long enough!) I'll just point you towards this website that explains the whole thing and gives different case studies of it in action - www.thebluntmethod.com
Any questions let me know!
Best
Chris
Congrats bhanu. Can you please share what is your tech stack? Anything you want to share that one should take care of while its rapidly scaling. Thank you.
My tech stack is Remix + Cloudflare Workers.
---
If you are asking me what tech stack to use while building your own product – I would say use something that you are comfortable with. Tech stack wouldn't and shouldn't matter while starting out.
I'm inspired by you man! Your journey the past 3 months = 🤯
3 questions:
1.) If you had to start over, what would you do differently?
2.) What have been the 2-3 biggest things that contributed to your rapid growth?
3.) Any advice to newbie SaaS founders?
One thing I might do differently is trying to launch it as early as possible. I think I took about 3-4 months just in product development. I will see if I reduce it somehow.
Other than that, I think I would do the same things – start with low pricing, get some constant feedback, and gradually improve the product bit by bit – while also increasing the pricing bit by bit.
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I think Social Proof is one of the biggest things that contributed to my growth. If people see that their friends are using the product, then they would be more likely to choose the same product over another. That also gives them the trust that the platform is here to stay for a long time, and is not something that will be closed off in a year or so.
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I don't think I have any advice for anyone. Each person's path, skillset, and conditions are completely different from each other. Seeing something that worked for one person might now work for another person. I think even if I start over and do the same exact things again, I am not 100% confident that I will get the exact same results. So, it's better to find our own path and try different things, rather than just trying to follow something that someone else is doing.
First off, congrats Bhanu! I've been following your journey on Twitter and know that you've been doing a tremendous job.
I wanted to ask you - How do you approach SEO/Google for your customer acquisition? Do you write a lot of tutorials and guides? Are you also creating programmatic content as well?
I am just starting out with SEO now. I may have more after a couple of months. But right now, the visits I am getting from Google are completely organic.
I don't have any particular strategy yet there. I am just starting to write some guides now. So will have to see how that will turn out.
Congrats - I really would like to know about the SEO and marketing strategy.
SEO is just starting to pick up. I am starting to get a few hundreds of clicks from Google.
I don't have an SEO strategy at the moment. I only have like a handful of blog posts on my website.
I think what worked for my site is having relatively high DA/backlinks.
Feather is a blogging platform and my customers can create their own blog sites with it.
When they create a blog, their blog will have a watermark saying Published with Feather and a link back to my landing page. Of course, people can turn it off anytime they want.
But most of my customers choose to keep it there instead of turning it off – to incentivize it more, I also allowed them to make it as an affiliate link. So if anyone comes to feather by clicking that watermark on their blog, they will get affiliate commission – win win for everyone.
Congrats Bhanu! Do you actually pay out commission or do you offer them as a discount on their future payments?
I have a minimum payout threshold of $100.
As soon as a person's affiliate commission reaches that threshold, I pay them out.
How are you deciding what "blog posts" to write about?
I am still figuring out a process. I’m just starting out at the moment. Will probably have more to say about this on my next milestone update.
Nice one and pretty smart move!
So inspiring, Bhanu! I currently don't have a question. Just wanted to congratulate you on this great achievement! To more MRR and less churn in 2023 and beyond!
Thank you Val!
Wish you the same too... More MRR and less churn in 2023 😀
This is an awesome idea! Can you post more details about how you come up with the idea and what block you have solved?
Congrats man! Way to go! Followed your journey and glad you're killing it!!!
Congratulations. Can you tell us a little bit more about how did you go about spreading the word in twitter and how did you encourage WoM?
Congrat's Bhanu! What was the size of your Twitter audience when you started?
Congrats mate! You inspire me everyday to grow my SaaS www.rolade.io (currently at $500 MRR)
I know it is not a easy road, but it matters! Keep going and wish you all the success!
Congratulations on reaching the $50k MRR milestone. By all means it is easier said than done! This is inspiring for all of us out here trying to build a business from 0. Any tips on how to drive sales and interactions through twitter?
Congratulations on reaching $50k ARR! That's an impressive achievement in a relatively short amount of time. Here are some questions I have for you:
What was your product or service that helped you achieve this milestone?
What marketing channels did you use to acquire customers?
How did you differentiate your product or service from competitors?
What was the biggest challenge you faced in reaching this milestone?
What advice would you give to someone just starting out in their journey to build a business?
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Hey Bhanu, first of all congratulations man! This is so inspiring for me
On to the question - I know you are a coder but what advise you'd give a marketer who wants to build products like Feather but knows zilche about code.
How do I approach?
Great!
That's awesome, congrats! The product looks super polished, how far along were you when you first launched on twitter?
wow. How many times did you try before this project?
Congratulations on the success of your product, Bhanu. It's impressive to see the growth you've achieved in less than a year. I have a few questions for you:
Thank you for doing this AMA and I wish you continued success with your product!
That's pretty cool. I'm looking to scale my SaaS https://askmax.xyz
That's awesome. I'm trying to scale my business as well.
This looks great! Really great web design!
How did you share this product with others? What's the best place to grow a startup like this? I have been working on Turbolink.io and am wondering where the best place to find potential customers would be.
Amazing work man, wow!
I'm in the pbrocess of launching a tool I've built with my buddy over the weekend (resumegen.ai)
I'm trying to get our first users to beta test and improve. I'm not too sure how to get started? I thought Twitter with be interesting. Any tips/ressources on that?
Thanks a lot
Nice! What did you mainly do for marketing?
For Evoke, it's mainly been posting a lot about it on social media for me
And also curious, do you have plans to integrate AI image generation into the app?
Congrats Bhanu!
Amazing growth in such a short span of time. How did you go about it? Mind sharing that story?
Would love to Ketchup :) https://meetings.hubspot.com/stephane-boghossian
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