Reaching 13k$ MRR with upsells - AMA
Hello IH 👋
My name is Axel Vaindal, and for those that do not know me, I'm an indiehacker and software engineer from France, former mojo employee (a YC-backed company 👇).
I wanted to share the milestone we reached with Edith & Nous, the french platform for writers and publishers.
- ~1000 active subscribers
- 8k$ MRR in subscriptions
- 5k$ MRR in upsells
In total, 13k$ MRR and we are almost discovering a new soon-to-be published book each month 🎉
A lot of people are sharing success, but I wanted to also share what went well and what went bad, as I think it's the most important aspect of building in public.
I'm in charge of engineering, product and marketing strategy in the project, but I'm not the founder of the company, so you can consider me the business advisor and personal hacker of the non-tech founders 😄
What went well
📦 We focused a lot on improving the product for our customers and discussing with them. Talking with customers help us discover flaws in our UI understanding and bugs we were able to solve.
💡We turned the expertise of the non-tech founders into revenue by upselling workshops on how to improve the books. Not only it created a new revenue channel, it also improved the quality of the books on the platform, thus creating more matches between publishers and writers.
📊 We monitor closely the behaviour of publishers and writers on our app thanks to Amplitude, so we are able to discover things people won't tell us and we found out our magic number of direct contact before conversion.
💬 Non-tech founders did an amazing jobs reaching out to publishers and making them try the product I built. Their feedback was amazing and we are going to add more features for them to deal with writing contests and call for writers.
📧 Email marketing and social media creators are our best conversion tools by far. My hint was that writers were into small community by interest, so we could reach out by integrating those communities. We did, and it created growth.
What went bad
❌ By focusing on the product and adding new features, we let the marketing aside for some times, which stalled the revenue growth. We should always market what we do live, not months after.
❌ We had a lot of feedback about the complexity of some features, particularly on the publisher side. I expected customers to push a bit to learn and it was not always the case, even on the B2B side.
The key learning here is that simple is not always clear.
❌ Churn started to appear as we did not focus enough on the information part. We sold subscriptions but people started to wonder why. Customers are not robots, and they need to learn some of the things you learn along the way. We know being published is hard and takes time, WHY is the thing people need to learn.
In summary
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Talk to your customers, or soon to be customers. Make them try your product and ask what they dislike. It can be tough to hear, but it's the best way to improve.
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Always check what people say with data analysis. Some information people gave us was correct, but the reason for the behaviour was not. Thanks to analytics, we were able to find root cause of the problem and we fixed it.
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If you're a non-tech founders working in a niche, use your expertise in that niche as an asset. You have an history and knowledge a lot of people would be happy to get/buy.
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Don't be afraid to fail. We made mistake and we had some churn. It happens. The key part is learning from it and
If you have any question, let me know, I'd be happy to answer 😊
