$26k/MRR the first month of beta testing and finally launching in 2 weeks
Greetings fellow founders.
I just discovered your incredible community and have decided to join and share what I have learned over the past 18 months of launching my company.
I'm Co-Founder and CEO/CTO (all the Os, so really, it doesn't mean anything). I'm also the technical founder. I do a lot of stuff (one of the lessons learned!)
After 12 months of beta testing (3 pivots, firing 6 people, and removing 2 partners) we're ready to ship our first public product on January 31!
Excited to start sharing our story and learn from everyone else here. This is just the money-making project as I'll be pursuing several more in the coming months.
Our stats:
Started with 52 users (closed beta group)
Launched day one with $23k/MRR
Lost 40 users and pivoted 3 times to find product/market fit.
Built 3 platforms (due to the pivots)
Maintained our 12 current users (still closed beta) for 9 months.
Currently sitting at around $6k/MRR
Excited to see how those numbers change starting February 1!
*Edited for the bad maths. Was actually $26k the first two months.
$500/user is a great number. What's the product and what market you work in?
Hopefully IH's approves my product soon so you can see all the details!
We started as a mortgage coaching and training company with just 3 trainers and have evolved into a business-in-a-box model with the top 1% producers in the industry. Think Masterclass but for the professional world. What most training misses out on (except for Masterclass that nails it) is having today's best in the industry. I want to learn from the best people TODAY, not the guys that performed well 10 years ago and decided to start coaching.
The product has 3 parts:
We're in the mortgage industry now, but expanding into real estate, insurance, and title soon.
Hi Cory, welcome!
Excited to learn more about your product. How did you find your first users?
Thanks! Excited to be here!
We ran 2 free live events in Anaheim and Chicago. Most of our original users came from signing up to pre-register at these events. We basically had a real, live, in-person landing page pitch!
The rest came from doing really cheap ads on Facebook and using a Facebook messenger bot to handle the incoming requests.
Can you explain more on the FB approach (cheap ads + messenger bots) ? I heard FB ad clicks were always very expensive (> 25-50 $ per click).
Not at all! I think we paid a total of $1k for 2 months of advertising on FB.
Setup a business account and page with FB. Then you just create ads, set the total amount you want to spend (max limit), the days you want it to run for, etc.
The most important piece is choosing your target audience. Be as specific as possible while not so specific that you only hit a few hundred people. I try to keep it between 2k - 30k people. You want to select age range, demographic, location, pages they like and follow, and their careers. (This is all in FB itself, no need for any 3rd party tools).
Once you run the ads, just set up a messenger bot on your page to auto-respond to people and send them to your website/landing page. I built the bot from scratch using Botkit (bots were part of our initial product), but you can keep it simple and use something like ChatFuel or similar.
The key with the bots is directing them to your landing pages and offering a deal. It saves a lot of time having to answer everyone.
Interested to know more about how your using a Messenger Bot
So you put them through the bot and still just funnel them to a landing page? Or is the landing page you're referring to the last step of the funnel where they "buy now"?
Yes, sir. I didn't use buy now through FB as most people didn't trust it. It's still a new concept.
So by the end of the conversation, it pushes them to a custom landing page that has the pre-registration/offer setup.
Thanks, much appreciated ! One more question : How many users actually saw the FB ad , and what was the click rate ? (for it to amount to 1K $)
Here's the results from our original run. You can see that one of them failed spectacularly, but the others did very well.
https://cdn.pbrd.co/images/HXVpnEt.png
What is the product?
Hopefully it gets approved here soon!
In the meantime, check us out here (the page is live but not public yet! You get a sneak peak!)
https://www.trainwithtop.com
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