Got my first paying customer, 1 year and 1 month in the making!
Today is an exciting day! My B2B SaaS product, HostedMetrics.com, has received its first payment from a customer!
I had to offer a pricing plan below the current ones, but the customer explained the product was a no-brainer if the price is right, so I went ahead and gave them the price they were looking for.
--- The Product ---
If you're wondering, HostedMetrics provides custom application monitoring as a service, which means that I host various open-source metrics platforms (only InfluxDB at the moment) combined with Grafana and StatsD . This means I give customers a very easy way to generate custom data points from their code, send the data to HostedMetrics, store it for them, give them a way to easily create dashboards, and lastly set up alerts to notify them when their systems are not working properly.
--- The Domain Name ---
I started in August last year by buying the domain, which I bought from a person whose business is domain flipping. I was able to buy it for 20-25% of the original asking price by simply being willing to walk away and telling the person no thanks on their original offer. They made some good money on it and I bought a domain name I absolutely loved for an affordable price but one which made me mentally commit to the project at hand. A successful negotiation is one where both sides walk away happy!
After the domain acquisition, I started building the product.
--- Working After Hurricane Maria ---
I live in Puerto Rico, and hurricane Maria hit the month after that. I spent a couple of months figuring Airbnbs one week at a time, chasing after small areas and individual condo buildings that had electricity in the central neighborhoods of San Juan. Having the basics of life be difficult turned out to be quite productive. As soon as I had electricity, I had absolutely nothing to do but work on building product. A lot of that was accomplished sitting with my laptop in a beach chair, covered in mosquito spray, in front of the lobby of buildings that had electric generators!
--- The First Nibbles (but No Conversions) ---
I ran a brief AdWords campaign back in November when I had my landing pages in place, and that gave me a much-needed confidence boost. I had brief inquiries from two potential corporate customers, but it went nowhere. In June, I've had a major company reach out and sound serious about using my product, only to end up with them deciding to host it in-house instead of going the SaaS route. I've had page views from Facebook's offices. I've had someone from Apple sign up and never get onboard. I ran another round of ads around April and realized that I'm not at the financial point for that kind of play where clicks can cost as much as $15 each. Try to bid a bit more than the major players and next day they have software that notices and allows them to blow you out of the water with their updated bids. I've literally seen a bid of $2, raised to $2.50, and two days later, the competition was at $10!
--- Past Efforts in Entrepreneurship ---
It's not my first foray into entrepreneurship, but it's the first one that gives me confidence. Unlike my previous efforts, this is slow and steady, building something reliable. With this venture, I understand the technology, I understand the customer persona (having been one myself), I understand B2B, and I understand SaaS. In the past, I have made about $50,000 over the span of a few years about 10 years ago with several Android apps back when Android was brand new. I've made a trickle of advertising revenue over the years on various items. I made about $5,000 a few years ago from sponsorships around a cryptocurrency charting website I put together with a cofounder. My mind was in the right place with that product, but seeing the market today, I realize I was a few years early with those ideas. People are monetizing crypto charting and data quite nicely at this point.
If you have any questions about my journey so far, ask away in the comments! And wish me luck going forward!
Love this. We don't often hear about the grind and commitment it takes to get that first paying customer, but I'm glad you stayed focused and kept hustling. That story about being in Puerto Rico during the hurricane, and having to hustle to find places to eat while building your product would make for a great blog post, and could potentially get you some good leads (even if you're B2B). Now that you've got your first customer? What's your plan to get the next 10?
Thanks! And thank you for that idea about posting.
For my next 10 customers, I am focused on content marketing by participating more in various locations where potential customers hang out (including here!).
I've also started reaching out to companies that fit several criteria as I find them by browsing the web:
some sort of unreliable systems (pulling data from third-parties, web scraping, affiliate marketing, cryptocurrency)
relatively new product so that they're in that sweet spot in their lifecycle where they need to improve their systems and make them more reliable
has revenue (if possible to figure out)
I was thinking of integrating on Heroku, but turns out that it is unrealistic this early on. Instead, I've integrated with a new startup with a similar setup. Working on figuring out where else I can integrate in a way that makes sense for the product: Github, Slack, Stripe, etc.
Lastly, writing about the milestones in this post, I realize I need to reach out again to the people who were nibbling from the past months.
Amazing, thanks for sharing! You seem to have a great positive attitude and the ability to keep marching on. How did you come to that stage? Are there things you do on a periodic basis that help you manage the hard times?
Also curious about your acquisition strategy -- why did you decide to go with Adwords? Do you have other strategies in play? What has worked for you / what have you learned?
I went with AdWords because this is the kind of product where people google for a solution and are ready to onboard once they find a match.
The vision is to offer multiple metrics platforms (InfluxDB, Graphite, Akumuli, etc.) but for now I'm only offering InfluxDB because it's popular. One of the main keywords that drives search traffic is
hosted InfluxDB. It doesn't get more direct than that! They know what they want and simply need a name.I'd love to say that I meditate, but no! Everybody talks about how great it is, but while I've tried it a few times and totally get it, I haven't been able to make a habit of it.
The main driver is that I'm directly competing in a space where the concept works. While there's direct competition with the concept, the implementation is unique for each company in the space so I can carve out my own corner. So, I'm dead-certain that this will work and it's just a matter of putting in the effort.
My mentality is an accumulation of reading philosophy, sociology, how the mind works, etc over the years. I love that stuff! My girlfriend recently got me into reading the Greek/Roman stoics, and that's really had a very fast and very profound impact with minimal reading. It's been the missing link that nicely ties together a lot of things I've read so far.
Other important things I do is eat clean and work out. After 15 years of trying, I finally understand that there's an easy way to do that that is sustainable.
Lastly, listening to MicroConf videos (they're on Vimeo) is super motivational. Instead of offering you founder stories, they focus on a subject that you can take lessons from and apply to your own company.
Ahh I have made many a linkedin posts looking for something like the MicroConf you mention. I'm adding it into my list to check out!
"After 15 years of trying, I finally understand that there's an easy way to do that that is sustainable" -- what's your strategy? I find it eats up a lot of my time each day, haven't found the right balance yet.
I won't deny it, a lot of my success in this area comes from working from home.
My approach is basically to tackle the subject with an analytical and logical mindset. By the way, best quote I've ever heard: "You can't outrun a bad diet."
For both food and exercise, you can look at costs and benefits to find the easiest things that give you the biggest gains:
Food - Keep it clean. It's quite easy. Aim towards caveman.
remove red meat and dairy except for special occasions (hello birthday!),
minimize bread, grains, and similar items,
remove processed food,
remove liquid calories,
focus on mostly fish and a bit of chicken and turkey,
eat your veggies, nuts, and fruits.
Costco is your friend when it comes to all this! Also, ponder food in a 3D space: 1) calories, 2) nutrition, 3) amount of time for which hunger is put off. Consider a McDonald's burger: high calories, low nutrition, you'll be hungry again soon.
A big win for me has been to reduce meals to a single item. Lunch? It can be as simple as one or two pieces of salmon. Baked. Oven is always set on 375F and I just have to turn the dial to 12 minutes for fish or 25-30 for chicken. I love the taste. Nothing needed on the side. Dinner? Make a salad or steamed veggies in order to give the stomach something easier to digest while I sleep. I listen to a podcast while in the kitchen in order to justify the time spent there.
For exercise, compound weight exercises and interval training are key and everyone recommends them over the rest. Pushups, crunches, squats, dips, pullups, etc. Pushups and crunches are my bread and butter. I have a permanent yoga mat in the center of my living room. There's one 25lb weight next to the wall near my desk. In terms of interval training, I'm lucky enough to be able to play tennis a few times a week, 2 or 3 hours each time, right next door to home.
For me, the main element to making weight training sustainable was realizing that I don't have to do it until it hurts like crazy, and I don't have to do it all at once. I do a decent amount of reps, but not enough to feel sore the next day. I spread it out over the day. Feeling bored? 20 pushups. Feeling tired? 30 crunches. Etc. At random times.
In the past, I've been through various approaches that were unsustainable yet showed me what's at the farther end of the spectrum.
For food, I went vegan a few years ago and it lasted for one year. I felt amazing and it was a great experience. But! It's a pain in the behind! Can't do it if you want a social life. It takes a lot of planning and doing. It's not sustainable.
For exercise, I've tried waking up earlier (5:30 am) and going to the gym before work back when I had an office job. Yeah, that didn't last. I've never been a fan of the gym either. Winter time? No way I'm going to the gym, which is only three blocks away! Not sustainable. A good one in terms of exploring limits was that I put my mind to the 100 pushups challenge (https://hundredpushups.com). I took three times as long. I didn't get to 100. But, I did get to 88 eventually! Guess what? Not sustainable! Yet, it showed me that even I could be a meathead if I truly wanted to :)
I like the focus on sustainability and keeping it simple, makes a lot of sense. I fail to keep it simple and that might be generating the strain. Thank you for taking the time to write this out!
Awesome story and good luck expanding to more customers.
I wanted to see if you're up for a quick chat regarding the technical side of the product. I'm running a service in a very similar niche, doing a very similar thing and would love to ask a couple questions but also give a couple comments.
Hit me up on my profile so we can chat.
Good to see you have the sense to negotiate on an individual basis! We sometimes forget, especially with high value B2B that it is sometimes better to have a little less but have something rather than hold out for a higher price and get nothing.
Well done on the acquisition!
I'd say that's one slippery slope right there. Being in 2B2 ourselves, when we started out we did the same; giving in to customers requesting lower prices, discounts, etc. However, we quickly learned that this is a bad idea; it creates tons of additional overhead and eventually word gets around. Before you know it, everyone is hassling for discounts, installment plans and custom plans. We stopped doing this almost completely (except for customers with a high LTV of over $5,000).
Really nice story! It gives some motivation for sure. Congrats and good luck!
I thought it needs to be shared to balance out all the "How I made $3000 in MRR in 10 days" posts :)
That's very good IMHO. The community can learn more from the struggles than the "easy" successes, it's much more realistic.
Huge congratulations @hostedmetrics. Good luck and hope to see your post on acquiring 10 paying customer and 100 paying customers :)
Many congratulations!
Hi Heliodor, your comment caught my eye earlier in the day @blunicorn post. Congrats on your tenacity and first paying customer! Wrt to keywords bids - did you see the reversion back to $2.00 after the end of your ad campaign? If it is of any help, @JunaidBhai actually dropped a nice list of places to list/ promote your startup a while back: https://github.com/mrcrilly/PlacesToPostYourStartup/blob/master/README.md
I haven't checked on the bids. I wouldn't be able to find it as I worked with a rather long list of keywords.
Thanks for the list. I've seen it in the past and posted to about ten directories. There are other types of angles on there, such as getting written up on LifeHacker or getting a journalist to mention you, but I stuck to simple directories for now and someone's comment that I saw a while ago rings in line with my page view analytics so far: AlternativeTo.net is the only one that generates meaningful traffic.
Thank you for the detailed reply and particularly your experience with the directory!
Congrats on getting the first paying customer.
I really loved your story of fighting through obstacles that would cause most people to give up. I can almost visualize you covered in mosquito spray, sitting on a beach chair, hacking away ;)
Now I wish I would have taken a picture of it! Found this one though: the setup when I was lucky enough to work from inside the Airbnb http://i.imgur.com/ItXELqU.jpg