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0 to $2000 MRR in One Month - Lessons Learned
By
Anthony
May 10, 2018
0 to $2000 MRR in One Month - Lessons Learned – Hacker Noon
Hey guys!
I'm happy to share some lessons I've learned building a MVP and getting to $2000 MRR with 0 dollars budget.
Hope you guys find it helpful and interesting.
Hi Anthony,
Thanks for sharing this. I really like how you focused on doing one thing well and that is working for you.
A quick question: what did you use to implement your referral system?
We built a hacky version in an hour.
We added a property on the user profile called referralURL that is just a hash of the users email. A hash function takes any input and outputs a string of fixed length.
Then we put it on the referral URL as a querystring. So like hodlbot.io/?referralURL=<hashhere>
Then when someone hits the site using that URL, we take the referralURL off the query string and store it in localStorage as a variable.
When someone pays, we go to localStorage and fetch it. If there isnt one, we assume they weren't referred.
If there is, we add the a referredBy property on that user, and increment the referral count on the referrer by one.
That is super easy to build. The logic to not charge users and give people free months is more complicated.
In the beginning, we just went to Stripe and gave people discounts by hand since we knew how many referrals each person had.
I recommend doing that just to see if referral works. No point building something so complicated without some validation.
Awesome, thanks!
Wow, great write up Anthony!
Thank you Johnny!
I'm currently working on answers for an Indie Hackers interview as well. Happy to share what I've learned.
I have you guys to thank for inspiring me to remain driven and keep chipping away at it.
Hey congratulations!
Could you tell a bit more about the tech stack?And what hosting do you use?Costs?
Sure happy to!
Our backend is in python. We use Django for our back-end and Postgresql for our database. We use RabbitMQ for scheduling rebalancing jobs.
For our front-end, we use React. We use Redux to manage application state, and Redux Observables for async action handling.
We host everything except the website on AWS. The website is hosted on Heroku.
We pay about $350 a month for all of our hosting costs. TBH, this is definitely overkill. We're paying for much more capacity than we need to right now. But we're happy to overpay in order to mitigate against the risk of any disruption of service that may result from a large uptick in new activity.
Awesome write up Anthony, really happy to see some success come your way out of this. I remember emailing you back when you first launched with some feedback on the landing page, hope it helped in some tiny way.
Yes! If I remember correctly, we implemented that in the new version of the site.
Thanks so much for your help and early feedback. It's a large part of why I love this community.
Great work Anthony, I remember reading a statistical breakdown from a Reddit user on an index type fund he'd set up and the impressive gains that resulted from it — I wondered when someone smart would whip it into a user-friendly solution for the masses!
All the best with your continued growth, $2k MRR in a month is an incredible feat.
P.S., if you want a shitty video meme for your social media content, feel free to use this to your heart's content:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_OQ3m3NlV0&
No ragrats.
Thank you! I recall reading something about a Redditor posting the performance of his "indexing experiment" on different subreddits. Is that what you're talking about?
No worries, and yep, I'm pretty sure that's the one!