0 to $2k MRR - Hacking Growth

Hey guys, we're a Waterloo-based start-up that launched on Product Hunt today.
We're currently the #2 product of the day.

In the last year, we've bootstrapped to 10,000+ users and $100M in transaction volume. I've learned a lot from working on HodlBot in the last year. I want to share some of these things here.

Growth:

• Find early-adopters in niche communities. (It’s hard to get the front page of Reddit. But it’s easy to get to the front page of a niche subreddit. One requires thousands of upvotes, the other just ten.) Niche communities have an extremely high reward to effort ratio.
• Creating high-quality content worth sharing. We did our own original data analysis that got featured on Bloomberg, Forbes, Investopedia, ZeroHedge, etc.
• If you need your users to do something for you. (e.g. participate in Product Hunt), engage them early.

Product:

• Reduce your scope and just make one good thing for your MVP.
• Build a community and keep them engaged. With respect to user feedback, sometimes users will reach a self-consensus on priorities for features and make your life easier.
• Avoid pre-mature optimization and analysis paralysis. Try getting different traffic sources if your conversion rates suck at the beginning. Don’t let the conversion optimization rabbit-hole suck you in too early.
  -Good customer service can make up for your MVP flaws. We have a FB widget plug-in when we first started and were able to mitigate problems with immediate customer support.

Team:
-Abide by one North Star metric even if it isn’t perfect. Remind yourself of that metric every day. At HodlBot, we get a Slack notification every time a new user subscribes.
-Value async teamwork & self-sufficiency. Teamwork is good but too much teamwork and inter-dependency can slow down teams.

Link to PH:
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/hodlbot-3

Link to learnings blog:
https://www.hodlbot.io/blog/zero-to-two-thousand-mrr-in-one-month