2020 in review: $0 to $100K+ MRR for our Cleaning SaaS/Ecommerce 🎉

Hey IndieHackers,

Even though I've been actively commenting (and browsing wayyy too much) on IndieHackers for the last year, I haven't been posting much about my startup, Onedesk.

I've been inspired by all of the other end-of-year retrospectives, and I thought to tell our story and hopefully provide some guidance to fellow IndieHackers here.

I launched Onedesk with my business partner Roman in March of 2020. Our mission to was make the process of booking commercial cleaning services simple.

Roman has a ton of domain expertise in the commercial cleaning industry over his 10+ years running a company, and I brought my tech/marketing skills to the table to make our mission a reality.

We built a mobile app to help office managers perform "self-walkthroughs" instead of needing to schedule time-consuming in person physical walkthroughs of their space. We also built a web application for office managers to message their cleaners, pay their invoices, and schedule additional services.

Commercial Cleaning is a massive, $100B+ industry. Every office building, retail store, restaurant, mall, and any other kind of commercial space needs cleaning every single day.

It's also recurring, which makes it especially attractive.

Sounds good so far right?

Well, do you remember that part where I said we launched it in March of 2020? You know, that month where the entire world shut down, along with every single commercial space?

Yeah. After many months of development, strategizing, setting up our marketing pages and ad campaigns, we launched an office cleaning service right at the peak of COVID hysteria.

Needless to say, we weren't able to onboard very many customers in our first month. With offices and other commercial spaces shuttered either voluntarily or by government order, no one needed office cleaning services.

Guess how many customers we acquired with this ad spend? If you guessed 0, you're a winner!

As we began to realize the mess we were in, denial kicked in. We started fantasizing that the pandemic, while enormously damaging to overall well-being in our communities and an overall tragedy, may end up being a good thing for our business.

After the "3 weeks of lockdown" were over, businesses would want more cleaning services than ever! Stores would re-open, people would go back to work, and the world would generally go back to normal, just with more cleaning. Right? Right?! RIGHT?!?!!?!?!?!?!?

Wrong.

The great thing about running your own company is that it forces you to take responsibility for your successes and failures. It wasn't our fault that a raging pandemic had erupted and knocked out the entirety of our market, but if we wanted to make the business a success, we would need to adapt and make it work in our favor.

And with some luck, that's exactly what happened.

We realized that just because google ads hadn't provided an ROI, it didn't mean that there were absolutely no customers to be found. Grocery stores were still open, daycares were still open, warehouses were still open, clinics were still open. We just needed to figure out a way to get in front of remaining customers in our market.

The solution to finding those customers ended up being SEO.

We started proactively reaching out to reporters, telling our story, and offering to help them educate their audience about measures they could take disinfect their spaces and reduce their likelihood of exposure to the virus.

It worked.

https://robinpowered.com/blog/office-cleaning-covid-19-expert-qa
https://www.carolroth.com/blog/small-business-covid-19/
https://www.rd.com/list/reopened-places-that-may-never-be-clean-enough/

The pandemic had crushed the majority of our market, but it had also spurred a ton of interest around disinfection and sanitization. News agencies were clamoring for quotes and insight from disinfection experts, and we had that in supply.

Getting quoted by authoritative outlets like Reader's Digest was the boost our site needed to start ranking. And boy, did we start ranking.

The rest is history. We've leaned in where we've succeeded, and have made SEO our primary channel for customer acquisition. This has resulted in an explosion of interactions with our customers, and deep learning about their disinfection needs during the outbreak.

A popular disinfection method that we started offering is electrostatic cleaning. This approach enables a "coating" of chemical disinfectant by charging the solution with a charge.

We started producing educational content including a youtube video and best electrostatic sprayer review.

Creating educational content was the single most impactful upgrade for our business. And pairing the traffic we generated with an ecommerce shop enabled us to capture some of the value we were creating. We went vertical.

Since then, we've been holding on and trying to ride the wave of growth.

The biggest lesson for me this year was that distribution is everything. If you don't have distribution, you're dead. Arvid Kahl, a popular IndieHacker, has some great tips about audience-first company building in Zero to Sold.

To succeed: (1) find distribution (2) work backwards to offer a product or service that fits inside of your distribution channel.