$5,500 MRR and still STRUGGLING. Anyone else feel the pain?

I tanked an independently run $30,000/month revenue application so I will share with you my anecdotal experience. Honestly, I think you are doing great to hit that MRR, it's not life changing money but you have the foundation to build something great.

What really resonated with me was that your mental health is declining. Building a business is incredibly difficult. You have to be FAIR to yourself and always remember that MOST people aren't even capable of making it far as you have.

I burned out so hard on my last application it took me 6 years to get back onto the proverbial horse. I was not as resilient as I should have been. Mostly because I tied my self-worth to the company's success which is something you absolutely cannot do.

Get outside and take a walk, its free and honestly one of the most therapeutic things you can do. Avoid substance abuse entirely if that is a problem. Be humble and always remember it could be always be significantly worse. The greatest entrepreneurs and businessmen in the world all experience the exact feeling you have now. Along with success, misery is part of the process. Accept it and it will become a lot easier to handle.

👋 Fellow founder in the messy middle here as well.

I am currently just over $3,000 MRR, 3 years in with hundreds of paying customers (a low-priced B2C app BudgetSheet).

Instead of focusing on that as a "low number", instead look back at your growth. My growth is slow (no "hockey stick" inflection yet) but steady. My revenue more than doubles every year. As long as you are still growing, keep going! You'll get there! :)

Hello!
I've encountered the same problem before. I had a service for monitoring advertising campaigns on Facebook and Instagram. We got stuck at $13k MRR ($3-5k profit).
I can say that our mistake was having prices that were too cheap, which didn't allow us to create a sales department. To convey the value to customers, we needed someone who could explain and showcase the use cases of our product. I didn't want to raise the prices because some users would have left, and it would have taken a long time to recover from that. At that point, I was already tired of the project, so I ended up selling it and started working on a different business.

If I can give advice, I would suggest focusing on Segment A of the audience (those who use the most expensive plan, don't complain, and don't ask for new features). Then, I would manually approach similar companies and sell them (later delegating it to a sales department).

all I would say is IH needs 10x more content like this than ppl congratulating themselves on MRR. This is the real stuff.

I've been thinking about this for the past day - it really struck me. Happyfeed is in a similar place (~$2k MRR) and has felt sort of stuck for a while now. I think there might be a reason we get trapped in this phase: enough to feel like we're onto something but not enough to call it a success.

I my case, I think the $2k MRR feels like a "win" and there's a (very false) assumption that it'll continue to grow on its own. I've gotten lax about reaching out to press, posting around the internet, and shilling gratitude journaling to everyone I meet. The business didn't get this far without a ton of work and it'll probably take even more to get to the next phase.

Lastly, I would echo what others are saying - please don't overleverage your personal situation. Crawling out of credit card debt can be a multi-year struggle and way too much stress. Maybe try to turn it into a side project and find a gig where you can build up a financial cushion?

Good luck and I hope things improve soon!

I read the screenshot and it doesn't seems right to me to take so much risk on you. If at all possible, think about taking an investment. The investment should at the very least finance your next marketing effort and relieve some of the pressure from you.

The problem I can see right away is that, as opposed to convertKit, this might not a must have in the general sense. There are alternatives. It will be difficult to get that investment for sure. If you want an investment it will probably require building on top of what you have to get to a larger velocity. E.g. convertKit doubled down on a specific market segment which there are no good alternatives.

I have no answers, only questions.
Personally, I am freelancing for 3 days a week to get income and 2 days to sustain the business.

Why are you struggling? Are your monthly expenses more than $5500?

I'm stuck on 40$ MRR :(

Hi Oliver, Cudos for being so honest and sharing your stuggle with the rest of us. In a world where everyone is pretending to be successful (fake it till you make it) and 'building in public' is usually just a marketing attempt, your email feels genuinely authentic.

Hey Oliver,
I've been there a few times in the past. Increasing Sales and MRR are the only way out of this. Focus on it.

Here's how I would go If I were in your shoes.

One - you need is someone external and not connected with your business to talk and discuss things. Talking things out clears a lot of your mind and gives you clarity.

Two - focus on the basics. You need to get to a healthy MRR with a razor sharp focus on the core functionalities that help your customers - Collecting and making use of testimonials. Anything which is nice to have but not core - PARK IT. Share a similar email (like the one above) to your customers saying the same and that all promised features are parked for 6 months to a year. I doubt customers would leave you for that. If they do, it's okay. They were not meant to be your ideal customers.

Three - If you are growing and are expected to reach a sustainable MRR within 6 months, create a simple balancing plan for your debt and living expenses and stick to it. Don't go back to thinking about it.

Four - Focus on sales/marketing. Ask all your existing customers for referrals. If you do it in the same email, you will get loads of love and referrals which can both take you a long long way.

Hope it works out. Feel free to DM.

Cheers,
Prakash

"You can only connect the dots looking backward."

• Steve Jobs

I'm exactly where you are, it's a challenge to create a profitable business. I guess it depends on how competitive and resilient you are. I've gone broke plenty of times investing time and money in ideas that never panned out, but did I learn my lesson?

The lesson I've learned is that there will always be risk involved, and once you're ok with that - all you can do is learn from your losses and take them as gained experience and wisdom - which wouldn't have been obtained otherwise.

That old saying "everything happens for a reason" becomes more and more true the older I get, especially the more I FAIL!

I appreciate your openness about the challenges you're facing. It may help if you cut down on non-critical tasks and work only on high-impact tasks to reduce workload. Once you get your mental health/space back, it's going to be infinitely better to figure out the rest of the future path.

So sorry to hear you struggling. When building a service everybody forgets about their opportunity cost. The money that you could have earned if you were building something else. Therefore you need to think twice about what you're building. A good bar for me is a subscription based service which is priced so that even one customer will cover all your expenses and gives you a decent profit. For me personally that starts around $3000 / month. Anyone else building a $$$ subscription based service?

+1 for the flip flopping fatigue, congrats nonetheless and keep it going!

It takes a lot of courage to share this, thanks @olly!

TBH you sound burned out. I'd suggest taking a few days totally off from the business to recharge.

Good luck!

I think you are blessed to have a product that does 5.5k in MRR, as long as monthly churn is less than 3 %, you dont have to worry :). I would add only limited AI related features, considering you are a testimonial tool. I would even get rid of the AI features, if they are not being used.

The next step would be either to take on investment, or to paradoxically let the boat run as it is, have 1 person try to crack marketing channels, and have 1 person work on the feature set and development. I would not really raise prices more than the competition, although you can definitely price match them.

Stuck in the middle

I really felt this post. It's a real grind building a business. I've been building a design agency for the past 2.5 years and we're around the same MRR mark. Lots of founders I spoke with mentioned that they caught their break around the 3 year mark. Praying for all of us to succeed. Thanks for sharing!

Hi Oliver! I'm on a similar situation as you.

I've grown Easy App Reports to 5k MRR, and we've been stuck for ±3 months on that threshold now.

I'm taking quite a few initiatives now, but I can't prescribe anything to you because the solution depends. I'm a Growth consultant, though, and I've solved this plenty of times for my clients, so I feel like I might be able to help anyway.

Here's what you need to think: you have two main levers to unlock growth: you either acquire more customers faster than you churn them or stop the bleeding by reducing churn.

In an ideal scenario, you'd fix both.

So you need to do there to reverse-engineer your problems to identify the bottlenecks. I recommend putting your funnel from awareness to retention on paper and then adding numbers so you know exactly what's wrong (and by how much). Then you can play with the numbers and see what should be your target for driving traffic and/or improving conversion rates and churn rates. That's the quantity part.

Then interview your customers to understand why they're buying and canceling. That's the qualitative part/

From there, you'll have a good map of how things are and where you can improve.

In the case of acquisition, it might simply be the case to scale current channels or explore new ones.

That's all just a starting point, of course. But there's enough work for a few weeks here already.

I hope that was useful! And good luck! Your tool looks really good. I might actually try it myself.

Hey Oliver, this could have been written by me. I feel the same pain. I am struggling in the same fight. Development expenses are blowing up because of producing more bugs than features, and it´s all blowing in my face right now. We started with Lifetime deals which we knew going in that it´s not a sustainable thing, and we soon realized this was cannibalizing any efforts to switch to subscriptions.

So we are still starting from ZERO every month over and over again, and my health went out the window. It totally fell back into my marriage, and we nearly filed for divorce due to this rotten situation. I am still desperately trying every marketing trick in the hat, but at this point, I am honestly only trying to ramp up more traffic and easy sales to be able to sell the tool off for the max price asap.

Thank you for being so open and honest! Most of us think that once you're past your first couple of customers, it's all peachy.

What I would do is step away for a month or two and get back to roasting or whatever gives you a steady income. Then start moving your efforts from roasting to Senja until you find that balance. Nobody pushes you to reach your KPIs by the end of the year, you can grow slowly and have fun, too!

Another option is to take money from a bootstrap-friendly fund like TinySeed.

First of all, I want you to know that it's completely normal to hit roadblocks along the way. Building a successful business takes time, effort, and perseverance. Remember, Rome wasn't built in a day!

Instead of getting discouraged, let's try to shift our focus to finding areas where we can make improvements. Take a step back and analyze your current strategies. Are there any untapped market segments or new marketing channels you could explore? Are there any customer pain points that you could address more effectively?

I think that the messy middle is a common phase that many entrepreneurs find themselves in. It's the point where you've made progress and achieved a certain level of success, like your $6,000 MRR, but you still face hurdles and uncertainties.

You're not alone in this. Many fellow entrepreneurs can relate to the struggles and compromises that come with growing a business.

Only one advice: you've already achieved a significant milestone, and your perseverance will lead you to even greater success :)
best of luck,