6
2 Comments

5 steps to $1k MRR

💥 BOOM bootstrapped to $1k MRR with bCast... how?

1. Get the niche right

We know there are a LOAD of podcast hosting platforms. We know it's a growing niche.

So how do we take a slice of the growing market?

We "take a slice" by focussing all product and marketing efforts on a specific persona.

In this case: high growth businesses.

E.g. the best type of podcast hosting customers 😉

Not the "hobbyists", not the "creators", the businesses that want to use a podcast to grow... and are more likely to make an ROI on the show, and therefore keep paying us.

So everything we do is focussed on our persona... the easiest way to do this is with the headline on your site.

Ours is: "Podcast Hosting For High Growth Businesses".

It really is as simple as that!

2. Content/Social/SEO Flywheel

From day one, you are pushing your Content/Social/SEO Flywheel... the real question is... how fast?

As the faster you push this, the faster you get to a point where it starts to snowball.

No I don't think we are there yet, but we have been pushing hard.

Our organic clicks have gone from 2-3 per day to 300 per day in 12 months. We create SEO optimised content, host it on the blog, share on social channels, promote in other places and then REPEAT.

I'm going to have to create a full paid course on this concept one day 😉

3. Understanding acquisition channels

bCast costs between $15 and $75 per month.

This means we can't:

👉 Have sales people
👉 Run paid traffic
👉 Advertise on podcasts

We have to invest in acquisition channels that will bring us customers for less than $100... and neither of those will 😉

We focus on just three channels and expect to keep doing so for many months:

👉 User Led Growth
👉 Content/Social/SEO Flywheel (see #2 above)
👉 Affiliates (We have the most generous affiliate program in podcasting)

This is super important... acquisition channels take months to build up, make sure you start building up the channels that will work for your price point from day one.

4. Speaking to every new free trial

Each new free trial gets this email that I send MANUALLY:

"Hey [[firstname]],
Welcome to bCast... you have my personal email here if you need anything!
I’m also happy to jump on a. 1-1 onboarding/podcast strategy call if that would be of value: [[Calendly link]]
Thanks
Tom"

(Feel free to steal!)

First off, this shows the customer that we CARE. Second it means that I can be first line support if they have any issues.

And the best part?

I get to learn about them, why they chose us and what they are looking to achieve when we jump on a call. This helps massively with our product roadmap 🙂

5. Relentless focus on speed

We know that we are on a timeline...

We know we need to build stuff that other podcast hosts either can't or won't build and FAST.

So we eradicate everything from our internal processes that will get in the way of us doing this fast. For example... we very rarely have internal meetings, we automate as much of customer support as we can and ensure internal processes are documented to reduce Slack comms.

Everything is focussed on how can we make the product better for our specific persona as fast as humanly possible.

I hope these five help if you're on the journey to $1k MRR or beyond, hit me up with any questions below! 🚀

  1. 2

    Thanks for sharing! I wonder if you are discarding paid ads too quickçy. I assume you are aware it’s not monthly bill to each user to cost of acquisition but LTV to CAC...

    1. 1

      No worries... can you please clarify your point... don't quite understand :)

Trending on Indie Hackers
I talked to 8 SaaS founders, these are the most common SaaS tools they use 20 comments What are your cold outreach conversion rates? Top 3 Metrics And Benchmarks To Track 19 comments How I Sourced 60% of Customers From Linkedin, Organically 12 comments Hero Section Copywriting Framework that Converts 3x 12 comments Promptzone - first-of-its-kind social media platform dedicated to all things AI. 8 comments How to create a rating system with Tailwind CSS and Alpinejs 7 comments