$500,000 MRR, VEED's last milestone as an open startup.
A few years ago, I was working as a contractor. While working, I listened to some early Indie Hackers podcast episodes.
I remember discovering how "Scott's Cheap Flights" were making over $1M a year and how Logojoy was making $70K a month!
I was inspired and obsessed by the idea of running my own small profitable company.
Since we started VEED, we have been open about revenue and growth as we wanted to inspire others and give back to the community.
But after a lot of consideration, we have decided to no longer share this information.
I identified 4 Pros and 3 cons for being an open startup.
If you want to know why we wrote a blog post about the pros and cons of being an open startup
Any questions, just shoot!
Sabba
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Sabba, thank you for being so open about your numbers even until this point. There is no tangible benefit to you sharing so much at your size, but it helps us Indies feel inspired by what's possible.
From 0 revenue and beers at the Bricklayers to $500k MRR 🤯 it's been quite incredible to see. You and Tim are a credit to this community.
There is only one case where it makes sense to share your revenue: if it increases sales within the audience you are sharing it with.
I can't think of many situations where this is true (MLMs? 😂)
Otherwise, as you said, you are just fuelling the competition.
There's a line where sales lost because of competition you generated passes the marketing benefits you got from sharing your numbers. I think people underestimate that a lot, especially if a funded competitor is born out of that.
There's a lot of "meta" (popular world lately) reasons people share, from inspiring others, transparency, etc... well, ok, but there are ways to do that without fueling competition. Today is easiest as ever to copy a product, marketing benefits are lower since there's no surprise effect as it was 5 years ago, every other indie hacker is doing that today.
Personally I don't see any benefit anymore and that's coming from someone who built an open startups aggregator 2 years before indiehackers.com was launched.
Interesting angle! Thanks for sharing. I guess it also comes down to how you share your milestones. Your tone and language seems quite informal – which is great. Keep up the great work!
Great story, a lot of learnings. I can relate to this (apart the $500k mrr haha).
I want us to be as open as possible. Our target audience after we pivoted to streaming is actually on these channels. Though the gain VS the loss of providing many hard-learned things to competitions is challenging.
Still trying to find the line between sharing valuable experiences for others & getting awareness while not giving up the secret sauce.
It's there tho I believe it. And it's crucial in the early stage.
And inspiration through stories is strooong!
Banner Bear and frankly I will stop posting these milestones on IH too.
Agreed, very little benefits and IH community is penniless and you can't virtually sell them anything other than a free plan. Who needs a free plan? Anyone?
What percent of revenue is spent on Ads and Marketing?
Wowwww 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥