After 10 years of building side hustles, this founder built a $25M+ ARR success.

Nenad Milanović  was determined to create a viable SaaS company on his own terms. So he spent ten years building projects while paying the bills with a consulting business. Finally he had a hit. And then another. And then another.

Now, CAKE.com is a suite of products bringing in over $25M per year.

Here's Nenad on how he did it. 👇

Doing it on his own terms

I'm the founder of CAKE.com. I’ve always been interested in technology and I always wanted to break into product development. But I wanted to do it on my own terms, without external capital. So, I started a consulting company as a means of financing and developing our own products in the long run.

The goal was simple: Ensure stable cash flow from our products so that we could break off with consulting.

Our first successful product was Clockify (2017), followed by Pumble (2020), and then Plaky (2022), which are now all part of the CAKE.com Productivity Suite.

I can’t say the exact number, but now, our ARR is in the $25M-100M range. We are profitable with 96+% gross margins.

Eating his own dogfood

The products we build are all products that we use internally — that was our motivation behind building them in the first place.

Clockify is time-tracking software that lets organizations track their time across projects. Key features include timekeeping, reporting, and team and workload management.

Pumble is an all-in-one team communication and collaboration tool that allows for easy messaging between teams, file sharing, and video conferencing.

Plaky is a project and task management tool that enables seamless project planning, progress tracking, and team collaboration, all within one centralized hub.

And we’ve recently launched CAKE.com Account — a single account with which you can use all three tools.

All of these products are practical solutions that our teams need to work efficiently. We need time tracking, team communication and video conferencing, and project management. We’ve always used these types of tools and so, the main value of those ideas was the fact that they’d solve some of the problems we faced as a company.

Slow times are an opportunity

When Clockify was in the making, we didn’t have enough projects on our hands, and coincidentally, out of nowhere, we got an email saying that the time tracker we’d been using was about to go up in price. Not wanting to overpay and with lots of time on our hands, we started building our own time tracker.

It took us around three months to build and release the initial version of Clockify, and eight people worked on the project. The whole thing was funded by existing cash flow. We had no external funding.

The products that helped us structure our idea were the time trackers that already existed — we researched their features and created a feature set that catered to our needs. We knew from the start what we needed and which features annoyed us, so we knew what kind of a product we wanted to make.

The product had to cater to our own wants and needs. We were the target audience. But we also saw that we could offer for free a lot of the features that the competition locked behind a paywall.

We use Java Spring Boot and MongoDB for backend development and Angular for frontend development. That’s how we started and it hasn’t changed much.

The only thing that’s changed is the scale. That was our first big challenge — scale and deployment. Clockify became very popular very quickly. Initially, our infrastructure couldn’t keep up. We had to build a bigger server and eliminate deployment downtime. It took a couple of months to iron everything out. 

Thankfully, we learned from our experiences, so things went a lot smoother when we launched Pumble and Plaky. In that sense, we did get the chance to start over.

Transparency-based marketing

As soon as we made Clockify available for the public, we saw it soar. The app reached more than 17,000 users in just five days. In 2019, we celebrated 1,000,000 registered users.

That said, we never had significant overnight spikes. It was stable growth over time, and we never had a month where we made less than the month before.

Undercutting the competition

We offered a product that people needed at a price that no one else wanted to match. The features that the competition charged for in their lowest paid subscription, we gave away for free. That helped us attract users.

Being transparent

However, going beyond that, users liked that we were honest, had no hidden fees, and actually built a product with their needs in mind.

Leveraging his network

When we released Clockify, I also asked everyone I know to try it out. Soon enough, we made a website that could be indexed and then, once the numbers were already up, we made our first marketing hire.

Timing

The pandemic lockdowns also caused a spike in demand for the kinds of products we were making. It was pure luck that this situation contributed to our growth. If we’d been in another industry, things would’ve been completely different.

Organic growth

Essentially, we based our sales and marketing strategy on transparency. But it was only in 2021 that we actually started getting more serious about marketing our products. Before that, it was all organic. The results were mainly achieved through SEO and content marketing.

Basing our marketing strategy on transparency worked for us because it showed our customers that they can trust us. They immediately knew what they could expect from us because we were so upfront about our pricing and what our products could do. Besides that, we let the products speak for themselves, and that worked so well that we didn’t have to do any unsolicited outreach.

Content and advertising

Now, we have ventured more into different kinds of advertising and content, so people can find out about our products in various ways. All three of our products have business blogs, and we’re also very active on social media, like LinkedIn, and platforms like YouTube. We also have a whole product marketing division, as well as both Marketing and Growth teams that are making sure our products get the visibility they deserve.

Choose the right distribution method

Choosing the right distribution method is key. It needs to work for not just the product, but also for you. 

Your product can’t succeed if you don’t like how you’re distributing it. The way you sell has to match your personality. Pick a business based on your sales personality. Don’t do business that requires you to do something you can’t do properly, like knocking on random doors while trying to sell.

Also, think carefully about whether or not the product you want to build has the potential to be financially sustainable. We once made a radio signal transmission device that we knew radio stations in Serbia would need because of new regulations. It worked, but the market for it was very small and the product was perfect — it didn’t need any fixes or updates. Needless to say, it didn’t turn out to be the cash cow I hoped it would be.

Take it slow

Before Clockify, we had some major ups and downs. We mainly did consulting, but we also tried making other products on the side. But, we’d invest resources into launching a product, see it come to nothing, and go back to consulting once again. This went on for almost ten years until we made Clockify.

During that time, though, we learned that we needed to take things slow. One of the biggest obstacles we had was that we couldn't dedicate ourselves to product development full time until we had a stable cash flow and were certain our products were viable. So, we had to tread with caution.

One of the biggest lessons we learned is that you have to create a product that caters to user needs. No matter how great it might be, if no one finds your product useful — no one will use it.

One of the things that helped us is that we were catering to our own needs, so we had instant user feedback available. Of course, we included external feedback as well later on, once Clockify was released. But, getting a chance to make a product for ourselves and test it out relentlessly in real-life work helped us nail the exact features we wanted to offer our users without them breaking the bank.

That’s the approach we also used to create our two other products, Pumble and Plaky. 

What's next?

We plan to make new products and offer a complete productivity suite, but — as with everything else — we want to do this in a manner that is sustainable.

That means not rushing into things. Even if we have the money for it, we also need to find the right talent to spearhead this project, and that just hasn’t happened yet. But it will. You can expect more things from CAKE.com. 

You can follow along on our blog. Or follow me on X, Instagram, and LinkedIn. And check out Clockify, Pumble, and Plaky.