Bootstrapped my SaaS to $10,000 MRR. AMA! 👋
Hey, fellow indie hackers! 👋
Doing an Indie Hackers AMA today.
I'm Alex, the founder of online document translator (https://doctranslator.com), which I bootstrapped to currently to $10,000 MRR. This tool has amassed 100,000 users last week and we had to do the emergency infrastructure upgrade! Thanks to our language switcher powered by ConveyThis that made so many new landing pages for foreign website visitors! The traffic has went through the roof!
I'm also working on several side projects as well:
• ConveyThis – the light-weight, customizable and secure alternative to Google Translate
https://www.conveythis.com
• GGLOT – easy and inexpensive automatic transcription tool
https://gglot.com
• MDGLOT – similar to GGLOT, but aimed at medical professionals
https://mdglot.com
You can follow me on the socials as well:
https://twitter.com/alexburan
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexburan/
I'll be here all day, so ask away! :)
I heard somewhere that the Operator types build like architects — layer by layer, never rushing the foundation. This feels like that blueprint.
Hi Alex, congratulations on this great achievement. The first typical question would be regarding the acquisition channels of new users?
I assume the majority of the users are using the free tier but what is the average conversion rate to a paid plan? and how important is the freemium model for your growth strategy?
Hi, the average for a freemium industry is 2%. So we don't deviate from it that much.
The best acquisition channels are organic and paid ads so far. We don't know how to make facebook ads profitably though. Do you have any idea?
Congrats! Curious what advantage Doctranslator has over Google Translate?
Hi Alex. Congratulations.
Just a question: I see your price model is based on nr. of words translated, is it correct?
Or are you charging on a subscription model? Because MRR, to me, it's associated with "predictable" revenue, that you charge on a monthly basis.
Or maybe I didn't get your pricing right. Just curious about that.
Other question that I have is: are you using GPT3 (if you can disclose)?
Thanks!
Congratulations! very impressive. How did you establish your domain authority on google?
Congrats Alex.
Please what are your acquisition channel that generates such amounts of users
Thanks!
Paid ads and organic traffic.
Hi Alex, congrats on your success! When you said paid ads, what platforms do you find yield most results? Google ads? Others?
I would be interested as well!
Hey bro I want to ask how you came up with ideas?
Just poking around. I noticed that everyone hates machine translations and considers them inaccurate. So, I haven't changed that.
Congrats Alex!
The website mentions it started in 2011, was the 10k milestone gradually achieved over 10 years? What impact did implementing ConveyThis have as a % of total users?
Translation Cloud started in 2011. DocTranslator is a side project that started in April 2021 and its milestones are described on IH in a timeline section under my profile.
So, the 10K milestone was achieve in less than a year. From scratch. No carry over.
Hey, Alex. My congrats on 10K! That's a big deal! 💪
I'm just curious how did come up with that idea? How did you find that problem with document translation?
Thanks!
The idea was wild. People hated machine translations and didn't see any market for it. But they are cheap and fast. So I've took a leap of faith and build an MVP that would allow to translate all sorts of files. Turns out people love the price and speed more than quality, hahaha!
Really cool, Alex. Did you go trying to look for that problem on purpose, or did you just happen to notice it?
Congrats Alex.
Thank you!))
Welcome
Huge achievement, this is a dream MRR for many!
Lol, thanks! I hope we can get somewhere to 100K MRR in 2022. That would be my dream.