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Bootstrapped my SaaS to ~$50K revenue in less than 1 year. AMA!

Good day, good people.

I am Stefan, and for the last ~4 years, I am building Automatio which is no-code web automation and data extraction tool.

This is one of the most complex and hardest projects I was ever working on, and actually, the first SaaS that is publicly launched and making money.

Currently, Automatio has 28 early adopters (annual subscriptions) which brought over $43,000 in gross revenue from February this year till now.

Stripe EA

Around two months ago, we released monthly packages, and currently, we have ~30 monthly subscribers which bring us ~$3700 MRR.

Stripe Monthly subscribers

I completely bootstrapped Automatio and grow it organically. Over the last couple of years, on a single landing page, Automatio got ~120,000 visitors

GA

Now, I am focused on content marketing and SEO, and winning there with small growth hacks. Automatio is ranking on the first page (top results) for most of the keywords we targeted and in just a couple of weeks.

Here you can follow my weekly progress updates https://www.indiehackers.com/product/automatio-co, but feel free to ask me anything.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/shtefcs
Polywork: https://stefan.smiljkovic.com/

  1. 5

    Hi Stefan, I'm happy for your well deserved success!
    I'm wandering what are the SEO actions you are taking? What's your process?

    1. 2

      Hi Alex, thanks for asking.

      The first thing is creating a solid piece of content of course. The second thing is distributing that content as much as you can. If you have a good strategy there and places to share your content, then most likely you will win as long you are realistically targeting the topics or keywords which align with your domain authority.

      Yes, we launched monthly packages 2 months ago, but our domain authority is gathering for the last 4 years. Additionally, I have my other projects like Vanila.io, Wireflow.co, Moon.ly, and others where I am pushing Automatio.

  2. 4

    Congrats Stefan! I have no doubts this will soon grow to $50,000 MRR, looking forward to that post.

    1. 3

      Anthony, thank you! I have no doubts as well. After I reach a certain milestone of 63 monthly subscribers and extend a team to tackle current issues and build necessary features, nothing will stop us to grow. And one day we will reach exactly the same numbers you mentioned.

  3. 3

    looks good. The only thing putting me off from registering is there's no pricing page I can see easily before registering

    1. 1

      I believe you. Thanks for the feedback, will be updated!

  4. 3

    Well done 👏 Congrats on your success so far!

    A couple of questions...

    28 early adopters (annual subscriptions)
    ~30 monthly subscribers

    How did you get those early customers over the last 4 years?

    1. 3

      Thanks Chris!

      How did you get those early customers over the last 4 years?

      Actually, those early adopters are acquired in the period from February this year till now.

      Well, at the beginning while we were developing Automatio and still didn't launch, I was doing some Facebook Groups growth hacks and acquired a good amount of subscribers, the people who expressed the interest in Automatio.

      Then over time, Betalist came which bring a good amount of traffic and exposure because we were featured on the front page for a couple of days. And here and there I was active in different communities and sometimes shared my project.

      So Automatio already has a ~4.5k email list of subscribers, so when we launched the EA program, Automatio instantly got ~5 people paying is $2k/y.

      Then I created a bit complex funnel with a lot of forms, approvals, emails, which lead people to schedule calls with me. During those calls, I demonstrated the product, and actually, most of those people who are early adopters are the ones I had called with.

      Also as you can see this spike came from being featured on the HN front page. Some of our subscribers shared us there, and that honestly didn't bring many EA users. Most of those people were annoyed that they couldn't try Automatio or even pay for a monthly package. To be honest, paying $2k/y in advance for something you can't even try is not an easy move, I knew that. But we needed to do it this way.

      hm spike

      Some people just liked my story, and I felt they wanted to support the project so it become a success.

      1. 3

        Very nice @kinder, so it sounds like you spent a few years on product development and building up an audience / email list. A percentage of them turned into early adopters who were then willing to pay a larger upfront yearly subscription that further helped fund your efforts. Is that about right?

  5. 2

    if someone wants to start with micro saas product then how should one decide about pricing? Lets say if I want to sell micro saas product (assume costs $10 per month) and there are already many competitors in market selling similar product with around 2-3x number of features (assuming it costs $15-20 per month) then why would someone be interested in micro saas product with few features. Someone can easily put 5-10$ extra and get product more features. Can someone please let me know what can be done in such situation? Has someone came across similar situation before? Thanks in advance 🙂

  6. 2

    Congrats Stefan.
    How did you start? Did you create this to solve your own problem? Did you do any idea validation ?

  7. 2

    It's awesome to see all that growth coming from organic 👌

  8. 2

    Congrats Stefan ! 👏

  9. 2

    I'm wondering what the reasoning is for not showing the pricing on the website? I get why you would do it for a more enterprise tool with actual negotation process, but I guess in this case the pricing is fixed anyway? Wouldn't it save you time to talk to people who end up not wanting to pay the fee?

    1. 2

      Hey Sven, thanks for asking this. A lot of people asked me the same. The reason is very simple. The landing page is more than 1.5 years old, and we are working on a new version that will have the pricing.

      That is the only reason. Hope it has the sense to you.

      1. 2

        Totally makes sense. I'm sure it will benefit your go-to-market strategy once you nailed your pricing page. ;-)

  10. 2

    Tech Stack and technical issues that you ran into?

    1. 3

      Nodejs, Typescript, React, Graphql, Prisma, RabbitMQ, PostgreSQL, Redis, etc.

      Web automation is fragile itself, especially when you wanna create a visual or "no-code" tool. So a lot of issues were and are still there to solve. For example, some websites are tricky either they wanna protect themselves from bots or it's just developer/designer decisions. So it causes Automatio troubles, especially for people who are not understanding tech.

      Deployment, auto-scaling, Kubernetes, etc, all this was problematic. I am not competent to talk a lot about tech issues, we had them plenty but honestly can't wrap my mind on it right now.

  11. 2

    How did you pick your idea initially?

    1. 2

      It started per need. I was always in need of another bot that will save me from boring repetitive work.

      So by understanding the technology and knowing what can be done (I don't know to write code), I knew that by connecting the dots I could get what I always wanted. Visual bot builder.

      And that is how it started. It was initially built as an internal tool for myself, so I don't need to hire another developer to build another scraper or bot for another website.

  12. 2

    Congrats on the very nice traction!

    1). As a non-technical person, can you please explain it to me like a 5 year old what your company does/who the target customer is?

    2). Which marketing channels have given you the best results?

    1. 2

      Jeff, thanks for the question mate.

      1). As a non-technical person, can you please explain it to me like a 5-year-old what your company does/who the target customer is?

      Not sure if the 5yo can understand the needs of such things :D, but will try to use simple words.

      With Automatio you could build a bot (robot) for "any" website, visually and just by clicking. No need for technical knowledge or to hire a developer.

      The targeted customers are anyone who wanna automate their repetitive, manual work. For data collection (scraping), clicking buttons, filling forms, etc. Literary any industry or company can use Automatio to simplify their workflow, save money and time.

      Which marketing channels have given you the best results?

      I just got started with real growth. By building in public and being part of different communities gave me really nice opportunities, exposure, traffic, and backlinks.

      Currently focused on doing content marketing and SEO. We are growing nicely there, so I can say that most of the traffic is coming from communities and SE.

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