Bootstrapping 2 micro-saas products in 10 months and crossed 2K MRR today
Hi, I'm Jacky, the founder of APITemplate.io and CraftMyPDF.com.
Job security grew elusive for many during the corona-virus pandemic and it's life-changing for me. I was looking for a substantial way to grow my income instead of IT consulting - then I found micro-saas.
APITemplate.io is a micro-saas that we launched 10 months ago and CraftMyPDF about one month+ ago. Both of them combined have just crossed $2K MRR today. Currently, APITemplate.io has 60+ paying customers, and CraftMyPDF has around 4 paying customers.
We launched 2 of the products with limited features. Each of them took less than 3 months to build. Over time, we collected some feedback and improved the products.
The followings are the things that I've learned:
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Aim to build and ship a product within 3 months: Launching early helps me to validate the product idea. After the product launch, I spent another 3 months focusing on SEO/marketing and collecting feedback to improve the product.
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Build a B2B product: B2C is more sensitive to price. Whereas small businesses(B2B) are more willing to pay if you could build things to save their time.
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Build a product that does only one thing but has the potential to expand. Don't spread yourself too thin by building too many features, just focus on a small set of features first and charge less than your competitors. You can always adjust your pricing later.
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Don't be afraid of competition: Before building your product, make sure that there must be a few existing products in the market and no clear market leaders. It proves the market demand is there and you just need to find your niche.
I am grateful to have found the IH community where I learn to grow my skills and products from other indie hackers. Thought of sharing things I've learned during the journey so far. Good luck with your projects, ask me any questions in the comment section!
Thanks
I'm active on Twitter - imbktan
This is APItemplate.io website
This is CraftMyPDF website
Hi Jacky, congratulations on this milestone :)
Seems to me you are repackaging or repurposing craftmypdf on Apitemplate (at least partially) for different market segment.
Wanted to ask you, how do you approach marketing for each of them?
Hi @Linkology Thanks!
APITemplate.io and CraftMyPDF both offer template-based PDF generation API. Initially, I wanted to have just one product, but after some thought, I decided to have 2 different brands - I have a bigger plan for CraftMyPDF, which will offer other PDF-related services in the future.
Also, most of APITemplate.io's customers use our services for HTML to PDF generation. There are a handful of competitors out there in the market doing something similar, so it's hard for me to compete with them.
CraftMyPDF is a more polished product and I built it from the ground up(I reused some components from APITemplate). It offers a drag-and-drop editor and for no-code/low-code users and offers on-prem licenses as well. It's easier for me to differentiate CraftMyPDF from other PDF generation API.
Organic search traffic is what I'm building right now. When it comes to SEO, I try to market them differently. There are some overlapped keywords but there are some unique features too. For the common features sometimes I ended up building 2 sets of content, which IMO is not efficient.
I'm a technical founder and new to marketing (have been doing it for the last 10 months), guess a lot of things I've to figure out.
I understand what you mean, I also agree that SEO is going to be the best strategy for this platform. It might take some time due to competition but hopefully will pay off as you go. I will give Apitemplate a try soon to generate some marketing content. Best of luck fellow.