Bootstrapping FormNX: $25k+ revenue in one year (with no proper landing page and zero audience)

1 year ago in August 2023 I started building (why & how later) FormNX, a no-code form builder.

Today, FormNX has achieved:
→ $25K+ in revenue
→ Used by 3,145 users
→ 5,820 Forms created
→ 64,807 Form submissions
→ 479,511 Unique form visits

With an average review of 4.7 stars by 16 users on G2.

This revenue may seem small compared to some other makers out there but this journey has been a remarkable learning experience, making me a better entrepreneur.

In this post, I'll share a few things on what we did & some of my learnings.

Why build FormNX?

I love solving my own problems. Previously, I built smalldev.tools, now acquired, to assist with various day-to-day dev works.

While managing my web dev agency, I often received custom form-building requests, with clients willing to pay up to $2000 for forms with complex logic and integrations.

In my free time, I built a simple script to help us create and deliver such forms faster.

Many months later in August i decided to repackage it into a SaaS application -- FormNX

Getting users without an audience 🥵

Getting users is more important than building a product. Many good products die because of no traction.

With almost zero active followers on social media and no marketing background, getting users was a difficult task.

Reaching Facebook group admins

Facebook communities are a goldmine of digital marketers, web agencies, freelancers, and studios looking for software.

I reached out to a few group admins and offered a generous plan. This brought in 100+ new users but zero revenue.

I felt sad and discouraged 😭, but I kept reminding myself, "Small progress is better than no progress at all."

Nonetheless, these users helped to test the software & provide feedback that helped to shape FormNX better.

A few of communities are:

1. Ken Moo SaaS Lifetime Deals
2. SaasWarrior

Leveraging Marketplaces
Lifetime deal marketplaces like Appsumo, RocketHub, DealMirror, SaaS Mantra are full of audiences hungry to try & use new software at a one-time pricing. (no recurring)

As a SaaS provider one-time payment isn't profitable. However, these generated some revenue & the customers provided valuable feedback based on use cases.

This also gave me confidence that we've some valuable that many are using regularly.

Collecting feedback 🗣️

More features do not necessarily make a good product.
We could keep adding more features but it'll never help until customers use them.

Once the MVP was built we stopped guessing & started collecting feedback, prioritized features based on upvotes and their plans.

→ canny.io is the best tool for this. The free version is more than enough for our usecase.

Customer Support & Documentation 🆘

Having a live chat to communicate with customers was the best decision we made. Customer facing issues (and there were some obvious ones) could quickly contact us...& we made sure to fix in few hours or provide an alternate way to do it.

Thanks to tawk for helping us do this 🆓

I enable email transcript for every conversation, allowing us to follow up with every customer.

Almost all FormNX customers love support 💜

Live support isn’t scalable, so we continuously updated the documentation and added links within the interface, increasing our support response time and quality.

Asking for Review

At end of every interaction, we asked customer to provide review via an internal link & G2.

While customers might love your product, they may not leave a review due to the additional friction of registering on platforms like G2.

Luckily, we received 16 positive reviews on G2 and many reviews internally.

We’ll repurpose these reviews to gain more visibility and build trust

Try FormNX

FormNX provides a lot of features for free.

You can create feedback form, survey forms, Waiting list for your SaaS, info products, courses or books.

Give it a try - https://formnx.com/

If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to ask.