Bootstrapping Tiiny Host to $6k MRR in 33 Months

Philip Baretto is the founder of Tiiny Host - Tiiny.Host is the simplest way to host and share your work online. It’s perfect for marketing, prototyping, demos, testing, learning to code, small web apps, and many more use cases. 
 
FounderBeats.com interviewed Philip and he had some interesting insights to share :

How long did it take you to acquire your first 50 customers, and what was your growth strategy?

It took approximately 18 months to acquire my first 50 customers. There were two main delays to this milestone.
 
Firstly, I launched Tiiny Host without paid features or even a way for users to pay. I just wanted to see what people would use it for and gave myself a strict deadline of 1 month to build and launch the initial version. Paid features were only added 3 months later after user feedback where I learned what people would actually pay for.
 
Secondly, our first payment processor kicked us off their platform and refunded our first 10 customers (probably the hardest to gain). There were one too many attempts to subscribe with fraudulent cards.
 
Ultimately after coming these hurdles I realized that SEO was the best growth strategy for the tool. I created content that targeted specific keywords and published it. It took Google at least 6 months for them to start ranking the content which is when we started experiencing organic sign ups.

Which technology stack are you using and what challenges and limitations does it pose?

I built the tech stack with two main goals in mind. Firstly, to be cheap and inexpensive to run to maximize profit margins. Secondly, to use my existing skillset in order to build quickly.
 
We're hosted completely on Amazon Web Services with JavaScript (ReactJS & NodeJS). JavaScript is normally criticized for not being the most performant language, particularly for your backend however we've hosted over 100,000 sites using this simple stack without any issues. It has more potential than people give it credit.
 
Because we are completely hosted on AWS we are susceptible to "vendor lock-in". Meaning if AWS chose to no longer support us, or increase their prices beyond what we can afford, it could dramatically affect the business. However, we could build our platform to be "cloud agnostic" in the future, but that' s not a problem to worry about during our early growth stage.
 
Complete interview & more founder insights around building profitable Micro SaaS products are on Founder Beats - Founder Insights