Breaking $1k MRR within 6 months of indie hacking.

This is the story of how I managed to break $1k MRR with BlazeSQL, in my first year of indie hacking.

Let's start with the first product I built, before I ever heard about indie hacking.

In 2021, while working as a data scientist, I learned flutter to build an app for making plans with friends. I was annoyed by chaotic group chats when friends tried (and failed) to organize holidays and dinners.

Social apps aren't really Indie hacker projects, since they usually need millions of users before they can make money. That means they usually require VC funding, and lots of time.

The social app is a story for another time, but I ended up finding a co-founder, having a conflict with him, and breaking up...

Then ChatGPT came along, and I discovered the indie hacker community!

January 2023 - I was amazed by ChatGPT, I had some development skills, and I just started a new job as a Product Owner but wanted to be independent...

Inspired by Levelsio, Danny Postma, and the rest of the community on twitter, I started building commercial products.

Project 1. AI therapist chatbot. I worked on this for 2 weeks, but it's a legally tricky due to the medical aspect. I quickly got suspended from google ads with no explanation, while trying to advertise for this.

Project 2. Chatbot app with voice conversations (like a phone call). I really enjoyed using this product, but I was struggling to find a specific target user group to sell it to. It also doesn't really solve a problem. I worked on this for about 3 weeks.

Project 3. Chatbot for SQL Databases. This solved my own problem, as I was annoyed by writing SQL queries in my job.

ChatGPT was helpful, but it was annoying to have to explain the tables and columns every time.

I quickly hacked together a simple app that lets you add your schema, and generate queries based on natural language requests.

I worked on it for 1-2 weeks, threw together a landing page with tailwindui, and posted on reddit.

The reddit post in r/SQL got a lot of engagement (it's one of the top 100 all time posts, and r/SQL is one of the top 1% biggest subreddits).

200 people created accounts in just a few days. This was stronger validation than I had ever received on any other product.

Lesson: FIND A NICHE, SOLVE A PROBLEM, SHIP FAST.

I shipped 3 products in under 2 months, and ended up with more traction than ever before. My first product ever (the social app) took months to ship, and I never even got real traction.

Moving on...

I decided to replicate this post in some other subreddits, like r/DataScience and r/DataAnalysis, and keep building the product.

It evolved into a chatbot, and I completely rebuilt the UI too.

I submitted it to a few AI tool catalogues and tried to get other backlinks, while talking to users and shipping fast.

Eventually I decided to provide some free messages, and then require a subscription.

In may 2023, 2 months after launching, I got my first subscriber for $19.99. They are still one of my main users now, 5 months later.

Shortly after that, I noticed a spike in traffic. Hundreds of accounts were being created per day, and I had no idea why. I eventually had to remove the free messages due to huge costs, and I asked the users where they came from.

It turned out that an influencer (who happened to be an Amazon Developer advocate) posted a video of my product on instagram. The video had hundreds of thousands of views, and eventually got over 5 million views.

I had to add a waitlist to manage the insane traffic, and tried to prioritize the users who were likely to subscribe.

Eventually the traffic from the video died down (my google search console graph is sad), but it was a nice temporary boost to motivate me.

My monthly revenue hit something around $1600 at one point (50% recurring, 50% one time purchases).

I did very little marketing and got cocky because of the video, so eventually my traffic and revenue started dropping, and my monthly revenue went well below 1k.

I Naively only focused on the product, thinking if the product is good enough, the growth will come.

When the revenue and traffic started dropping, I assumed the product just isn't good enough...

When I asked churned users why they cancelled, there was never any negative feedback about the product. It was always positive, and they just didn't need it anymore.

Current users were really happy, and there were only minor issues and requests which I implemented quickly.

Around 8 people even paid $200 for the lifetime deal, and none of them used the 30-day money back guarantee.

The reality is, if your product doesn't work with viral product led growth, you have to work hard to market it. Unfortunately an analytics chatbot for SQL Databases doesn't really grow much organically, since the only sharing/collaboration would be internally within a company or team.

It's easy for indie hackers with no marketing background to think marketing is simple and transparent, just because it doesn't involve complex code.

We assume we can spend 80% of the time building, and 20% marketing... but sometimes it's the opposite.

In some ways, marketing is actually more complex. You can get really unpredictable and inconsistent results, and it often takes time to see the impact of what you do.

When I realized I need to focus on marketing, I started experimenting.

1. Building an audience.
   (Slow) This is slow and uncomfortable. I think we should all do it eventually, but I wanted something faster.

2. Posting in forums, like Reddit.
   (Works sometimes, but difficult) Reddit users hate even the slightest sign of self-promotion. Even if your post is genuinely helpful and you have great intentions, things can quickly get toxic.

3. Finding tweets and posts from people who have the problem your product solves.
   (Effective, but not scalable) If someone tweets about the topic or problem your product focuses on, it's easy to win them over. They're already thinking about it, so you're not disrupting them. The only issue is this takes a lot of time.

4. Paid ads.
   I had high hopes for this one. I figured that since people were happily paying for my product (conversion around 5% for target users), I could grow quickly by paying to get the attention of other target users.

Linkedin ads, Google Ads, and Reddit ads completely failed. Barely anyone even made a free account!

The lesson?

If you have a target customer profile (ex. data analysts), it doesn't mean that everyone fitting that description will be an early adopter. Only a small % of your target users are early adopters.

Your conversion rate from organic inbound traffic (ex. inbound data analysts) is NOT the same as your conversion rate from everyone in your target group (ex. all data analysts). Organic inbound traffic is from people who area ALREADY INTERESTED in your product.

To start growing in the early days, one of the best things you can do is make it easy for early adopters to find you. That means SEO.

SEO can be grueling, and it takes time.

For AI tools one of the biggest hacks is to submit your tool in as many AI tool websites as possible. Ex. "there's an AI for that", "findmyaitool", etc. It usually just takes a few seconds, and is the easiest way to get your first backlinks.

Beyond backlinks, it's also important to capture all the different keywords that might lead to your product.

Rather than trying to stuff everything into your landing page and ruining it, this typically means creating some blog posts related to some keywords and search terms that your landing page doesn't rank for.

The good news is, you probably have lots of knowledge to create blog posts from. If you know a space well enough to build a valuable product, and spend time solving a problem and talking to users, you have a unique perspective.

All you have to do now, is find some keywords related to your product/industry with decent volume and difficulty (ex. via ahrefs, or semrush), and share your unique perspective.

This process can take time, and writing content can be slow and painful as a technical indie hacker who just loves to write code... But that's why mastering this skill is so valuable.

You'll establish yourself as an authority, and get a steady stream of organic traffic from people who are interested in your solution, and will trust you thanks to your unique insight. Those are the people who are most likely to subscribe $$$

Writing is one of the best ways to improve your communication skills, and that's one of the main weaknesses of most Indie Hackers.

Marketing is mostly communication, and mastering that will give you a huge advantage over most indie hackers.

Since putting more focus on increasing organic inbound traffic, my Revenue has started rising steadily again. MRR is just over 1k, and steadily rising.

Sidenote: today happens to be My Product Hunt Launch day!

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/blazesql

I hope you can pick up a few lessons from this journey, but as always, take it with a grain of salt. I'll be sure to report back with progress!

But as I'm focusing more on marketing I'd love to learn from you!

What have been your marketing wins and failures? Where have you had the most success?