From $1 to $1k MRR -- my journey

Timeline: 12 months (2019-2020)

For my first year, about 3 months of that timeline was part-time, so progress was minimal, and I also took several weeks off during the summer to enjoy life (and hedge against an early death, if you know what I mean). I had several road trips, staycations, and travelled large parts of the US with my girlfriend and family during that time, but I digress. 🤣

I remember being a bit ticked off getting customer support emails during that time, but eventually the churns caught up to me, and so I decided to get serious again.

What worked for me

I think the most important thing in my $1 to $1k MRR journey, as a solo founder, was to focus 80-90% of my time/effort on getting the product right, transforming a wonky MVP to a passable/good-enough product that can compete in the marketplace.

Here are some specific things I've done:

• I filled in feature gaps so that my product is state-of-the-art for my product category, using customer feedback as my guide -- I worked on the most-requested features first.
• I fixed every bug reported, even if I considered it edge-case (nothing is "edge-case" if a customer encountered it).
• I sped up the site as much as I could, rewriting/refactoring tons of my code to utilize more efficient database queries for instance, adding more RAM/processing power to my server, caching generously, enabling gzip, minification, etc. etc.
• I continually updated the UI/UX if I had a customer emailing me about something that was unintuitive or confusing.

All the while I was also facilitating my users to spread the word easier on my behalf, thus in essence outsourcing the bulk of my marketing.

I created a generous affiliate program, and I paid a fat 50% recurring monthly commission to incentivize my users, provided double-sided incentive (every referred user gets 60-day free trial right off the bat), and soon enough there were users who tweeted constantly, wrote blog reviews, created YouTube reviews, and even ran paid ads to drive traffic to my site.

I assisted them by providing graphics, screenshots, copy, and also creating a simple affiliate dashboard where they can view their affiliate stats and redeem their commissions at any time using a one-click interface:

In the earlier stages, early adopter feedback should be more than enough to carry you to an MRR in the thousands, assuming your product is "good enough" and comparable to others in the marketplace with no glaring critical feature gaps.

All you need to do is to help them help you.

Some people think that 50% commissions are too high, but truthfully it's better to be at $1k MRR with 50% margins than to be at, say, $500 MRR with 100% margins (some people will debate this, but the former at least shows you've discovered a repeatable lever of growth where you can invest X dollars and get back 1.5X dollars, so theoretically you should be able to scale this up indefinitely).

Oh, I also ran an AppSumo Marketplace deal which accounts for 50% of my monthly revenue now. I can obviously sell lifetime deals on my own too (I do), but AppSumo legitimizes my nascent app, helps me garner 5-star reviews/testimonials, gets affiliates to link back to my site and thus drive traffic, and also they increase the visibility for my brand by running paid ads on my behalf. Absolutely worth it.

Ah yes, one last thing: email marketing turned out to be massively valuable. As my user base grew into the thousands, I now have thousands of email addresses to leverage on, to whom I can blast offers or update emails. I wrote a custom script to send emails to my user base who have trialed but not upgraded, or churned, and I periodically send out offers, discounts, product updates, etc. to get them to re-engage with my product. Mailgun is such a godsend for this. I'm still too cheap to use an email marketing software. 🤐

What I haven't tried

Between working on the product and other competing commitments in my life, I haven't been able to invest too much time and effort into these long-term marketing channels:

1. Blogging/Content creation/SEO
2. Tweeting/Audience-building/Building in public
3. Paid ads/Sponsorships
4. Cold outreach
5. PR/Podcasts, etc.

I'm sure those channels work for many founders, it's just not part of my experience building Zlappo from $1 to $1k.

I hope someone finds this useful! 🚀