From $8,000 to $80,000 MRR in 2 and a half years

In our first month, we made just shy of $8,000. That same month we paid our first creators as well. Of the $8,000, our creators had generated a little over $200. Roughly 3% of the total earnings.

This blew us away, we had officially helped someone else make money!
We saw the potential in this from day one and were dead set on growing our company.

Growing your business is at the heart of what we're all trying to do, but it happens at different rates for everyone.

It's easy to lose sight of the big picture and start focusing on minute details that only you care about. Another pitfall is purely focusing on growth but slowly drifting away from what made your product great to begin with.

It's easy to obsess over a new feature, and wanting it to be perfect is natural. For me though, that perfection has more often than not come in the way of progress. It's something I still struggle with, but I always keep it in the back of my mind.

As we were developing FlippedNormals it became more and more clear that the way forward for us, was to prototype and get features out quickly. They might not be perfect, they might not be fully working, but they served as a proof of concept for us to build upon.

But for a lot of the features we built, the opposite happened. We got stuck in feedback hell for months. I constantly try to get us away from feedback hell even to this day, and I think just being aware of it allows us to be more efficient.

Which in turn helps create better features for everyone.

Aside from that, I think what has had the biggest impact on our growth has been building a community and consistently creating new content for our YouTube channel.

Way before we went full-time we started building a community. We didn't set out to do this from the getgo, but it quickly became apparent that the more we helped our community, the more we grew. The bigger our community, the bigger our reach.

Fast forward to today where our YouTube channel has nearly 200k subscribers.

It's key to note that this platform isn't and shouldn't be used to exclusively shill products. We've learned this the hard way...

Giving to the community ensures that you keep growing, and in turn creates customer loyalty.

I believe that we can attribute much of our success to maintaining our YouTube channel. It's a great way for us to directly engage with both students, professionals, and ultimately, customers.

That brings us to the title I suppose. When we first launched our marketplace 2 and a half years ago, we did that on 5 years of hard work creating free content and building a strong following.

That meant that we weren't blindly trying to get something up and running, we had an inkling that this could work.

Today we're averaging around $80,000 a month with our creators making up between 30-50% on any given month. We're always striving to increase payouts to our creators, they are the backbone of our platform and our way to grow even more.