6
0 Comments

Getting to $1.8K MRR

Describe what ChatKitty does in 50 characters or less.

An API service saving startups time building chat.

How far along are you?

We launched ChatKitty as a free beta in November 2020. In April 2021, we began charging a monthly subscription fee for our product. Between April and September 26th, we've acquired 32 paying customers with 27 still active subscriptions. Most of our paying customers are actively developing with ChatKitty or running ChatKitty in their production environment and are generally happy with our product. As of September 26, we've made almost 4000 USD in revenue.

Anything you would like to share regarding your revenue or growth rate?

From April to July, our growth was purely organic based on SEO from a series of developer-focused articles I wrote and outbound sales leads my co-founder Raymond found on Reddit. In August, we began experimenting with paid lead generation, using Google search ads (under $200 USD per month) and ZoomInfo. Our experiments have so far been successful, acquiring two high revenue Growth subscriptions, and doubling our Startup subscriptions in August.

How do you make money?

We charge a monthly subscription fee based on usage with a base amount. ChatKitty has three plans tailored for organizations at different stages; Hobbyist, Startup, and Growth. We have active subscriptions on all three plans.

Our lowest tier plan, Hobbyist, is designed for individual developers and solo founders building a demo or validating their product idea. This plan is fixed at 9 USD per month and supports up to 500 monthly active users.

The next plan, Startup, is designed for early-stage startups that are pre-revenue but are ready to launch a product and begin acquiring early users. This plan starts at 99 USD per month with an additional 0.04 USD per monthly active user after 5000 monthly active users.

Our highest tier plan, Growth, is designed for maturing businesses that are funded or generating revenue with teams of developers. This plan starts at 599 USD per month with an additional 0.06 USD per monthly active user after 15000 monthly active users.

A monthly active user is counted as an active user of a customer’s application that has connected to ChatKitty within the last 30 days.

How did you get your initial users?

Prior to our launch, I worked on building an inbound marketing channel using SEO for customer acquisition. I wrote developer tutorial articles covering building chat with ChatKitty, using Google Trends and Google Search Console to identify keywords our target audience in countries of interest are using to search for chat solutions. This approach paid off, and currently, we’re ranked on the first page when searching for some keywords related to building chat. Since January, we get about 294 website visits per week and 20 signups for our free trials per week from organic Google searches. We then reach out to these users to make sure they aren’t stuck and to further pitch our product. We also post on various online communities like Reddit, Linkedin, Indie Hackers, and Product Hunt to increase visibility.

Concurrently, after we launched our beta, we began building an outbound sales channel, finding leads on Reddit, and reaching out to them one by one. We initially focused on selling our Hobbyist plan. After our sales process became more mature, we moved our focus to our Startup plan. In August, we started targeting revenue-generating startups with our Growth plan, and we got two high-paying Growth customers that month. Every new customer has access to our community forum where they can find resources to start building chat quickly. Customers subscribed to our Startup or Growth plans, get added to our customer support slack organization where we provide them with real-time priority support.

What's next?

Currently, our focus is on selling the Growth plan. We can gain 2–6 net new Growth subscriptions plus additional Startup subscriptions per month with the sale process we've developed so far. In addition, we plan to double down on SEO and organic Google Search through new articles targeting new keywords, as well as user-generated content for our community forum. We’re also optimizing our sales process with ZoomInfo to acquire high-quality leads.

Trending on Indie Hackers
Competing with Product Hunt: a month later 33 comments Why do you hate marketing? 29 comments My Top 20 Free Tools That I Use Everyday as an Indie Hacker 18 comments $15k revenues in <4 months as a solopreneur 14 comments Use Your Product 13 comments How I Launched FrontendEase 13 comments