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GrowSurf Is Now An Open Startup ($24k MRR)

We are making all of our revenue and core metrics public at https://growsurf.com/open.

Why? Because building SaaS is really hard. Doing it bootstrapped (with no external funding) is harder. But we've found inspiration and motivation in being able to follow other SaaS founder's journeys.

Here’s my personal list over the years:

  • Joel Gascoigne of Buffer
  • Alex Turnbull of GrooveHQ
  • Jon Yongfook of Bannerbear
  • Pieter Levels of Nomadlist
  • Nathan Barry of ConvertKit
  • Sarah Hum of Canny
  • Sabba Keynejad of Veed

I hope that by sharing our ups and downs, victories and challenges, mistakes and insights, we can shed light on the SaaS startup world and maybe one day provide some inspiration of our own.

GrowSurf in charts:

Years ago, I was listening to an IndieHackers interview (can’t remember which one) about a founder who didn’t get traction from the v1 product, but found success following a complete overhaul. I'm sure this sounds familiar to some of you, but this is also the GrowSurf story.

We had a really bad v1 product, $88 MRR, and no traction (after a really long time):
Bad MRR

After months of stress, self-doubt, and a never-say-die attitude, we decided to rebuild the product from the ground up. Fast forward to today, we are at $24k in MRR:
Good MRR

Our open goals:

There’s a quote out there that if you can get your first 10 customers, then you can get 100, then 1,000.

So, we’re shooting for 5x growth. Our main goal is to reach $1MM annual recurring revenue (ARR). Let’s see how that goes, and how long that will take us 🙏

Do we have a plan? Yes

Will it work out? TBD

See our revenue and core metrics at https://growsurf.com/open

Follow me on Twitter for the latest updates.

on March 17, 2021
  1. 2

    Nice job guys. I'm in Chicago as well. You guys are doing a great job.

  2. 2

    May we know the tech-stack you guys are using for GrowSurf?

    1. 1

      Here's our stack: AngularJS, Preact. Node.js, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, NATS, Redis

  3. 1

    This is so cool, planning on doing the same with my startup!