Hitting $16k MRR after years of failed products

What stood out to me wasn't the $16k MRR.

It was the phrase "after years of failed products."

Most people only see the successful version of the story, but the real lesson is usually in the projects that didn't work.

I'm currently building a developer tool and one thing I've realized is that every "failed" project leaves behind something useful: skills, distribution, audience, or a better understanding of the problem.

Looking back, was there a specific failure that ended up contributing the most to this business, even though it didn't feel valuable at the time?

The "churn limits the ceiling" section hit home. So many indie hackers obsess over acquisition and ignore the leaky bucket. Smart move focusing retention before scaling.

Also love "when in doubt, do something" — the counter to analysis paralysis. Four years of shipping before one stuck. That's the real story here.

What was the moment BlogToPin clicked? Was it a specific customer conversation, or did you just notice the numbers creeping up one day?

1.5 years of failures before the first win. This is what the "overnight success" actually looks like.

Love to see people from my country succeeding in these hard times! Slava Ukraine!

That's awesome man. How'd you go about finding your referral partners? Just customers or other promoters too?

The churn math hit me — if you're losing 10-15% monthly you're basically running to stand still. Did you change your pricing model to reduce churn on Sequenzy, or just the niche choice?

the 16 hours per day observation is honest but worth unpacking. working more hours compounds when you're running the right experiments. it compounds much more slowly when you're working on things that don't move the needle. the reason it worked here is probably that the problem space was real and SEO had genuine leverage. the same work ethic applied to a bad market or a channel without compounding would produce different results. the hours matter less than what the hours are pointed a

Loved the story, thanks for sharing both the wins and the struggles along the way.

"When in doubt, do something" — best advice in here. Momentum beats overthinking every time.

These stories speak to me and tell me, do not give up, believe in what you are building. You will hit it at the right time.

was there a moment where you knew this one was different?

Or did it feel just as uncertain as the previous products until the numbers started moving?

'when in doubt, do something' resonates but I'd push back slightly - 4 years of products without one sticking suggests the issue is pattern recognition, not effort. what actually changed between the failed ones and BlogToPin?

This is a great example of a product coming from a real workflow instead of just an abstract saas idea.
The part that stood out to me is that BlogToPin seems to have started after you had already seen Pinterest working as a traffic channel for your own blog. So the product wasn’t built in a vacuum, it came from a problem you were actually living...

Do you think BlogToPin worked because the pain was already validated through your own blog, or because Pinterest you found the right distribution channel ?

My first SaaS which was about Loan Tracking service for private lending businesses failed. And now i am finding another idea but this time I know my mistakes and I will improve them and giving up is not an option it is a choose. With my failed SaaS I learned building in public is very important and validation before writing any line of code is the second most important thing, as it is better to failed before building instead of months of grinding.

The churn point hit different. Most people obsess over acquisition and ignore that churn quietly sets your ceiling before you even notice. Curious, when you onboard new BlogToPin users, is there a specific moment where you see people get it vs not get it? That first "aha" usually tells you more about retention than anything else.

Very helpful. Thanks!

The churn math is something most people building subscription products don't confront until it's already limiting them. 10-15% monthly churn meaning you need $2k in new MRR just to stay flat is a brutal treadmill — and you're right that almost nobody thinks about that when they're celebrating hitting a revenue milestone.

The decision to build Sequenzy specifically in an infrastructure niche because of inherently lower churn shows you actually learned from BlogToPin rather than just replicating the same model. That's rarer than it sounds.

The influencer marketing breakdown is refreshingly honest. Most people talk about it like it's a scalable channel when really it's "reach out to 50 people, two reply, one works." Knowing that going in changes how you approach it — it's a lottery you run repeatedly, not a strategy you optimize.

16 hours a day is not advice I'd give everyone, but the underlying point is real: volume of experiments compounds. The founder running 3x more tests than their competitor will win over time even with worse intuition.

Ukraine to $15k MRR in a niche most Western founders wouldn't even think to look at — that's a genuinely good story. Good luck pushing to $20-30k.

This pattern shows up often: success comes when founders stop optimizing execution and start optimizing problem selection.

Most “failed products” are actually correct execution on slightly wrong problem definitions.

The correction is upstream, not downstream.

Knowledge comes with an experience. If something fails now, it doesn't mean that's an end.

good job

For someone who just started vibe coding, your story and advices mean a lot. Truly motivating, thanks.

But you also mentioned you worked 16 hours a day. I have a full time job only get to do vibe coding for 5-6 hours a day. Can you give us a high-level breakdown of your daily routine within the 16 hours?

The part about failed products before success is waht most people skip over. Everyone wants the $16k MRR story but nobody wants to talk about the graveyard of products before it. How many failed attempts did you have before this one clicked, and what was the moment you this product was different?

Great write-up! The hardest part for me has been getting those first few users who actually give meaningful feedback. It is easy to get caught up building features nobody asked for. What was the biggest lesson you learned during the early stages?

I've been here for a while now and I'm still happy to hear stories like these.

that's why i love so much indie hackers....these contents are absolutely fantastic

Such an inspiring and raw read, thanks for sharing!

I completely relate to the "vibe coding" approach with Next.js and shadcn — it's exactly how I'm building my own AI legal tool right now as a solo dev. The speed of iteration that stack provides is just insane.

Your point about "churn limiting the ceiling" is something rarely talked about in the indie hacker community. It's terrifying to think you need to acquire $2k MRR every single month just to stay flat. Choosing an "infrastructure niche" for your second product sounds like a brilliant strategic pivot to fix that.

Best of luck hitting that $30k MRR goal! Quick technical question: Did you find that building a separate Express/BullMQ server for long-running tasks was strictly necessary from day one, or did you migrate to it later when Next.js serverless functions started timing out?

The part about spending 1.5 years on failed products before finding traction really hit me. I'm still early in my journey, building projects and trying to turn them into something real, so it's encouraging to see that success didn't come from the first idea but from staying in the game long enough to learn. Thanks for sharing the honest version of the story, not just the revenue numbers

I’ve been building an app called VoxPho recently, focused on adding voice to photos.
The interesting part for me is not storage, but whether people actually revisit memories when audio is involved.

Thanks for sharing your journey, Nic! Your focus on solving the churn problem early and choosing low-churn niches is really insightful. The point about SEO contributing 50% to your growth is valuable — it's the sustainable channel that compounds over time. This approach of picking battles you can outwork in is a great reminder that success comes from consistency, not shortcuts.

Really helpful perspective. Building something similar and this gave me some good ideas. Thanks for sharing! 💪

Nice story. Most people waste years chasing big ideas when the real progress usually starts after you just build something useful for a problem you actually have. The fact that BlogToPin took off while the newer tool is moving slower feels pretty normal. Curious how you're thinking about growing it from here.

Yes, reaching $16k MRR after years of failed products shows that persistence, continuous learning, and refining your product based on customer needs can eventually lead to sustainable growth. Success often comes from applying lessons learned from previous failures and staying consistent with improvement.

The Reddit growth note is buried in the list but it's probably the highest-leverage insight here. 'I just try to be genuinely helpful' — that's exactly it, and it's also why it doesn't scale.

Running 10+ products myself, the pattern I keep seeing: the founders who treat Reddit as a distribution channel get banned. The ones who treat it as a learning channel accidentally build distribution. You answer questions, notice which pain points get the most upvotes, and that feeds back into product decisions.

The second thing worth flagging: having two products with different churn profiles is actually a hedge most solo founders never think about. BlogToPin at 10-15% churn is a cash flow engine that funds experimentation. Sequenzy at lower churn is the long-term compounding asset. Together they're more resilient than either one alone.

Curious whether the Pinterest niche is growing or plateauing — that determines whether $20-30k MRR is an optimization problem or a market expansion problem.

the gregoryscotthenson 'hours dont compound, position does' line is the actual lesson buried in this post. blogtopin works because pinterest indie creators are a tiny audience screaming for the exact thing you ship; sequenzy is going to fight much harder for the same hours because saas-email-marketing is a knife fight with mailchimp/loops/resend already in the ring. the 16-hour-day isnt the moat, the pinterest-niche-with-no-real-competitor is. 10-15% monthly churn means you need a $2k mrr treadmill just to stay flat, which is a niche-saturation tell more than effort tell.

Really inspiring story.

I'm currently building Red Flag Advisor, an AI tool that helps people distinguish between genuine relationship red flags and anxiety-driven overthinking.

Reading that you spent years iterating before finding traction is a good reminder to keep going.

One question: looking back, what was the single biggest thing that helped you get your first 100 real users?

that really inspiring man.. im on same path, hope our path will cross

It looks like a really tough and tiring journey.

The referral mechanic you describe — 30% lifetime commissions — is interesting to unpack. The commission doesn't create the behavior; it activates people who were already inclined to share.

The founders who refer BlogToPin aren't doing it because of the 30%. They're doing it because Pinterest marketing is a specific enough niche that when it works, they naturally want to tell the two or three colleagues in their space who might need the same thing. The commission makes them act deliberately rather than casually.

For Sequenzy, the question worth thinking about is whether email marketing for SaaS produces the same natural enthusiasm. It's a more generic category — less of 'I found the one tool that solves this specific thing' and more of 'I switched to something cleaner.' The referral impulse might be lower even with the same commission structure, which means the product itself needs to create the enthusiasm that the niche used to provide automatically.

Building Waitrocket, this is something we think about when designing referral mechanics for early-stage products — a mechanic surfaces enthusiasm that's already there; it can't substitute for it. The niche determines how much referral energy exists in the first place. A generous commission in a high-enthusiasm niche compounds. The same commission in a low-enthusiasm one mostly attracts affiliates.

Thank you so much for this post. I've just started building in public and posts like these are exactly what one would wish they had starting out. I'd love to know how Nic would've done things differently, if at all, were he to start from scratch again.

The churn math is the part people don't internalize until they're in it. At 10-15% monthly, you're not building a $15k MRR business -- you're running a $2k/month acquisition machine just to hold position. That's basically a full marketing job on top of the product.

The decision to prioritize annual plans on Sequenzy from day one is the right call. I made the opposite mistake with an early product -- started monthly-first to lower friction, and ended up optimizing for signups while churn was silently eating the floor out from under me.

What's your current channel mix for new MRR? Still mainly SEO-driven on BlogToPin, or has anything else moved the needle?

Great story, Nic. The "years of failed products" part hit home.

I'm in a similar boat — just launched Megafish, a dating/social platform with key-based authentication (no email, no phone number). 11 days in, 141 visits, 7 users. Reading about your 1.5 years of failure before success is humbling but motivating.

The churn point is something I'm already thinking about. At 10-15% monthly, you're running just to stay still. I'm curious — what's the one thing you wish you'd known about churn before launching BlogToPin?

Congrats on $16k MRR. Following your journey.

- Jimmy

The churn section hit hard. Just launched my first product this week and already thinking about whether monthly vs annual pricing affects long-term sustainability. 
Curious — when you were at zero revenue in the early days, what was the one thing that got you your first 10 paying customers? Was it purely SEO or did you do direct outreach too?

That 10-15% churn stat on BlogToPin gave me anxiety just reading it 😅 having to find $2k every month sounds like a treadmill. Curious, are you actually seeing that lower churn play out with the new product so far?

What stands out to me here isn't the $16K MRR — it's the "years of failed products" part. Most people quit somewhere in that window, which means Mykola's advantage wasn't skill or luck, it was just staying in the game long enough for the lessons to compound.

There's also something interesting about having two products now (BlogToPin and Sequenzy). Failed experiments usually leave behind some useful infrastructure — code, audience, distribution instincts — that quietly accelerates the next thing. Curious whether either of those earlier projects laid any groundwork for what's working now.

The "years of failed products" part is the whole story most people skip. What was different about the one that hit $16k vs. the ones that didn't — the idea, or the distribution?

Great

Honest pushback - 'outwork the competition' undersells what actually happened. Four years of failing taught you which problem's worth solving. That's the real edge. $15k vs $1k from the same founder proves it.

What stood out to me wasn't the $16k MRR, but the 1.5 years of failed products before finding traction.

A lot of founders see the revenue number and miss the real lesson: persistence, distribution, and solving a problem you discovered firsthand.

Also, the point about churn limiting growth is underrated. Getting new customers is hard, but keeping them is what really raises the ceiling.

Thanks for sharing the honest journey

The most underrated line here isn't the 16-hour days — it's deliberately choosing an infrastructure niche for Sequenzy because of its inherently lower churn. At 10–15% monthly, BlogToPin needs $2k in new MRR just to not shrink. That meta-learning — picking the category based on retention mechanics before writing a line of code — is the kind of thing you can only arrive at by running the first product long enough to feel the treadmill.

Congrat Man

The most valuable line here isn't the 16-hour days. It's choosing an infrastructure niche for the second product because of churn. At 10-15% monthly churn you replace $2k of MRR every month before you grow a dollar, and that treadmill never slows down, you just get more tired. I'd push back on "I outwork every competitor" as the takeaway. Hours don't compound, position does. His own story proves it: same founder, same work ethic, two very different businesses depending on the niche he picked.

Man, "indie hacking is the easy way out" has got to be the biggest lie we all tell ourselves before getting into it—I feel that so much.

This is really inspiring — especially the part about 1.5 years of failed products before finding traction. Most people quit way before that point.

I'm 17 and just started my web dev journey with NovalNC — currently doing cold outreach to small businesses and building my first client projects. Reading about someone who started shy with no big ideas and built to $15k MRR is exactly the kind of thing that keeps you going when the inbox is quiet

The churn point is something I'm already thinking about as I plan my first SaaS product — choosing an infrastructure niche specifically for low churn is a really smart framing I hadn't considered before.

Thanks for sharing the full journey, not just the highlight reel.