How I grew my Shopify micro-SaaS to $25k MRR and 20k users in 14 months

14 months ago, my co-founder Sankalp and I set out to build a business that can sustain our livelihood while allowing us the freedom to live life on our terms.

When we started, we each had roughly 12 months of savings to survive on, assuming we made $0. Hence our minimum goal was to make $1,500/mo and the case where we would be celebrating with champagne was set to $3,000/mo.

14 months later, we grew past $25,000 in MRR while remaining a 2 person team.

I’m so proud of what we have built here.

If life is a video game, and there’s 100 levels to it, I feel like we have finally crossed level 1.

Here's what we've been up to in the 14 months since launch:

• 20,000 active merchants (users) on the app
• 1,500+ paying merchants (customers)
• 450,000 automated WhatsApp messages sent in June
• 2.2 million WhatsApp chat messages initiated in June
• Highest rated 5.0 🌟 app for all things WhatsApp with 500+ reviews
• Users from 50+ countries around the world

We did a lot of things right, but we also messed up here and there. I've tried to capture an honest and accurate account of our journey so far.

11 key learnings and mistakes from our journey

1- Learning: Always keep moving the needle
2- Learning: Help users realise value as soon as possible
3- Learning: Care about your users, they can feel it
4- Learning: Be smart about managing and reducing support ticket volume
5- Learning: Say No, often
6- Mistake: Optimise top of the funnel
7- Mistake: Competition will copy, don’t completely ignore them
8- Mistake: Charge according to customer value
9- Mistake: Don’t get complacent
10- Mistake: Expand your distribution channels
11- Learning: Keep your expectations low, and keep surpassing them

👉 Check out the full post on my blog where I've written in great detail providing screenshots and examples.

Feedback is welcome ✌️