How long did it take you to go from $1 MRR to $1000 MRR?

busy.io

It took about a year I think where almost nothing happened, and I had no advertising in place whatsoever — but one happy user told another, they told another and it started to get momentum, slowly at first. I pushed into the $1k a month range once I started offering agency accounts (which were slightly discounted bundles for multiple users, where one agency was worth about 10-50 users) — this not only boosted MRR but also made a huge difference in "support effort per dollar"...

So (new for me, at the time) lesson-learned was that larger-ticket customers (B2B) where much nicer to deal with, almost never required support and once everything was up and running, they had no intention to leave or reconsider. This was a huge difference to the low-tier $5 users who kept negotiating, bouncing credit cards, causing general support chaos and always figuring out ways to break the system.

Another lesson would be that it sometimes can take seemingly forever. I had half-forgotten about the product and was half-distracted with contracting work when I started noticing that more users were signing up. I think it took about half a year for the first 10 or 20 customers, and then another half year or so for this to go into the thousands (with a lot of those using the free tier). Again, no ads, no marketing.

I have a new product now and have (so far) zero sign-ups. The page is technically at MVP-stage and ready to go, but I have the same thoughts I had with the site mentioned above. Will anyone ever use this? Why is nobody signing up? Was this a waste of time!? — I hope I can learn from the past (or trust my instincts) and keep it going.

From $1 to $1k MRR took about 1 year for Zlappo.

$1k to $2k was a lot faster (3 months).

For my first year, about 3 months of that timeline was part-time, so progress was minimal, and I also took several weeks off during the summer to enjoy life (and hedge against an early death, if you know what I mean). I had several road trips, staycations, and travelled large parts of the US with my girlfriend and family during that time (summer of 2020), but I digress.

I remember being a bit ticked off getting customer support emails during that time, but eventually the churns caught up to me, and so I decided to get serious again.

What worked for me

I think the most important thing in my $1 to $1k MRR journey, as a solo founder, was to focus 80-90% of my time/effort on getting the product right, transforming a wonky MVP to a passable/good-enough product that can compete in the marketplace, all the while facilitating my users to spread the word easier on my behalf, in essence outsourcing the bulk of my marketing.

I created a generous affiliate program, and I paid a fat 50% recurring monthly commission to incentivize my users, and soon enough there were users who tweeted constantly, wrote blog reviews, created YouTube reviews, and even ran paid ads to drive traffic to my site.

I assisted them by providing graphics, screenshots, copy, and also creating a custom affiliate dashboard where they can view their affiliate stats and redeem their commissions at any time using a one-click interface:

In the earlier stages, early adopter feedback should be more than enough to carry you to an MRR in the thousands, assuming your product is "good enough" and comparable to others in the marketplace with no glaring critical feature gaps.

All you need to do is to help them help you.

Some people think that 50% commissions are too high, but truthfully it's better to be at $1k MRR with 50% margins than to be at, say, $500 MRR with 100% margins (some people will debate this, but the former at least shows you've discovered a repeatable lever of growth where you can invest X dollars and get back 1.5X dollars, so theoretically you should be able to scale this up indefinitely).

Oh, I also ran an AppSumo Marketplace deal which accounts for 50% of my monthly revenue now. I can obviously sell lifetime deals on my own too (I do), but AppSumo legitimizes my nascent app, helps me garner 5-star reviews/testimonials, and also they increase the visibility for my brand by running paid ads on my behalf. Absolutely worth it.

Ah yes, one last thing: email marketing turned out to be massively valuable. As my user base grew into the thousands, I now have thousands of email addresses to leverage on, to whom I can blast offers or update emails. I wrote a custom script to send emails to my user base who have trialed but not upgraded, or churned, and I periodically send out offers, discounts, product updates, etc. to get them to re-engage with my product. Mailgun is such a godsend for this. I'm still too cheap to use an email marketing software. 🤐

What I haven't tried

Between working on the product and other competing commitments in my life, I haven't been able to invest too much time and effort into these long-term marketing channels:

1. Blogging/Content creation/SEO
2. Tweeting/Audience-building
3. Paid ads/Sponsorships
4. Cold outreach

I'm sure those channels work for many founders, it's just not part of my experience building Zlappo from $1 to $1k.

I hope someone finds this useful!

5 months for usegravity.app - 198 → 99 → 99 → 297 → 198 → 1821

I was just tinkering as a side project and not investing 100% of my time and energy into it at the time. I got to $1000/mo mostly from just posting on here.

It took me about 7 months to go from 0 to 100$MRR and that's where I am now... I have been narrating my full journey in my podcast.

It took Shift 8 months.

Two important points though. First, my initial pricing was ridiculously low (~$3 per use). So, with proper pricing, this might have been hit sooner. Second, I didn't really do any marketing/advertising. In August, I had to opportunity to speak at Laracon - a conference directly for my target audience. That's when I hit $1000 MRR and quickly to $4000k MRR in the following months.

I think these are important points because I still wonder if more marketing/advertising and proper pricing early on might have propelled Shift sooner. Or, did the low pricing and organic approach allow me to grow my user base and tweaking the MVP into the service it is today.