How to Get Your First $100 in MRR (Based on Our Experience W/ Kualia)

I'm guessing a lot of folks here are for the same reason I am—to learn from other IndieHackers about what’s working and how to turn side hustles into full-time gigs. Now, I don’t think where we’re at with @Kualia is extremely impressive yet… but I figured I’d share some lessons learned as we recently crossed into triple digits in MRR! 💸

For context, Kualia is our B2C mobile budgeting app for iOS. We’ve been focusing heavily on three main stages that have helped us grow our MRR consistently. To give some numbers:

November 2024: $0 MRR
December 2024: $40 MRR
Today (2/16/2025): $115 MRR

This post is broken into three parts:
1️⃣ How we got our first paying user
2️⃣ How we got our first 10 users
3️⃣ How we continued growing our MRR

1️⃣ Getting the First Paying User

This was arguably the hardest part. We had been on the App Store for four months with plenty of downloads, but no one was sticking around. Why? Because our product wasn’t good enough—simple as that.

We dug deep into our App Store Connect data and saw our Day 1 retention was awful. If users didn’t stick around past the first day, they weren’t going to convert. We needed to figure out why.

So, we spent hours:
🔍 Reviewing user session recordings (shoutout to UX Cam)
🧠 Brainstorming ways to fix our biggest product gaps
🛠 Iterating fast and tracking retention improvements with every update

After about a month of intense iteration, our Day 1 retention started improving. One day in mid-November, we saw our first trial conversion. We were ecstatic, and that small win fueled our drive to chase our next goal: 10 paying users.

2️⃣ Growing to 10 Paying Users

Now that we had proof at least one person would pay for Kualia, our focus shifted to Day 7 retention (since our trial length was 14 days). If we could keep people engaged for at least a week, we had a solid shot at converting them.

We used the same process:
🔄 Iterating based on user feedback
📊 Tracking behavior via session recordings
🚀 Rapidly shipping features requested by early users

(Side note: If you're in B2C, listen to your early users and implement things they care about. It builds trust, makes them feel heard, and increases retention. Shoutout to Canny.io for helping us manage feature requests!)

By December, our trial starts were increasing, and we were seeing more conversions. The key takeaway? Listen to your users, iterate quickly, and they’ll stick around. That’s how we hit our first 10 paying users.

3️⃣ Hitting $100 MRR (and Beyond)

With MRR growth in mind, we started experimenting with:
💰 Pricing changes – We raised prices in January and found trial starts & conversions remained steady.
🛠 Onboarding flow improvements – Tweaking this increased trial starts and conversions.
⏳ Trial length – Switching from 14 days to 7 had zero negative impact but got us paid sooner.
📣 User engagement – We doubled down on engaging power users, prioritizing top-requested features, and testing changes with feature flags.

All of this compounded into steady MRR growth, and today we’re at $115 MRR with solid user engagement. (To be clear, $100 MRR ≠ product-market fit, but we’re getting closer!)

💡Final Thoughts

If you’re in those first few months wondering "Will I ever get a paying user?"—trust me, I’ve been there. It is possible. There are faster ways to grow, sure, but for us, the formula has been simple:

✔ Focus on improving one or two key metrics at a time
✔ Listen relentlessly to your users
✔ Iterate fast based on feedback

Hope this helps someone out there! If you have any questions or want me to go deeper into any part of this, drop a comment—I’d love to chat! 🚀