How we got to $400 MRR in 5 months
IH is full of jealousy-inducing stories of people who somehow managed to create unicorns after 6 days of coding and marketing.
My own much more modest level of success is having reached $400 MRR in 5 months. But I'm still pretty proud of this, so I thought I'd share the big things that got us there:
We found a problem that 1,000s of people have
Product forums are a good place to start to find a startup idea. We found thousands of people across dozens of product forums asking for custom domains for the public sites they make with those products.
We hacked a popular product's Slack channel
We found that RoamResearch customers, many of whom wanted custom domains, were easily accessible via Roam's Slack. That's how we got our first customer.
We didn't write code until someone paid
Slight exaggeration. We wrote some code, so that we knew we could theoretically solve people's custom domain problem. But we didn't make a working product until the first person paid.
We posted everywhere that people have the problem
We searched the internet for every possible place that people were talking about custom domains to post our solution.
Full write-up here with tons more detail, which I will keep updated:
Followed all the best practices! Congrats!
Thank you!