How we reached $6250 monthly recurring revenue in 77 days from launch
I build SaaS products for living and recently, launched Helpwise ( https://helpwise.io ) - shared inbox for teams to manage team emails like help@, sales@, jobs@ etc. Here I'm going to share how we reached $6k MRR within 77 days of launch.
We built this product because we had tried the two other main players in the market and felt that these products are
1)expensive
2)complex
On 2nd Dec'19, we launched on PH. Kept following things in mind:
- Use GIF in the thumbnail
2.Product screenshots - Post close to 12:00 am PST
- Never indulge in fake voting
We ended that day at 4th position! Coming in the top 5 on Product Hunt opens a lot of early PR opportunities. So, we go covered by a number of niche blogs.
We spent $1k on SEO & $200 in FB Ads targeting job profiles like Support Manager, HR Manager, etc. To break some users (similar to us) from existing players, we built 1-click account migration for both Front and Help Scout from day 1. Also, we built a few other integrations (Stripe, Twilio, Pipedrive, etc.) to get some distribution going for us as early as possible.
We signed up 500+ users within 1st week. We priced the product the way we wanted it to be as a customer of other shared inbox offerings in the market. And, the pricing was also partly influenced by our love for Basecamp. So, we have 2 plans - free and $99/m for unlimited users.
When you have a free plan, it is very important to design that free plan smartly. If you don't put the controls on features at the right trigger point, you will miss out on the upgrades. Hence, we spent more time on planning our free plan than our paid plan. The idea really was to figure out the stage at which a small startup feels the pain of email chaos and is ready to pay for the solution. So, we offer the product for free for up to 5 team members. If you need anything more than that, pay $99/m.
In 77 days, we have converted 52 accounts (4% of signups) into paid @ avg $120/month.
I hope this is useful for some of you.
Thanks for sharing that! I'm curious about how exactly you spent that $1K on SEO. Was that towards on-page site structure and technical SEO or was the spent on acquiring backlinks, etc?
I used The Hoth agency to buy some of their off-the-shelf SEO packages. I picked couple of keywords using Ahrefs where it was easier to rank i.e. you needed 5-10 good backlinks to do well.
So, I ordered few blog posts to seed our blog with content. Then I bought some guest posts around those keywords and a small link building package. They were running thanksgiving deal so I got some 1300-1400 worth services for 1000 bucks.
From our end, we worked on content and site structure to target those shortlisted keywords.
Thanks for sharing! May I ask do you think publish your product on PH really helps to growth? If yes, how?
PH helps with the initial momentum and some search engine visibility. So, consider PH only for a short term boost and not for any long term growth strategy. End of the day, it is a good source of getting free visibility among some of the most active early adopters on the Internet. So, why miss the chance? :)
Hey nice man!
Where do your users come from? On Dec 3, you got 50 signups for a free trail from ProductHunt. Are most of them coming from Appsumo?
Also, how can your average be 120 while your plan is 99 and you did some appsumo which is most often 50% of the price or something like that?
Lastly, how do you convert your users because there is quite a gap between 0,- and 99,- per month.
We're not counting Appsumo customers as a part of our customer base size because those customers are non-recurring customers. We got over 400+ signups from Product Hunt, Hackernews. And, then some from a couple of blogs that covered us after our product hunt launch. The Appsumo campaign started this month only.
We have add-ons like extra mailboxes ($49/m), help center site etc. We onboarded some big companies as well as customer support agencies that handle customer support for their clients who needed more inboxes hence bought these addons. So, that increased the average ticket size.
The conversion rate is definitely lower than what we expected. But, we are quickly adding new features and offerings to our $99 plan to make it worth it for our customers. For example, we recently added Shared Inbox for SMS and WhatsApp, Help Center (knowledgebase site) and new integrations. Having said that, we understand that there is a huge jump from $0 to $99 so we are reconsidering our pricing and will be coming up with new pricing soon.
Congrats and keep growing
Well done! I’m curious why you decided to focus budget on SEO out of the gate. As someone who has offered SEO services, I wouldn’t recommend them early in the game. What exactly did you want/get out of that spend?
SEO has played a huge role in organic growth of our other SaaS products. It is a long term investment, the earlier you start the better it is. We're already doing pretty well on the search now and starting to get organic traffic. We started paying for SEO 2 months before the launch.
Some links, guest posts, blog posts for our own blog. For the keywords that we wanted to target didn't require much work to rank on top. So, a $1000 budget was more than enough.
Got it. If it's mostly getting good, SEO optimized content out, thats definitely a smart investment early on.
How do your paid users avg at $120 if your only paid plan is $99? Did you change the plans? You had around 1000 accounts after the 77 days. How did those other 500 users after the first week find you?
Your product looks very interesting and very close to something I recently thought about. Unfortunately your plans doesn’t really fit my needs.
Good luck.
We have add-ons like extra mailboxes ($49/m), help center site etc. We onboarded some big companies as well as customer support agencies that handle customer support for their clients who needed more inboxes hence bought these addons. So, that increased the average ticket size.
great progress!
First, love the app. That was so needed at my previous company. However, what is PH?
PH is Product Hunt, a website where you can post your product and people can upvote on it. Its popular because if you reach top 5, generally you can get a lot of PR and hype around your product. Here's the site: https://www.producthunt.com/
Thank You.
Very interesting and inspiring story.
Hi Gaurav! How much time did you spend on building the product out before launching?
Hey! It took almost 3 months to build the MVP and launch on Product Hunt. 2 Engineers + 1 product lead built the first version.
Congrats on your launch! I've just analyzed your site and found several bugs and problems with it. Just sent you a DM on Twitter
Thank you for the amazing insight! We are building a Saas project manager and really hope we can repeat your history in a few months. I have a few questions if you don't mind. How long did it take you to get a beta ready? Did you solved all issues/bugs before launching, or did you allow users early on? What is your team like, how many people completed the work? Thank you again.
We had a very basic structure in use internally for our own team (we have other SaaS products as well) for some time. All-in-all, 3ish months.
All bugs solved before launch - not at all. Waiting too long to launch is a mistake I have done before and didn't want to repeat this time. For MVP, that one key feature should work perfectly fine and rest can be fixed on the fly.
Total 2 engineers and 1 product lead built & launched the product. In the last 2 months, we have added 2 more engineers. There is no one in sales/support/marketing as of now. Engineers are handling customer support as of now. This helps in fixing bugs and prioritizing new features.
How did you handle UI/UX and design? In our case, we had to hire an agency to help with it for an additional cost of $3k USD. We are on our 4th month, and it seems we need a few more weeks. My bet is that you are using Node, any recommendations around frameworks and work flow?
Did you get any early signals of product-market fit/traction?
Thank you again!
Bought themes for that and customized here & there as per our requirements. So, that saved us a lot of time.
We are using a very basic LAMP stack. Everyone in the team knows it well so speed of shipping & fixing things is really fast. Once PMF is achieved, we can always optimize.
I won't say we have achieved Product-Market fit but there are some early signals. We track:
On all these fronts we are growing. Still, early days though so it may be a false positive. It's important to have paranoid optimism to keep your team & yourself grounded and keep working hard towards PMF or $83333 MRR - whichever comes first.
Where did you get the theme, looks great! Chartmogul may help with stats to keep track of PMF. With the numbers you are sharing I think it won't be long until you are way over 83K MRR. You have a great project, congratulations.
For themes, sounds, vids for ads we use envato.
Using a similar product called Profitwell.
Thank you for the kind words :)
Great success! Did you also do cold outreach to people and companies using Front and Help Scout asking them to try out your product?
We haven't really started reaching out to them directly. But, we built Single Click migration from Front and Help Scout before the launch so we have onboarded some customers from there. Also, we are working on couple of important features like Chat Widget & Social Media channels. Once we have these, we will a more solid proposition to pitch current HS and Front customers.
"When you have a free plan, it is very important to design that free plan smartly. If you don't put the controls on features at the right trigger point, you will miss out on the upgrades. Hence, we spent more time on planning our free plan than our paid plan. "
I added this to my notes. It's probably nothing new but I'm getting started on pricing a product for the first time and this is helpful advice so thanks for sharing.
Hey, thanks for the kind words. Pricing is a tough nut to crack and an important one for sure. We're still experimenting with pricing and will be moving to a new pricing model in the coming weeks. Let's see how it goes! #fingerscrossed
Congrats!
Thank you :)
Thanks for the details and good luck with your product :).
Thank you :)
Nice insight! Great point on carefully analyzing the free plan to maximize conversions. What do you think was the best source for getting your customers?
Initially, it was all the noise that we created via our Product Hunt, Hackernews, Reddit etc posts. As our PH launch did well and we ended at #4 on that day, getting picked up by some tech blogs also helped.
These days, SEO is working great for us. Due to Covid, ad rates have dropped a bit so we are investing in Google and FB ads. FB Lead Gen ads did really well for us in last couple of weeks.
Awesome. Glad things are doing well for you guys!
This is great! Congrats. Really interested in how a free plan can act as a good acquisition channel.
It is working fine till now as most of our competitors don't offer any free plan. So, a good way to grab the attention of small businesses but only if you have proper hooks built in your product to convert them into paid in near future :)
This sounds so incredible 🤩
Thanks for the useful tips!
Thanks :)
That's super cool. It's wild you signed up so many people in your first week, do you have a breakdown of where they came from?
Edit - Seems like the PH launch was 5 months ago, so why post this now when the 77 day period was months ago?
Hey! Most of the signups (80%) came from PH/Hacker News. Rest from couple of blog reviews, 30-40 from social media and 20-30 from direct emails/prospecting.
PH launch was on 2nd Dec. Post was in the draft for long. I was updating my indiehacker profile today and saw that this post is still in draft so published it.
I was actually planning to share our recent experience with appsumo. Will write that later this week now.
Amazing, congrats! Looking forward to our PH post aswell!
All the best with your PH launch 👍🏼