How we went from $10 MRR to $100 MRR
I'm extremely proud to announce that our Personal CRM made it to 100$ MRR (monthly recurring revenue).
This is the goal we set ourselves about 7 months ago when we reached 10$ MRR. You can read more about our plan back then on my personal blog.
While being just a symbolic number, recurring revenue of 100$ is an important milestone for a bootstrapped business: you go from nothing to something.
From nothing to something.
100$ MRR is still not enough to quit everything, but it's enough to dig deeper. We've proven that there is something, now we need to prove that there is a real business to be built here.
Looking back on my personal entrepreneurial journey, this is as far as I've ever made it with any of my projects, from now on, I'm in unchartered territories.
Here is what we learned as a team that you can apply to your bootstrapped business.
Grow your funnel
Personal CRMs (still) being a relatively niche thing, it's amazing how differently people react.
I have had calls with potential customers who would totally not get it and get me pretty frustrated. On the other side, I've had calls with people who just got it and wanted me to stop talking so that they could subscribe.
If you get unlucky and meet many people who just don't get it first, it can get really demotivating so make sure to talk to many people from different industries and backgrounds.
Instead of changing your product to try to satisfy unhappy leads, find people who like your current product.
This means content creation. A lot of it. Explore different channels and persevere. SEO takes years, so by starting now you're doing your future self a favour!
Make it easy to subscribe
We were so not confident in our own product that we did not believe anyone would subscribe and pay us. This massively impacted our design and development roadmap making it hard for potential customers to start paying us.
Don't do that.
Let people sign up on their own and start paying you on their own, you might wake up to happy surprises!
Hire a designer
Our team was initially only backend developers and a marketer: No designer. When an old friend of mine offered to help out with the design, I said yes without thinking.
Now that our new app is out with her design, things have changed massively! The perceived value of our app has gone through the roof and we're now perceived like a real company and not some weird MVP.
Customers are also much more generous and forgiving with a well-designed app.
Do calls with potential customers
As small young businesses. we have to fight very hard to earn our customer's trust and a great way to get there is to get them to know you. 8 out of our 10 paying customers did at least one call with me.
Hope that helps! I'm sharing our plan to reach out next milestone: $1000 MRR, on our company blog.
dude I thought you went from 10k to 100k and I was like how isn't everyone all over this post?
but seriously, super happy for you. Personal CRMs are so cool!
Haha :P Yeah I'm not sure how relevant this actually is but I guess it can be helpful if someone is just one step behind :)
Thanks!
I don't know, i'm here to celebrate any success!
It's 10x - you should be proud :)
What's your next big step to hit another 10x?
Mainly content creation :) https://nat.app/blog/how-we-plan-on-goi-from-100-to-1000-mrr
This is very cool, and I like the idea a lot.
Are you considering having some manual controls as well? I don't use E-mail to keep in touch with people, but I'd love to be able to add notes manually, and manually mark when we've had some facetime.
My 2c. Congrats on the growth, looking forward to your 1k post!
We do let people manually log interactions and take notes :) But this should be rare occasions as we focus mainly on automated data entry :) Thanks!
Hey @Webbiger 👋
Congratulations on the milestone :) and for the insightful tips!
I looked through the website and was surprised to see that you fetch data from gmail - I had the impression that Google now charges an outrageous fee to ‘verify’ companies that use their data this was - did you go through this process?
Thanks
Geordi
Hey :) Thanks haha :)
Yeah they do charge a big fee - we actually haven't gone through the process yet so we're still "unverified", meaning we can only onboard 100 customers for now and they get a big warning when they sync Gmail.
We also sync calendar data, which is not limited (and thus on our free plan).
Hope that clarifies things!
Ahhh I see :) How have you found that discussion with customers if you don't mind me asking?
Ahh okay! Nice work 👌
Yes, it does! Thank you
Happy for your success. But always look beyond MRR and follow other useful metrics that guide you in a user-centric manner like LTV and Churn.
Absolutely! Thanks for the feedback!
I feel like you're a bit dismissive about what you're doing.
There's no "it's just a 100 buck." It's awesome! That's how you start.
Everyone started with dollar 1, then 10, then 100, and so on.
So good on you and don't apologize for feeling good and being proud. Rooting for you my friend.
RJY
Thanks for the support :) You're absolutely right - every company grows at different speed but it does feel a bit weird to celebrate 100 MRR when you have someone celebrating 100K MRR next to you :P
But still super proud of our growth of course and of what we've accomplished! Thanks!!
🤟🏽💪🏽
Very interesting. "No Meetings, No Deadlines, No Full-Time Employees" and that works! I believe working remotely can lead to communication mishaps and delays in productivity. so I am building Tappy👈 to enable spontaneous meetings with one click from any workflow.
Its eye-opening to find how your written-only communication works out. Thanks for sharing!
Absolutely! Yeah we're using Tandem from time to time, seems pretty similar :)
You are right! Tandem is a well-made product but it seems like losing its initial focus as just adding up all kinds of features. Tappy is simple enough to start meetings from any workflow.