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31 Comments

I bootstrapped a side project to €15k MRR in 1 year in 1 market - AMA

Hi Indiehackers,

my name is Sumit and in 2018 I started taking care of my finances (I sucked at it) and eventually started to invest in the stock market. In January 2020 I started a niche side project to track stock portfolios across brokers in Germany (parqet.com formerly known as Tresor One) as I needed this myself. I solved my own problem first. 1 broker, 1 language, 1 currency, 1 market, 1 asset (stocks). Totally niched down.

3 months later I introduced my first paid plan and the first subscribers rolled in. From then on, I grew it with its revenue - slowly but surely. I built sharing into the product so I don't need to focus on marketing (and haven't spent a single ad-dollar so far). I introduced an affiliate program that handles all user acquisition for me so I can focus on conversion, churn, users and the product.
By now, Parqet supports basically all brokers in the DACH region, soon supports all currencies and is ready to expand internationally with support for cash, crypto and more assets to come in the next month.

To this day, the product is only available in Germany, in German and we will cross 100k users soon. Yes, I said "we" because I hired freelancers and even our first official employee (since this month 🎉). With part-time people, freelancers and all, there are about 10 people working in some shape or form for Parqet.

Some stats as of today

💰 17k+ MRR
📊 2M+ Pageviews / mo
👤 100k registered users

A note on time management

A frequent question I get is that next to my full-time job at Stripe, a newborn kid (August 2020) and 2 projects (Parqet being one of them) with a 100% month-over-month growth at that time, how the f did we make it out of there alive?

Great question!
I think COVID played a role as I had to stay inside for basically the entire year. I completely skipped Netflix, Gaming and most other forms of pure consumption and replaced it with productivity (coding, planning, reading). Relentless focus was also a big part. Saying no A LOT to people, features and opportunities was hard. I also bought as much as I could instead of building it myself (Auth, Payment, DB, Infrastructure, etc). Time is the bottleneck for me, not money.
Nonetheless, I worked from 7am to 9am before work and then again 8pm to midnight - every day - basically the entire year with some family time in between. It was a massive burden sometimes and I have to thank my wife for supporting me on this. That's why I immediately started hiring some full-time help this year resulting in a much more balanced life and health since then.

I still work at Stripe. My daughter just started walking 🎉. And I still work almost every day on Parqet together with a great team but my focus switched from building the product to building the machine that builds the product. Just writing and thinking about it gives me fuel and excitement 🔥 - I absolutely love this and I hope me sharing as much as possible will help others to get started too.

Financing

After some German publications, for example Gründerszene (Business Insider) posted two articles about the project, the already good VC interest went through the roof and I had dozens, if not hundreds of VCs and Angels interested in investing. This was really, reaaaally tempting as I wanted to build something big and did not (still do not) want to wait until revenue allows me to do that. However, I said no to all inquiries so far.

Competition

Of course, competition came with success. Legit startups and plain copy-cats - it's all there. Some of them VC funded which is particularly interesting (and scary). As I am the only one sharing numbers I only have a few metrics to go by but it looks like Parqet is still at #1 or #2 in Germany (and is profitable) while the competition has millions at their disposal, large teams and spends serious 5-figure cash on ads every month. Growth seems to be similar though. Either way this gives me lots of FOMO and I expect to be crushed from a market-share perspective sooner or later. The good part is that this is not a winner-takes-all market and I'm happy to operate a profitable business that offers value to customers and employees even if it's a tiny market share. But as we are talking between friends here: my ego would take a hit when I get crushed 😅.

Plans

Parqet will become a Wealth Management platform - all assets, your entire net-worth in one place. Analyzed, supposed to motivate, give insights, share, learn and grow. We will open our API, we will introduce business-facing features and much more. I will continue to experiment on pricing, design, etc but I am limited by the generated cash flow. My dream is to have 5 to 10 people full-time working on this. Bootstrapping means going slow :)

Open Startup

Since day 1, I'm sharing the journey on YouTube and on Twitter - so if you want to trace back specific steps - it's all out there :) - and of course, you can just ask here 👍.

AMA

  1. 4

    which programming language and tech stack dis you use?

    1. 3

      Hey, great question. It's all Javascript. This is my tech stack:

      Frontend:
      Nuxt.js (vue), tailwind, chart.js - hosted on Vercel

      Backend:
      Node.JS, Fastify, Redis, MongoDB - hosted on Render

      SaaS:
      Auth0, Stripe, MongoDB Atlas, Linear, Plausible, Mailchimp, Canny, Datadog, Sentry and a bunch more

      1. 2

        great! I am learni=ng javascript too!

  2. 2

    Much respect on your journey and wonderful success! Would love to hear a bit more on market research & validation. Were you able to collect user problems before building? Did you have an audience before? Kudos

    1. 2

      I had no audience before (still not). My Twitter and YouTube audience are bootstrappers and indiehackers while my product targets german retail investors. Very little overlap.

      But yes I knew there was a userbase that used existing free open source tools. What I didn’t know was if anyone would pay for it so I tried to test this immediately after an MVP that gets the first few hundred users in.

  3. 2

    Awesome work.

    Have you considered branching into markets of other countries? If so, why haven't you done it yet?

    1. 1

      Sure thing, answered this above:

      There are enough users in Germany for me to serve to start with (picked my niche). Releasing worldwide means I'd have to handle localizations, currencies, hundreds of brokers to support - I would be in many countries with a weak product. Instead I went for one market (first) to build a strong product. There is still so much growth ahead in Germany that an international expansion does not add any upside but lots of downside.

      I will expand at some point but again: there is still enough market to capture in Germany and DACH.

  4. 2

    Congrats Sumit! I got questions about your journeys first months because I'm in 3. month of mine, around $275 MRR. :)

    1. Which paid acquisition channels did you use in first months?
    2. How did your LTV/CAC ratio start and go?
    3. How many months did you drive with negative cash flow?

    Thank you for your highly valuable contribution.

    1. 1

      I've later seen your video about paid advertising but I'm still curious about your current opinion.

      1. 2

        Hey there, congrats on your first MRR milestones 🎉 - keep going!

        1. I have not used any paid acquisition channels, except a very limited Affiliate program that I started a year in.
        2. CAC is basically 0€. LTV goes up as I focus on reducing churn and raising value and prices but it's not where it should be. What would be a great LTV though?
        3. Mhh I had around 4 months of negative cashflow but we are talking a few 100€ (not counting in my time).
  5. 2

    You're an absolute machine 🔥

    I love your balance between building in public, but also building a real business outside of the Twitter bubble.

    I also love your approach to outsourcing. I'd always struggled with this as I didn't value my time as a founder. Once I realised that time was also my biggest bottleneck, it completely changed my perspective.

    You deserve every bit of success you've amassed. Looking forward to watching you grow 👏

    1. 2

      Aww thanks a lot for the kind words. Time is such a huge factor that is a big asset, especially as a Solo founder. I outsource / buy as much as possible and use my time to add value to users. Highly recommended!

  6. 2

    Absolutely love your approach to building the product.

    If you don't me asking, what does your churn look like? I'm assuming it's extremely low, simply because of how niche your product is.

    And based on your observations, are you seeing that customers find success with the product early on because of how narrow the customer segment is? I'm curious because I worked at a startup that would cast a massive net when it came to acquiring customers, and we were struggling to help customers get value with the product soon after signup.

    1. 1

      Hey there, mhh our churn is definitely too high. We cut it in half already this year but it's still too high. We focus a lot on that. We talk to as many users that churned as possible, collect reasons, win them back, solve their problems, work on what they miss to get to better product market fit.
      So yea, unfortunately it's not low (won't share the exact number though) and it's one of our 3 north-star metrics that we optimize for.

  7. 2

    my focus switched from building the product to building the machine that builds the product

    Love this...

    1. Can you share more about what this process has looked like for you?
    2. Any advice for fellow developer founders who have revenue and still find themselves coding everything even though they probably shouldn't at this point?
    3. What functions did you begin to hire freelancers for first? What order do you think makes sense?

    Thanks!

    1. 2

      Hey policenauts,

      let me try to reflect a bit on that:

      1. The hardest part for me was to give up control, let others decide on technical implementations or architecture, release without me, own pieces of the system. That was a big success for our backend where the team releases new things and I sometimes only know when they release the changelog. On the frontend side (where I have the most technical experience) I am still on the process of letting go. But it requires lots of communication, documentation and collaboration to get whatever is in your head out so others can make decision that contribute to your vision and goal without you giving an explicit task list. Most of the time, other people will go a lot deeper on these topics and ultimately make better decision than you do.

      2. Outsource the bottlenecks first. What's the most limiting factor to go towards your vision / creating more value for your users? Then find that. Could be a skill you lack or it could be your core skill (coding) so you can focus on other things. Start with a freelancer, pair a lot until you trust them to get the job done. Then focus on mapping the roadmap, prioritization, etc and let them code. Take your time in code reviews, let them have their way sometimes so they own success (and failure) and learn from it.

      3. I hired backend first because there was just A LOT to do. My hiring plan is always focused on the next bottleneck and bottlenecks are usually where I spend the most time on. Currently, our web app needs lots of improvements and that's usually what I do. But with a kid and a full-time job at Stripe, I'm the bottleneck to our progress. So - next hire is a frontend dev (already hired freelancers so we can start asap). I focus on enabling them. This slows us down at first but will snowball into multiplied productivity once they're spun up and comfortable taking decisions. Of course, I'm still involved in all of what we're building - until I hire a product manager (but that's probably far off).

      Hope this helped!

  8. 2

    Hi Sumit,
    Great story, I wish you have your 10 full-time team so soon :)

    At which point did it make sense to you financially to hire the first full-time employee?

    1. 2

      I only have full-time freelancers thus far (first employee works part time). With freelancers we can scale up and down in case revenue is unstable. For full time employees - I currently think about it this way: for each 8-10k in monthly revenue I can hire a person. When I get that revenue buffer for a few months in a row and metrics look good I consider hiring someone.
      Or, start with a freelancer for 1 day per week - scale up add you grow. Suddenly, the freelancer works full time for 6 months and hiring a full time employee will actually save you money 🙌

      1. 2

        Thanks for the answer, that makes sense.
        What was the best way for you to find good freelancers?

        1. 2

          I’m pretty lucky in that regard. By putting myself out there, lots of people who wanted to support Parqet reached out proactively so I did test runs with them and continued the collaboration with a few

  9. 2

    I follow you on Twitter and always wondered how you combined a job at stripe with building your product. Very impressive!

    Don’t you think you could grow faster if you want full time on Parquet?

    1. 1

      Oh yes definitely. However, I learn a ton at Stripe that will benefit me down the road. It’s a great place to work and I do want to learn some more things there.

  10. 2

    Did you have any Twitter/Youtube followers when you started your project?

    You have now 5 633 followers, any tips how to build up a follower base?

    Cheers, Kiru

    1. 1

      Hi Kiru, Mhh good question, not sure how many followers I had back then. Maybe 1500 or 2000. I focused on adding value, being authentic and talking about success AND failure, showing vulnerability and hopefully some accountability.

      I always look at people much further than me in this journey which makes it hard to share because it feels like it's insignificant. So I think it's important to remind ourselves that for any person ahead of you, there are 10 people that would like to be where you are - so sharing will help THEM. Even if you just took the first step, you will be an inspiration to anyone who did not started yet.

      With that mindset, I shared my learnings, failures, successes - everything. To make this a more focused and efficient process, I usually devote 1 - 2 hours per week on a Sunday to create content (YouTube, Twitter, etc) and schedule everything.

      Hope this helps!

      1. 1

        Thank you for your reply.

  11. 2

    First of all - congratulations on this success! I‘m super grateful for your sharing everything so openly.

    Can you share a bit about how you manage the team and how you work together? Do you have meetings, calls and so on or is it all async? Any tools in managing a team and communicating that have been especially valuable?

    Thanks!

    1. 2

      Thanks a lot!
      I try to design everything async. That means lots of documentation and stuff takes longer. Upside is, new team members are onboarded way faster and our future selfs are thanking us already for documenting everything :)

      We have 1 meeting per week - a weekly where we share important news, look at wins, challenges, discuss the current progress and focus. Then some team members will have occasional virtual pairings or virtual meetings to discuss something in sync which is just more efficient sometimes before they create a design doc or another artifact for the rest of the team to read. So all in all, very lightweight, async, completely remote and no bound working times. Work during the night, day, in between - no one cares.

      There are challenges of course and lots to do - I read many books on the topic (just finished Primed to Perform). A few things which I think are very helpful:

      • Enable them to make decisions, don't create task lists
      • explain problems, measure outcomes, give everyone access to metrics
      • don't say "do x", say "we need to solve problem A"
      • establish a culture where new team members should raise the bar - everyone should strive to raise the bar (when my team stopped accepting my backend Pull Requests, I knew things are going well)
      • I gave equity (virtual shares)

      Hopefully, I'm bringing my point across somehow. Does that make sense?

      1. 2

        Makes a lot of sense, thank you!

        I especially like the ‚culture of raising the bar‘ 🙌🏻

      2. 1

        Can you share more books that you read on this topic? And what do you mean by virtual shares?

        1. 1

          Sure, I can recommend:

          • It's my company too
          • Primed to perform
          • Start with why
          • The mom test

          Virtual Shares are the common way how Startups give equity to employees. These are not "real shares", they don't have voting rights and things like that. It's much less complicated to distribute them but give employees a way to participate in possible exit scenarios (IPO, merger, acquisition).

  12. 2

    This comment was deleted a year ago.

    1. 1

      There are enough users in Germany for me to serve to start with (picked my niche). Releasing worldwide means I'd have to handle localizations, currencies, hundreds of brokers to support - I would be in many countries with a weak product. Instead I went for one market (first) to build a strong product. There is still so much growth ahead in Germany that an international expansion does not add any upside but lots of downside.

      Re competition, I'm not really looking at them much. I haven't seen a tool that I want so I built it myself - there are lots of copycats now but I will just continue to serve my users. There is nothing specific that I did to "get ahead of them". I did my best to solve my users problems.

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