I got to $5,000 in monthly revenue but it took me 3 years & a burnout

For context, I started a business in 2021 as a naive 23-year-old with no prior experience

My family comes from a middle-class background, so I learned everything about running a business from other entrepreneurs & from books

I've seen a lot of people achieve overnight success. For me, this was never the case.

This was the reality of building something from scratch when I literally didn't know anything.

In the country I live in, $1,000 MRR was sufficient to get to ramen profitability. So I set that as my goal after quitting my job and living off my savings

The primary goal of me wanting to start a business was to achieve financial freedom. I didn't want to rely on a job or continue the soul-crushing work just to make money

Failed in my first year with 3 businesses

I got a cofounder who was a long-time friend of mine. In my first year as a founder, I was too excited.

I initially started a business that helped startups hire engineering graduates.

After shooting 40 cold emails, I made $300 for the first time in my life from a business. * This was the best feeling *

But I didn't continue on this business as it required me to rent a lot of my time to find engineering grads & startup recruiters

We pivoted and worked on building a community-based platform for software engineers with the thinking that this would solve our distribution problem of getting devs hired at companies

In order to make things work, I blindly followed a lot of advice given out by "gurus" online, but that was a costly mistake

To be honest, a lot of advice on the internet was fluff. You can't apply advice directly to your business without understanding the context first

Eventually, the product failed miserably. It was the end of 2021, my cofounder left as he felt exhausted & I had a severe burnout which took me almost 2 months to recover

Now I was all alone. A depleting bank balance. But the will to become financially independent stayed strong

A new SaaS

I was clear with my goals.

1. Reach $1,000 MRR as a solo founder.
2. Build a subscription-based product so that it's easier to maintain a steady cash flow
3. Sell a solution for a problem that I was familiar with

So in 2022, I fixed on the idea of building a software product that would charge a subscription fee every month to users

And I chose a problem I faced in my previous venture which basically was that there wasn't a reliable and affordable tool to collect testimonials & display them on a business website

The tools that existed in the market were either too overpriced, or too complicated to use and offered no support

I launched Famewall to solve this exact problem

Launching & getting my first customer

It took me 1 month to build the product. I was hell bent on getting my first customer.

I went after small businesses & creators as customers.

I didn't want to sound sales-y.

So I sent a DM via Twitter to potential customers asking if they had faced the problem of testimonial collection and only if they answered yes, I would share my tool and ask for their feedback

Finally got my first paying customer after 1 month

What helped me grow

In the beginning before Elon acquired Twitter, it worked the best in terms of marketing channel for me.

I'd share what I was building & interesting situations I encountered with my customers (For instance I had an hour long conversation with an 80 year old entrepreneur who liked my tool a lot)

People found such stories interesting and I finally got to $1,000 MRR

Ever since then, I tried a lot of strategies like writing cold emails (didnt' work at all). Ran Facebook Ads (didn't work either). Influencer partnership (They mocked me and turned me down)

SEO & word of mouth were the best channels that worked.

Customers found the tool to be very affordable and recommended the tools to their friends.

In terms of SEO, I'd write articles on pain points faced by my potential users rather than going for keywords suggested by keyword research tools

For instance, I'd focus and write more on "how to collect testimonials" than "what is a testimonial". I didn't use any fancy AI tools.

I do customer support myself. This stood out a lot from the competition that most of the testimonials you'd see on Famewall's landing page is customers liking the experience of the founder helping them out when they get stuck

Became a lifestyle business

This month I hit $5000 MRR

The reason I didn't grow fast was that it was a conscious decision.

I became a bit more philosophical, to be honest. I was making 3 times what my first job ever paid.

I didn't want to keep chasing money for some pointless MRR milestone

So I took the time to enjoy the other things in life as well.

Got married & then in these 2 years I travelled to countries like the United States, UAE, Singapore, Vietnam & Thailand while also building my business

I couldn't even believe that I got to experience all this. I'm grateful to the customers of Famewall for this.

The biggest lessons I learned

1. Most online advice without context is garbage: Everyone wants to give you the "one weird trick" but won't tell you about their specific situation. eg. Increasing your prices will not work if it's a saturated space and competition already has the same features as you do at a lower price

2. Talking to customers > everything else: I wasted 1 full year building products nobody wanted because I was afraid to actually ask people what they needed. (Afraid of being rejected)

3. Being consistent matters: When I used to work 16-hour days for weeks without taking weekends off, I burned out. Since then, I worked 5-7 hours at most daily for 2.5 years, and that worked.

4. Your first idea might probably suck & you could fail. Several ideas of mine did in 2021.

5. Whenever you learn something new, experiment and measure the results. You'd never know if something would work great for your business until you test it yourself and measure the results. But make sure that you test quickly, or procrastination will kill it.

Thanks for taking the time to read till the end. Would love to answer any questions or learn from your feedback if any!