Indiehackers! What's your MRR goal and why?
Curious to see the separation between how many of us in here are aiming for huge numbers v.s. taking a more 1,000 true fans kind of approach with what they're building.
Either way is fine.
If you don't have an MRR goal, what current metric are you working towards, by when and why?
I'll start: On my current project the goal is to build monthly traffic. Not yet launched. Launching in approximately 1 week. Aiming for a consistent 100k monthly visits.
Product is community based. More info to come soon.
How about you?
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My goal with FeedbackPanda was $50,000k. When it became clear to me back in 2017 that we were going to build a niche SaaS product, that number popped into my head. I thought that with $600k a year, with good margins, that would be enough to build liquidity for myself and my partner Danielle, as well as increasing the actual value of the company itself.
We reached that goal in early 2019. Immediately after, Danielle and I figured that next time, we better set a higher MRR goal :)
For a solopreneur/bootstrapped business, I would recommend setting a high future goal (like $50k MMR, $83k MRR or maybe a 6-figure number). Have a short-term goal of $10k (+expenses, so $12k-$15k realistically) that will allow you to build financial stability for yourself. Decisions are different once you know that you have a year or two of money stashed away. Later, set $30k as a new secondary goal, which allows you to hire a few people you need for scale. And so on.
My experience is: set lofty goals, and then define steps.
Awesome advice, wish I had the control to move this to the top of the thread. You mentioned you had more freedom due to having a year or two of money in the bank. Did you have that during building due to savings from a job you had?
or are you talking specifically about business bank account balance that started building over time?
I had maybe a month or two of savings when we started the company.
I had been moonlighting for a bit, as I built the tech side of the product as a solution to Danielle's immediate problem. It was easy to validate the product seeing how much it improved her life, so the risk of going all-in was not too high.
Here is the IH interview with Danielle https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/turning-frustration-into-a-35k-mo-product-that-helps-teachers-excel-e530d2e344 about how we got started.
I am talking about the company bank account, mostly.
Having some savings is something I recommend. Having a regular income is also a good idea, which can be either a day job or, better yet, an established freelancing practice (as that will allow you to better structure your time working on the bootstrapped business).
So maybe the FIRST goal should be "$0 MRR + have enough job security / contracts / savings to last for a few months".
The great thing about bootstrapped businesses is that they don't take 5 years to build. You can try and see if your idea is good, great, or totally off within a few weeks. We got lucky with our product/niche/market/audience combination and were profitable within a month. Other businesses I had before didn't get to profitability ever. For some, it was clear that they were duds a few weeks in. Learned something from every single one of them.
and then it moved to the top, who knew it only took an upvote ;)
Congrats! Well done on hitting 50k! Especially living in China, that's great. Guess you don't need to worry about optimizing your infrastructure costs after all 😂
We live in Germany, our customers are mostly US/Canadian, and they themselves work for Chinese companies. SO a lot of countries involved. Just to clear that up :)
It's still good money for Germany though, even though taxes here eat up a good 35% by default.
My MRR milestones would be:
$2-3k - it proves that there's a market and you have some sort of product-market-fit
$10k - you have a business to build, and need to find your way to grow it
$50k - you have a real business, and figured out how to grow it initially in at least a semi-scalable way
$100k - you have an acknowledged business, that solves a real pain for several thousands of people, and is better than the competition in many ways
$250k-$500k - maybe it's time to think of an EXIT because you can get a good price for the company and team that you built, or raise loads of money to be able to grow to $1M+ MRR
$12,500 MRR before I quit my fulltime job. Once I quit, my goal would be $25,000 MRR.
Solid goal. @parkeragee Are you on your own in your venture? I'm with you there on X before leaving full-time job. But sometimes I also wonder..
"How fast can I get to financial escape velocity having both the side projects $12,500 MRR and the jobs income?"
I guess it depends on time spent.
My goals for testerbot.io are to get traction and keep improving the product. Once the paid tier is released, I would aim to reach ramen profitability. I will break it down into smaller steps from getting my first customer to the next 10, 100, 500, etc.
One of my challenges is that the MVP for my product is a lot of work. The MRR goals will need to be determined based on the number of individuals working on the product.
Testerbot looks interesting. So you're releasing API for testing? How would you handle domain-specific testing needs?
I'm targetting 5k MRR to be able to get a paycheck from it. The issue in France is that when you consider a paycheck of 1500€/m, you have to pay+80% of taxes, so 1500€ in your pocket means 2700€ for your company.
The delta is the costs related to the service (servers, saas I use, etc) and the rest would go to try things for growth.
I'm currently at around 3k MRR with PDFShift in about 15 months so I'm hoping to be there next year!
This is awesome. I was looking for a good PDF api. There seem to be no good options for it. I'm not a buyer at the moment, but I'm bookmarking for future use. This is great.
Thank you so much :) Happy to help you set up if you have any questions!
I bookmarked the tool. Might use for work soon.
I don't have a specific MRR goal because I think it's kind of silly. Just like the days of healthy life or the amount of love I experience in those days, there's no specific limit, I'd put on it. Enough to survive is enough. All else held equal, the more the better.
Along with @arvidkahl's line of thinking, I'd say my goals are:
I'd say I'm at stage 1.33 or so right now. I can provide for myself via indiehacking, and have a bit of freedom but only if I'm frugal. I.e., I can take a vacation every few months, but only in places much cheaper than SF.
I agree with this way of looking at it. Do you ever think what 3 or 4 look like, or is that more personal change within your own close network?
I do, but I try not to often. It's far, far off and daydreaming that far our doesn't generally have a good ROI.
Trying for 1k MRR with https://www.jobtrackable.com/. This is a good enough amount as I live in India. Obviously the more the better.
Awesome. The jobs market is very lucrative if you tap into the right niche. Good luck!
How much do u currently earn with it
Just launched. Only 1 sale as of now.
Cool. All d best.
About 1k MRR and that would bring me to ramen profitability. Not necessarily from Random HIIT, but I'm still figuring out my game plan for it.
Random HIIT not monetize-able? I'm curious to why.
It is, but not sure how I want to do it. By sponsorship or pay to unlock more features. Random HIIT was made for me to use so I haven't put much thought into growing and monetizing it. it's one of the things I'm mulling over now.
Final goal is $100 000, which is when we'll be able to sell our project and get enough money to do what we want.
Current goal is to get the first paying user.
For 2019 I've been aiming for an average of $250,000. We are currently at an average of $255k so we did it! Next will be to try and reach $300,000 for our average MRR.
This year involved significant amounts of investment that cut into our profit margins quite a lot so I'm now focusing on getting our profit margin back up to 20%+.
My current goal is $1,600 MRR before I go full time. I'm currently at $250 MRR.
Awesome on getting first paying customers! Lots of cold outreach?
I got the first customer via a connection (someone I know knew them) and all my other customers have been referrals of that one customer.
$500 a month would be enough, $1000 would be ideal.
Anything after that is a plus.
I respect that point of view. How're you getting the data on Monocle Reader? Lots of scraping?
Currently hovering at 6K, 10K would be ideal, income fluctuates so dipping a bit below 10K wouldn’t be an issue, while with 6K a dip makes me worry.
6K allows me to take care of my family, 10K would take away some worries and would allow me to “feel” like I can take more days off. So 10K.
Solid goal. Days off are a plus. I'm starting to realize that honestly. I've been grinding extremely hard at my day job. 50 hours a week. Managing multiple large project build outs.
Then I'm hacking together my own projects in after-hours time. Really ought to schedule a vacation from all the work and take a week to refresh.
For me I want to take my current MRR from $150 to $500, which is the basic income in my country, believe it or not.
The metric I am working on is website visitors.
Of course from there, other goals would be $10k ARR and $100k ARR
Wow that's pretty awesome. So I can imagine at $100k ARR which is very doable your living situation would drastically improve. Must be fun to think about?
My goal right now is to get the landing pages up and running, start generating visitors and then sooner a consistent min 3 hires / month via Jobflow. That would mean around €6000 MMR
How do you intend to get the visitors?
At the moment people.
My goal is to focus on product till it go viral
Interesting. I didn't know there was a community for people who had a serious interest in mobile history. How big is the niche?
It's more about personal cellphones showcase part :P. People can add phones to their timeline, review them, add a short story about the passion.
Myself am a smartphone freak, so there it is.
There are almost 16.000 registered users. But that's over a long period of time (since Nov 2012).
Wow - 16,000. That's a decent size. Are you monetizing your site at all? or intend to?
A at the moment, nope. In the future, maybe i will try amazon affiliates.
But for now, this is a hobby project and don't expect any money.
Myself i've learned a lot when developing the site, since almost pretty everything is done by myself, including the slider/carousel logic :D.
I'm working on my first project. The goal is $1000 a month. After that I'll go for $10k, then repeat for $10k increments until I can get $50k a month. If I hit my limit, I'll find another idea and repeat. Goal is to get to $50k a month in a solid space. It's a nice amount of money to be comfortable, take care of my family and not worry about working for someone else.
I hear that, what's the project?
Project doesn't matter tho. I'm trying to change the mindset of product focus and focus on business. My idea is if project 1 fails, I repeat with 2, and so on no matter how many N projects it takes. My current idea is just another daycare app.
My first goal is $2,000/mo in recurring revenue. From there I’d love to grow to 10-15k. No great reason behind any of those numbers, they just sound good and would make me feel great.
Interesting product, I know of someone who is in this situation right now. Also, you've got a CSS bug on your pricing page. Looks like no CSS is loading.
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Interesting take with 'Where it went wrong'. It's like the opposite of starter story. What's your traffic goal? Also - Is your plan primarily SEO?
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Good first set of goals. I think my first month will likely be somewhere along the same lines goal wise. Are you pounding the pavement on social media or running ads?
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Yeah I can see what you mean. Likely generate revenue from advertisers over memberships, unless you come up with a compelling reason for a membership.
Paying for ads could really just be negative ROI until advertisers come along looking to promote on your platform. Chicken & egg, huh?
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That's awesome. Good luck! - I think you can attain that rather quickly with the right product. Be sure to stay active here and let us know what you're working on :)
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$10k is a good starting point. $10k is very different. We have been struggling to get from $10k to $50k, so I think $50k is a good next step after $10k :).
Note: I also checked out Streak, and sent it to our PM. Maybe we'll try it with our devs.
If I were you I would go with a different name, because of Streak CRM... I've been using it for 6 years now :D maybe it's just me who uses Streak, so it might not be a huge issue for you.
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I looked at streak. It's really well designed, good job. I really like the concept too. I've been using a concept from Andy Frisella (MFCEO Podcast) called 'The Power List' it's basically 5 essential tasks to get done each day.
I joined your waitlist. It'd be cool to get it off paper and see if there is some kind of data I can unlock about my working habits over time.
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