Last day of January brought us our 1st paying customer 🥇
Just so you know what type of business I'm writing about - it's a SaaS.
On the last day of January we got our 1st paying customer and they already purchased an annual subscription. A day later they requested an additional data connection for which we charged them extra as it was more than what was in their current plan. They agreed without any negotiations.
This one customer required and still requires a lot of support. It seemed annoying at first but we soon realized it’s actually great. That’s because we get to improve our product (fixed few bugs and added new features). Having a customer that is willing to share so much feedback is something I wish for each of you.
Except from fixing the bugs, thanks to their requests we added Disputes and Disputes Ratio from Stripe. And we break them down by country which is something you don’t even have in Stripe’s dashboard.
We are also going to add MRR by the end of the week. It is also something that this customer requested. We wanted to add MRR earlier but prioritized other things. Now we have the motivation to do that.
Here are some milestones that led us to this point
We're still far from reaching our first revenue goal but it's already something. If you're interested in what we're building, it's Raport.
Awesome, Wojtek! Congrats! It's also great to hear that even a single customer can be radically helpful in refining the product and moving it forward. There's so much focus on getting 100,000 users that it seems most people skip right over the outsized value of one prolific user! This is a great perspective to share. 🙏🏻
I like the insight you've found in this post. I agree it's best to make the most out of every stage of the startup. Having this first customer is an important milestone and shouldn't be overlooked. Each step can teach us something and it's important to learn along the way. This way we can be prepared for the future challenges.
"Each step can teach us something and it's important to learn along the way." 👌🏻
Since this is a community of entrepreneurs, the foremost metric in almost everyone's mind is MRR... But I do think that if we back up a bit and take a broader perspective, we should focus on learning and growing as people as the most fundamental value to be derived from our activities. Ideally, that learning and growth translates into pecuniary success eventually... But isn't learning an end in and of itself?
I also think this opens the door to being happier and more fulfilled during the journey, rather than always waiting for 10k MRR, 50k MRR, 100k MRR... and then expecting to be suddenly happy when you finally hit the 'destination'.
so nice!
Cool! 🔥
Gotta start somewhere 😅