Listen to founders who are 10 steps ahead of you, not 1000
Here's a fact: Most of the people here make $0 with their SaaS.
If you're one of them, then why do you go and read "inspirational" interviews of founders doing $20,000, $100,000, or even 1 million in revenue/MRR?
A person doing $0 or even $10/MRR goes through fundamentally different challenges than a person doing $100,000/MRR.
A person doing $0 probably has a full-time job. They struggle to find time to work on their side project. They also struggle to find motivation.
I found one person who has overcome those challenges. He finally started getting some traction and made close to $30/MRR. He keeps going.
This is a person that's 5-10 steps ahead of you, not 100. His name is Joe Tito and he got his first paying customer in August:
Here's my short interview with Joe:
What's your name and what are you working on?
My name is Joe Tito. I’m a 36 year old developer from the greater Baltimore area. I have a B.S and M.S. in Computer Science. I have 16 years of professional software development experience working for top 10 financial companies, government agencies and consulting agencies. Over the years I’ve had many roles including full stack web developer, devops engineer and technical manager.
Right now I’m working on a SAAS service called Zoobl, a powerful link shortener. Most link shortening services are simplistic and boring and don’t offer advanced features. Not only does Zoobl shorten a link, but we provided advanced ‘smart’ links that help you implement A/B testing and geo based routing behind the scenes of your links.
We also provided dead link notifications so that users know when the destination of their short links are broken. Zoobl also provides detailed metrics and analytics to better help customers understand who their customers are, where they’re coming from and what type of devices they use. Customers can even utilize their own custom domain names to brand their links with their own short domain.
What's your current full-time job?
Right now I work as a Technical Manager for a consulting company. We help clients modernize their outdated tech stacks, implement CI/CD pipelines, help migrate to the cloud environments (AWS/GCP/Azure), deploy Infrastructure as Code using HashiCorp Terraform and deploy HashiCorp Vault for Secrets Management.
How much time do you devote on Zoobl , while you're still employed?
I usually devote around 10-15 hours a week towards Zoobl - depending on my work schedule. Since I’m 100% remote, I eliminated my daily commute which has opened up a lot of time in my schedule for side projects. I also try to work on side projects instead of bingeing Netflix for 4-5 hours after work. Some days that works better than others.
How do you manage to find the time/energy to work on Zoobl while having a full-time job?
I don’t ‘find’ time to work on side projects, I make time to do it. I intentionally block off time to work on Zoobl, even if it’s 30 minutes to an hour a day.
Programming has been a hobby of mine since I was 15 and taught myself how to write HTML/PHP to build websites. Having a technical project to work on brings me a lot of happiness and satisfaction, so I always make time for it.
There’s a few ways that I mentally trick myself into staying consistent:
I don’t take side projects too seriously (for now). I look at them as a way to learn, play around with new technologies and be creative.
I break down tasks into small bite size pieces. This allows me to have realistic goals for the time I can spend working on Zoobl and motivates me to knock out lots of little things. If something seems too big to accomplish in one session, it’s more daunting and I’m likely to push it off. So I really break things down on my to do list so that I can feel accomplished more frequently.
I consider my time for side projects as ‘Joe time’ and treat it like self care.
How did you manage the motivation to keep going, knowing that your full-time job brings you predictable/stable revenue?
As part of my full time job as a Technical Manager, I do more overseeing of projects than hands on development. Since I’m a developer at heart, I use side projects as a way to stay technically sharp, flex my ‘developer brain’ and learn new technologies. As a manager, I always want to be able to hang with the technical rock stars that work for me. So that motivates me to keep chugging along so I can keep up.
Even though my full-time job provides 100% of our income, I like to think that the work I do on Zoobl will pay off and eventually add an additional income stream for our family. The goal for any of my side projects isn’t to start a big company, it’s to add more ‘easy-ish’ streams of income. Even if Zoobl were to only make $500 MRR, and be easy to manage, I’d be incredibly happy with that.
At what point would you consider abandoning your job to focus full-time to Zoobl ?
I’m a huge fan of stability - so the only way I would consider leaving my full time job to work on Zoobl would be if/when it was providing the same, or better, income compared to my current position. Even then, my goal for any project is for it to be easy to manage, so I’ll probably do both until I can’t balance both any longer.
Have any questions & advice for Joe?
Type them in the comments below.
Hey Joe! Zoobl looks pretty cool.
I wonder if one of the things that's stopping you from growing is your low prices. I've seen countless interviews with founders (who were B2B, like you) who said that after they increased their prices, they immediately saw higher conversion rates. Maybe businesses see those prices as too low and ask: "What's the catch"?
Not always true, I read somewhere that there are two ways to earn lots of money, sell something expensive to a few people, or sell something low cost to a lot of people. Of course, it has to be profitable in both cases, but I like the second approach as I think it is easier to execute. Just my opinion.
Definitely raise prices.
If not even 1 in 4 users complain that you're "too expensive," it's definitely time to raise prices.
Hey Molly - yeah, I can see your point and how people can view 'cheap' plans as having a 'catch'.
We're still playing around with pricing models / plans internally and will probably do some split testing to see what performs better. But with the way I built Zoobl to dynamically scale and be serverless on AWS lambda, it's super cheap to run (< $150 / month). So for now I like the idea of pricing it reasonably and putting the site through it paces to make sure it's stable and scales properly.
I love serverless. It's the way to go. If I were to build Zoobl, I would go with Cloudflare Workers + KV for an even cheaper and faster (at the edge) service. I think it would be a perfect fit for this use-case.
When thinking about pricing, you shouldn't consider your costs at all. Just consider the value you are providing the client.
One thing you could do is to email the few customers you've landed and ask them these questions in a short survey (after letting them know they will be grandfathered into their current plan):
This works better with a larger survey pool (and you might send it out to leads who have shown interest), but you can then graph the results and find your sweet spot. This is the results for my product, charted out: Online Writing Tool Survey Results
You can see where to price it by the inflection points (where the green lines cross and the red lines cross). I wanted my product to be seen as the premium option, so I went with the higher LTV inflection rather than larger market share. But anywhere in that range would work.
Another note with the survey, I asked them to rate features like this:
What I found is those who chose Goals/Stats as the most important feature were the ones willing to pay the least. That helped me with packaging to put the lowest value features in the lowest tier package. Including pricing + features in one survey will help you determine the value of your features as well. It was a lot of work to put together, but very valuable.
BTW, the packaging + pricing changes resulted in an uptick in customers and revenue. It made the difference between running out of money (I went full time before Dabble was paying me a full salary) and getting to a full-time salary for me.
You're basically giving the customers what they want/need with correct pricing/packaging. As builders we always undervalue our product because we built it and know if we were in the customer's shoes we could just build it ourselves. But our customers are busy building their own companies and place a higher value on what we offer than what we do.
Need more of these types of articles about micro achievers. Really inspiring
The "$10k MRR in 6 months" and "$100k MRR in 2 years" posts are quite intimidating, so those who have smaller milestones are embarrassed to post about their achievements.
Which is a shame, really, since we all start somewhere and need all the motivation and encouragement to keep going.
Agreed!
Super inspiring. Thanks for sharing, wish you success.
I got my first paying customer today for the https://orso.app
It took me 1.1 year after publishing the extension on chrome store to get first paying customer.
Congrats, Rahul! Would love to invite you to check out https://geeksandexperts.com/ - a lot of indie creators would be glad to learn from your experience.
WOOOOO!
Congrats!
Thanks a lot
I'd really love to find other people who are just starting to get traction.
If you know some, pls tag them below 👏
Hey Lilian. I'm happy to connect and share resources that I've been using to get some traction on https://geeksandexperts.com/ - we are pre-revenue, but many of the other indie creators who have joined us have some revenue-generating products.
The challenge for most is the "cold start", the first 10 customers.
Acquiring the first few customers is the absolute worst! Soooo discouraging during this time, but keep going :)
Really inspiring article. I needed to read this at some point—thanks for that!
It is manual labor with a numbers game. Reach out to 40 a day.
"Listen to founders who are 10 steps ahead of you, not 1000"
This is a belief that you could turn into a pretty amazing business if done right
That's the goal! Gotta crawl before you can run :)
Great interview!
Those who are 100 steps ahead still remember the early days and have great advice to give. Especially because they've figured it out at least once. You just have to sift advice that applies to early stage.
Here's mine. It took me 2 years to build Dabble while raising 6 kids
Very good Insights and motivating. Thanks for sharing.
My pleasure!
Let me copy microsoft. ok?
Super inspiring. Thanks for sharing
My pleasure :) Glad you enjoyed!
:)
Loved the post, very well said!
This was very very inspirational!
Glad you enjoyed it :)
Great post. The headline outlines exactly how you should think.
Agreed - it's hard following advice for people who are too far ahead of where you are. The advice just doesn't translate.
How did you find your first customer?
How are you promoting/marketing your product?
Nicely explained! I also posted a similar content to this - "Lessons from Founders".
Really good to read this!
This is the sort of post & podcast that drew me to IH in the first place.
This is why we're all here <3
This was the article I needed to read!
I'm in the same spot right now, working a full time job while bootstrapping a startup with my cofounder. And making (not "finding") time to work on it, even if it's just 30mins to an hour a day.
You got this :)
Man this had to be said.
Great article.
Really interesting interview. Liked the part about finding the time to work on Zoobl.
Curious, how did you attract your first paying customer to Zoobl?
My first paying customer actually came from reddit. I posted in a subreddit looking for beta testers and a marketing person reached out to me tell me he loved the idea of Zoobl and actually wanted to build a similar thing himself, but didn't have the technical chops to do it. So I gave him a coupon code for a free few months in exchange for his help, and now he continues to pay monthly :)
My next paying customers came from signups from targeted Google ads.
Totally agreed. Another metaphor would be: start-ups often think of themselves as a smaller version of Amazon or Facebook, i.e. thy apply what the big guys do but in a smaller scale. In most cases this is wrong as the former and the latter are two radically different organisations
Great advice and a great post! I assume that as a developer, you focus less on promoting your product, hence a long time to acquire the first customers. This is super common among founders. From what you write, it sounds like you already have an amazing product – now it's time to let the world know about it!
This is great material. Mentally tricking one self into the desired outcome is a good practice since a lot of other things are tricking us into giving them our time and attention. I do it too, or else I can just waste all the time playing videogames or watching series.
🙌
Great post. A person at a different stratum is not going to have a good grasp of your strata's current context. Adjust accordingly.
Nice! One day your startup will become a unicorn 🦄
Very nice interview, Darko. Thank you very much.
After launching our first beta, we started selling our product as a lifetime deal. That was a great starting point. At the beginning we were completely overwhelmed by all the questions, bug-reports and feature-requests, but it turned out to be a perfect bootcamp on all levels. Besides many bug-fixes and a very good amount of money, this experience forced us to become more and more confident with our product. ... It was a super training, that I can strongly recommend to any founder.
Agreed - Remember businesses get bought and sold all the time across the globe.
This is an outlier and not most companies - https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/15/adobe-is-buying-figma-for-20b-taking-out-one-of-its-biggest-rivals-in-digital-design/
100K sale with 10K initially invested is often much better when repeated 5-6 times.
I would even bring it closer to 3-5 steps ahead of you in revenue. Aim for multiple small wins. Going from 0 revenue a month to a consistent 2K is a game changer for some. Then just multiple the steps. 2K > 10K > 50K > 150 > 250K (you reached quarter of million) consistently - better than most.
This sounds like simple advice, but its not. That was very well said. I echo your sentiments on this 100%. Baby steps! We are doing the same thing for our forms backend fabform.io . It's gradual improvement and moving the "needle forward" litle by little. Just focus on wants at near hand.
Hey Joe, this is inspiring!
How did you start working on this? Did you do market research to prove the need or solved your own itch?
Zoobl was definitely a scratch your own itch type project. Except it was my friend who had the itch, not me. My friend runs a youtube channel with over 100k subs. He has older videos, which still pull in a lot of traffic, that have a bunch of dead links now because they're 2-3 years old. So I built this for him so that he could create short URLs that can be monitored / changed at any time.
Okay. Got it.
And before trying to build it up did you also think of doing market research or user interviews to see if this is going to be a problem for others too? If not, why?
Honestly - no I didn't. I know there are a ton of other link shorteners out there, so figured the market could easily handle another. The only thing I did research was feature sets of the other link shorteners to see how I could differentiate myself from them.
The other reasons I skipped doing more research:
Understood. Thanks a lot for your reply.
Great article. Very inspiring article. An amazing article. So amazing, it's as though it speaks about my situation, speaks about my current troubles. Thanks for this.
Joe! It Looks Cool.
Thank you Eric! :)
Really interesting read and love the energy and enthusiasm you bring to the project. It has to be a sustainable approach that you enjoy each and every day.
Hi Joe, how many days did it took for you to get your first paying customer?
Hard to say because I kind of soft launched the site. From when I started developed to when I had a paying customer was probably 4-5 months. I built a very simple MVP so that I could launch sooner rather than later and just keep adding features.
Great interview! I really like the way you break down tasks to create a sense of constant achievement. I am currently balancing medical school with building Apply Medic, an online tutoring agancy for medical school admissions. Do you prefer being a solo founder or being part of a team?
Good luck in medical school and on your app too by the way :)
Thank you so much! Best of luck with Zoobl!
Depends? For side projects, I've only ever been a solo founder. I built everything on zoobl myself. But for my primary job, nothing beat having a good team on your side :)
Thanks so much! That's good to know.
Really inspiring interview! I really love Joe's perspective of treating his side projects as self care. It's giving me hobby vibes.
Just thinking about all of the pressure I have put on myself and my side projects, has me feeling a little silly and embarrassed. Building/creating technology should be fun and doubly so when it's something we are passionate about.
Thank @zoobl and @Darko
Appreciate the kind words :) Yeah man, building stuff should be fun - don't take it too seriously to the point where it stops being fun and stops being enjoyable!
I see you're local to me! I'm from Catonsville MD :)
Agreed! Yes, I am in Baltimore not to far from JHU. I actually sent you a LinkedIn request/message. Would love to connect in person or virtually if you are down.
Hey Joe! Keep up your hardwork! It's very inspiring.
Thanks Jeff :)
How do you consider an idea a good one for a startup
I think this is different for everyone. For Zoobl in particular, I set out to build something that solved a problem for a friend. I discovered my friend had dead links on his YouTube channel's old videos, which were still getting a lot of traffic. So I saw a gap in the market and tried to fill it.
I agree, Joe. Finding a personal problem makes sense. I really wanted a way to connect with those who are just a few steps ahead of me in the founder journey and sending cold DMs or asking for "pick your brain" requests didn't work too well so I started working on https://geeksandexperts.com/ which makes it easy to find and connect with other indie creators over a quick call and get the advice you need. The indie creators also get to monetize their knowledge on shipping, scaling, or selling their side hustles - win-win! They can, of course, choose not to charge as well.
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