Shattering the 7-figure ceiling after a 4-year plateau

Jesse Schoberg started DropInBlog as a side project in 2015. The first four years were a grind. The next three got him near seven figures. The four after that, he was stuck.

Here's Jesse on how he finally shattered the ceiling. 👇

Both ends of the barbell

I'm Jesse, co-founder and CEO of DropInBlog. It's a headless blog CMS that drops into any existing website.

Most companies have a marketing site they love and a blog they hate, usually because the blog lives on a subdomain or in a platform that doesn't match the rest of the brand. We fix that. We now have SDKs for React, Next.js, Laravel, and Express, plus a Rendered API and an MCP server for AI workflows. Your blog looks beautiful with a super-powerful infrastructure behind it.

We launched in 2015, but didn't gain traction until 2019. Four years of grinding before it clicked. We experienced strong growth from 2019 to 2021, then reached a near-plateau of slow growth around 7 figures. That lasted about four years. In the last stretch, we finally broke through that ceiling and are growing again, with bigger plans and a much stronger brand and product. It's a really exciting chapter.

We've been bootstrapped from day one and now power 2,000+ blogs across 50+ platforms. Our customers include venture-backed startups, publicly traded companies, established B2B SaaS brands, and ecommerce names you'd recognize. I run the company with my two cofounders and a small team.

These days, I'm focused on the other end of our barbell. We've had self-serve pretty dialed in for a few years, but we hadn't focused as much on the upmarket side, where we have a lot of demand. So we are currently working on pre-enterprise and bigger customers, plus a recent UI/UX refresh to match. It's been a lot of fun.

Outside of work, my wife Janine and I live nomadically, based mostly in Bangkok, and traveling the rest of the year. She plans retreats for remote teams all over. We've been doing the location-independent thing for about ten years now.

Starting as a side project

Before getting started with DropInBlog, we ran an agency for years. But running a SaaS was the promised land.

We shipped a few products, but could never get any of them over $2k MRR. DropInBlog started as a side project to solve a problem we kept having with our agency clients: they wanted to embed a blog on their existing sites without needing WordPress or Ghost on a mismatched subdomain.

In 2015, the stack reflected that era. V1 was Symfony 1.4 and Bootstrap.

Then, the no-code revolution hit in 2019, and suddenly, a lot more people had the same problem. We got traction and went all in. We completely rewrote it in Laravel, and we couldn't be happier with that decision.

I'm a CSS and front-end guy at heart, so I manually handled much of the UX/UI and really dialed it in. Jason (my CTO and cofounder) handled the heavy backend work. Meanwhile, Laura (my COO and cofounder) ran the business while we played with the code. That's still the case today.

More recently, we redid the dashboard's presentation layer using Flux, which has been a huge upgrade.

Early technical challenges

The main challenge early on was embedding a blog cleanly into someone else's site design, ensuring it worked across dozens of uncontrolled platforms, and remained SEO-friendly.

Initially, we only had a rough API. Then we developed some JS magic that could render a blog anywhere and ensure proper crawling and indexing. From there, we continued to build upon it.

Today, we offer SDKs for major frameworks, a Rendered API, an MCP server... allll the things!

The stack

So, here's the stack:

• Backend: Laravel

• Frontend/dashboard: Livewire + Flux UI, Tailwind

• Customer-facing Blog SDKs: React, Next.js, Laravel, Express

• APIs: Rendered API, Raw API, plus an MCP server for AI workflows

• Infrastructure: Laravel Cloud, Cloudflare, PlanetScale

The whole game is making something complex feel simple. The dashboard is where customers write, schedule, and manage content. That's all Laravel on the backend with a Livewire and Flux UI on the front. Content lives in PlanetScale.

When someone visits a customer's blog, the request hits us via their chosen integration. Enterprise customers typically call the Rendered API server-side, some use one of our SDKs, and others use our platform apps for Shopify, BigCommerce, and others. Cloudflare sits in front of all of it for caching and edge delivery.

The infrastructure runs on Laravel Cloud; PlanetScale manages the database. We use a few smaller APIs where it makes sense, but we try to avoid external dependencies as much as possible. The architecture ensures the customer never thinks about any of this. Their site stays their site. We're just the blog underneath.

SEO, GEO, and word of mouth

The early years were a slow grind. We primarily used SEO and agency word of mouth. And we became the obvious solution when people searched for it.

As far as SEO, we do what most serious SEO teams do. This involves constant data analysis of keywords, search volume, and rank difficulty. We've been doing it so long, it's just become muscle memory.

That's the foundation we are now building upon.

The shift upmarket has also opened up channels that didn't make sense before, like podcast sponsorships and direct sales. Honestly, this whole new push feels like running a new business again. I'm learning things I haven't had to learn in years and failing at new ideas as fast as I can. That, plus how much Claude Code has changed how we build. It's the most fun I've had with the company in years.

Recently, we researched with our customers how their content appeared in LLMs, which provided real data on what works. I recently turned that into a talk at MicroConf. We built Mention Boost™ directly from that work.

The broader trend is that blogging's next chapter involves feeding AI. Search isn't going away, but becoming the source LLMs cite is becoming equally, if not more, important. We built for that shift, and it's been pretty wild watching our smallest customers beat out big names in AI mentions as a result.

Overcoming the 7-figure plateau

The biggest challenge was the plateau that I mentioned. We spent almost four years stuck at 7 figures. I had finally "made it" and joined the big indie hackers, but it was a very frustrating period. The old saying, "If you're not growing, you're dying," is a feeling that's hard to shake.

What happened lines up with what Jason Cohen calls Max MRR. Every SaaS has a ceiling determined by how much new MRR you bring in versus what churns out. Our main channel has always been SEO, and at a certain point, the math was the math. I didn't know it was coming, or even that this concept existed.

We addressed it in two ways: fixing pricing and finding new channels. Until this point, the whole team consisted of hourly contractors, but we finally leveled up, hiring three full-time employees in marketing and success to solve it.

During that period of finding a new growth lever, we also rebuilt the foundation. Using de-anonymization tools, we noticed that customers from large companies visited our site but did not sign up. Since we couldn't find a magic wand for our current customer base, we took a big bet. We built bigger plans with features larger businesses need, redesigned the site, rebranded, and rewrote the copy to reflect a more serious business, aligning with our product's growth.

This was a lot of work and a big bet, but I got it right. Those customers now sign up.

We also started offering demos, which are almost required for larger customers. An unexpected benefit is that the demos have also shaped the product better for our self-serve tiers.

It's still in progress, but we can finally see the light. Higher pricing tiers opened up a new customer profile we couldn't serve before, and now we can test more new channels.

Rob Walling has a great talk on this called Break Through the 7 SaaS Plateaus. TL;DR: most SaaS companies never break through. Most founders get bored and sell, or just coast forever. If you want to keep growing, you have to work on new markets, new pricing, or new channels. That's it.

If I were starting over, I'd solve this earlier. SEO had been compounding for us for years, and we kept assuming it would keep going. Channels tap out. By the time growth slows, you are already late, and the plateau is imminent.

Community, tools, and time

A few things that have been particularly helpful:

• Being around other founders working on similar things has been the most helpful. I've been a member of Dynamite Circle for about 10 years, and it's a special community full of the most amazing and diverse people I have ever met.

• In the business, we've had good results using Microsoft Clarity to understand user behavior and fix onboarding flows.

• This point is more counterintuitive: DropInBlog took a long time to get traction, and that's been oddly helpful (or so I tell myself). I truly respect how hard it is to grow a 7-figure business. I see many newer founders gain traction, sell right away, and assume they can quickly spin up the next business. Usually, they can't. Having $200k in the bank and burning $5k a month is scarier than $5k a month landing in your account. Cash flow and cash piles are not the same.

Lessons for new indie hackers

Here's what I'd tell anyone on this journey:

• Details matter.

• Surround yourself with other indie hackers IRL.

• Talk to customers and pivot early.

• Work on marketing as hard as you work on product.

• Read The SaaS Playbook.

• Do the Dreamline exercise.

• Move somewhere cheaper.

• Don't sell too early.

What's next?

I'm excited to play in the upmarket category. It's a lot of fun and a new challenge. For now, I'll see where that goes, and if we're still having fun, we'll pursue proper enterprise next.

Personally, my wife Janine and I have a good cadence, spending about half the year in Bangkok and significant time in Barcelona or Mexico City. It's been a nice contrast. This year, we discovered and fell in love with Hong Kong; it could be a nice addition to our rotation.

I'm trying to stay curious, be grateful for the magic internet money, and eat good food and share good company around the world.

You can banter with me on X, read my thoughts, or upgrade your blog with DropInBlog. Happy to chat with other founders about SEO, growth issues, or global living.