Competing on price to carve out an $18k MRR foothold

While Abhishek Chakravarty was building a side project, he noticed an influx of users who weren't quite right for the product. So, he did some investigating, sold the product, and built a Youform specifically for those users. Now, it's bringing in $18k MRR.

Here's Abhishek on how he did it. 👇

Quitting corporate

I started working as a software developer in 2015. My first job was at Accenture. I hated that big corp, so I left after six months to work for a startup. Four years later, I left that startup to work as a freelancer. And I kept building projects on the side.

Some of them worked; some never got any users. Then, I made Botflow, a no-code chatbot builder.

While I was growing it, I realized most of my users were coming from Typeform — a price increase was leading users to search for alternatives. But I had built Botflow as a chatbot builder, not a form or survey builder, and that presented limitations. So, I sold it on Acquire.com for $10k and built Youform from scratch.

Youform is a form and survey builder that 80,000 users currently love. We're generating $18K MRR.

Building the product

I built the initial version in 3-4 days while freelancing for multiple clients.

Here's my stack:

• Laravel

• Vue.js

• AWS

• Laravel Envoyer for zero-downtime deployment

• Stripe

I also use many AI models, including Claude, Grok AI, Codex, and Gemini, for tasks like writing code, code reviews, server monitoring, finding low-hanging SEO keywords, and reviewing help documentation to improve it for our users.

Going full-time

When you start a SaaS, the revenue is peanuts, and other appealing products or freelancing clients can easily distract you due to the promise of short-term income. Maintaining focus on the product is a challenge, but once you surpass $5k MRR, a SaaS business offers the best kind of work.

If I had to start over, I would save one or two years of financial runway from my job or freelancing work, then focus completely on the SaaS.

Pivoting from LTDs to subscriptions

Youform is a freemium SaaS. Almost all our features are free, so free users serve as our marketing channel — when they build forms and send them to others, the forms carry our branding and badge, so we gain many users this way.

As far as monetization, we initially started with a lifetime deal for $299. Then, we increased it to $399. We ran that lifetime deal for 40 days and made over $35,000. Since then, we have fully adopted a subscription model.

Our price is $29 per month, the cheapest in the market, offering many features that even existing incumbents do not currently provide. We primarily grow revenue by listening to users and shipping fast.

Growth via social listening

In the beginning, I searched for keywords like "Typeform" on Twitter and Reddit whenever I was taking a break from client work. Then, I'd send a direct message like: "Hey, you are using Typeform. Would you try my product, which is an affordable alternative, and give me some feedback?"

The replies were positive. I gained around 200 users this way.

Then, I met my cofounder, Davis, who runs a successful SASE called Oneup. He proposed a partnership and I agreed.

His Twitter profile provided a boost. He has over 20,000 followers there. When he posted about our partnership, we attracted many lifetime deal users.

From there, we expanded to multiple social media channels like LinkedIn, Reddit, and YouTube. When you're starting out, ranking in search engines is very difficult, so our SEO efforts have been minimal.

Look for competition

Never create something where there is no competition. Find a market gap existing players aren't filling, then position yourself there with simple messaging.

Youform started in a highly crowded market, but we found a market gap, and our messaging was simple from the start. We didn't start with "another form builder" tagline, but "an affordable Typeform alternative," and kept that messaging until we reached $200k ARR.

On that note, target a niche where users are already searching for solutions. For example, if a 'moderative keyword' receives over 3k searches per month, and you can find an alternative keyword for an existing player in the market, it will be much easier to acquire users.

What's next?

From here, my goal is to continue scaling the product and the user base. The form builder market is big, so much remains to be done here.

You can follow along on X and LinkedIn. And check out Youform!