The Product-Market-Fit confirmation I could only dream about

Hey there! I'm solo building my SaaS for more than 2 years now, selling for 13 months already. I had a strong vision from the very beginning, as I badly wanted this kind of app for myself - so no pivots, no researching - building for myself and a wider group that I had a hunch, that must exist somewhere...

It's an investments monitoring app behind a subscription, so a pretty crowded space already, but I decided to just do my thing, without copying others.

I had no followers, no friendly influencers, no high karma on Reddit or HackerNews. So veery slowly, through combination of very low key SEO, monitoring and giving legit answers on Reddit, and some local networking I've started to grow a small user base.

At some point, somebody recommended my app to a local "retired" influencer, who still has a pretty good following and an active community. He liked it, started a trial and bought a subscription. His community took notice, but it wasn't a drove of users. I've slowly racked up around 200 users in a year, with only a quarter out of this community. I'm writing this, because he didn't bring me droves of users, but brought me something more important - trust and credibility - which I was able to build upon with fast pace of updates and quick and friendly founder support.

Now, to the PMF part.

Last week I've started a "black weeks" promo, where anyone, including my current users, can pay for 4 years up-front and buy a license for life. So not a regular LTD. And guess what happened...

20% of my existing users cancelled their subscriptions and purchased the lifetime. They liked it so much, they decided they'll be using it for more than 4 years, and believed I won't disappear before that. If that's not a definition of Product-Market-Fit, I don't know what is...

And when I came with the product to a financial fare this weekend, people who didn't know me, or the influencer even, was very interested, excited even to try it out, as it's pretty feature-full at this point.

I'm in a little nirvana-like state now, and wanted to share this success. My morale 4 weeks ago was medium at best, as building the app, marketing, design work, literally everything is dragging slowly and wears me down. But I've persevered, didn't give up, and was able to experience this. It's still a small step on a road to a fully bootstrapped business, but I'll have a marketing budget now, and maybe even will outsource some work to move a bit faster.

But most importantly, I know have a strong feeling, I'm building something meaningful.

And I wish you all experience the same thing! (unless you already did ;)) 🚀