Tiiny Host reaches $10,000 ARR 📈
Tiiny Host continues to grow to $10K ARR after recently hitting $500 MRR 🎉
Timeline so far:
- Aug 2019 - Launched Tiiny Host
- Feb 2020 - Launched subscription plan
- Mar 2020 - First paying customers
- Jun 2020 - 10 paying subscribers
- Dec 2020 - SEO traffic begins
- Feb 2021 - $500 MRR
- Apr 2021 - $10K ARR
SEO is still the #1 channel for growth and month on month growth is currently between 30-40%.
In the past few weeks I've introduced a new subscription plan at a higher price point based upon user feedback and have been working on increasing my domain authority.
Whilst SEO is still doing very well as a marking channel I'm currently exploring other growth channels to reduce this single dependency.
The past few month have been a lot of fun, doing support for customers, learning what they like and find difficult and then improving the product ever so slightly & repeating.
I'm so grateful for all the support I've been given till here so if anyone needs any SEO help, I'm by no means an expert but happy to help where I can!
Huge congrats Elston! It's been great to see your progress. Keep plugging away an Tiiny Host and that momentum will just continue to build.
Thanks James! Appreciate all the support 🙏
Hello Rabbitsfoot8,
I felt your product is worth featuring on Product Startups. So took few minutes to publish it - https://my.productstartups.com/c/community/tiinyhost
Good luck to you
Kindly keep in touch
Venkat
Oh wow, thank you Venkat! This is awesome :)
Welcome. Kindly keep in touch - Venkat
Congratulations! I remember reading your first update, it's so great to see you hit this milestone. Site is looking sharp with compelling copy and clear value props. I'm curious - do you have a roadmap at this point?
Also.. at this point, given the customers you're pulling in now do you see them churning from a particular competitor (who may now start to notice you) or do you think you've found product-market fit in a market / segment gap others have left underserved?
Thanks for your kind words! Great questions!
We don't have a strict roadmap but have identified a list of features that users have been asking for. So we're currently evaluating the effort required to implement them vs return in terms of growth. Everything we still do is tied with growth.
Regarding competition, we're genuinely not concerned about them and I don't think you should be for a long long while. The hosting industry is huge and each company is focused on their own roadmap & strategy. I think tiiny has definitely captured an underserved niche but its not something a larger company is concerned about. We're still very small revenue wise compared with larger companies so it doesn't make sense for them to invest in this niche.
Interestingly we don't seem to "steal" customers but rather introduce new users to the world of hosting and some customers use us and our competitors because we serve specific use cases.
Your strategy to hold fast and stack rank features based on growth sounds like the right way to go. Focus is harder when growth starts to happen, the temptation to say "yes" to every feature is hard, particularly with customers who seem like a big fish.
I was thinking about how I would frame the growth strategy of Tiiny as a PM - a mental exercise I can't help myself from doing. It's good practice for me (I'm in between contracts atm) and if i do it out loud here maybe someone benefits from it :)
Taking Tony Ulwick's Growth Strategy Matrix (https://jobs-to-be-done.com/the-jobs-to-be-done-growth-strategy-matrix-426e3d5ff86e), as a way to frame whether you're actually attracting over-served or under-served segments of a market.
You have to know your customers' underlying "job" (or jobs), which I assumed I did for Tiiny, but actually based on what you've said maybe I don't. You mention that you serve specific use cases, I wonder if that equates to serving multiple jobs or if it means it's all the same "job" but you're already discovering segments of users based on their unmet needs within that main job.
If some people are using you as well as a competitor, that's where you may find the first direct competition coming. In this instance, when a competitor notices that you're sharing customers a good PM will take the time to assess whether you represent a missed feature or a partnership/integration opportunity. Be careful here, because an ambitious PM might think they see an opportunity for a quick win by copying Tiiny. I've seen this happen, where a PM wants to chalk up a win but those PMs often don't look deep enough at what makes a product or feature great.
Taking this back to the Growth Strategy Matrix, this could put you in the Differentiating or Disruptive quadrants. The difference being that the former gets a job (or multiple jobs) done better, but at a significantly higher price. A Disruptive strategy gets a job done more cheaply, but not as well as competing solutions.
I suspect though, that you could actually be in the Dominant quadrant with a new product or service offering that gets a job done significantly better and for significantly less money.
The only way to know where you are is be sure of what the "jobs" are and of the needs underneath those jobs better than the competition.
If (future) competitors are familiar with Clayton Christensen's model of disruptive innovation. They might notice you earlier than you think too, especially if you are introducing new people to the hosting market. This is worth a read on that topic:
https://hbr.org/2015/12/what-is-disruptive-innovation
Apologies for dumping thoughts you didn't ask for :P I'm trying to keep a habit of daily writing and keep my head in the game while I wait for a new contract to start :)
Thanks for the incredible insightful reply! I rarely think of my products in this way but it's definitely beneficial for the long term.
My points would be:
Yes I think there are some users that use tiiny for a specific use case in their main job (e.g. developers who want to quickly host a prototype but use a larger platform to host their production site).
There are also users that use tiiny for their complete job (e.g. students who are learning to code and like the simplicity of tiiny because they don't need to understand the complexities of hosting early on)
Interesting point about competitors and PMs copying the idea. My hypothesis is however that competitor sites are currently far too invested in serving the professional technical community (large revenue to be made) that their product & marketing comes across as too daunting for segments of users (e.g. students).
Also noteworthy is that two of my largest competitors (both multimillion dollar companies) actually already have tiiny as a feature on their platform. It's just not as user friendly, hidden and forces users down a funnel they don't want to go down. They just want to host a small webpage in seconds. And so they very size of my competitors makes it hard for them to compete with a small, simple tool.
Thinking longer term, I do think there is a new segment of hosting that I am tapping into now. Traditionally the industry thought of hosting only for permanent content (e.g. blogs and websites). However, with the advent, availability and low-cost of the cloud we have the capability to host anything and very quickly. Some of the sites I see uploaded genuinely surprise me.
Fascinating :) I'd say you're right, the market size and segment differences - plus that kind of bad product development practice you mentioned from your two largest competitors - will ensure Tiiny gets a strong foothold in this space. I have no doubt.
Competitors will likely continue to see it as a feature and not a segment solution for a while. People overlook the simple things when building products- it's crazy but understandable (I've done it multiple times).
It sounds like a core value of Tiiny is in the adoption by 'first-hosting-experience' segments, some of whom evolve into enterprise segments . If someone's first experience of hosting is with Tiiny - then you set the bar for all future experiences! We all remember our first, am I right :P
It's great to see you have a strong sense of the jobs people are using Tiiny to do too.
I'm excited to see where you go with this !
Seems like growth is accelerating nicely. 60% MRR increase from Feb to April ($500 to ~$823). Congrats
How are you getting your customer feedback? I'm currently sending one email 48 hours after sign up asking if there's anything I can help with. Open rate is good, but response rate is pretty low. I'm thinking to start doing an additional email follow up with paid and active free users after a couple months.
Looking forward to the next update!
Thank you! Yep we have a very similar flow and also receive a very small amount of responses. However, the responses we do receive are great.
Follow up email is a great idea!
Do you used python?
Our stack is JavaScript (ReactJs & NodeJs)
Been watching your project from the start. It's so great to see you reach this milestone! Huge congratulations.
Ah wow thanks @chr15m ! It's definitely been a long road, hope I've been spreading some knowledge along the way :)
Congrats on your accomplishments.
This comment was deleted 5 years ago