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Turning a Struggling Side Project into a $2,500 MRR Success

Wow, our side project just hit $2,500 MRR! 🎉

Here's our bumpy journey, the strategies that worked, and the lessons we learned along the way 👇

So, how on earth did we end up here?

We launched our MVP in early 2021, but since the initial results were a flop, we decided to put the project on hold.

Fast forward to the end of the year, and surprise, surprise - our MVP somehow started gaining some traction!

So we thought, "Hey, let's give Featurebase another shot."

Enter 2022: we launched a sleeker, more polished version of Featurebase, and by year's end, we'd hit $1200 MRR.

And guess what? It took us just 3 months to double that this year. 🚀

What worked for us?

Offer insanely great customer support 💕

From the beginning of the year, I have closed over 320 live support requests with an average response time of 1 minute.

This might not be sustainable, but offering customer support as a product founder is a game changer.

It sets you apart from the competition because, let's be honest, which other founder is fixing bugs and helping customers at 2 AM on a Sunday night? 🌙

In the beginning, your product will suck, but your customers need to have the confidence that you will work day and night to get shit done once a problem arises.

Validate new features with money 💵

A product is never truly "finished." There are always new features some users might want.

Instead of working tirelessly to ship a feature for a trial user who may never pay, ask them to subscribe to a paid plan first.

Promise to deliver their feature in a few days, but only after they've subscribed.

This approach has saved us tons of time by avoiding niche features for people who were never going to pay anyway.

Capture more of the value you create 💰

Want a sustainable business? Charge more, but do it the smart way. Focus on adding value to your product first.

We achieved this by rolling out features like SSO, User Segmentation, and other unique ones for larger companies.

You can keep entry-level plans affordable, but why should an enterprise company pay just $35/mo for something that delivers 100x value?

If we had bundled all the Enterprise features into our standard plan at the same price, we'd probably be missing over 40% of our MRR.

Consistent email newsletters and changelogs with email drip campaigns ✉️

Don't let your traffic flow into a leaky bucket. Plug those holes and keep more customers around.

Craft and optimize drip campaigns to onboard new users and showcase your product.

Stay on the radar of potential customers and keep existing ones engaged by consistently sending email newsletters and changelogs.

This approach keeps everyone in the loop about updates and ensures you remain the first choice that comes to mind for those still weighing their options.

Content marketing for high buyer intent and low-difficulty keywords ✍️

If you're in a competitive space, consider targeting and writing content for keywords like "[competitor's name] + alternative."

People searching for this content are actively looking for a better option, and you'll be right there to capture their attention.

If you have a great product, this is an amazing growth hack that has worked wonders for us.

Now, let's talk mistakes, cause we made a few:

1. Setting wrong priorities 🔠

The typical indie makers' game plan goes like this:

  • Cook up a basic MVP
  • Launch on ProductHunt, Betalist, Twitter, etc.
  • If the results are meh after a few weeks, jump ship to the next idea

We followed the same script, but here's the catch: in a competitive market, a rushed MVP just won't cut it most times.

Our MVP struggled to stand out from the competition and was missing key features.

The problem was that we failed to understand this early on and wasted a lot of time trying to find a hidden marketing tactic that could magically 10x our MRR, rather than confronting the issue that our product sucked.

As soon as we took a few months to hone in on our product and build something that people actually wanted to use, we found real traction.

2. Fumbling with customer tracking systems 📊

Here's the problem:

  • Most privacy-friendly analytics tools delete user origin data after 24h - when a user visits your website and comes back a day later to sign up, you won't know where they came from
  • 40% of folks use an adblocker

We're only now starting to feel the impact of these holes in our data when deciding which marketing channels to double down on.

Our solution:
We now use a combo of Plausible Analytics and Mixpanel to track events.

Plausible allows us to get a high-level overview of where traffic originates, and Mixpanel provides a robust way to monitor events, ensuring we always know where users that sign up come from.

3. Ignoring crucial features 🤦‍♂️

In the beginning, we postponed features like SSO, User Segmentation, and integrations, which other competitors had.

We thought that improving other parts of our product was a better investment, and we brutally ignored them.

As soon as we shipped these features our more expensive plans now became viable, which now drives most of our revenue.

So, ask yourself: Are you delaying any features that your customers keep asking for?

The irony is that our own product helped us realize the true importance of these features—SSO and integrations topped the list of customer requests.

Also, a word on development: Instead of writing unit tests, focus on shortening your bug-fixing cycle—this includes spotting the issue ASAP, so you can release a fix quickly. We use Sentry paired with Better Uptime and Axiom to make this happen.

What's next?

While hitting $2500 MRR seemed like a good milestone when we started, it now feels like just the beginning.

Our growth has been accelerating, with nearly 20 new customers joining us last month alone.

Our plan? Keep doubling down on long-term marketing channels like SEO and focus on creating the best product feedback tool in the market.

The journey has only just begun.


If you found something helpful in this, consider following our journey on Twitter: https://twitter.com/FeaturebaseHQ

  1. 4

    Great story @BrunoHiis!

    I liked the bit about adding SSO as it was amongst the top customer requests.

    But how did you first start getting users to visit your site, in order for them to later make requests? Was it just Betalist, PH, Twitter initially? And did you already have some following on those platforms?

    1. 1

      Thank you @michaelcho! 🙂

      Yeah, it was a combination of platforms like Betalist and PH, that got us our first customers. We did not have any following on those platforms.

      However, I think that the results of launching on these platforms would be much worse nowadays since everything is much more competitive. With a simple MVP, it is probably nearly impossible to get real traction by just launching on PH, unless you already have an audience or an incredibly good product idea that just takes off organically.

  2. 3

    Congrats! That's an awesome milestone.

    Great advice too. The content marketing idea ("[competitor's name] + alternative") is clever, I'll definitely remember that one.

  3. 3

    Thanks for these actionable tips! It's always difficult to set the quality bar (at least for me), I'm still trying to know what are the best metrics to capture interest from people at the beginning

    1. 1

      Yeah, it's incredibly difficult...

      With really great ideas the interest would probably be clear from day one, but this will happen very rarely.

      It's much safer to build in an already validated market than try to come up with a golden idea that will most likely fail. However, then the validating part will become 10x more difficult.

      Additionally, if you invest too much effort into an idea, you might be able to make it "somewhat successful." In such cases, it could be just better to shut down the project and focus on something else. For some reason, I think that this might be the case with Feautrebase as well, but I guess time will tell. 😅

      But I think that chatting with your initial/potential customers to find problems in your industry will most likely give the most insights into if your idea might be viable or not. If there aren't any major problems, then only competing on price won't lead to a great outcome.

  4. 3

    Very useful article! +1 on 50-80% of your tips and issues and specially thank you for pointing out that it often may take months to hone in on a target group and feature set that works.

    1. 1

      Thanks a lot, @jansroka! Happy to hear that you found it useful. 😊

  5. 2

    Indeed, the best marketing sometimes is simply improving the product.

    That's when your users are delighted and spread the word for you.

    Definitely true in my experience.

    You can be a build-focused founder and still gain traction.

  6. 2

    How do you get your first 5 pay customers?

    1. 4

      Hey Simon!

      I'm pretty sure we landed our first 5 customers just through Product Hunt and Betalist.

      However, that isn't very sustainable, so most of our growth has been from people looking to switch from competitors to our platform.

      We have built "Alternative to X competitor" pages that rank for this keyword in Google. Also, https://alternativeto.net/ has been a good way to quickly drive attention to our product.

      1. 2

        Pretty clever with the alternativeto, never realized it was crowdsourced and could be used to drive traffic even though it has been popping up in my searches ha.

        Do you any more sources like this?

  7. 1

    Thanks a lot for sharing it!
    Added some tasks into my todo list from this post to take action 💪

  8. 1

    Great article. Congrats on reaching $2500 MRR!
    Why did you decide to put the project on hold? Were you doing something during the year for people to notice the project?

  9. 1

    Thanks for sharing this, I'm just starting on the indie hacker journey and user analytics is something I'm not putting enough attention on.

    Just curious, what was your approach to acquiring those first users

  10. 1

    Congrats Bruno and thank you for sharing your story. Curious, did you build SSO in-house or did you use an off-the-shelf tool? If the latter, what did you use?

    1. 2

      Thanks a lot! We built the SSO in-house.

  11. 1

    Solid advice, I enjoyed this reading, thanks!

  12. 1

    What is FeatureBase?

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