44
17 Comments

Using Communities and Product Launch Websites to Grow to $5.3k/mo

Hey guys. This week I'm interviewing Stefan, the founder of Automatio ($5.3k/mo), a no-code web automation tool. He has an interesting story about how he launched and grew the product to its current MRR. Enjoy!

Hello! What's your background, and what are you working on?

Hi! Stefan here, the founder of Automatio.

I started my digital journey ~15 years ago. From 3D modelling, to UI/UX, growth hacking, business development, client work, etc. My full focus now is on Automatio.

The Idea behind Automatio is to be able to reproduce whatever manual work you have on the web, and create a bot without writing a single line of code.

It's a no-code web automation and data extraction (web scraping) tool. It's important to point out that Automatio is not just a web scraping tool, but an actual visual web bot builder. It can deal with complex scenarios, bypass blocking detection, solve Google Re-Captcha, click buttons, fill forms/fields, take screenshots, export and import data from Google Sheets and much more.

What motivated you to get started?

Automatio was created out of a desire to solve my own problems. I was always looking for web automation, for a bot to save me from tedious, repetitive manual work. It was obvious to me that if this tool serves me well, other people will require it as well.

Automatio started as our internal tool more than 3 years ago. One day I shared a video of Automatio on Facebook, and it got tons of positive feedback, questions, and “take my money” comments. After receiving positive feedback, we decided to create a SaaS.

What went into building the initial product?

We have a web agency called vanila.io. We did a lot of client work, made some profit, and then reinvested that back into the Automatio.

I already had a small team on Vanila, but I needed a new team with a different set of skills for Automatio. As a bootstrapped project, it was difficult to find the right people to work with who possessed the necessary skills at an affordable price.

It took a lot of brain power to rebuild Automatio from the ground up in 2019 with completely new logic. .I had to think about how to design and build something modular that could be used in a variety of cases.

We also spent a significant amount of time testing what we had created.
For many years, I was the only user, and I was the one who tested, found bugs, and reported problems. I did everything I could to save developers time so they could focus solely on building. For each issue I discovered, I would make a video with a detailed explanation so they could get right to work fixing bugs or adding features.

Aside from developing the initial product, I spent time thinking about and planning the growth strategy.

How have you attracted users and grown Automatio?

Everything started by using Automatio to grow Automatio.

Back in the days, before GDPR, I was scraping different communities and was finding people who were related to me and my business.

I started growing my Facebook account. I scraped the information of relevant people and started connecting with them. That way I built a network on Facebook, which worked really well.

Back then, I discovered a plethora of small growth hacks on Facebook.
One obvious one was joining relevant Facebook groups and being an active member by commenting and interacting with others.

The biggest growth hack on those Facebook groups was creating a related video about how I am using Automatio to solve some of my problems, post the video on the Automatio business page, and then share the video in the FB groups. I had 30,000 views per video, without paying any ads, and a lot of people were commenting that they want to use Automatio.

Another big milestone was being on the Product Hunt upcoming page. This was a new feature for products which are not fully ready but preparing for a beta launch. I contacted the right guy on Product Hunt and he was interested to feature Automatio on the their upcoming page. I needed to build landing page before getting there. I spent a lot time and energy on design, making an intro video, content writing, etc. Being featured there gave us good exposure. We were the number 1 product on the upcoming page and that brought us more than 500 subscribers to our list.

In 2017, launching on BetaList worked great. We were featured for a couple of days on the Betalist frontpage. Being at the top section and having the most likes, it brought us a lot of traffic and more than 600 subscribers.

At that moment Automatio was just a prototype and wasn't even close to being launched.

That was all in 2017.

After that, there was a period where I didn’t do any growth at all. I just focused on development. During that time, we had only one landing page (homepage), and people still somehow were able to find us. Even after taking a 2 year break from growth, Automatio still had 120,000 visitors on a single landing page.

Coming back to the present, right now I am growing Automatio mostly organically. I am going all in into content marketing because of our promising results with SEO. We have a set of small growth hacks which help us rank fast on the first page of Google for the most of our keywords. I am going write about this in the future.

I also found that building in public gave me a chance to talk about the progress of Automatio and expose it to new customers and users. This also gives me additional benefits, like getting backlinks to my content for SEO purposes.

Currently Automatio gets around 1300 visitors per week.

Here you can see that we are just starting with SEO, but growing well.

What's your business model, and how have you grown your revenue?

Automatio is a SaaS business where users subscribe for a monthly package. That gives them a fixed amount of credits to be used.

Back in February this year, we started an early adopter program for people who want to support the project and get early access to it. For the cost of the EA program, we had two options: $1000 and $2000 per year. The $2k option gave a 50% lifetime discount to users. Most of the people chose the $2k package, and with 28 early adopters we got a bit more than $42,000 revenue.

Most of those early adopters were converted because I had live calls with them showing them the power of Automatio. They really liked this. Sometimes I was putting myself "in to the fire" by trying to wrork out how Automatio would work for their use-case. This is really tricky because web automation is really fragile.

We released the monthly packages in September, so now finally our users can pay us monthly instead of annually. In a little bit more than 2 months we reached 30 subscribers which brought us $3700 MRR.

What are your goals for the future?

● Expand the team
● Update the website
● Create better onboarding process
● Go on Product Hunt
● Reach a milestone of 100 monthly subscribers
● Improve Automatio with adding new features

Have you found anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

I believe that having acquired various skill sets over the years has given me an advantage. But that also came with a cost. Being spread thin across multiple side projects makes it difficult to focus and complete tasks on time.

Even though I don't know how to code, I understand technology very well.
That was useful because, as a bootstrapped founder, I had to design logic myself, explain to developers how things should work under the hood, and design how the overall user experience should feel.

I worked on many projects over the last 15 years and learned how to grow things organically.

I knew that being a part of a community is important because it allows you to learn and share knowledge, meet people, and gain some credibility. Some of the communities I'm on include Indie Hackers, PH, Indie Worldwide, MakerPad, etc. There is a lot to learn from these communities.

Where can we go to learn more?

You can follow my bootstrapping journey on IndieHackers, where I share my weekly progress updates.

Also, here is the link to the Automatio website where you can learn more about it . Feel free to write to me if you have any questions or suggestions.

You can also reach me via email or on Twitter.

  1. 4

    Great interview! Curious how people found you while you weren't promoting Automatio (from 2017 onwards).

    1. 1

      Hey James. I think they mostly found me through other communities. I didn't work on hard promotion since Automatio was in development, but wherever I could I put a link to Automatio.

      I also think that a lot of people were finding it through Google.

      But to be honest, I am not sure either where all of those people came from through these years. 120,000 visitors are a solid number.

  2. 4

    Hey Stefan. Could you share some of the videos that you posted on those FB groups?

    1. 1

      Hey Dare. Here is one example,
      but this was ~3-4 years ago and there are more
      videos out there https://www.facebook.com/automatio.co/posts/1509806652535489

  3. 2

    Interesting journey. For me the most important takeaway in this story is the amount of preparations up to the actual launch, which gave them a significant MMR just a couple of months after launching. Normally it takes several months just to get the first paying customer.

    1. 1

      True man. We did a lot of work on Automatio before we launched. It's good that I decided to build a landing page that collect emails back in 2017, as you can see over ~4 years period it captured a lot of traffic and emails.

  4. 2

    Awesome interview as always @zerotousers :D

    1. 1

      Thank you, Darko for the interview!

      1. 2

        @kinder I'm curious why your pricing is a bit hidden on your website? Actually I wasn't able to find it at all :D - what's the rationale?

        1. 1

          Hi Johna, the only reason is that we just wanted to release it and start selling monthly packages. I added packages inside, just as a starting point, was thinking it's better to have something than nothing.

          We spent so much time in the development and were hungry for release.

          Definitely, the pricing is missing, and that is something that will be added to the updated home page which comes soon.

          A lot of people actually asked the same.

          1. 1

            Gotcha gotcha! Can't blame you there! Really slick looking tool - wish ya all the success!

  5. 1

    Thanks for sharing. I tried to find the pricing on your page but it appears to be missing. How much do you charge?

    1. 1

      Sorry for that, the pricing is indeed missing from the landing page, and we gonna add it with a new homepage update.

      Currently, we disabled smaller packages and started with $99/m. It might be too price for someone to play around with, but if you have a real use case, it will be handy for you.

Trending on Indie Hackers
How I grew a side project to 100k Unique Visitors in 7 days with 0 audience 49 comments Competing with Product Hunt: a month later 33 comments Why do you hate marketing? 29 comments My Top 20 Free Tools That I Use Everyday as an Indie Hacker 18 comments $15k revenues in <4 months as a solopreneur 14 comments Use Your Product 13 comments