We hit $2,000 MRR. 3 Things Fueling the Growth.
Our little startup, Senja just crossed $2000 MRR.
It took:
→ 11 months to get to $1,000
→ 40 days to get to $2,000
For the most part, we're still using the strategies that took us from $0 → $250 MRR.
- We're still building novel and extremely valuable features that differentiate us from the competition.
- We're still refining on our kickass onboarding
- We still constantly experiment with new marketing ideas.
But there are three things we've done in the last 3 months that are fueling our growth.
1. Building highly requested features
In December → January, we launched features that blocked dozens of users and had been requested over and over again in support conversations since we first got started.
By doing so we got
— More active users
— Less support conversations
— And of course, a thinner backlog 😅
So when someone unexpectedly launched us on Product hunt, and when we were mentioned by influencers and got a ton of traffic, we were able to convert more people than we would have if we never built these features.
2. Affiliates & Referrals
In December, we migrated from Rewardful to FirstPromoter for our affiliate program for a couple reasons.
- While Rewardful notified our affiliates about their sales, they didn't notify them about their signups, so they didn't get the motivation they needed to keep promoting.
- Rewardful doesn't have analytics, so we couldn't measure our progress with affiliates over time.
- We couldn't manually assign existing customers to affiliates, so if an affiliate reached out to us about a user they referred IRL, we couldn't attribute the sale them.
While FirstPromoter is a tad pricier, moving there has already helped us gain 5 new paying customers in January, so it's already paying for itself.
We also started reaching out to influencers in December.
Big Twitter influencers like Easlo and Pascio on Twitter caught wind of Senja in December.
Some of them found us organically, while we had longer conversations with others.
They even started including us in their tweets with roundups of tools. That brought in a decent amount of signups, and a few customers.
3. Pricing increase
Since we launched Senja, one of the most frequent comments we got was that it's underpriced.
There have been actual businesses that have chosen not to use us because our pricing seemed "to good to be true" and "desperate"
Here's what one of our customers said:
"When I first tried Senja it was the best option of all my choices but way way cheaper than the others and it definitely made me wonder 'why'"
It was clear that we had to improve our pricing.
So in January, we increased the price of our pro tier while simultaneously introducing a lower priced starter tier with all the essentials.
Once we announced the increase, many users who had been on the fence about paying for Senja upgraded their plan to lock in their early bird pricing.
The number of signups we're getting also hasn't reduced, and some people have already upgraded to our higher tier.
The recurring theme here though, is compounding growth.
→ More referrals & testimonials = more signups
→ More signups = more customers
→ More customers = more feature requests
→ More feature requests = better product
→ Better product = more referrals
We wouldn't be growing as we are without the previous 11 months of work we put into refining and polishing the product.
Next big milestone, $5K MRR 💪
