Cloakist

Custom domains for any site

No Employees
Founders Code
Solo Founder
Content
Design
Marketing
Programming
SaaS
Utilities

People deserve to be able to move products they love, like Notion, Google Forms, Airtable, Trello, Coda and ClickUp, to their own domain and white-label them.

That's why Cloakist exists!

July 11, 2022 June 2022 update

It was basically a flat month with some new subs, but also some churn...

💸 MRR: +0.7%
🦶 Subs: +0.6%
♻️ Churn: 4.62% ⭐️

The month ended flat, with (almost) an equal number of signups and churns.

Much of this is due to the fact that I spent a lot of time focusing on the product this month, and not so much on marketing.

Churn is manageable at 4.6%, but I need to work on conversion. I'm happy keeping it below 5%

Hopefully, the product improvements are going to help with that in the months to come.

✅ Notable activities in June:

· Transactional email automation (saves ~80 manual emails per week)
· Landing page + copy improvements (more to come)
· Blog Post: Custom domains for Notion pages

🎯 Objectives July

· Add Email signups for Notion
· 2x new Blog Posts

More details here:

June 2022 Milestone $2.5k MRR 🎉

💸 MRR: +8.4% major milestone 🥳
🦶 Subs: +7.6% 👍
♻️ Churn: 38.5% increase 🤬

Major MRR Milestone → $2.5k MRR 🥳

When the business was listed for sale on @microacquire the MRR was at ~$2k

The 161 new sign-ups resulted in 13 new subscriptions, an 8% conversion.

It's the first month I'm calculating the conversion rate and I was quite happy with it. There are some tweaks I'm making to improve this.

Not all good news though.

Most of the churned accounts were "legacy" customers, and I still believe that the new onboarding will yield higher quality subs in the long run.

✅ Notable improvements:

· Custom JS support for Notion
· Custom CSS for JotForm
· 2x blog posts published

🎯 Objectives for Q2:

· MRR growth of 8% MoM
· Keep churn below 5%

More details here:

May 2022 May 2022 update

💸 MRR: +4.7%
🦶 Subs: +5%
♻️ Churn: 320% improvement

When the business was listed for sale on @microacquire the MRR was at ~$2k

In December the seller did a big sales drive which brought volume, but low-quality subs. Resulting in high churn during Jan & Feb.

By end-Feb, the low-quality subs had mostly all churned.

A new onboarding process was implemented, removing the need for customers to enter card details up front.

This resulted in fewer, but higher quality subs.

✅ Notable improvements:

· New onboarding
· Support added for Trello, Loom, Microsoft Sway pages

🎯 Objectives for Q2:

· MRR growth of 8% MoM
· Keep churn below 5%

More details here:

February 16, 2022 Cloakist got acquired

☎️ 18 Jan: Intro call
🤫 19 Jan: NDA
🕊 20 Jan: LOI
✅ 21 Jan - 15 Feb: Due Diligence + Contract Negotiation
🍾 16 Feb: Share Purchase Agreement signed
💰 16 Feb: Payment + Asset Transfer
🤝 17 Feb - 4 March: Handover + Post Sale Support

Read the full acquisition story here:
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/closed-a-60k-saas-acquisition-all-the-details-26ff021031

January 15, 2022 Cloakist listed for sale
  • Cloakist was listed for sale by the original founder, Louis
  • I'll see if I can get him to share some insights into his motivations for selling the business, maybe as a "guest post"
  • I'll be sharing further updates on the eventual sale and acquisition of Cloakist

Be sure to follow along 🚀

December 15, 2021 Hit $2000 MRR
  • Even though Cloakist briefly crossed $2k MRR in August, it was not a sustainable spike
  • Sometime in December we crossed the $2k MRR mark again, and this time it looks to be more sticky
  • A lot of manual work is still being done to onboard new customers
  • The product is heading in a good direction overall
June 6, 2021 Hit $1,000 MRR
  • Sotion.so provided a good amount of recent growth...
  • ...as well as a bunch of existing customers happy with the service and coming back for repeat business
  • Now that I have 76 customers customer support can get quite stressful, particularly with the weekends
  • But overall, I'm feeling much more relaxed. It feels like Cloakist is on the right trajectory
  • There's great organic interest. I've barely done any marketing for the last 2 months
April 23, 2021 Hit $10k ARR

A whole bunch of changes have led to Cloakist finally getting over the $10k ARR mark:

  • New, clearer landing page has doubled the number of leads coming in
  • Churn has finally started coming down. Earlier customers didn't do a trial and many didn't get their Cloakist sites set up properly, so they didn't really understand what they were paying for
  • Customers are now able to self-serve to get DNS records instead of manual back and forth with me
December 11, 2020 Hit $9.99 MRR after 7 years!

It's been a really long ride at Cloakist.

I've been through the highest highs, and the lowest lows.

But now, looking back on it all, with $9.99 coming into my bank account every month just like clockwork, I can definitively say:

It's all been worth it.

Here is the story of how I managed to turn 7 years of my life into cold, hard cash.

And not just any amount of cash.

$9.99 so far.

Read more here:

https://cloak.ist/blog/how-i-got-to-9-99-mrr-after-7-years/

December 2, 2020 Hit $400 MRR and got @cloakist Twitter handle

Finally got to $400 MRR after a bunch of churn got in the way. I'm now doing a trial so that people who do eventually pay are far less likely to churn - feels like a good compromise.

And...managed to get Twitter to change my handle from @getcloakist to @cloakist. Been trying for 6 weeks! Means I'm going to use Twitter much more actively from now on.

About

People deserve to be able to move products they love, like Notion, Google Forms, Airtable, Trello, Coda and ClickUp, to their own domain and white-label them.

That's why Cloakist exists!