Woke up this morning and checked our SaaS dashboard like I always do, and had to hold back an emotional tear as I saw that we had hit 1000 companies who have subscribed to our HR SaaS.
It was truly a big milestone for us. I have been working on my startup now for about 4 and a half years. I can still remember the days of having just 3 customers, then getting to 10. Hovering at around 15 for a while before finally hitting another ledge with 23 customers.
Then there was a long, slow ascent to 100 customers (which I posted about on here a few months back). But then it seems like a bit of a rocket ride to 1000. It almost snuck up on me in amongst everything else that is happening at the moment.
I consider luck and timing a big part of that, as a big influx of new users are companies that are suddenly finding themselves with a remote, work from home team, and they need a solution to manage this drastic change from an HR perspective.
I am grateful that we have a product that can help people in such a difficult time, and I do feel for those businesses and startups that are struggling right now because of the huge changes enforced upon us by the pandemic.
I also wanted to say to any other IndieHacker out there who is doing it tough - sometimes you just need to have faith in your vision, and hang in there. There were SO many times that I wanted to call it a day and pull the plug, especially when growth stagnated, and I lost my first co-founder.
But in reality - that 'stagnation' really gave us time to improve our product based on the feedback of that small customer base. (No way we can iterate as fast with the larger customer base that we have now). Also, my new co-founder who took over has amazing marketing skills and has grown the business 100x in a shorter space of time compare to her predecessor.
Somehow, every negative seems to have a downstream positive effect.
Many thanks to my co-founder, and my family for their untiring support, and a huge shout out to our growing team who are all just amazing at what they do to help me execute my vision.
Also, thanks to the incredible community right here at IH for tips, advice and your own stories that kept me going through the tough times.
I'm so happy for you mate really well done!
Hitting milestones like that really is an amazing feeling, I remember getting my first conversion and I jumped around my room like a kid hahahah
Also congrats on having such a strong team/co-founder, (not talking from experience) but I can only imagine how helpful that would be!
Congrats again :D
Thank you Louis! Yeah, it really makes a big difference working with people who really know their stuff!
(Oh, and never stop being a kid!) 😄
Big congratulations to you! 4.5 years is a long time! Losing a co-founder is equally terrible. But things turned out well! Yay!
Amazing. Its inspiring to read posts like this. Congratulations, I hope you continue to grow.
If you don't mind me asking, what is your tech stack? And could you give us some marketing tips from your awesome co-founder? Who seems to be a whiz at marketing.
Thank you! We host everything on AWS basically - we use over 20 of their services, including EC2, RDS, SES, SQS, Lambda, Elastic Beanstalk, S3, Route 53 and many many more.
I did do a blog post a few months back on some of the marketing things that helped us (most of which were instigated by my co-founder) - https://devan.codes/blog/2019/11/29/my-chinese-bamboo-startup
Inspired !!
Thanks Allan! :)
Woohoo!
Congratulations! 🙌
Thank you so much Anita! :)
Thanks Ardy! Looking forward to your "1000th customer" post! :)
Congrats Devan. A big milestone indeed!
Thank you Kriang!
Congrats! That’s truly inspiring, thanks for sharing!
Thank you very much Loic :)
Wow congrats
Thank you Alok!
Congratulations! Glad to see small businesses growing! Hope I can get there one day too ;)
Thank you - I am sure you will!
Congratulation for this milestone, hard work truly does pay off ! ☺️
Thank you very much!
Congrats, Devan! This is a great reminder to all of us about perseverance and believing in yourself and your product.
Thank you Israel!
Congrats Devan, on completing 1K customers in such a crowdy space. You must have done pretty well with your product. I am yet to feel that feeling of first paid customer for my side project.
Thanks Utsav. Keep going! It took us one whole year before we got our very first paying customer. Those early ones are the hardest, then it gets better from there.
Congratulations, persistence pays off! It’s encouraging to see the stories of people who trudge through years of slow growth to become successful. It gives hope to the rest of us. All the best in the future.
Thank you! Yes, I think stories like ours is more the norm. We usually hear of the 'overnight successes' on most blogs and podcasts, but I believe those are the rarity, and that 90% of startups are mostly trudging and grinding for a long while!
Great write up! It's a pleasure to be working on this with you, Devan!
Thank you Fiona! A special thank you for believing in me and jumping aboard!
(Everyone - This is my amazing co-founder at HR Partner)
This is awesome Devon, Congratulations! I have so many questions but will read through all the comments first before coming back to you with them. :)
Thank you. Feel free to shoot through any questions either here or via email (on my profile).
Congratulations Devan.
Keep up the awesome job
Thanks very much!
Awesome! Good work!
Thank you Greg! :)
God damn, congratulations!
1,000 paying customers is insane.
How long did it take you guys to get from Customer #1 to Customer #100?
Thank you Jayber!
Customer 0 to 1 was 1 whole year(!), then 1 to 25 took us about another 18 months, then 18 another months again from 25 to 100. Then 100 to 1000 was about 3 months! We had an AppSumo promotion in there too which helped in a HUGE way - I plan to write a blog post about our AppSumo experience next month.
HOLY GUACAMOLE.
You have the persistence of a God man.
How did you even maintain the motivation to keep going, even as the numbers looked bleak and demoralizing?
I have a crazy amount of respect for you.
And I'm so happy that your SaaS company is finally seeing its growth spurt!
I'm reading your Chinese Bamboo blog article, and this part truly resonated with me:
Did you know that when you plant Chinese bamboo seeds in the ground, that it can take up to 4 or 5 years for the first shoots to show? And did you know that as soon as the first shoots emerge, it then only takes about 6 weeks for the plant to grow to reach 90 feet in the air? The trick here though, that you still have to nurture and care for those seeds through all those years of not being able to see anything above ground. Otherwise you won’t get that dramatic growth spurt at the end.
Keep going, my man. I'm so happy for you that your persistence has finally paid off.
0-1: 12 months
1-25: 18 months
25-100: 18 months
100-1,000: 3 months
1,000-10,000: ???
What's the projection here? ;)
Haha - Thank you again Jayber! You are too kind.
As for 10,000 - who knows? My co-founder and I would love to be at that level in 12 months time, but there are so many unknown variables in the air now due to the pandemic etc. While we are grateful that we have had this huge surge in new customers (in many ways, due to the pandemic changing their work situation), it is sadly looking like some of those customers may struggle to stay in business themselves if the lockdowns continue for an extended period.
Overall though, we are seeing a really positive 'knock on' effect from having a large customer base. We have a ton of reference sites, and proof of validation (Just 2 days ago, we won a new fairly large customer in Singapore purely because we had 30 other Singapore based customers - Just 6 months ago, we had zero customers in that region!).
I am terrible at setting goals (I predicted it would be about 18 months before we went from 100 to 1000!), but I just want to take the next 12 months making sure that we really look after our 1000+ customers, plus grow our team in a manageable way, then tackle the next stage of growth.
I will keep posting updates here - good and bad, and keep learning from this great community.
Great! I'll be staying tuned to your updates.
From the sound of your blog article, taking on your co-founder was a total game changer, as she brought a completely-fresh (and correct) perspective to your strategic direction as a company.
Would you have gone out to look for a co-founder earlier had you known that it would have accelerated your growth curve faster?
I actually had another co-founder early on in the business (when we were at 0 customers), but unfortunately, quite lacking in the marketing and sales discipline & expertise, which is the main reason they had to move on a couple of years ago.
After that, I wasn't actively looking, but I was approached last year by my current co-founder out of the blue when she saw an opportunity with my startup on another community forum. She had already built and sold 2 previous startups successfully, so I agreed to her coming on board, and wow, the difference between someone who says they know marketing and someone who actually knows marketing - is chalk and cheese, as is evidenced by our latest growth trajectory.
Respect the hustle.
Thanks Drew! :)
Wow ! Just from february ! Good job !
How much is the MRR now ?
EDIT: Just checked your product, it's amazing (just try to edit the links on "features")
Thanks! Actually, I have to go and do some calculations to work out what our current MRR is - it is not straightforward any more.
We now have our standard monthly/annual subscriptions, but we also now have some huge (1000 employee+) customers on a separate contract. Plus we also had a massive AppSumo promotion a couple of months back which isn't really recurring revenue which I have to factor in, AND we also recently launched an affiliate reseller partner program, so I have to work out the differing commissions on those to work out our component of the MRR. Whew, lots of accounting homework for me to do! (but I guess it is a good problem to have).
Congratulations Devan! This a Milestone with capital M. 🥂
I can certainly relate to the early struggle of getting customers and I hope we'll join you with Sidemail.io in the 1000 customer club soon!
Thank you Patrik! SideMail looks really cool - best of luck - I am sure you will blast through the 1000 mark and beyond.
Congrats! What a milestone. I remember when my first company got our 1k milestone and it felt surreal.
Thank you Dustin! Surreal is the word. I am still pinching myself now, a day later.
This is so awesome, congrats and keep up the good work!
Thank you Leon!
Congrats! It's a remarkable milestone!
Thanks Benny! :)
Truly incredible and well-deserved. Congrats Devan!
Thanks for the kind words (and your email) Kunal! :)
Congratulations! I checked out the website right now and am very impressed with your work - well deserved growth indeed!
Thanks for the compliments Jason - Yes, we worked hard on our website and marketing, so I am glad to hear that it has a positive reaction.
well done it must've been an amazing feeling and rewarding as well to know you were right not to give up prematurely! what you said reminds me of Steve Jobs in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptD0T-ZcF2M: "getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could've ever happened to me... during the next 5 years I started Next, Pixar and got married. I'm pretty sure none of this would've happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple".
Thanks ludd - yeah, if there is one thing that I hope others take away from these sorts of stories is that the 'bad stuff' can be the precursor to something better. It is definitely hard to see it when you have your back to the wall and feeling that everything is against you though. That's when you need a good friend or mentor that can keep you focused and on track. I am grateful that I had people around me at those times that helped in those ways.
That's a big milestone! Your product looks very slick. Congratulations
Thank you so much Daryl!
Wow, so happy for you
Congratulations 🍾
Thanks Navin!
Congrats Devan!
What a number! :) 1k
Keep them happy and the road to 10k will be easy ;-)
Thank you Yannick! Looking forward to that journey to 10,000! :)