HR Partner

As most know, one of the best ways of success in B2B startups is to get recognition and reviews from your ideal customers, which in turn leads to more customers seeing them and trusting you with their business as well.

I recall in the early days, back when I was a solo founder, we had a mere 3 reviews posted on Capterra, and it stayed that way for over 12 months.

I mean, they were 3 positive reviews, but it seemed like such a struggle to get more than that. In the meantime, I watched our competitors seemingly get hundreds of glowing reviews so effortlessly. It was really discouraging.

But yet, we kept our heads down and focused on just providing the best possible customer service that we could, and just ignored the B2B directories for a while.

So imagine my delight and surprise to see Xero Magazine publish this tweet this week:

It felt so nice to be finally getting such industry recognition for all our hard work.

And I must stress that I really didn't have much to do with this. It was really the sheer hard work that our team puts in to listen and respond to customers, and constantly delighting them with our friendly, yet professional support levels - which includes going above and beyond what is expected on many occassions.

Very happy, grateful, and proud of my team. I want to say a public "Thank You" to them for all they do.

As my tweet yesterday - https://twitter.com/dsabar/status/1442644719608102919

Not going to lie - the first few years were a grind and really challenging, and I thought about giving up quite a number of times.

But lately, I have been waking up all excited and with a spring in my step, and I feel that all that early sacrifice has finally paid off, with things humming along really well, and my SaaS growing steadily.

I've always said the #1 traits for a startup founder is perseverance and resilience. So glad I stuck with it and pushed through to a great place where I am really happy now.

![Software Advice FrontRunner Chart for HR Software](https://s3.amazonaws.com/www.hrpartner.io/img/promo/Software+Advice+FrontRunners+Chart+June+2021.jpeg "Software Advice FrontRunner Chart for HR Software)

We were please to note that we made it high on the list in June for the SoftwareAdvice frontrunner chart for HR software vendors.

We outranked a lot of our competitors who are funded to the tune of millions of dollars, so it was nice to see our scrappy, bootstrapped startup made it high in terms of usability and customer satisfaction.

SoftwareAdvice is one of the largest B2B review and recommendation sites out there, and is responsible for a large number of customers coming to us after reading our reviews there, so fingers crossed that this recent accolade will bring in more customers and help us grow!

The high customer satisfaction rating is in large part due to our small but dedicated team being really focused on looking after our customers and providing the best support that we can - after all, we haven't got deep pockets to spend on marketing campaigns, so our differentiator from our funded competitors is to outpace them in terms of customer service.

I am really grateful to be working with such an amazing team!

Well, this week marked one whole year that I have been earning a regular, steady pay check from my startup! (AND a 50% raise halfway through last year as well to boot).

After previously living for nearly 4 years on savings (and my wife having to work 3 jobs to keep the family fed), it is a nice thing to be in a place where all our household bills, and living expenses are now pretty much taken care from what HR Partner is bringing in.

Biggest win is that my wife has been able to go back to ONE part time job (which she loves), plus spend some time on her art passion (https://www.instagram.com/samsabaratnam/).

Next goal is to earn enough to put some savings aside again, and have my wife not having to work so she can go full time on her art - she deserves it after all the unflagging support she has given me over the years.

In the spirit of sharing the 'not so good' along with the great stuff happening at my startup - We have this month noticed a levelling off in our previously fantastic growth rate.

Churn has gone up from around 1 customer per month in the past to about 4 or 5 just this month so far.

We reach out to these customer as part of our customer care, and the message we are getting back is that they LOVE our system, but things are really financially tough at the moment, or in one case, we suspect the business itself is closing due to no activity in their industry sector.

This was actually something the team and I had in the back of our minds when we started getting huge growth at the start of the worldwide pandemic. We knew that the initial spike would have to be countered by a down turn when the economic reality hit a few months later.

A lot of businesses have been chugging along on government grants and subsidies during the various lockdowns around the planet, however it is coming to the end of those lifelines, and with things still uncertain, I think a lot of business will really be cutting back drastically on expenditure or closing altogether.

It is sad times, but the reality of what is happening in the world right now. Thankfully, we have not had to take a cent of government incentives during this time, and we have managed to help a LOT of companies get good HR processes in place while they have been in hibernation, using our SaaS platform. We are still growing, but not nearly at the same rate as the past few months, but still - we will carry on helping other businesses as best we can.

This morning I checked my phone and noticed that for the first time, we had hit six figures in our bank account. This was after paying nearly all expenses for the month including salaries etc.

It is a great feeling to know that we have such a runway now that we can reinvest into building our SaaS to the next level. Also this week, we welcomed a new developer to our team that has made my (programming) life much easier too.

Oh, and we also released a new major feature in our HR app that our users had been asking for.

All in all, a massive week for us, and as a result, the team has supported me to take a full week off, completely away from work and technology so I can recharge my batteries after a hectic few months of growth.

That is probably the biggest win for me - that I now have an amazing co-founder and team that can keep things running really well while I switch off and focus on other passions for a week.

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.

Not sure if this counts as a milestone, but I guess it does.

I was called by an old work colleague of mine that I hadn't heard from for years. She asked if I was interested in walking away from my startup and to leave Australia and move to another big international city to work alongside her in a senior role. (She works at one of the FAANG companies).

I politely said "Thanks, but No".

If that call had come in a couple of years ago, when I was still grinding and building my SaaS startup, I would have jumped at the chance with bells on.

But today, while chatting to her, I realised how much I love my startup, and how well growth (and financial returns) have been lately, and how it would be really hard from me to walk away from it all.

Call me crazy, but I would still rather be master of my own destiny, especially at this stage of my company's growth. I am too excited to see where I can take HR Partner. The senior exec role and share bonuses will just have to wait a while.

I still clearly remember 2 years ago sitting despondently in my office, seeing that we only had about 6 paying customers to our HR SaaS. I remember thinking back then "If only I can get to 100 paying customers, that would be so great and mean so much"... But it seemed too far away and such an impossible task.

But just yesterday morning, I glanced at our company KPI dashboard and noticed that we had 103 paying customers on the books. I actually had to pause as I became emotional thinking back about how important that milestone had seemed to me, and I nearly missed it! 😄

Actually, at the time of writing this, we are up to 110 paying customers. It makes me ecstatic that all the hard work me and my co-founder have put in over the past 6 months have paid off. Most of the credit actually belongs to my amazing co-founder and the marketing team/strategies she has put in place since joining the company.

Now - onwards and upwards for the next milestone - 1000 paying customers! 🚀

Well, today was a special day for me. After nearly 3 years of living on saving and my wife having to run 3 part time jobs to support my family, I managed to take the first of what are to be regular paychecks from my startup.

Coming just before the Christmas holidays, this is welcome indeed, and it is a special feeling to have your SaaS product doing well enough that the bank balance keeps increasing every month even after my earnings are taken out.

I made the decision to go all in a couple of years back, and shut down my other consulting business that was generating income for me because it was keeping me from really focusing on HR Partner. That added focus has really helped to maximise how effective my development, sales and marketing energy has translated into new customers and revenue.

Next step - more hiring!