We hit $100 MRR!
by Francesco Di LorenzoAfter working on Mailbrew for the past 5 months and running our private beta we finally hit this important revenue target.
It might not seem much, but considering that the product is not even publicly available yet we are pretty proud of this result.
Here a brief timeline of how we achieved this:
- September 22, 2019: First commit on GitHub ⌨️
- October 11, 2019: Received my first Daily Brew, we are now at issue 123 🤓
- October 21, 2019: We manually onboarded our first user over a Skype call 📞
- November 24, 2019: Launched invite system and start onboarding users from our early access list 💌
- January 2, 2020: Launch monetization and first paying customer 💰
- Today: $100 MRR, ~700 users, ~1500 newsletters and counting, set to launch in just a couple of weeks 🚀
❤️ Thanks a lot to the IndieHackers members supporting us, we have seen quite a few of you creating newsletters and subscribing to the product. It has been awesome sharing this journey with you.
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Cool product! Endorsement from DHH, god himself! 🙇♂️ This is gonna be big
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Very cool idea, I just signed up. It's nice if I can get the few things I like in a summary without all the noise and distraction that comes with normal browsing.
I think I would love that even as app / website as it's essentially a multiple source (not only twitter) feed specifically for me.
Probably, I would also need some filters and muted keywords to only import certain posts from certain sources and not always all.
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Super-useful feedback, thanks! Regarding filtering, we are already considering it as a next feature. Do you think it would be more useful to have it as newsletter setting (filter all content of the newsletter) or for it to be configurable differently for each single source?
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The big dilemma for me is time. I don't say I don't have time as I always have 24h, but I am super conscious about how I spend my time as I have a full time job, side project, want to spend time with family, friends and do sports.
Social media, email newsletters, blogs etc. can easily lead to procrastination and addiction and way too much time spend. One way to solve it is to completely remove it from my life. This comes at the cost that I miss the occasional super useful resource, advice or something else. I also believe in minimalism or the calmness that DHH writes about in the Basecamp books. If I take every piece of content from all sources that sometimes provide very valuable content it's already way to much noise with it.
A concrete example would be DHH and US politics. Instinctively I care about US politics and it grabs my attention. But politics change quickly just like news, I am not a US citizen or anyhow directly involved and I already committed to focus on other things. So to declutter I need to block this. In the end it doesn't help anyone if my attention is spread over many topics. So I see this as a toxic candy with short-term benefits and long-term problems. But when Basecamp released their Shape Up book this was super valuable for me and I saw it via a tweet from DHH.
TLDR: I need a mindful feed of really valuable stuff that doesn't autoplay infinite videos or spams me with targeted ads. It helps me to limit my time spend to avoid procrastination and rabbit holes as well as processing content at my own speed. Quality over quantity.
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I completely agree with you. Thanks for taking the time to read this, we will keep it in mind when building filtering!
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Congratulations, this is a cool product!
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Thanks Anton!
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Congrats! That's a great achievement. I like your design, it feels clean and polished and I think it's clear what your product does.
In your content you have "But it’s increasingly hard to use it without getting addicted to it (the internet), and retaining the fundamental ability to unplug from it" - I can see how you're focusing your news sources into one curated list which is a nice idea, but aren't you still adding to the difficulty in unplugging from it by providing another newsletter? It felt like a contradiction to say it's hard to unplug from the internet, and you're trying to solve it by providing another newsletter.
The focused content is good, but after you've clicked those links it's still not helping with the tempting rabbit holes I get to when I go off to those sites, Twitter being a good example. The problem and solution didn't seem to fit for me.
That said, I do like the idea of more focused newsletters! I just don't think it will solve the difficulty in being able to unplug.
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Thanks a lot Jamie, awesome feedback!
We know for sure that some users are actually using Twitter less, and checking fewer sites, thanks to their brews, so we feel pretty confident keeping the unplug part in.
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Congratulations man! How did you get your first paying customer - Was it through a free trial converting to a paid tier?
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Congrats! Great landing page.
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Congrats!! :)
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Congrats! I'm a beta user and I think Mailbrew is ready to launch, definitely an MLP (minimum lovable product)!
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Congratulations Francesco, well deserved!
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happy paying customer: Mailbrew is amazing and you guys are doing all the right things. Keep up the amazing work!
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I feel this could hit $10kMRR pretty easily.
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Congrats! How did you think of something so innovative?
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Well done guys! Keep up the good work! 💪
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Grazie Andrea 😄
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Cool product! Congrats on the revenue. Subscribed.
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Thanks mate!
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DHH endorsed?! Nice work!
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Thanks Daryl 🙌
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