Nat.app
A Personal CRM that knows who you're losing touch with
We're now making enough money to cover our server costs as well as paying ourselves a tiny little bit! Pretty much default alive considering that I would keep working on this part-time forever!
After reaching $100 MRR in January, we've now just reached $250 MRR! We can now fully cover our server and database costs.
The most surprising part is how little effort we had to make to 2.5x our revenue compared to reaching the first 100/mo.
The main changes we did are:
- Increasing our pricing, currently at 20$/mo
- Removed the free plan and replaced it by a free trial.
- Start publishing Youtube videos to show up on YT.
One outside factor that is helping a lot is that we're now ranking on the first page for the "personal CRM" keyword on both Google and DuckDuckGo.
To reach the next big milestone of $500/mo, we plan to:
- Creating more content
- Building a clean onboarding (right now everyone has to go through an onboarding call with me)
- Redo our landing page
- Launch a side app to help people remember birthdays
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Awesome, congratulations!
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Thanks! I really appreciate the support :)
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Well done!
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Thanks! It took 2 years though :P
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Interesting that removing the free plan helped this effect - one of my projects has a free plan and it's something I wouldn't do again. Well done!
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Because so many internet companies are VC backed, they can afford free plans and thus made it "normal". But the reality is that for any normal non-VC company, you just need to charge to survive :)
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That's a good point - the project that I give a free plan on is in a space like this. Since all the competitors have them it is the norm and some do convert to paying customers but the free users cost me more than the Pro users in hosting resources. This makes it hard to scale profitably and any problems with bots etc are all through the free plan. It still makes a few bucks... but only just.
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Congratulations🤗🔥! I wish you a lot of success!
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Thanks!
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Well done Nathan!
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congrats! now, $500!
Super happy to announce that we've made it to this symbolic number!
It's that tipping point were you go from nothing to something. Don't get me wrong, this still isn't a real business or anything.
But it's enough validation to keep going and reach our next milestone: 1K MRR :)
Some learnings: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-we-went-from-10-mrr-to-100-mrr-5a6aafe574
We've launched our new Personal CRM app! It now includes the ability to send emails to contacts straight from the app as well as a new calendar integration and a brand new UI.
We've also reached 50$ in MRR and are finally seeing retention go up and people starting to use the app for long periods of time!
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Congratulations 🎉
Time to add an affiliate program?
We can help connect you to thousands of active affiliates, referrals, and resellers around the world.
Would you be open to a 20-minute intro call to learn more about Promote and how we can help you grow through affiliate marketing?
As a bootstrapped company, we will never be able to acquire users through paid channels. We have to think very hard on how to create long term viral growth acquisition channels.
That's why we've just launched an extension that allows users to send audio messages in Gmail. There is a small watermark at the bottom of every email which will drive additional traffic to our app and people who use this extension will be really interested in our Personal CRM.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/natapp-record-audio-in-gm/pjpambjkhcilibnmeihhfgdkhfelbdkj
We've finally done it! Someone (who's not from my family) and who've been using our app regularly subscribed to our paying (early bird discounted) plan!
This is the validation we needed to double down and keep the troops motivated!
The road ahead is long, but there is light!
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Congrats! One piece of advice on your landing page:
We'll happily extend your free trial if you want to
Came across as very desperate to me. I would imagine that it would be better to personally email people after the 30 days signs up and offer them that extension. Instead, I got the feeling that I was being begged to sign up.
This could be just me. Have you found this up-front offer to be successful?
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Hey Kev! Thanks for the feedback! You're totally right about this, I've updated it and will start to just email people after 30 days to ask them about their experience :) I inspired myself from Basecamp's landing page initially.
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Well done
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Thanks a lot!
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Congratulations!
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Congrats! Super exciting when someone finally pays, good luck continuing to grow!
If you haven't already, check in with them to chat. It's always great to know what drew someone to your product and inspired them to pay for it, it'll give you a good framework for messaging in your marketing to more users.
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Absolutely! I'm worried though that the user who paid might just be a one-off from a totally different niche.. I'm not sure how much weight I should give to the paying user to decide who to go after to get the next 99 paying customers.
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That's fair, though motivations could be theoretically similar - for ex I'm working on an SEO SaaS platform, the businesses signing up are very different but the goals and reasons for those goals are pretty similar in the end. Best of luck keeping it going!
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Congratulations! I'm hoping I'll get my first paying customer as well soon. That validation boost is so important to keep the motivation up!
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Yeah! In our case it took a whole year :P
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Congrats!!
Shortly after the Pioneer Livestream (sort of demo day for Pioneer --> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1qCW7TWNyI), our signups spiked and we can now happily announce that we've passed the 100 users mark and are now managing over 50k contacts.
This is exciting as it gives us enough data to really work on our algorithm and make it perfect!
We've just been approved by Google Contacts API. Yes, I know. Nothing crazy right? Well, for us, it has been 5 months that we've been struggling to get our Gmail API usage approved.
While we're still very far away from that, getting Contacts verified is the first step! If anyone is looking for help or advise with the Gmail api verification process, reach out!
We've finally hit the 100 user threshold! By the time of writing, we're actually already at 120 or so. It's funny how "the rich get richer" applies to user counts! The more users you have, the more users you get. We're now managing over 10k contacts on behalf of our users! That's really exciting!
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Congratulations Nathan , way to go 🥳
Any advice for others how to get the first hundred? What did you do to get the first then and did what you do change at some point?
What did you learn along the way?Would be awesome if you could share your experience as I am about to launch the first iteration of my product and of course want to get to first the 100 also.
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Sure! I actually just posted an article on the topic! https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-i-growth-hacked-my-way-to-500-waiting-list-subscribers-9612933fd3
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We've become part of the Pioneer community! As part of the prize, we received 1k$ in cash and 100k in AWS credits! We're glad to have won this competition!
Besides, we've also been awarded a university startup grant by the EPFL in Lausanne. They given us 2k$ to cover most fix costs!
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Congrats!
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