Nocodelytics

It took us just under 3 months to get our SaaS to $100 MRR.

Then it took us just over 3 weeks to get to $250 MRR.

It's an exciting start but we know that SaaS is a long game and one that's hard to predict.

We just have to continue to listen to our customers, keep improving the product and sharing how it can help Webflow users.

$500 MRR, here we come!

Every indie hacker hopes to get to 10 paying customers. But when you have zero, you'd think you'll never get there.

Heck, you can have 2-3 customers and still have major doubts about getting to 10.

I just want to let you know that's totally normal.

It took us 3.5 months to go from zero customers to hitting this small milestone for Nocodelytics.

But really, it's taken us longer than that because we've had to spend a few months working on the project and giving free access to get feedback from users.

Now that we're here though, as small as this milestone is, it gives us some confidence to know that we're building something of value.

And if we can get to 10 customers, then we're much more likely to get to 100 customers.

Onwards then!

After 3 months, we reached our first (albeit small) milestone: $100 MRR.

In January, we got our first 5 paying customers.

In February, things slowed down for various reasons and we focused on getting a few key features out.

In March, after taking a short break off, we hit the gas again and have started to see efforts pay off.

We're back to our previous rate of 1 new customer every 5 days. If we can keep this up and grow to 5-10 new customers a month we should hit our next milestone of $500 MRR in about 3 months.

Onwards to $500 MRR!

We now have 5 paying customers for Nocodelytics!

We signed up our first paying customer just over 3 weeks ago and have had 1 new paying customer every 5 days or so. (We actually had 6 people upgrade but 1 of them churned)

Some stats on the funnel in case you're interested:

• Site traffic: 512 users
• Signups: 28
• Upgrades: 6 (1 churned)

That means 5% of visitors to our site sign up and then ~20% of those upgrade to our premium plan. Definitely some improvement we can make there.

Any suggestions on how to improve the signup to upgrade conversion rate?

We've managed to hit our December traffic and signup numbers.

For the entire month of December we had 343 users and 10 signups.

In the first 15 days of January, we've already had 351 users visit our site and 20 signups.

Most of this has come from more of a focus on marketing, extra content on our site, being more active on Twitter, engaging with communities on Reddit and elsewhere.

Since launching in November, we now have 50 users who have signed up for Nocodelytics.

In the first month, we had 21 signups (many of which actually came from our waitlist of around 120 people). In the second month, we had 29 signups, so it's good to see that we're growing.

For the first month and a half, we actually weren't doing much marketing. This is mainly because we thought people from our waitlist would sign up and we also were happy to go slow whilst we added more features.

In the last 2 weeks, we started ramping up our marketing by writing more content, adding and sharing specific pages about our product's features, and being more active on Twitter.

The focus on marketing has definitely showed as we went from getting about 4 signups a week (in the first month and a half) to 10 signups a week (in January so far).

So if I had a takeaway it would be to do more marketing!

We've had a lot of people ask us how Nocodelytics is different to Google Analytics.

So we put together a landing page about what sets us apart.

Nocodelytics automatically tracks events including clicks, searches (input changes) and even popular CMS items - really taking advantage of Webflow.

GA, on the other hand, is obviously great because it's free but it expects users to spend a lot of time wrangling with GTM to understand button clicks.

We've also had a ton of users say how much they liked our setup and onboarding process, which we've tried to make as simple as possible.

Saying that, if there's one thing I'd recommend in terms of setting yourself apart from competitors, it would be to not forget the things outside of your product. I'm specifically talking about documentation.

A lot of indie hackers start of focusing purely on the experience of the app itself but the messaging, support and helpful information for your product is just as important.

The comparison page is in a way an effort to improve the information we provide to our users. It has no bearing on how they'll find the app itself but it will help them make a better decision when deciding to sign up (or upgrade).

One of the most requested features is to be able to build a member dashboard in Webflow.

We've had this request from users over time but it seemed quite complicated. We decided to just launch an MVP version as a beta which works by tracking the member's profile page in Webflow. When a user sets up the dashboard, they specify the path of this profile page, and Nocodelytics does the rest.

The great thing about doing it this way is that it works with any membership services, whether that's Memberstack, Outseta, MemberSpace and even Webflow's own native membership.

We've had some great feedback from people so far. We're super excited to make it even easier for people to build the Webflow sites they want!

We're building Nocodelytics, an Webflow analytics platform. It's safe to say building this kind of app is not easy.

We launched the MVP in June 2020 and, by August 2021, we managed to grow it to 25 customers generating about $250 MRR (or $3k ARR). Then we scrapped our MVP around the same time and re-launched in November with a new version built from the ground up.

We went from $250 MRR to $0.

Why?

When I built the The MVP was built on top of Hasura as it meant I didn't have to worry about maintaining a database or GraphQL schema. Our MVP was seeing increasingly large amounts of traffic flow through (millions of events a month) and it was not built for that kind of scale.

As more and more customers signed up and tracked their websites, the app became slower. By August, many new customers were greeted with errors in their dashboard. Nearly every action they took resulted in long waiting times (if they were lucky) or even more errors.

The idea of starting from scratch was daunting but also presented a big opportunity.

We could build a more responsive app, make it more reliable and much more scalable. All important attributes for an analytics platform. Unfortunately, however, there was no way to achieve this and keep the existing analytics history. So all our customers had to start from scratch.

In the end, we decided it was better to rebuild. So we disabled sign ups for the MVP version and refunded every customer who had received an error. When the new version launched in November, we offered all existing customers 2 months of access for free.

At the start of 2022, we also cancelled all subscriptions, effectively starting from $0 MRR. We didn't have to do this part, given our app still does what it's supposed to do - just better. But we felt it was appropriate given the fresh start.

Would we have done anything differently? I don't think so. The MVP wasn't scalable but it allowed us to quickly test the market and learn what Webflow users want.

Now we can focus on building the right features without having to worry about our tech stack!