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Hit 10 Paying Customers! 🎉

About a week ago, my co-founder Matt (@mc2147) and I received an awesome email from a trialing user. He told us that ProfitKit solved a huge issue his agency faced with calculating weekly expected revenue and saved him hours of work each week.

I was thrilled to hear this because our goal has always been to save our users time and simplify their subscription workflows!

After a brief email exchange, he promptly entered his payment card. At this point I realized that not only had we just gotten an amazing testimonial, but we had also just hit 10 paying customers — a goal that we had set out to achieve by June 30, 2020!

It felt so surreal to hit this goal almost a month early, considering it was something we had been working towards since early February.

While it may not seem like a big achievement to most, for us — as a bootstrapped team of 2 — it absolutely is.

Hit 10 Paying Customers for ProfitKit

Our story so far

Matt and I officially launched ProfitKit at the end of December 2018, at which point we got 3 paying users within the first month. We got these users from talking to past freelance clients and sharing launch posts on Indie Hackers and Reddit.

I left my full-time job around this time to work on ProfitKit because I had planned to “make the leap” after working in industry for a few years. I always had that entrepreneurial itch, and I knew I would never prioritize my ideas if I worked for another company. Meanwhile, Matt had just started a new full-time role.

Things stagnated for a year due to a series of hurdles:

  • Matt’s new full-time job became increasingly more demanding, which led him to work long hours and occasionally on the weekends (which meant less time to work on ProfitKit)

  • Not knowing how to market ourselves outside of launch posts. We spent some time experimenting with Facebook ads, cold emailing people (though we gave up prematurely after only receiving a few responses), setting up a blog, and writing tutorials as a form of long-term marketing. The blog brought in a lot of traffic, but we didn’t see any conversions

  • Scope creep – we spent a little too much time refactoring the code and redesigning the overall platform to make it look less like an MVP and more like a professional product. Much of this was due to me learning UX and visual design in tandem with the refactor

  • I was affected by a sudden, complicated medical condition that required 4 surgeries and lasted 6 months. It was difficult to work for a month and due to the pain, I had to transition to working part-time for the other 5 months (thankfully I’m recovered now!)

A new year, a new mindset:

At the beginning of 2020, we made a conscious effort to bounce back and spend more time on ProfitKit. Matt negotiated with his company and was luckily able to transition from a full-time job to a part-time contract. I was also feeling much better and was able to work longer hours.

In February, after my final surgery, we made a pact to reach a concrete goal: we’d try our best to reach 10 paying customers by June 30, 2020. If we didn’t reach that goal by then, we’d consider dedicating our time to other ideas.

Since the beginning of this year, we’ve:

  • Taken a more structured approach to marketing. We’ve done a brand sprint (which forced us to think about positioning and messaging), hosted web surveys on our affiliate blog site and ProfitKit to gather information from visitors, and actively reached out to users asking for feedback. Huge shoutout to Forget the Funnel for helping us along

  • Engaged more on sites like Indie Hackers, Twitter, and Reddit

  • Continued to take a very personalized approach with all of our users. We’ve tried our best to listen to their requests and feedback and implement solutions ASAP. I’m so thankful for our users – many have been very supportive, helped us improve the product, and gain more users (e.g., they have recommended we reach out to certain people on Twitter, and they’ve even gotten other people to sign up)

  • Had more of a “process.” We make a weekly plan every Sunday night and try our best to stick with it. We’ve also reduced the time we spend on emails by coming up with templates for each stage in the customer journey (we do still try to add a personal touch to almost every email)

While we did see a dip in traffic and an increase in delinquencies due to Covid-19, we surprisingly got 2 more paying customers recently, which brings us to our goal of 10 paying customers!

Our next goal is to hit $1,000 MRR, and we have some exciting ideas for marketing that will hopefully make our next 10 users a bit easier to come by. If everything going on in our world smoothes out, maybe we’ll even be there by the end of this year!

It’s been quite the roller coaster ride, but I’m proud of us 2 for making it this far. Thank you IH, for being a huge source of motivation and inspiration – incredibly grateful that a community like this exists.

  1. 4

    Woohoo! Awesome milestone, Amy and Matt! And thanks Amy for sharing your personal story & hardships during the development of ProfitKit. It is part of your journey and you've clearly come out of it a stronger woman. 💪

    To anyone reading, I'm one of the 10 paying customers. Also, anyone who has read my blog posts might know that I have a strong aversion to paying for services. Well, I can say that for me, ProfitKit is 100% worth it.

    I've tried many subscription analytics solutions and they all spewed out different numbers. Worst yet, their customer service would just tell me I'm out of luck because I use coupons a certain way. Working with Matt & Amy has been awesome because they have made their product customizable to everyone's unique needs and I now have full confidence in the numbers I see on my dashboard.

    I am so excited to see ProfitKit continue to grow. I am rooting for you two!

    1. 2

      Thanks a lot Jen, we appreciate it and are excited to continue helping you out too :)

    2. 2

      Wow, thank you so much Jen, for your kind words and continued support ❤️ We really appreciate you helping us improve the product and get to where we are today! I’m also so happy to hear that you enjoyed working with us and that we were able to fit your use case 😀

      Thank you for taking the time to write all of this out and share your experience!

  2. 3

    Ahhh @asitwala I'm so happy to read this update!! 👏👏

    So happy that FTF can play a small role!! 💖

    1. 1

      Wow, thank you so much, Gia! 🙏 You, Claire, and the FTF community have been so amazingly helpful and supportive — have learned so much from you already and am excited to learn more! ❤️

  3. 3

    Great achievement!

    Just a note - I can't figure out what it is, and what it does without the scrolling.
    And I need to scroll quite a bit (2 pages down) before I can figure it out.
    This might lose you some potential customers!

    Good luck, 10 customers is a great feat!

    1. 2

      Hey Bart, thanks for the support and awesome feedback!

      I have been thinking about a lot of these points lately too — mainly how to describe ProfitKit concisely in the hero section of the page while also mentioning the value it provides.

      There’s also a bunch of things I want to improve (explain our subscription activity calendar in more detail, make a friendlier sign-up page, etc.) based on what I’ve seen from Hotjar recordings in the past — hoping to tackle all of this within the next month.

      Appreciate the feedback, and thanks again :)

      1. 3

        Sounds great. Good luck! It looks really good so far!

  4. 3

    Hey Amy, This is Abinaya. Founder of Remote Leaf. You just got yourself a new customer. I really need this. I'll start using this in a couple of days.

    1. 1

      Hi Abinaya! Wow, thank you so much — I’m so happy to hear this 😀 I just sent you a welcome email, so definitely feel free to respond to it if you have any questions, feedback, or concerns. We’re excited to have you on board and work with you!

      1. 3

        Thank you for your quick support. Good luck with your next goals 1k MRR, 10k MRR and much more ❤️

        1. 1

          No problem at all! Always happy to help, so feel free to reach out anytime :) And thank you so much for your kind words 🙏

  5. 3

    That’s amazing! Your first 10 customers are the hardest to get. You’re well on your way to success.

    1. 1

      Thanks Shane! That's been our mindset too - we knew getting an initial group of paying customers would be the toughest part and we're hoping to grow at a faster rate now that we have somewhat of a customer base and processes in place

    2. 1

      Thanks so much for the support and encouragement, Shane 😀 Means a lot!

  6. 3

    Congratulations! It looks so good. Good luck

    1. 1

      Thank you — appreciate it! 😀

  7. 2

    congrats friend! keep going!

    1. 1

      Thanks a bunch, John 🙏 Also thank you for all of the time you put into this community helping others -- have learned a great deal from you!

      1. 2

        ahhh! thanks! keep going!!

  8. 2

    Woohoo!
    Congratulations! 🙌

    1. 1

      Thanks, Anita 😀 -- appreciate it!

  9. 2

    Hey Amy!

    Congratulations!

    And I want to really complement the fact that you documented everything for us.

    Cheers!!

    1. 2

      Thanks so much, Gonzalo! Just wanted to share our journey since I figure many Indie Hackers are going through similar struggles. I also wanted to remind them that it’s important to celebrate wins, no matter how big or small :)

      Just bookmarked ABTesting.ai + followed it here — thanks for sharing! We’ll be working towards improving our landing page within the next month, so I’ll see if ABTesting.ai could help 👍

      1. 2

        If you want to book a call some day I would be more to happy to show you the tool and give any tip from previous expirence :)

        Cheers!!!

        1. 1

          Wow, thanks so much for the offer! Will let you know once I shift focus back to the landing page 👍 Thanks again!

    2. 2

      I also just checked your product and I belive https://abtesting.ai could be a great tool for you :) Feel free to check it. Cheers!

  10. 2

    Amazing stuff Amy, huge congrats to you and Matt, that's a massive milestone to hit.

    1. 2

      Thank you for the lovely comment, Fred 🙏 Matt and I really appreciate all the support!

    1. 1

      Thank you for the support!

  11. 2

    This looks nice! How does it differ from BareMetrics (the service the company I work for uses)?

    1. 3

      While there are some similarities (as with any of the numerous subscription management and analytics apps out there), I'd say we have a more specific focus on Stripe-based businesses and push for transparency and customization in the metrics we provide.

      We also offer a few displays for your subscription activity that are unique as far as I can tell and aim to be more affordable, especially for small-to-medium sized businesses.

      For more information, you can see what some of our users have said about us at: https://www.profitkit.io/testimonials

      Baremetrics seems like a great app as well and it's really up to each company to decide which platform makes the most sense for them.

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