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.
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.
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!)
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.