$5,000 MRR from our Direct Service

At some point which I can't remember, I added the option to sign up directly for the service via our own website using Stripe, without the need to go through a cloud provider marketplace, and that business had been growing steadily and we hit $5,000 MRR in late 2016.

The key lesson here is that working with your customers directly, instead of via a marketplace, is a good way to increase exposure and revenue since in many cases the marketplace would be the broker between customer service discussions which leads to misunderstandings and slows down the issue resolution process.