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51 Comments

Broke $100k MRR!!

Another milestone that we've been chasing for quite some time. This one is important for a few founder-specific reasons.

We've got a large founding team (5 of us), all of whom have been sacrificing for quite some time. We hired additional team members who were being paid market-rate salaries, at the expense of our own salaries (which is standard and makes sense to do).

At the $100K MRR mark, I was able to hit a salary goal for the founding team that is respectable - still not market-rate / still not what they're worth to me, but at least respectable.

One of the coolest feelings in the world is being able to reward the people that put their blood, sweat, and tears into helping you build your dream. To be able to show them that it's ACTUALLY WORKING.

Keep crushing it everyone - slow, incremental growth FTW ๐Ÿ’ช

  1. 5

    Nice. $100,000 MRR seems fantastic. I'm wondering how big is your team - i.e. how many employees? Pls, tell me less than 5 :D

    p.s. I've added UpLaunch to SaaSHub. You can verify it now.

    1. 4

      Haha not less than 5, we're at 14 but it's a mix of FT/PT/Contractors. 8 of us are FT (including the 5 person founding team).

      1. 3

        Challenge: 200k MRR without growing the team ;)

    2. 2

      Can you add textita.com to saashub too ! :)

        1. 1

          Thanks. I like your site. How many unique visitors are you getting a day? Care to disclose?

          1. 2

            Sure. It's around ~1,000 on a biz day.

  2. 2

    That's really cool, very impressive! Have you shared your story somewhere, from the beginning?

    1. 2

      We were on the IH podcast a while ago, itโ€™s a good summary of how this all started.

      https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/from-fireman-to-first-time-founder-with-matt-verlaque-of-uplaunch-9820b3051d

      1. 2

        Oh, thanks, I guessed something like that should already exist :)

  3. 2

    This is wonderful - and the respect you're having for your team by paying them market and yourselves less is incredible. I am very happy for you :)

    Is the founding team still heavily hands-on or have you delegated operational work to the team yet?

    1. 3

      Honestly, it's somewhere in the middle. As a SaaS that focuses on a specific vertical, there are some functions that will never be delegated, although they are a select few (webinars based on our story / experience, internal marketing efforts such as our Office Hours webinars, some of our consultative calls, etc).

      Our CTO is still about 90% writing code, but honestly there's just a huge volume of work to be done. I've been the primary person who has zoomed out of the weeds, and my co-founder Jake is next behind me as he transitions into a more legit COO role.

      It seems to ebb and flow - if something comes up, one of us will usually fix it ourselves first, document how we fixed it, and then operationalize / delegate it to a team member. We're big on leading by example / doing the work first to show how it can get done. Of course, now that we're hiring more and more talented team members, sometimes they are ahead of us (which is exactly what we want).

      It's a subtle, but specific way to interact as a leader. Instead of "telling them what to do", we lead with action first - and the expectation is that they'll start to iterate / innovate within their roles to fix problems or make improvements before we can get to them.

      1. 2

        Thanks for the insight. I am a big fan of documenting procedures to make them available and comprehensible, and you seem to have that figured out really well.

        Our business is in a niche as well, and I understand the "some function will never be delegated" as a statement of operational complexity and founder involvement, and while this is true very often, I think that getting most of these things handled by employees eventually has always been a goal of ours, and it was eventually accomplished. Not all, but most.

  4. 1

    Great job! keet it up

  5. 1

    Great work - fantastic achievement.

    btw your site give security warnings in Chrome - for mixed content (some resources loaded via http).
    Also your 'about us' page looks broken in Chrome (?)

  6. 1

    Wow this is amazing! I remember when my consulting company hit this metric, annually, a few years ago and it was such a good feeling. Given that we are not based in the US, $100k/year was pretty good!

  7. 1

    Very impressive mate. Keep on going.

    1. 1

      Thanks! No turning back now ๐Ÿ’ช

  8. 1

    Wow amazing! Awesome work

    1. 1

      Thank you ๐Ÿ™

  9. 1

    Very nice Matt and congrats on achieving $100K mrr

    1. 1

      Thanks!!! Really appreciate it ๐Ÿ™Œ

  10. 1

    Congratulations! ๐Ÿ™Œ
    This is HUGE.
    Woohoo!

    1. 1

      Thanks so much ๐Ÿฅณ

  11. 1

    Awesome! Congratulations. Seriously impressive achievement!

  12. 1

    Well done guys. I love the business model + Product. I imagine churn is low and there are lot of upsell possibilities in the future?

    1. 1

      Thanks - churn is pretty decent (5% or lower, all month to month sales with no contracts). Always room to improve that, Iโ€™m happier sub-3% but we are always focusing on it. Not many upsell opportunities yet but we are working on some ideas - I push hard on making sure that the ideas are valuable and well validated so itโ€™s a work in progress.

      1. 1

        5% is amazing! We have about 400 monthey paid users at $20 but churn is super high as user done need our product every month. Maybe this is us targeting the wrong users or just the nature of the product.

    1. 1

      Thanks so much for the comment!

  13. 1

    Wow, definitely a milestone worth celebrating! What's the next big milestone you're looking forward to?

    1. 1

      Itโ€™s a product milestone for us. We are working on some substantial platform improvements to better serve our customers and increase market penetration within our niche. Have some ambitious goals but it should unlock additional revenue and provide increased value as well.

  14. 1

    That's amazing! Congrats!

    1. 1

      ๐Ÿ™ thank you!!

  15. 1

    Congrats!

  16. 1

    Just as a FYI: Your check openings link is not working, I was trying to take a peak :)

    1. 1

      Thanks - I'll get some eyes on it ๐Ÿ˜ญ

  17. 1

    Thats great. So how do you get new gyms? Do you have a sales rep calling them or do they find you online?

    1. 2

      We are 100% inbound at this point. Major channels are customer referrals, joint venture partnerships, and occasional webinars. Working on additional paid acquisition channels currently, both product-driven and educational in nature.

  18. 1

    hell yeah! congrats Matt, here's to the next milestone 1m MRR!

    1. 1

      Haha I feel like there are 1 or 2 milestones in between there - let's goooooo!

  19. 1

    Congrats, Matt!

    1. 1

      Thanks Courtland! Just set up an AMA as well, looking forward to it!

  20. 1

    Nice!! That's incredible Matt, nothing like having all your team's hard work pay off. Congrats!

    1. 1

      Thank you ๐Ÿ™Œit's an amazing feeling.

  21. 1

    Damn! Seriously impressive! Keep up the good fight man.

    1. 1

      Thanks so much ๐Ÿ™too stubborn to quit!

  22. 1

    Congrats! Major milestone. Now onto $500K :)

    1. 1

      Thanks ๐Ÿ™Œwe're chasing it haha

  23. 1

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