Userfeed
Product feedback made for Intercom
Episode #1 of Made with Grit is live and we'll have a new ~30 min episode every Monday 👇
"Hello world! Also, we hit $250k in annual recurring revenue":
https://madewithgrit.simplecast.com/episodes/1-hello-world-also-we-hit-a-revenue-milestone-f6j_epbV?recast=c222e0d1-683a-53d2-8e44-dbfbbaf8f074
We’ve never really publicly discussed our revenue, but we’re pretty excited about where we’re at and want to start being a little more open about our journey building Ad Reform and Userfeed. After ~2.5 years, our little two-person bootstrapped businesses recently reached $250k in annual recurring revenue!
We've learned a ton from others on Indiehackers, so we figured we'd share some things that have worked for us:
https://medium.com/@LandonB32/made-with-grit-bootstrapping-to-250k-arr-320041d93213
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That is awesome! Congratulations, this is a very important milestone.
Thank you for that comprehensive post as well. A lot of the steps remind me of our own journey, bootstrapping our 2-person business over the last 2 years. The customer-feedback focus, bootstrapping and in particular, the price changes stand out to me.
I personally started hiring way too late, way past the 250k ARR point. And when I did, I was in way more over my head than I should have been. What are your plans for that? Are you planning on eventually removing yourself from the day-to-day? Or do you want to stay hands-on?
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Thanks for the kind words Arvid 🙏
Good question. We just hired a full-time dev to alleviate all the product burden being on my co-founder (Kyle). This has forced us to put more process in place which is probably a good thing. The thing we spend the most time on is support, but I actually don't mind that too much because it allows us to gather a lot of high-quality feedback (using our product, Userfeed). Eventually, we'll need to get someone on the customer success side to allow me to focus purely on Sales/marketing.
What hires/roles do you think you made too late?
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The exact same things that you already have either hired or on your mind.
The customer support role was something that I took to more and more, even though I should have been working on the tech side of the product. As tickets come in whenever the user has a problem, I was constantly interrupted in my dev work.
We eventually hired for that role, and with some training, the interruptions have become almost non-existant (or are pushed to the next day / time-slot).
Hiring a developer to then take away the other things like product work, maintenance and fixes was the other thing I neglected. Instead of focussing on customers needs and vision, I was entrenched in maintaining integrations and fixing tiny issues.
From my perspective of a bootstrapped engineer, those two stand out. Just because I CAN do these things doesn't mean I SHOULD. I learned that lesson a bit late.
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For sure. Yeah, the challenge is that support questions many times end up getting routed to dev for these reasons:
- There's a bug that needs to be fixed
- There might be a bug, but a dev needs to make sure
- The answer to the questions requires an understanding of how the tech works on the backend
It's hard to avoid this. This is why it's so important that you put great support docs in place and route feedback to a hub so devs/product folks can look at the data on their own time, instead of immediate disruption. A little pitch for Userfeed ;)
Congrats on your business by the way. Looks like you all are doing great and the idea is so smart. Were any of you a teach prior to starting the biz?
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Thanks! Danielle was a teacher, and it was her pain points that led us to build the product.
Her IH interview is at https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/turning-frustration-into-a-35k-mo-product-that-helps-teachers-excel-d2205a1100
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Awesome! Love this. By the way, we just launched our first podcast episode on the topic of this post today: https://madewithgrit.simplecast.com/episodes/1-hello-world-also-we-hit-a-revenue-milestone-f6j_epbV?recast=c222e0d1-683a-53d2-8e44-dbfbbaf8f074
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10 Comments
Love the name.
Can you tell more about your setup?
What apps/hardware you're using? - audio sounds great.
👋Hey Nathan! We've kept things pretty simple on the hardware side:
As for software, we use a combination of Garageband (to record) and Descript (to edit). We've been recording locally, so we haven't used remote recording tools (yet). And like Landon said, we're using Simplecast for hosting.
Hope this helps, happy to discuss further if you'd like!
Thanks. I know we use Simplecast for hosting. @conarro what physical equipment do we use?
Congratulations! Love the podcast logo design. Very cool to hear your experience on growing the two SaaS products. Awesome story with lots of takeaways.
Thanks! I hope we can keep it at a high level :)
Congratulations 🥳 What podcast equipment do you use?
We've got a pretty simple setup:
As for software, we use a combination of Garageband (to record) and Descript (to edit).
Let me know if you have other questions!
Good question. I know we use Simplecast for hosting. @conarro what physical equipment do we use?
Congratulations! I've subscribed and downloaded the first podcast to take a listen to later today. :)
Awesome! Thanks for subscribing and feel free to give us any feedback you have.