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37 Comments

Crossed $5000 MRR in less than 11 months

Finally i have crossed to $5k MRR and proud to say that Visal List has attained ramen profitability. I was achieve all this in less than 11 months of official launch. The revenue has increased ๐Ÿ’ฏ% over previous month .

So how did i reach here? When i launched Visa List, i was very skeptical about the usefulness of visa requirements. But that quickly changed when it became viral and the traffic exploded in a week. I realised there is a huge need to for streamlined visa requirements, documents and all that. But with all the traffic, i only had ads here and there and no business plan in place. So couldn't generate much revenue. But over the period i added different channels to increase the total revenue.

Visa List Revenue

Visa List is an Open Startup

  • #1 Traffic: The traffic whent down to 30K users after initial month traffic of 150K users so i concentrated on SEO and slowly but steadily i improved the traffic to 300K users.

  • #2 Partnerships: I started Partnerships with Visa agency for Processing visa for people who don't have time to do it themselves. This was for people who need visa, then what about people who don't need visa or who can get visa on arrival. So for them i got into a partnership with Skyscanner and started showing flights prices

  • #3 Pro Membership: So after thinking about how to sustain viability of visa list in long-run. It started as an experiment to see if people who really need use lot of the pro features would pay. I'm now confident and can say that this experiment was a success and you can should never really dismiss any ideas untill you give it a try first, especially if it's about revenue.

  • #4 Ads: I personally don't like to show ads. Everyone thinks that if you get traffic you can get revenue but this is not true. There ar so many parameters and permutations and experiments you need to do. There is a whole profession aroudn this called AdOps. It was not at all easy for me but i kept at it like everything else in my life and if not immediately but eventually i cracked it. Once i reach a threshold with other channels i will probably remove it but as of now this has been not only essential to keep me motivated but also has been a big contributor for the total MRR.

I wanted to share this big milestone with my community as i have learned so much and helped me in different stages of my indie hacker journey and i hope this may be useful to others aswell.

I would also definitely appreciate any feedback/ suggestions/ feature requests from my fellow indie hackers.

You can find where you can travel with your passport tension free with Visa List

  1. 13

    Congrats from your biggest fan.

    some advice.

    I think you need to start putting a lot of effort into inbound marketing. Because if a product like this can grow from 0 to $5000 MRR, you can scale it to $20,000 MRR.

    Target the digital nomad niche and start writing content about it.
    If you can't write it, find someone to.

    start finding sites to guest post that will increase your brand awareness.

    my question is which payment platform are you using?

    1. 1

      Thanks mate, that's very useful advice! I'm currently using stripe.

    2. 1

      This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

  2. 7

    Congratulations Hari! How do you source and maintain up to date information on visa requirements? Having worked on a similar product a while ago itโ€™s something we struggled with

    1. 2

      I was wondering the same, there are literally thousands of combinations to keep up to date!

  3. 3

    Congratulations on the growth, this looks very impressive!

    Are there a lot of recurring users, or are most users looking at visa requirements for one-off trips?

    1. 1

      Thanks. As of now repeat users is small around 10%

  4. 3

    Congrats Hari!
    Could you please share with us a percentage ratio for each type of your income (ads, membership, partnership) by last month?

  5. 3

    Amazing!
    Curious to know about how your revenue streams are divided between the different sources you mention, like โ€œads are % of total rev, affiliates are % of total revโ€ etc.
    Could you elaborate on that a bit further?

  6. 2

    Congratulations. Inspired reading this. Thanks for sharing.

    1. 1

      You are welcome mate!

  7. 2

    Congrats! And thanks for the advice on my project!

  8. 2

    If $5000k MRR is "ramen profitability", I'm concerned about how high your costs must be. Or you're just eating some REALLY expensive ramen ;)

    Congrats!

    1. 4

      Actually the cost is around $30 per month

  9. 2

    Awesome, I used your website just 2 days ago! heard about it like 3-4 months ago from a viral reddit post...really awesome work, really happy for you!

    1. 1

      Thanks mate!

  10. 2

    Congratulations. Really impressive! What have you done for SEO to get to these traffic levels?

  11. 2

    I love visa list <3

    1. 1

      I'm glad you like it

  12. 2

    I came across VisaList today on the first-page @google ๐Ÿ‘๐Ÿป I remembered your tweet and now you're here. Congrats ๐Ÿš€

    I'm a non-EU citizen living in Ireland so I'd recommend expending beyond visas, like immigration, relocation, work permits etc. Happy to contribute regarding the Ireland immigration process.

  13. 2

    Congratulations! This is a great achievement :)

    1. 2

      Thanks mate!

  14. 2

    100% growth in October, wow you must be stoked.

    1. 1

      Yes, fully stoked!

  15. 2

    Awesome, congrats! What did you do between September and October to double your MRR?
    That's pretty awesome. Did traffic double, as well? Or a particular traction channel that did really well?

    1. 2

      Thanks. Traffic was more or less similar, i just started optimising all the channels one by one and started pro subscription as well.

  16. 2

    Well done ๐Ÿ‘ taking VisaList to such profitability. Given the sheer number of people applying for visa's every day, VisaList will grow even more in time due to word of mouth recommendations from different travellers!

    1. 1

      Thanks mate! It's always good to hear such nice words and belief in Visa List

  17. 2

    Congratulations Hari!!
    I really love the Skyscanner integration, so useful!
    But I feel like you could provide more information about the pro membership and its benefits. Maybe a seperate become-a-member page or something similar. You could display all the benefits, the price and maybe even a free trial that fits your business model.
    Good luck mate

    1. 1

      Thanks for the suggestions but actually I'm showing it as card in all the pages. Or may be I'm missing something?

  18. 2

    Congrats and thanks for sharing your experience with us!

    Just one small suggestion, the lazy loading in the country list input on the landing page feels a bit slow when you have to scroll down to the bottom of the list. I think it would be better from a UI perspective to load the list at once (also, maybe shorten the names of a few countries to keep the dropdown width the same as the select input).

    1. 1

      That's a good advice, thanks for the suggestion.

  19. 2

    What a great achievement, Hari! What are your plans for future growth?

    1. 1

      Thanks, currently there is room to increase conversion of visa processing agency.

  20. 2

    Congrats Hari! $5k MRR in 11 months is super cool!

    1. 1

      Thanks mate!

  21. 2

    Congrats Hari!

    1. 1

      Thanks Alex

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