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29 Comments

$25,000 MRR ✅

14 months ago, my co-founder Sankalp and I set out to build a business that can sustain our livelihood while allowing us the freedom to live life on our terms.

When we started, we each had roughly 12 months of savings to survive on, assuming we made $0. Hence our minimum goal was to make $1,500/mo and the case where we would be celebrating with champagne was set to $3,000/mo.

14 months later, we grew past $25,000 in MRR while remaining a 2 person team.

I've written a detailed post about our top 11 learnings and experiences 👇

https://www.preetamnath.com/blog/grow-shopify-micro-saas-to-25k-mrr-in-14-months

  1. 3

    Congratulations.

    I had a good time reading the blog.

    By the by, you haven't thrown light on how much and where did you spend on marketing activities...

    Do you mind sharing that information ?

    1. 2

      I wrote a detailed post on how we got our initial traction, and the same formula has been working ever since - https://www.preetamnath.com/blog/shopify-micro-saas-growth

  2. 3

    Really great read and reminds me of my experience a few years back hacking away on the Shopify app store. The ecosystem has really become more competitive and your points about people copying (yes, straight up copying the design, copy, EVERYTHING) is an unfortunate part of the whole experience.

    A few other things I've noticed about the app store vs having a non-app store app:

    • Churn is super high. I remember it was close to 10-15% on the low end.
    • You have a decently high rating. I remember a lot of merchants trying to hold me hostage by giving a poor review in exchange to develop some feature that they (and only they) wanted
    • A lot of race to the bottom economics happening

    Anyway, several years back, I had an app that was doing about 10-15 paid trials a day (30+ installs/day). Over time, it did drop significantly. Reading your story reminds me of those good times :-).

    1. 2

      Your observations are spot on, and we are currently navigating our way through the race to the bottom and dealing with 1:1 copycats.

      Time will tell how we fare, but it will be interesting nonetheless :)

  3. 2

    Great blog Preetam, absolutely enjoyed it. Very valuable insights :)

    1. 1

      Happy to hear that :D

  4. 2

    You have such good reviews on your product!

  5. 2

    "The vast majority of our users are small merchants who barely have a few hundred orders a month. By becoming more expensive, we were alienating the 90% of potential paying users coming our app."
    Well said, boss. Thanks for sharing!

  6. 2

    Had a great time reading your blog post. Thanks a lot for sharing your lessons!

    One thing I’d like to know more, what do you do during this 5% of competition survey?

    1. 1

      Thank you :)

      I try to find out what the competitors did that truly add value to the end user, that we should be doing too. Whether it's product features, UX, or even pricing structure.

  7. 2

    Congrats with your achievements, I also really enjoyed reading your post.

    1. 1

      Thank you. It has been a learning experience :)

  8. 1

    This is really great Preetam, congrats!

  9. 1

    That is some incredible progress, great job guys! It must be a wonderful feeling :) Thanks also for sharing your insights in the blog post.

    1. 1

      Also, just noticed your website still says 2019 in the footer :)

  10. 1

    Thanks for sharing~ And congrats! 🎉

  11. 1

    Congrats, Preetam. This is super inspiring.

  12. 1

    Haha... just checked your app... You have not deleted the react map files... Your whole front-end code is visible... It's not necessary but I would prefer deleting them...

    1. 2

      Noted, we are looking into this. Thanks for the heads up!

      1. 2

        This made copying your app very easy. And this is why competitors copied your app's frontend.

        1. 2

          Nah, I had a server-side rendered one. They copied that too.

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