Passed $1,000 MRR - here's how
Hey Indie Hackers 👋
I quit my long-term freelance gig a few weeks ago to work full time on Indie Worldwide.
In that time we grew from $0 to $1,000 MRR!
That sounds fast, but this is a community I've been growing for over three years now. I just recently added a monthly membership option and leveled-up my marketing efforts.
Here are the steps I took that had the biggest impact:
- Ditched my custom-coded landing page. 🙅
Maintaining a Gatsby site turned out to be a big time suck.
Ditched the old landing page and switched to Carrd which has let me move a lot faster.
- Streamlined onboarding. 🤝
Potential customers reach a payment portal way earlier now.
Free subscribers to the newsletter automatically get pitched to upgrade.
I've made it much easier for people to pay me who want to.
- Switched to a monthly recurring model. 🔄
Previously everything was set up as an annual payment.
Except it wasn't actually recurring because I wasn't sure how to set that up and I procrastinated on it for over a year.
Now it really is a monthly recurring subscription!
Building MRR made me much more confident about quitting freelancing and working full time to improve the community.
I know I can depend more on the revenue and therefore can confidently invest in things like paid services and hiring part-time help.
- Leveled up my marketing efforts. 🏆
Primarily on Twitter.
I analyzed my last three months of tweets and doubled down on the kinds of content that drove the most new followers.
• Giving my time away for free.
• Posting about milestones, especially revenue milestones.
• Replying early to other people's tweets so that new people will discover my account.
I also posted a lot more frequently here on Indie Hackers and made some posts on Reddit as well.
Now that I've reached $1,000 MRR, my next big goal is to get 100 paying users in the next 100 days.
Thanks for reading!
EDIT: Here's my next post, co-founder speed dating 💖.
🔥 Roast My Landing Page
This is why I read IndieHackers. Very informative post, @AntCas ! It's exactly what I wanted to know about today.
Thanks Dorian!
Congratulations! Are you doing any paid ads, or is most of what you do on Twitter?
I pay to be featured on The Hive Index. That's it.
Congrats to you! Very cool. I'm wondering how you knew it was time to quit your long-time freelance gig? Did you wait until you had a certain amount saved up? Or a number of customers? Just wondering about this process and how you navigated the transition.
I went with my gut.
I accomplished what I wanted to accomplish freelancing and was beginning to feel torn between ongoing work there and what I wanted to achieve with Indie Worldwide.
Once I made sure they would be fine without me I made the leap!
Thanks for sharing this, @AntCas! There's some good tips here. Will look at Indie worldwide as well. :)
Thanks Nikki, see you there :)
Im confused, if there are 2k members in slack, at $29pm - How have you only just passed $1kmrr? lol
At first it was free to join, then I started charging annually, and only recently did I start charging monthly.
Existing users were always grandfathered in, so we grew pretty big without any MRR!
cool bananas- just sent you email
Got your email, welcome to Indie Worldwide 🙌
Congratulations! How did you decide to zero in on Twitter as opposed to other social media platforms?
I talked to my existing members and asked how they found out about Indie Worldwide. Twitter was the most common response!
That's super cool! Man, I didn't realize Twitter could be this powerful. How much of a following did you have before this? What of those things you listed do you feel was the highest impact? I'm curious about using Reddit to grow but don't know where to begin ha
I've been building my following up over the last couple years from under 1k to about 3k. Since focusing full time on Indie Worldwide I've also been spending more time and energy on Twitter. Gained 1k followers in just the last month!
Hard to say which of the things I mentioned had the biggest impact individually since they are all part of a single system, but changing pricing scheme was probably number 1.
When you post on Reddit, pick a community you want to post in and then sort by "top, all time". Read the top 10 posts and get a feel for the kind of content that subreddit values. Review the community rules before you post and then give it your best shot. Worst they can do is ban you, so what?
Interesting to hear that you went with Carrd over your custom landing page. I'm not a developer myself, and I always thought low-code/no-code was for the non-techies among us. Cool to hear that even devs find these to be faster/easier at times.
It's a night and day improvement.
This is really inspiring to see. Thanks for sharing!
Thanks!
Looks great, my startup has hit $300 a view months back and we are hoping to reach $1000 soon. I'll have to check Indie Worldwide out
You got this!
I'm also running a free challenge (hosted by Indie Worldwide) which you might be interested in.
https://100in100.co/
Amazing work! 10k MRR soon 🚀
That's the dream!
Thanks for the informative post!
Glad you liked it!
Oh dude, that's just awesome!
I just can't wait to ever get to this level of MRR 😁 It seems like you've been putting some good work in for the last couple of years, so well deserved 💪
You're really making me re-thing my custom-coded landing page 😅
Every time I've switched out code for no-code it's made things easier and better.
That's interesting. So you're just using Card for your landing page, and the rest is all custom code?
I was thinking about doing that, but then I wondered how to create continuity in terms of design. The card landing page wouldn't have the same Tailwind theme as the rest of my pages, etc. It seemed more complicated than if I simply coded the landing page myself 😆
Every other landing page on that domain right now is hosted using feather.so -- a no code blog builder that uses Notion as CMS. It's super slick.
Congratulations on your goals! Did you consider adding free trails? I see myself as your potential customer but I am not sure I want to pay 29$ just to see what's really behind and how active the community is, etc... (I am not trying to be negative or something just saying my inner thoughts)
Hey Doki, we don't have a formal free trial, but we do host a lot of free events.
I would like to design a better "free trial" experience, but still thinking about how to do that right.
Open to suggestions!
In the meantime, here's some stats:
Stats are kind of bland, I think video would sell the experience better, but taking things one step at a time :)
Nice! Looks good amigo!
Thanks Elliot :D
Thanks for the posts. Have you ever thought about split testing your pricing section?
Is there a no-code way to do this?
I'm trying to validate my idea regarding this. The idea is to provide pricing page templates (easily hook in with your Stripe account) to make A/B testing easier & faster. You can compare the result of your split testing with the analytics.
Do you think is this something you would personally use for your SaaS businesses?
I do need to work on my conversions, hovering a bit below %1 right now. But it's not my most urgent task rn, because I'm more focused on getting more traffic to the page in the first place.
My goal is to get to 10k page views per month (4k currently) and then start optimizing from there. Otherwise I feel like there's not enough traffic to optimize/experiment with.
2022 for the win! Congrats Anthony, it's inspiring
Thanks Marc!
I've found that giving my time away for free can be hit and miss. Were you able to calculate your ROI on it?
I've a hard time figuring out how many followers are worth a few hours of my time. It's easier to put a dollar value on customers, but what is the dollar value of a follower?
In the end, I decided it wasn't worth it follower-wise. But then again, I suppose there are added benefits — meeting people, branding, etc. so who knows 🤷♂️
Hard to calculate ROI but here are some correlations I've noticed:
Newsletter subscribers seems to roughly keep pace, but lag behind, twitter followers.
Signups have been about 1 per day while new twitter followers lately has been 20 to 30 per day.
So far no churn to account for.
This comment was deleted a year ago.
This comment was deleted 2 years ago.