2.5 guys, 2 years, $140+ MRR, 1st PH launch

Hey everyone, I'm Vojtech developer at Atmos.

Today, we are launching Atmos on Product Hunt! It's been a two-year-long journey to get here, and I thought it would be valuable to share how we got here with other Indiehackers.

It all started with the need to scratch our own itch. My friend Ondra (designer), was using Nunacier, a niche prototype for creating palettes in LCH, but he was experiencing issues with it. It would break, he couldn't save palettes, and sometimes the results were off. I thought it looked simple enough to fix these issues, and thus, the idea for Atmos was born.

The first few months were really fun. We worked on Atmos during our free time, building an MVP of Playground (our LCH/OKLCH editor) and a website. Despite having no users or visitors, we weren't bothered since we didn't have anything to show the world yet.

After we put together the first somewhat meaningful version, we posted it to a couple of websites and forums, but no one really cared. We were devastated since we thought it was the best product in the world. However, we didn't lose hope - we decided to experiment with Google AdWords!

Some of the Google AdWords campaigns we tried.

After spending a couple of hundred bucks, we had over 3000 visitors and our first ~500 users. This gave us a solid idea of what we needed to improve and what worked. Although we stopped using AdWords after that (the quality of users was terrible compared to organic traffic), we were still encouraged by the results.

Four months and many features later, we had a better product and were confident enough to release paid plans powered by Paddle. We opted for the freemium model with free, monthly, and yearly plans. In the first two months, we reached 7 paying users, netting us $25 MRR.

We were a bit discouraged at that point, however there was one more thing we didn't try. What if we try the thing that we hated, you know… marketing! So we tried everything we could think of, such as posting to communities, submitting to tool libraries, blogging, and cold outreach, etc. But what really worked for us were high-quality blog posts (like our #1 ranking post about LCH) and SEO optimization of our website.

Our traffic from google

Posting to high-traffic communities gave us a nice boost in traffic for a few days, but nothing could beat a steadily rising organic stream of people coming to our website every day (we are now at 100-200 per day). Since we started focusing on marketing, we've managed to increase our traffic by ~5x and our revenue to $140+ MRR.

Our daily signups

Our MRR since we launched paid plans

Earlier this year, we switched from freemium to a free trial model, which seems to be the right decision for Atmos. The conversion is night and day. For the first time in the two-year journey, we feel like we know what we're doing and are really proud of what Atmos has become. What started as a fun side project turned out to bring real value to people around the world.

I hope our story has been helpful to anyone starting out, and it illustrates that with great determination and a bit of spare time, you can build a great product that will bring value to someone.

If you enjoyed our story, we would really appreciate your support on our Product Hunt launch. And if you have any questions, feel free to ask!

Thanks for stopping by and have a fantastic day!