We smashed our $1000 MRR goal - here are the lessons we learned

Last year we set a goal of getting to 1k MRR.

Today we have 35 active paying customers, are doing over 1.2k MRR, and growing faster than ever. 🎉

Some cool stats for 2022 📈

• 5 237 posts created on feedback boards
• 11 106 accounts created to post feedback
• 824 organizations created
• 36 359 upvotes to posts

Best marketing channels for us 🚀

1. Word of mouth is underrated - Build a great product and offer outstanding customer service.
2. "Alternative to" marketing - Create alternative pages for your competitors and drive SEO traffic to them. Post your product on AlternativeTo.net as well!
3. "Powered by" marketing - Our tool allows you to create public feedback boards and widgets to capture feedback. All boards have a small "Powered by Featurebase" button.
4. Integration marketing - We're featured on the Intercom marketplace and others. I really recommend this since you make your product more useful while marketing at the same time. Our Q1 goal is to double down on this.

Here are a few lessons we learned 👇

1. In a competitive market, your product comes first and marketing second 🏗️

You have probably seen tons of memes about how small-brain founders only focus on building new features and completely ignore marketing.

So we followed the advice. When launching our MVP we went ham on marketing and tried over 10 different marketing channels, and... none of them worked. 🫠

We almost quit back then since the general indie founder's advice is that if people don't care about your MVP after a few weeks, you should probably work on something else.

The problem was that our product sucked. Therefore any marketing efforts were wasted because there were so many better options on the market.

In a competitive market, success is at least = 70% product X 30% marketing.

Therefore if you have a shitty product, you are essentially trying to multiply by 0.

In our case, we could draw a matching line between our MRR and how good our product is.

I wish we had doubled down on making our product amazing before wasting so much time on useless marketing efforts.

2. Pick one marketing channel and stick to it 🎯

Rather than finding the next shiny marketing channel that could magically 10x your MRR, just pick one that fits your target audience and master it. Pierre from ScrapingBee made a great talk on this that you should definitely check out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLVQ96pGHw4

3. It's much safer to build in a validated market ✅

If you're great at building products and design, then this is the way.

There are niches in big proven markets that you could hop into. Pick a few features from a bloated tool and do it much better.

And remember that 99% of the time, it is a big red flag when you can't find existing competitors to "your new fantastic business idea."

I hope you found something useful in this. However, take everything I shared as a data point and not a fact. Your experience might vary significantly based on the market you are in and hundreds of other factors. Hah, I wish more indie founders added this disclaimer.