£117MRR in 37 days - 5 things that made a HUGE difference
I’ve been wanting to see a graph like this since the day I first thought about starting a business.
It’s a small amount of money and our customers haven’t had a chance to churn yet, but after 3 years of 0 revenue startups, I finally feel like we have made a breakthrough in how we think about building startups.
These are some lessons we learned going from £0 to £117.78MRR 37 days after “launching” our startup Choppity.com which edits TikToks/Reels using AI.
1 - Do more cold sales
After “launching” via a LinkedIn post, we achieved our first sale. However, after that, our MRR stagnated for a long time as you can see on the graph.
This is because we weren’t doing cold sales and we focused on development. The part of the graph where MRR starts growing, is when we really started doing cold sales. There is a very clear correlation.
2 - Too early for marketing
Your first few customers should be via founder-led sales for a few reasons:
- If you can’t find individual people and sell the product directly to them, you likely won’t be able to do it with marketing.
- Founder-led sales has helped us create great connections with our customers, this has helped us gather lots of feedback to improve the product and should help with retention.
- Sales is easier than marketing. Speaking directly to potential customers means you can very quickly learn if you’re doing something wrong with your sales approach and improve. With marketing, feedback may not be so explicit.
- It’s genuinely fun and motivating! I’ve always hated the idea of sales (I’m a compsci graduate who loves building products), but recently I’ve enjoyed sales so much that going back to dev work takes effort. It’s very rewarding to get to talk to potential customers and then receive a notification that they’ve bought a subscription!
As a disclaimer, I have very little experience with marketing. But this is the opinion I have formed so far.
3 - Build something people want
Yes, it’s a cliche. But if you manage it, it’s surprising how willing potential customers will be to talk to you.
With our past products, potential customers were “interested” and curious because we were building cool tech, but they didn’t really want it because it didn't solve a significant problem for them.
4 - Qualify your customers
When we started doing sales, we talked to anybody who had any chance of finding our product useful.
Our qualification process was essentially this:
- Do you work with video?
- Do you have a beating heart?
- Great! Let’s set up a 30min demo call.
While this was great for building confidence with talking to people and demoing our product, it meant that we would spend a lot of time organising and executing these calls, only to find out after hours of work that they had absolutely no need for our product. This wasted a lot of time.
Instead, our qualification process now looks more like this:
- I saw that you create a lot of short form video content for your clients (we perform some initial qualification before reaching out to them)
- How many videos do you create in the average week? (qualify the frequency of the problem)
- How long does each video take you to make? (qualify the intensity of the problem)
If they have a frequent and intense problem…
- We’re working on X. We think this could help you increase your revenue and save you time by doing Y. Would you be open to a call? (qualify willingness to adopt new solutions)
5 - You can do it!
I’ve been on IndieHackers for a while, seeing people post their MRR figures and I always thought they must be very skilled and experienced. We are neither of those things, but we’ve managed to achieve a little growth, and we’re proud of it!
It really is as simple as building something people want and then getting it in front of them.
I have an ask
Do you know someone who spends a lot of time editing short form, social media videos that look like the images below?
Maybe they have a podcast, they’re an entrepreneurship coach, or they run a digital marketing company. I’d really appreciate it if you could put me in touch with them or send them our demo:
- Demo - YouTube link
- Email - [email protected]
- LinkedIn - www.linkedin.com/in/aarvn/
Thank you! Feel free to reach out to me yourself btw, always happy to chat and help - good luck!
Gah, I've see entire agencies pulling in 5 figures a month doing this service manually. Looks like they might need to pivot asap.
I think you have a few competitors, but the market is undoubtedly huge for this right now.
Thought 1:
Do customers really need a 30-minute demo call for this? It seems so simple I can't imagine you need to stretch it out that long. Can't you just let them upload a video and try it out?
30-minute custom demos are usually the domain of enterprise providers costing thousands a month. There's no way you can scale that at your price point. As a founder you've surely got more important things to work on.
I guess in the early stages it could be useful for getting feedback from potential users.
Thought 2:
I'm gonna go against the grain and suggest that deep qualifying of your prospects might not be necessary, at least if you're automating some of your outreach.
You have an extremely powerful offer, in my opinion. Cold email campaigns could be a winner for you.
Here's a (ChatGPT-assisted) template offer:
Subject: Make your videos TikTok-friendly, 45x cheaper
Hi [Prospective Customer],
Are you tired of spending precious marketing funds on video editing?
Our software can automatically edit your long-form videos (like podcast recordings) into short TikTok reels, saving you 45x on costs compared to hiring a video editor.
Say goodbye to the hassle of manual editing and let our AI magic do the work for you.
Want to learn more? Reply to this email and we'll give you a free demo.
Best,
[Your Name]
Doing that at scale to companies in certain niches that publish video could work really well. That data shouldn't be too difficult to scrape.
You don't even need them to reply, many of them will just look at the domain and type it into their browser to check you out. It's a less customised approach than what you've done previously but I just think if you put it in front of the right customer, they won't need that much convincing at all.
Also applies to LinkedIn outreach, PPC ads, whichever other channels you want to use.
Anyway great job on the service, you've got a promising future!
Thanks for sharing! Great product, great website and also great way of transporting to the customer what your SaaS does.
I account that mostly to the cool interactive demo and also the video of you explaining the product
Thank you for your positive message! We've definitely found that a demo has made a massive difference - potential users much better understand our value prop after we've shown them our demo.
Awesome.. This is insightful.
Thank you! I'm glad you found it interesting :)
Good stuff! Have you tried reddit for growth? We found that being active in relevant communities, providing value and plugging the product if it makes sense works wonders.
We set up reddit keyword alerts around our problem space and jump into every relevant convo.
We haven't utilised Reddit much yet, but we want to!
Signed up to your tool :D It looks great!
This could also be awesome to market on Reddit I think, there are a lot of content creators who are struggling to chop up content into clips.
I have recently been using Reddit more and more and seen some great growth but you need to find the right subreddits, threads and comments.
Surfkey.io by @JohanCutych helps massively with this.
Absolutely! Thanks for the recommendation, I just signed up :D
Awesome. This is something I need. Will sign up. Congrats to you and your team.
Hey! Thanks for your message! I'd love to connect on LinkedIn or via email and chat more about it if you're curious :)
Sure. Drop your LinkedIn profile here. I'll mention your product in my newsletter that comes out every Sunday.
https://theperipheral.beehiiv.com/subscribe
Awesome, thank you! I just subscribed to your newsletter :)
Here's my LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/aarvn/
I know so many folks in the twitter space who could use this. Have you started a twitter/ IG campaign yet? If not, do you have a referral link and ill see if I can get a few folks to try it out.
Not yet, I've sent you an email though! Looking forward to chatting!
Great point about sales before marketing. Sales should always be done first, it's outbound and the feedback loop is fast. Marketing is inbound, more difficult and usually builds on what you learn throughout the sales stage.
Exactly! And I believe there will come a point where the transition to marketing will make sense
Wow, great insights. Thanks so much
Thank you! I'm glad you found it helpful, I'm looking forward to posting more
Can you tell us a little more about your "cold sales" approach?
Sure! So, it's pretty much just searching on LinkedIn for people in our target customer segment.
Then we send them a connection request along the lines of "Hey X, I saw you're working at Podcast Agency Y, I'm working on a tool which may help you grow your business/make your job easier, I'd love to connect!"
Then it's basically a few back and forth messages following the system I posted above in the qualification section.
And if choppity.com could help them, we set up a call.
It's really nothing overcomplicated.
Also, the more you do it, the easier it feels and you can do it at a greater volume.
I hope that helps! Feel free to connect on LinkedIn or email if you want to ask me anything more :)
That's good stuff, thanks for the clarification!
I'm seeing a common trend with a lot of indiehackers lately... cold sales.
Whether it's web scraping and cold emailing, auto-follow on Twitter, or LinkedIn outreach, people are taking a proactive approach to their marketing. Feels like I should do the same for my product.
Do you have any analytics you can share about the cold sales approach? Like how many respond/accept your connection, how many sign up for a free trial from that, how many covert to paid users, etc.?
My experience with Google Ads through 2 months is just under a 1% conversion. The reason I'm curious about your analytics is that I'm wondering if cold sales is worth my time or would it be better to just scale PPC.
Nice thanks for sharing such a great piece of lessons you learn from your product.
Absolutely, I'm happy to help and I'm going to continue sharing in the future!
Thanks for sharing such great insights
Thank you!!
Hey, I've discovered a similar app that seems to do the same thing. Take a look at dumme.com. It appears to be YC-backed.
Hello! We're aware of them, we're actually in touch with one of the founders. There's quite a few competitors in this space - that's not stopping us though!
That's an interesting product--I think YouTube shorts have that feature of auto-extracting the "interesting" part of a long video, might through an ML model.
Oh interesting! Could you send me a link to the feature? I haven't come across this yet
This is good stuff. What indies want. Thanks for sharing.
Loved, even more, the Qualify your customers part. All the very best for the future.
Thank you so much!!
Thanks for sharing Aaron; as someone on a similar path, I agree that sales can really help you move the needle because of the direct feedback that you're getting from prospects
Yes, totally! It also helps us hone in on who our ideal customer is - the image is becoming clearer and clearer each week.
Thanks for sharing. Good luck to you and your project!
Thank you so much!
I’m getting close to my first launch, so this was really useful. Thanks for sharing!
I'm pleased it could help! Good luck with your launch :D
Great tips!
Trying to do this with Evoke
Basically hosting open source AI models on the cloud for devs and businesses building AI apps. Mainly focusing on image generation for now.
However, the main issue is finding people building AI apps that haven't implemented image generation yet, which are quite hard to find.
Where do you mainly find and cold DM/email your leads?
Honestly, we just do it via LinkedIn. We've started testing Dripify too for LinkedIn automation, might be worth looking into!
Great post @aarvn, you are spot on about qualifying your customers. Made the same mistakes when we first started out.
Thank you! It's so easy to do when starting out - especially when common sales advice doesn't emphasise qualifying as a crucial step
Awesome tips on how to grow MRR! Especially love the founder-led sales tip!
I'm glad you enjoyed the post!
Yes, it feels extremely useful at this early stage. Personal connections should help retention, and maybe even create some word of mouth :)
nice demo!! super informative and quick.
Thank you!
Since our product is so visual, it can be hard to explain via text. A 1 min video really helps people understand what we do :D
Got my first customer yesterday. No domain, no landing page, just DM-ing a lot of people and having conversations. Ditched two previous projects because couldn't find enough interest.
Here is an important gamechanger:
Stop asking them if you like your idea (they always say yes).
Start asking them how much they would pay for it.
Asking for money is hard at first. It's much easier to set up a pricing page and ask for $5/mo. But you have to remember that if you're building something useful, people would beg you to take their money. So it's either you ask them now, or you spend a few precious years of your life adding features in the hope that "I'll just add this fantastic feature and they will start buying".