Making $4.5k/MRR with side projects while working full-time
Last week I met Rikki Pitt, a full-time Ruby & JavaScript consultant who is also working on a few side projects making him around $4.5k/MRR each month.
What's your name and what are you working on?
Hey, I’m Rikki Pitt and outside of my day-to-day Ruby and JavaScript consulting, I build and run several SaaS projects. Quite a few actually!
My most recent ventures are a pair of email-based products. The first is called Paced Email and is a productivity and privacy tool to save users time from endlessly checking their inboxes.
This led to the creation of Vend Email, which is an email forwarder (similar to other relays, like Firefox relay). The kicker is the ability for users to quickly, easily, and safely transfer their email addresses to others. Or even sell them. The benefit here is if the email has any intrinsic value (i.e. is the account email on a valuable lifetime deal), you can sell it by escrow.
Other projects I have built and currently run include:
Quikk - a Xero accounting platform backup and auditing system
Tweex - a way to update website content without coding or CMS integration
There are also RFID and R&D claim submission-based products too, but I won’t bore you with those!
All combined these projects make ~$4.5k/MRR.
You're working on so many projects at the same time. How do you stay organized?
Over the years, I’ve become quite adept at building products and sites in Ruby on Rails. From planning, and management to scaling, I’ve seen it all. It’s helped me build muscle memory and a set of tools that make it easy to develop and deploy many apps. They all follow similar processes.
You seem to be in so many niche markets/industries. How do you decide what market to go into?
When entering a new market or niche, it’s usually because I build something for myself to help my workflow or business efficiency.
Take InView, for example. I made the calendar integration with Xero to help me keep track of my company invoices and bills directly from my calendar. Xero imposes some strict partnership rules, like having a website to get full access to their API. After selfishly going through the process to get the app running, I was left with a product accessible to everyone on the web. It went on to win a Xero award, exhibit at an accounting conference and then recently got acquired by a globally leading tech company – Amaka.
At what point do you decide to abandon a project? Can you describe the last 2 times when you did that?
I don’t think I’ve ever really fully abandoned a project. As soon as it’s out there and in the hands of users, I’d feel terrible taking it away just because it wasn’t as successful as I’d have liked. As long as the costs to keep it running are minimal, the other products will absorb those costs.
What % of your time do you spend building vs. marketing
Originally, like most developers, my time was 99% dev work, and 1% marketing. Over the years I’ve grown to realize it should be the other way around ideally! Sadly this isn’t an ideal world and I’m still around 80% dev time and 20% marketing. I’m part of a mastermind group and we try to ensure we all focus as much as possible on marketing rather than just “adding another feature”.
How do you maintain all of these projects?
I’m a huge proponent of ensuring I adhere to as many security practices as I possibly can. As Basecamp say, “we’re not in the business of selling your data” and so I guard my user’s data fiercely.
Generally speaking, Ruby on Rails is my go-to web framework. I make it a priority to keep on top of updates for three main reasons. First, to ensure that any vulnerabilities are squashed. Second, to make sure that it’s easy to upgrade in the future (smaller steps are easier than one big version jump). Lastly, you get access to new and cool features, not to mention performance gains too.
Curious how do you currently promote your side projects? Did you get to $4k/mrr with "build it and they will come"? Have you found any channels to work well for you while buiding all of these side projects?
I used to believe in the "build it, and they will come" mantra. I built a site over 15 (20?) years ago, and it quickly received millions of visitors. Those days are sadly behind us now!
Both Paced Email and Vend Email have done exceptionally well on AppSumo. I've managed to find many thousands of early adopters via their marketplace. The feedback has been incredible and has helped form the roadmap.
Paced Email recently left AppSumo and finished at the top of the average user rating list! YMMV though!
I'm currently experimenting with Google Ads.
Are you including AppSumo revenue in your MRR?
Hey @gilli, no the monthly revenue from AppSumo far exceeded the above but isn’t recurring sadly. It’s one time payments in exchange for lifetime access.
Yeah I know I just wasn't sure if this $4.5k/MRR was somehow including the AppSumo revenue or not.
Did you see a big uptick in MRR after your AppSumo deals ended?
My own AppSumo Select deal is ending today actually: https://appsumo.com/products/baseline/
Woah, these are some serious projects. How long on average does it take you to build each one of them?>
Hey @nelsonmez54, a proof of concept of the core feature is usually an evening or two. If the idea succeeds, the development work to make it a proper "SaaS" can take anywhere from a few weeks to months. Saying that, I try to keep my apps focused on one idea and make it as useful as possible.
Where do you generally host your sites? Any tips to get the POC up faster?
Hey @Swissy, I’ve used Heroku for everything for many years. I’m looking to re-platform though soon due to their ongoing security and pricing policy updates.
Fly.io looks good, but it has its limitations in my case for how I build Rails apps. Hopefully they’ll sort it out soon!
Great interview! Rails projects can be very hard to maintain (especially with all updates), do you use any tools to make things easier?
Hey @molly8or, you're right! If you follow the "Rails" way, and keep on top of things, upgrading shouldn't be too difficult!
I guess it's the same with any framework though, if you leave upgrades too long, you'll be in a world of pain down the line!
As far as tools go, not really. I just use vim/tmux very extensively. I develop products in approximately the same way. I keep my processes the same too. Meaning that I can easily jump between projects and know exactly where everything lives.
Nice information.
Thanks
Cheers!
@Darko great story! @rikki I am also writing a newsletter on side hustles. Would love to feature your story in it. Can we connect for the same? https://hustlers.beehiiv.com/
Great post. How do you handle change of focus between projects quickly. Do you dedicate any time reserve on this?
Very good question! Context switching is always a place where you lose efficiency. In my case, because all my projects are built in Ruby on Rails, I know exactly where all the moving parts live. They all follow the "Rails way" and all the standard conventions associated with the framework.
I have all my projects loaded up in tmux meaning I can quickly switch between projects in my terminal with a couple of keystrokes.
Interesting, thanks for reply! :-)
As a RoR indie hacker myself, it is great to see others building and succeeding with the same approach!
RoR all the way. Well, as long as it makes sense! I do dabble in a few other frameworks if the project doesn't fully warrant spinning up a Rails instance. E.g. static sites etc.
Yeah, I totally agree. Since you have multiple projects up and running. Do you have your own RoR template that you base your projects on, or are you using something open source or similar? ☺️
I do actually! I'm a bit of a fanboy of Thought Bot, and I use their "suspenders" template which is aimed at Heroku deployments. Sadly, it's not been kept up to date with more recent releases of Rails.
Edit: I take that back! It's now up to Rails v6.1.6.1. I'd love to see them add updates for Rails 7, though!
https://github.com/thoughtbot/suspenders
Having a solid MRR, are you planning to stop your consultant job in the future to focus on product development entirely?
Not just yet! I think I'd like to slowly transition away from client work to SaaS rather than just abruptly switching.
What inspired the projects? Did you have existing problems and try to solve them?
Usually, the ideas come from neccessity. I'll encounter a problem or point of friction in my primary business and then build a quick prototype for myself. I then mention it to others and gauge if the abstraction is generally valuable for them. If so, I then take steps to open it up on the web.
Tweex is very interesting, but I don't get if it actually makes changes to the website itself or if its just for visualizing and sharing changes?
Thanks! It does make changes to the website, we provide a tiny snippet of code you add to your sites. You can then publish the changes once you're happy with the visualisations and have internally decided to release them. I'm in the process of launching a commenting and sharing system. It'll be live very soon!
Impressive! How long did it take to get your first customers? How did you get to that point?
In the case of Paced Email, it actually got paying users pretty quickly. A prominent Twitter user mentioned it, and a considerable influx of devs came in. A few started paying. That's when I knew it had potential. Fast-forward to now, it's a much more featureful product and is super robust.
Great post. What is a "mastermind" group?
Good question. It's basically a regular call with other SaaS founders. I met my mastermind mates via https://microconf.com/masterminds. Well worth the small fee to sign up!
great! do you work on this project by your own or do you have some people helping you?
All dev work is conducted by myself.
https://www.tweex.app has two other co-founders who are non-technical and concentrate on business strategy and marketing.
Good info
👍
Do you validate your idea before building it? I recently built a SaaS product https://turbopitch.live I was very excited during launch, I promoted it in free ways like posting on linked in and fb grps, product hunt, etc. But i did not get a single paying customer. And now i feel like its a useless product no one wants it.
Looked at your website and the video demo.
Your target market are freelancers who usually send pitches to their clients.
Where do you find freelancers? If you are on linked in, you can use a tool like getprospect extension to find emails of freelancers, then write to them and ask them if they can try the project.
You can also try to find freelancers on freelancers.com
I try to yes. In fact, Quikk, mentioned above, started life as a somewhat complicated tool for auditing companies. I built a landing page for it first (luckily), and after it didn't get much traction, I canned the idea.
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