From $0 to $250 MRR. How we broke out of absolute zero.
My New Year's resolution for 2022 was to start a business that can support me and my family.
I've been logging about my journey on Twitter since January 1st, and I thought I'd share what I've learned and accomplished so far.
For my first product, I chose to build senja.io, a tool for collecting, aggregating, managing, and sharing customer reviews and comments. I started building it on January 2nd.
It's a direct competitor to products like Endorsal, Testimonial, Vocal Video, and Shoutout.
I started building it because I wanted to add social proof via a wall of love for an earlier project I worked on.
I signed up for one of my current competitors to do that, but my pagespeed dropped by 40 points! In my head, I thought, “I can do better than this.”
The popular tools used to collect and manage testimonials were either slow, expensive, or ugly. I wanted to do things in a more fun and exciting way than the competition, so I gave it a shot.
I had really high expectations when we first started, thinking I'd get to $5k MRR within 6 months, but as the title shows, that was not the case 😅
I worked on it for 6 months, getting no customers and no recurring revenue.
In this short post, I'll share what it took to break out of Zero MRR, and how you can do the same.
I spent January to February building the first version of my product.
In the month I launched, I gained 65 users.
- None of them became paying customers
- Only one of them started actively using my product.
After that, signups were sporadic.
From April to the first half of June, I got around 20 signups per month, all of them usually coming from Twitter.
Up until this point, I had earned $350 from two LTD sales, and had $0 in MRR.
Everything started changing for the better at the end of June. Here’s exactly what happened.
What Kickstarted Growth?
1. Building a unique and valuable product.
Up until June, I had no real vision for Senja.
I had solved my own problem with embedding a fast wall of love, but I didn’t know what else the market wanted, and I didn’t know how to innovate.
So I just copied a lot from the competitors I tried to replace, without bringing anything new to the table.
That’s where Olly came in.
Towards the end of June, Oliver Meakings joined me as Senja’s cofounder.
He knew the market and had felt the pain of collecting and managing testimonials first-hand. He had the knowledge of the market that we needed to build something that people actually found valuable.
After he joined, he immediately started dumping ideas that would shape Senja’s future.
💡 Building a faster or more beautiful product usually isn’t enough to get people to pick you over the competition. You need to have unique selling points and a vision of your own to actually succeed.
Some things we would eventually start to do better than the competition include:
- Richer review management.
- Multiple forms for collecting different kinds of testimonials.
- More ways to embed and customize your testimonials.
- Automatic image generation from your testimonials.
These few features have already begun to give us an edge over our competition.
Before all this, we still had a bare-bones product with $0 in MRR, and we were figuring out what needed to be done first.
So we started with onboarding.
2. Fixing our non-existent onboarding
When we first started, our onboarding was absolute shite.
We'd drop users into our app, and expect them to start exploring till they found what they wanted.
Getting traffic and signups was never a problem for us. We were getting 1.5K → 3K visitors to our site every single month.
But none of our users activated. They'd sign up, look around for a moment or two, then abandon the app and never return.
This was the page they were dropped in at first:
There were no clear instructions on what to do next. At this point, none of our signups were activating.
So the two of us got to work, and with a few changes, our activation rate more than doubled!
Here’s a video breakdown with everything we did.
https://www.tella.tv/video/cl84i0glz00000gl797uscfhl/view
To summarize:
-
We made sure our users completed one primary action when they signed up, making our users experience value from the get-go. For us, this was creating their form.
-
We artificially reduced the time to magical moments with dummy data and automation.
-
We cut out the dead ends in our app. Giving our user something to do on each screen.
For example, when they first visit the testimonials page, instead of having an empty state, they’re prompted to import their existing testimonials. -
We improved the playfulness on our onboarding.
Once we did all these things, our activation more than doubled, and we started getting a steady stream of customers.
3. Acquiring more users
Up until September, our #1 acquisition source was Twitter.
In August, we started experimenting with more marketing methods:
We experimented with talking about our product on LinkedIn, Indie Hackers, Reddit, and Twitter.
Twitter remained our #1 acquisition source, but now things were becoming diverse.
70% of our customers came from Twitter. All I do is write about what I’m learning and the interesting things that happen to me. Somehow, it’s attracting the right crowd.
As for diversification, we’re starting to see the work we did compound. This is what September looks like so far.
Twitter is still our #1 source, but we’ve started seeing more diversity in our analytics.
Betalist is also brought us 10-15 signups and a lot of exposure.
4. Cold Outreach
I got us our first customer with cold DMs a few days back.
I found him using a Reddit Audience Research tool called Gummy Search.
To start, I looked for people who were talking about collecting testimonials, and I found someone who was using screenshots as reviews on their website.
Then, I sent this cold dm to them:
Hey [person]! Just saw your comment about [business].
Isn't managing your reviews as screenshots a little tedious? I saw how you embedded them on your website. They're also hard to read because of how small the text is.
We talked for a bit, then he signed up and upgraded. After trying out our product, they fell in love with it.
I’m definitely going to try more cold outreach in the future.
TL;DR
The things that have sped up our growth include:
- Finding our unique selling points
- Building a first-class onboarding
- Experimenting with all sorts of acquisition channels
I respect you grinding your own ways to grow your app. Good luck!
Really great post and I appreciate the video link with the walk through of the updates and details included in the post. I signed up! This post gave me the courage to start asking for early customer testimonials!
Hello,
I spent a few minutes this morning featuring your product on LinkedIn and ChandraCloud
https://www.chandracloud.com/customer-testimonial-review-management-software/
Hope you like it.
Venkat
Question on Twitter growth strategy:
I'm bad at Twitter and was wondering about how you even get an audience on Twitter? Do you just tweet a bunch of stuff (with or without hashtags) and people just organically come?
Or do you also have to sort of follow people in your niche and then comment on people's comments?
Or do you have to use paid ads on Twitter?
Or is the process something completely different?
Wow, good job sticking with it and awesome to see that your hard work is paying off. Your onboarding flow looks super slick now and the general presentation of your app and website looks great!
Really good post! Thanks for sharing your little (big) victory.
Senja is really beautiful, amazing work! Did you design it yourself or get someone to do it for you? As a technical person I'm really struggling with that part of things 😅
The part about copying from competitors without bringing anything new to the table is interesting. I'm actually building something similar to the GummySearch tool that you mentioned, but am mainly focussing on features that I've missed while using it, while ignoring parts I didn't think were that useful. Will see how that goes 😄
Welcome to the wonderful world of building Reddit tools. Enjoy and best of luck :)
Thanks! GummySearch is a great tool and I also love its design, a big inspiration to me for sure!
Thank you so much 💜
Yes, I built and designed it myself (running on Sveltekit)! It's gone through quite a few iterations to get there, though.
V1 -> https://web.archive.org/web/20220218192732/https://senja.io/
V2 -> https://web.archive.org/web/20220618092522/https://senja.io/
V3 -> https://web.archive.org/web/20220803174045/https://senja.io/
V4 -> https://senja.io/
Yup, copying just for the sake of it is a mistake that a lot of new indie hackers make when starting out. I've found that if you start from the problem and not from the solution, it becomes easier to build something better than the competition.
That's awesome, I just started using GummySearch and it's really helpful but also missing some important stuff. Is your tool live yet?
It's not live yet, but you can join the waiting list here and I'll let you know once you can start using it 😉 Also interested in hearing what important stuff you think GummySearch is missing!
Thanks, I've signed up! One of the major features that are missing is the ability to track comments. I just send out a survey about struggles with Contact Management/CRM in small businesses, and I want to get notified right away if someone comments on Reddit. That way, I can hopefully spark a conversation.
Let me know if you have more questions.
Great to hear you signed up and thanks for the reply. That will definitely be in the MVP as it was something I was missing as well (I actually just implemented the basic version of it now 😄)!
That's good to hear! Any idea on you will release the MVP?
Hopefully within a month :)
Thanks for this detailed post!
Glad you liked it :D
Senja is an amazing tool 😍
Thank you for sharing your growth story.
It's Really Nice
Congrats Wilson.
Tried Senja. Seemed too complex to me.
let me build a simplified version of Senja 😅
Or you could tell me what you found confusing, and I can fix it 😉
This is very helpful. Thanks for sharing. All the best for the future.
This is a great post.
Your point about onboarding really resonates with my experience as well.
I'm working on a new product I'll be releasing publicly soon. In August, I made a post about it on reddit and recruited an army of very enthusiastic reddit users to participate in a closed beta. These folks were extremely excited about the product.
What I found was that users would sign up... but then drop off pretty quickly out of the funnel. Right after signing up. Only the most technical users pushed forward.
After talking with two of the more vocal users who fell off after signing up, they both said the same thing. They didn't know what to do. They didn't understand what they were looking at. A few of the concepts were a little headscratching.
I spent a substantial amount of time rewriting a few things to be simpler and am now directing them to a tutorial walking them through what to do, step by step. I sent out an email announcing the changes and - boom, several came back and pushed further into the app.
I've since taken that same idea of improving onboarding to the next level with the next iteration of the app, and have taken the following approach:
It seems to me that when a user arrives at your app and signs up - you've basically got under 60 seconds to show them something valuable.
Users do seem willing to consume video content for longer, however, which is interesting.
Great to hear, thanks for sharing! What's the name of your app? And how did you get people excited about the beta? (We just started developing a really simple and easy to use contact manager and we'll need to find beta users as well :) )
Excellent post, Wilson. Thanks for sharing your experience 💪
Glad you enjoyed it 😁
Great post mate. The onboarding improvements are definitely interesting!
Thanks! Improving our onboarding was definitely the #1 thing that sped up our growth. I might write a more detailed article about this in the future.
Great experience. Thinking about finding a co-founder for my projects.
Let's connect! Urge everyone to DM me, I need a marketer/head of growth
Really useful and inspiring post. This information is priceless to me as a solo developer planning to create my first ever product. I appreciate you sharing it. I hope you have a lot more success in the years to come.
Btw, your website looks amazing!
This post is absolutely gold - thank you for writing it and congrats on your success!
I especially liked the vid you linked with your onboarding changes. Pure value.
Cheers to your continued success!
This was an amazing post and helps me a lot in my current stage :)
Now how old is your Senja.io? And what MRR are you getting now? Are you using Firebase for backend service?
I really loved your journey. Thanks for sharing!
Great post Wilson, keep up the good work! (I'd love to see a new post when you hit the next mile stone)
Thanks for the informative post, @euboid!
It shows that it's about experimenting with different acquisition methods, product diversification and reducing time to value for users.
To improve onboarding, have you already thought about implementing product tours using tools like Appcues or Driftly? What do you think about them?
Super helpful! We need more posts on the insight from 0-250 - which is where most of us are!
Great post and some very interesting insights, especially the use of twitter as a form of customer acquisition. Good luck with everything
Congrats on the improvements and the nice concise article Wilson!
Stories like yours inspire me on keep going, focusing on improving every day and how to handle initial expectations on paid users. Nice also that you found Olly, cofounding can be a very enriching experience, I talk firsthand here.
Thanks for sharing and all the best with Senja!
Very inspiring!
Excellent, very real product cold start case, very inspiring!
Thanks for such a transparent breakdown.
Had no idea about Gummysearch, just signed up for their tool to play around with it!
Regarding Twitter, that sounds like the #buildinpublic approach is certainly working for you, great work :)
Thanks for sharing! Curious about your marketing on Twitter, how do you get subscribers from Twitter? paying for ads or just making posts and coming up with organics?
This is helpful. Thanks for sharing!
This is helpful. Thanks for sharing!
I really appreciate breakdowns like this! Thank you and great job.
Thanks for sharing the growth story. How are you going to reach 1k mrr for the next goal?
The way you did cold outreach was informative and useful. I have heard about gummy search but didn't know what it was used for.
Great story, thanks for sharing. The video on improving the user onboarding experience was really helpful too, will definitely be implementing some of those ideas.
Nice and useful set of actionable points. Thanks for the insights
Thanks Wilson for the breakdown! Especially liked pivot point #1 on understanding the vision and mission of the product, and #2 on nailing the onboarding. It helped me validate next actions for us (I'm all new here, so have not posted our product-to-be-launched yet 🚀)
A great achievement @euboid - keep it up!
Out of interest, did you ever try FB or google ads?
Well written. Thanks for sharing
Immense article, great to hear about your journey and how far you've come in just one year!
I love the optimism of $5k in 6 months!
I hadn't heard of Gummy Search before. Really smart example of how you combined cold outreach to get a happy customer on board. I'll definitely check it out
Super interesting reading this, wow!
I really need to work more on my onboarding. I have sign-ups, but just as you mentioned, they drop off fast because I don't guide them more. Thank you for this!
I need to try cold outreach as well. A huge thank you, Wilson!
This is really helpful!
The video breakdown with everything you guys did is great. Gave me lots of ideas.
Thanks for sharing, Wilson.
Very inspiring! Congrats Wilson, Senja is a well-done work!
This is so inspiring to hear as someone with $0 revenue since a month of launching. Patience and consistency is truly the key!
been following you on twitter for a while, really great journey and hoping for the best in future.
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this is really useful, coldstarted is very hard , but you cant void it .
this is really useful, I've always known onboarding on my app is a bit crap because people don't fill it out properly - it's given me a simple idea to improve it by showing the outcome of their inputs as they enter them
Really good thanks 🙏 keep going
It gives inspiration, thanks a lot for sharing!
Thanks for sharing and congrats!
I think you showed a great determination to continue even though the first 6 months didnt go anything like according to plan. Im sure your growth trends from this point forward will consistently improve and your own your way.
Thank you for sharing your journey, this is good stuff.
Thanks for sharing your journey of g rowth. People are afraid to cold outreach, but seeing how simple this can be and can deliver results gives and I am sure many other the confidence to use this channel more often than not .
Worth the read. Authentic.
Yay for onboarding, and congratulations on getting your first users!
It's often a bit scary to make the switch from "I'm just happy people are using what I built" to "OK everyone, this is worth a lot, so you should at least pay a fraction of this value I'm providing!"
Kudos to you on making the shift :-)
Love this breakdown.
How unbelievably satisfying is having a hypothesis on consumer behaviour, implementing a tactical approach to solving an issue and watching it convert. Even in the smallest way, gooood god, there's nothing better.
I also back the product and we're going to give it a nudge on both our ecomm sites :)
Beautiful. This is the realism I love to see ;)
Thanks for sharing your experience. This should help me with my products.
Great. Thanks for sharing your journey. Grow big 🙌
Really great tips. The onboarding improvements are sure to improve the product and drive more business.
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Awesome work, Wilson. Thanks for sharing your experience in such a detailed way. I am also in the midst of acquiring our first users, especially converting them into paying customers at https://geeksandexperts.com/