Josh Pigford, Baremetrics, $70k/month
What is the product?
Subscription analytics and insights.
What is its current revenue?
$14k/month after 6 months, $70K/month in 2017, $120k/month now.
What is the business model?
Subscription.
How did the founder come up with their idea?
- Was running 2 other SaaS products in the survey space and needed these numbers himself: monthly recurring revenue, lifetime value, churn,… There was no anything great that existed then.
How did they know it was the right one?
- Realized that there was a pretty big need from talking to other SaaS friends.
- Launched the first version in November 2013 and it was clear by February that there was a much larger opportunity. Focused 100% on it.
What did it take to get the initial product out the door?
- Vanilla Rails app, hosted on Heroku, just one big monolithic app.
- Later spent a lot of money running background jobs so that he did not have to spend time on infrastructure!
How did they get their first paying customers?
- Used Twitter connections to push for it, though he only had than 1k followers then.
- Start reaching out to random people he knew and they shared it.
- Sold to a $250/month customer in 8 days.
- Advised to have someone start using the product right away and try to have them pay for it, instead of getting stuck in the testing phase (building email list, building a landing page,…)
- Later wrote useful, educational content on the blog.
References:
Tagged: #early-days, #indiehackers