I solo founded a business and it just crossed 100K MRR (still solo). The trick is:
1. Don't give up after the first month of no traction, if you can get at least 1 customer at this stage that is a good sign.
2. Make contact with every customer you acquire, find out why they installed your product and what they want from it. Build any feature that they say is missing and offer the best customer support possible
3. Repeat this for a period of time. Once you have more customers the circumstances will change but this how you go from 0 -> 1 and get some runway IMO
Good advice. Do you think the part of point two about building every feature request might be a bit risky for some solo folks?
It’s easy to get carried away building every request, especially with early adopters who likely aren’t actually invested yet but may be excited about their own vision for it.
My personal experience is that too much of it leads to the product becoming a sort of shapeless, unwieldy ooze. Or perfect for one customer and few others. Some things can be tough to undo later too, so you might end up supporting them a lot longer than you’d like.
I agree there needs to be a way to fit it into the overall product direction. Solving these on a case-by-case basis is important and part of the job.
When I first started, getting customer reviews was my north star, so i would add any feature and hide them under "advanced" if they were ridiculously long-tail. Still worth it for the review and positive experience even if you hide the feature...
How do you know what feature request to add, then? The ones suggested by multiple users independently?
This hit at the right time.
I just launched something and the first few days have been quiet. Reading this made me decide to keep going.
Point 1 especially. Thank you.
100K MRR solo is insane, congrats.
I think the "Make contact with every customer" hits hard here. I think a bunch of people forget they you talk to people more.
Nothing to say, great advice.
Underrated advice here.
yeah but how to get new customers
You've to go into founder mode - solve problems that exist for customers you've already discovered, rather than build something and expect magical "marketing" to find customers. The latter was previously a weak strategy, and is completely gone with the AI era. No alternative to working very closely with customers.
Honestly, I'm still not quite seeing how this fits into marketing. I get that we're focusing on our current customers, but how do we actually bring in new ones?
No magic pill: you can't work backwards. Pivot away from current idea if it's not getting word of mouth or any other traction, and for the next idea start with finding problems for people in your network that they will pay for.
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Go looking for them wherever you think they might gather or hang out (online or in person). Reach out to those who seem like a good fit and ask them about the problem(s) they’re having that your product solves. Once you know if your product would actually solve it well for them, tell them about it in earnest.
If you’re doing that honestly, where they really have that problem and you actually have a good solution, you’d be a jerk not to lightly pitch it at that point.
You could probably do that up to 100 or so customers reasonably easily.
I used the shopify app store to get the first customers - i think an app store is still the way to go since they handle a lot of the customer outreach for you. that said, there are a lot of other ways to niche down - discord communities, subreddits, private boards, etc... come to mind as good places to start