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How we built a $1M ARR SaaS startup
- tiffanyh 6y agoAn amazing and massive accomplishment. What should be highlighted here is just how difficult it is to hit $1M in ARR (took them 3.5 years and they have a staff of 9 employees ... which is only ~$110k in revenue per employee)
- codegeek 6y agoTo be honest, 3.5 years to hit 1M ARR is pretty impressive if you are bootstrapped. Were they bootstrapped ?
- otoburb 6y agoYes, they bootstrapped their way entirely to $1M ARR. Huge accomplishment. HN hug of death on the original link so it's hard to read that right now.
- ponker 6y agoUh, how do you “bootstrap” a team of 9 at $1m ARR? I thought bootstrapping means your revenues cover your costs.
- ptudan 6y agoIIRC bootstrapping just means that you don't take VC funding, instead rely on yourself, family and friends. You certainly aren't always breaking even.
- jlokier 6y ago> I thought bootstrapping means your revenues cover your costs. No, I would say almost everyone who bootstraps either goes into debt or uses savings to fund the business, hoping to break even and make a profit eventually. If you can get enough revenue from the first day to cover cost of living for even 1 person, that's a good start, but unusual. Bootstrappers who start with an existing client or product that's already selling can do that. Also, depending on circumstances $1m ARR may be enough to cover costs for a team of 9. Many people earn much less than $100k even accounting for costs, and some SaaS don't need high operating costs (hint: cloud services are not the cheap way), or are still working their way through AWS/IBM/Google free credits.
- USNetizen 6y agoHaving done the same thing myself (bootstrapped a services company from $0 to over $8M/year in revenue in 5 years and grown a SaaS product from $0 to ~$800k ARR in 16 months completely bootstrapped), you can go into debt for a short time while bootstrapping, but generally not 3.5+ years unless you are independently wealthy or have a retirement nest egg you've been saving for a few decades you're prepared to liquidate. At some point your access to capital dries up when banks see your level of risk increase. You might be able to survive moderate losses for a year or two and cover it with personal debt financing, depending on how much money and access to capital you have personally, but 3.5 to 4 years covering losses with personal debt is REALLY pushing it. You're most likely talking several hundred thousand dollars at that point even for a small startup. And $1M ARR is only enough to support a team of 9 if the average salary being paid is around $50k-$55k/year (or if 2 or more people aren't even drawing a salary). Which makes sense because, in their blog, they describe hiring someone for marketing that was much less "senior" - i.e. cheaper - and not being happy with it. Taxes, fees, registrations, legal/accounting, benefits (if any), insurance, hosting, technical infrastructure, etc. can easily eat up over $300k/yr for a team of 9 - not including direct payroll.
- tiffanyh 6y agoRe: $8m/year in 5 years time. That’s an amazing accomplishment. Would you mind sharing, - how many employees you have - biggest driver to your revenue success - biggest mistake the company made - anything else you might find of interest to share
- USNetizen 6y ago42 employees, or thereabouts. Biggest driver of revenue was focusing on an industry that buys everything in bulk - services, software, you name it. The federal government. It took two years of laying groundwork to get our first few contracts then took off from there. Biggest mistake we made was twofold - one, hiring too early in the beginning (we used a small amount of debt initially paying salaries for "overhead" people, like marketing, sales, consultants, etc., that simply didn't work out or were far too inexperienced) and, two, giving a substantial amount of equity to someone who was intended to be a cofounder type but was a paid employee, didn't put any money into the business (but took plenty out), and didn't have the mindset of an entrepreneur. Key lesson: choose your partner(s) and employees wisely.
- treis 6y ago$1m ARR is enough to support a team of 9. Especially when they're remote, some offshore, and 2 are founders.
- ticmasta 6y agomaybe with a SW company where salaries are by far the biggest cost, but $1M revenue isn't $110K per person like a previous post suggests
- a13n 6y agoAlso helps that 2 of those 9 people are founders who don't take a salary.
- csomar 6y agoThey are probably hiring from cheaper countries than the US. Tech engineers don't cost that much once you are outside the Valley and the US of A.
- davidedicillo 6y agoThe post articulates this pretty well. > For us, ramen profitability was at about $50k/yr. Andrew and I are a couple, so our living expenses are cheaper (per person). We were also digital nomads, and Airbnbs in Spain are a lot cheaper than rent in San Francisco.
- biztos 6y agoIf you're actually living in Spain, and you manage to get that to $50k net (maybe not so hard if you're the only two "employees" and you're doing standard "digital nomad" tax hacks) then it's a pretty good income, or at least you probably know couples who make less. Still I'm sure it takes dedication when you could just as easily make FAANG money.
- a13n 6y agoWe're back up now!
- AlchemistCamp 6y agoWhich part of your infrastructure buckled? Any lessons learned?
- a13n 6y agoThe $10/mo lightsail instance our blog runs on couldn’t handle 300 concurrent readers so we upgraded it to a beefier one.
- asadlionpk 6y agoJust put that server behind cloudflare and max the caching on edge option :)
- acwan93 6y agoIt's honestly very reassuring knowing that hitting $1M ARR in 3.5 years is considered a massive accomplishment. This is speaking as someone who's trying to move an older software shop from a one-time on-premise cost to SaaS. Fortunately the current business's revenues are directly being reinvested towards new products that are on the recurring SaaS model.
- bkruse 6y agoLove Canny We use them at CommentSold for feature ideas, bug reports, and even top 1% feature ideas. The ability to tie it into our product and see the features voted on from an MRR aggregate not a vote-aggregate is phenomenal
- a13n 6y agoThanks for being a customer, Brandon! Definitely let us know how we can push the envelope even further here with regards to MRR/SaaS aggregation.
- ponker 6y agoWhat is “comment selling”?
- bkruse 6y agoWithout doing the sales pitch, it's using comments as the medium for indicating purchase intent instead of clicking on a link "Oh, you like this item you see on your facebook feed? Comment sold and your size to order it"
- ponker 6y agoAh. Makes a lot of sense. Gets the person to a lower friction commitment point where they feel like they’re going back on their word if they abandon at that point. And you can harass them with PMs to follow up lol.
- 0x62 6y agoDown for me, cache link: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:a7QDlHvrQC4J:https://canny.io/blog/how-we-built-a-1m-arr-saas-startup/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=je https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:a7QDlH...
- a13n 6y agoBack up now! Upgraded our AWS Lightsail instance. Thanks for posting that cache link :)
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago> Upgraded our AWS Lightsail instance. Use ElasticBeanStalk... nah, actually that's a terrible idea. Edit: Use Caprover inside of an AMI on an autoscaling group on EC2 (t2.smalls if you want)... or use ECS on Fargate.
- a13n 6y agoFair point, but honestly not a huge priority. Lightsail is a super convenient and cheap way to host our blog. The main problem is we were on a $10/mo server, which is plenty for our typical blog traffic. But definitely not enough for HN! Heh.
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y agoYeah, it happens. Trust me, we've given up on static resources because of the fact that social media can blow something up very quickly.
- ghiculescu 6y agoCongratulations to the Canny team. It's a great product, apparently we've been happy customers since they were 20x smaller :) I found the note about luck in the Zero to One section interesting. I don't know anyone who runs a bootstrapped SaaS that's made it past 1M, who doesn't feel like they got super lucky with their first customer. We did exactly the same thing - a random connection that just happened to work out. And yet, most people starting new companies don't seem to focus much on making this luck happen.
- a13n 6y agoThanks so much for being a customer! And yeah, it always feels bad to write that "we got lucky", as it isn't really that repeatable/helpful. But it's true.
- auto 6y agoI don't think it's something to feel bad about; on the contrary, with your level of transparency here and in the context of everything else you did that wasn't centered around luck, I think it's an honest aspect about this kind of growth. Congrats on the milestone!
- RangerScience 6y agoFun story: The lead artist/dancer of https://www.skyfirearts.com/ https://www.skyfirearts.com/ had had that dream for years, and that "first lucky break" came when (8-9 years ago) he was getting coffee and the guy behind him in line was the guy for Tesla Coils in the US, who then helped Skyfire get up and running. AFAICT, what's repeatable / helpful is a bit more nuance about "how to make luck": 1) Know what you want so you can recognize it when you encounter it 2) Give yourself lots of opportunities to encounter it 3) Have the self-direction and resources to jump on it when you encounter it Of course, there's also just pure blind luck. Edit: I know there's another step in here, but TBH I'd love advice for it: Making sure the other party recognizes you as something they've been looking for (aka, all the above but from their perspective). Advice?
- biztos 6y ago
- _benj 6y agoCongratulations! This is a really inspiring story and I really appreciate you guys opening the backdoor to show us how the magic happened!
- a13n 6y agoGlad you enjoyed it! We're eager to write more transparent content like this, so let us know if there's anything specific that'd be interesting (eg. recruiting, finance, etc).
- seapunk 6y agoHi Andrew and Sarah! Congratulations for this milestone. I'm following your journey since your first blog post and it was a great motivation when we started building our startup as digital nomads too. I think many bootstrappers were inspired by Canny and your transparency along the years.
- a13n 6y agoThanks!! Best of luck with Threader :)
- welder 6y agoThe key learning: Get your product used by the React.js team for hyper growth.
- a13n 6y agoI sure hope that wasn't the key learning from our post! It's not a very repeatable/helpful learning :) Luck can definitely play a big role in building a successful company. I think what a lot of people don't realize is how you can increase your exposure to luck. For example, if you have a bigger/better network, you're more likely to get lucky from that. If you talk to more people about your company, you're more likely to stumble across key partners/investors/customers. In our case, our luck with React.js can be attributed to my working at Facebook before starting Canny.
- David 6y agoOr: Focus on finding impactful early customers that increase your visibility (and then make them happy). Finding such a great customer may require luck, but that doesn't mean the odds are fixed.
- ZephyrBlu 6y agoThat's far easier said than done for most people though.
- exolymph 6y agoThe key learning: People will totally ignore everything you did to prep and find luck, as long as there's an element of luck they can use to dismiss your hard work.
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- vmception 6y agoHow we are trying to get bought out at a 20x revenue multiple
- a13n 6y agoWe aren't looking to sell Canny. Part of building a sustainable product/business is sticking around for the long haul.
- dang 6y ago"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- vmception 6y agoGetting a high revenue multiple isn't a bad faith assumption. my PR agents would push me to write similar articles and file it under "thought leadership". It would be interesting if other people had a similar experience. The end.
- dang 6y agoThe bad faith assumption is reducing an entire article to some alleged motivation that the article didn't say. If you're looking to have interesting conversation about similar experiences, that's great and definitely on topic, but you'd need to go about it differently. What you posted sounded snarky and reductionist.
- hartator 6y agoOur startup (https://serpapi.com https://serpapi.com, our canny: https://forum.serpapi.com https://forum.serpapi.com) is a happy customer of them and it has been instrumental to be able to collect issues from our clients. The alternative was basically a GitHub repo just to collect feedback but Canny is sooo much better.
- fakedang 6y agoWhy are you repeatedly posting this since the past week?
- a13n 6y agoSometimes it takes a few submissions to make it to the front page. There's nothing against this in the guidelines. We don't usually submit stuff to HN but this felt particularly worthy!
- dimitrios1 6y agoYet again, not a single person over 40+ (probably even 35) in that happy-go-lucky clique team photo. Happy for you all, sad for the ageism that is rife in our industry. For all the talk about representation matters, and tech workers champion social issues, this just seems like a really frustrating and curious massive blind spot. Anyway, again, not to detract from the success, but I just see examples of this weekly here.
- randomchars 6y agoAgeism? Generally speaking older people are: - more risk averse, less likely to join a small startup and prefer the security of a 9 to 5 job at a larger company. - more experienced, and more experienced people require higher salaries, which a smaller company might not be able to afford. Don't look for opression when there's none.
- skrebbel 6y agoI'll bite. I'm 37, a tech startup founder. I'm wary of ageism and I've long believed that not being ageist would allow us to hire smarter than competitors. However: - The amount of programmers grows exponentially. I've seen stats claiming it doubles every 5 years. - This means that at any time, 50% of the available workforce has <5y experience. Often this overlaps with young ages. - It also means there are simply way more programmers under 40 than over. If you randomly hire 9 programmers there's a fair chance they're all under 30. - Anecdotally, less than 5% of the job applicants we got was over 40. - Young programmers haven't had time yet to make the mistake to "repeat the same year of experience 10 years in a row". If you hire a young, junior programmer, you know they're junior - what you see is what you get. If you hire an older programmer they might be great or they might be that same junior programmer but more stubborn and with higher salary expectations. As an avid anti-ageist, in fact I'm rather disappointed about that last point. I've met many programmers at around or above my age that have gotten completely stuck into a tiny niche of experience and, even there, seem to not really have progressed much in terms of depth. Why do people let this happen to themselves? I mean I met people who spent the last 10 years developing just-not-the-same custom Magento webshop plugin over and over again, each time with a slightly different twist for a different customer. Not hiring someone like that isn't ageist, it's common sense. Once Magento is out of fashion these people have a pretty serious problem. The reason I don't understand this is because with each new technology you learn, there's a diminishing effort to learning the next because there's so many similarities to a thing you already known. There's a reason most people complaining about "javascript fatigue" are young. As an example, when React/Flux/Redux first came to the scene, old farts like me could recognize that its "unidirectional data flow" wasn't fundamentally different from the good old desktop MVC UI pattern (before Rails hijacked the name and gave it a different meaning). I imagine that this made learning React and architecting decent apps on it easier for me than for people who'd never seen data "flow" in circles before. Age definitely can be an advantage. But it isn't by definition. Keep learning new stuff folks! And if that ever stops being fun, you can always become a manager.
- boldslogan 6y agoCool read! Very inspiring. Just curious, what kind of metrics are you running for the sales part? Or some new strategies learned from hiring a sales position?
- a13n 6y agoHmm, we're still pretty new to sales. Inbound: VIP trial sign-ups, demos booked, demos given, opportunities created, opportunities lost/won Outbound: Emails sent, emails opened, reply rate, calls made, calls answered, conversions to trial/demo We use SFDC for our CRM, and Apollo for outbound activities.
- davidsawyer 6y agoHere's the Indie Hackers podcast episode with Sarah Hum from Canny from last October. Good episode! https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/124-sarah-hum-of-canny https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/124-sarah-hum-of-canny
- personjerry 6y agoThat is seriously impressive, congratulations on your success! Did you guys set off to build this particular product as soon as you left your previous job, or did you have some pivots along the way?
- andrewmcwatters 6y agoWhy would you write an article about your first fire? How immature can you be? "We really wanted someone who would live and breathe Canny." Delusional owners.
- blueline 6y agothe linked blog post for that gave me some serious raised eyebrows > Within the first week, we had over 100 applicants for our content manager position. We easily passed on 90% of applications that: >Opened with something like: “Dear Hiring Manager” or “Dear Sir/Madam” am i taking crazy pills? why would you pass on someone just for that?
- as_keyof_typeof 6y agoI interviewed with them this summer and they did then and continue to come off really snarky. Glad I took something else
- 1123581321 6y agoThey either didn’t know how to, or didn’t have time to, train for the tone they wanted. So they passed on everyone who didn’t write the way they were looking for out of the gate. It is common at new companies, consciously or not. Just explaining, not defending or accusing.
- a13n 6y agoIt’s not just the generic intro, but also the copy paste template email that follows. If you don’t have time to spend even 30 seconds researching the company before applying, we just aren’t the right fit for you. The first hires at an early stage startup are so important.
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- jamesmishra 6y agoCongratulations! I remember meeting the Canny founders around when they first launched in March 2017. It's great to see how far they've come. They've built a very well-designed product.
- cryptica 6y agoIt never made sense to me why these kinds of 'marketing', 'feedback gathering', 'a/b testing', 'email campaign management' and 'project management' tools seem to always make so much money when clearly they add no value at all to the businesses who use them or their customers. They just keep employees busy and create more jobs. I blame the Federal Reserve Bank's money printing. One of the Fed's 2 mandates is 'job creation' but people severely underestimate how damn good the Fed is at achieving its targets in that regard. The Fed will keep printing more and more money and jobs will become increasingly useless. It terrifies me to think that the situation could get worse than this and most people still won't notice. If it continues down this path, in the future, we'll have people whose entire career will be to sit at a desk and stare at a wall from 9am to 5pm and their employers will seriously believe that this activity adds value to the economy. We'll have consultancies which specialize in wall staring. Some will specialize in staring at white concrete walls, others at wooden walls, etc... It might sound like I'm joking, but I'm very serious.
- HatchedLake721 6y agoHave you ever considered that you might be wrong about “these kinds of tools” not having value?
- cryptica 6y agoYes. I thought they did for a long time, but having used them as a developer and project manager and seen the harm they cause, I learned that they destroy value by creating unnecessary bureaucracy which has taken on Kafkaesque proportions in recent years. The only people who claim that these tools add value are people whose jobs depend on the existence of these tools. There are a LOT, a LOT of such people. I would say at least 90% of office workers today and increasing.
- seattletech 6y agoMy new disruptive startup will TEAR DOWN THOSE WALLS for the wall-less experience
- 6y ago
- highfrequency 6y agoCongratulations, and great writeup! Compared to other SaaS startups you have seen that eventually fizzled out, what would you guess are the main meta reasons you guys succeeded? In particular, how much value would you attribute to just not giving up at any point? Were there any low morale points on the journey?
- a13n 6y agoHmm, there's definitely a BIG lag between when you do work (engineering, marketing, etc), and when you see results (revenue). Like months. You really have to be self-driven and have some faith that the work you're doing now will pay off down the road. There's a quote, "Do nothing, and nothing happens", and it's super true in the early days, before you hire people. If you don't work, your company makes literally no progress whatsoever. This is motivating. Like, everything relies on you, so show up and get it done! I think a lot of VC-backed companies only get 1-2 years of seed money to try their idea. It took us 1.5 years to make our first dollar, and another year after that to get to profitability. If we were venture backed, we might not have had enough traction to raise our next round, and would have had to call it there. Similarly, I don't love the "lean startup" approach of trying a bunch of stuff quickly. If you pick a good starting point (big market, competitive differentiators, etc.), and spend years at it, you're bound to have some success. Just due to the sheer fact that you're willing to commit more of your lifetime to solving that problem than anyone else is. That's what worked for us at least.
- ZephyrBlu 6y ago> Similarly, I don't love the "lean startup" approach of trying a bunch of stuff quickly. If you pick a good starting point (big market, competitive differentiators, etc.), and spend years at it, you're bound to have some success. Just due to the sheer fact that you're willing to commit more of your lifetime to solving that problem than anyone else is. That's what worked for us at least This is what my thinking has shifted to as well. Play long term games instead of trying to make a quick buck. If you're trying to do something very innovative, I understand why the lean startup method is advised so you don't waste a lot of time. But if you're going into an existing market, I'm not sure it's the best approach.
- itsmefaz 6y agoFor some reason, I find the writing and decisions to be mature. Shouldn't the early stage product development be messy and full of doubts? I understand the post doesn't capture everything, but it feels the decisions the founders took most of the time had positive outcome. Is this luck or value of product-market fit?
- ZephyrBlu 6y agoVery interesting and relevant Twitter thread from patio11: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1312972409809428480 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1312972409809428480
- a13n 6y agoEarly-stage definitely was filled with messiness and doubts. We had no idea we were going to get to $1m ARR. When we started we had no idea how to price a SaaS product or make a landing page. There's that quote, "hindsight is 20/20", meaning it's easier to understand what went well/poorly when looking back. It's easy for us to reflect on what went well, and share just that. Doesn't mean it was easy/obvious in the moment, but hopefully our post helps others with their journey!
- itsmefaz 6y agoGot it! I'm currently at the stage of my life where I want to venture out on my own. Few questions that I have are - a) How relevant was your experience (as engineers) in building and growing startups? b) Looking back, what skills would you have liked to acquire before starting up? c) How much of startups is marketing and networking compared to product and growth? Thanks,
- a13n 6y ago> a) How relevant was your experience (as engineers) in building and growing startups? Super relevant to building the product. I feel like to be successful, you have to be really, really good at a couple things. For us that was engineering + design. For another team it might be that they're good enough at sales that they can close big deals right off the bat. Being great at engineering + design meant we could build the best product in our market, with a robust codebase that's free of errors (unit tests, CI/CD) and easy to scale. > b) Looking back, what skills would you have liked to acquire before starting up? Hmm. It might have been good to work at an early-stage SaaS startup before starting one. This would have given us a lot of context into pricing, sales, marketing, recruiting, etc. Problems that we kind of just had to figure out from scratch. > c) How much of startups is marketing and networking compared to product and growth? Most of our success can be attributed to a) building a great product, and b) getting it in front of people. B is all marketing. Ads, SEO, content, etc. Now, some startups rely entirely on product + sales, and some startups are able to attract all of their customers with just product (esp consumer). It really depends on your product/market/company, and how your customers want to buy.
- laksdjfkasljdf 6y agoTheir first success hire was a job to do exactly what their product is about?! "Buy our awesome car! ...and our first hire was this person who drives us around on his own car"
- ijidak 6y ago> You’ll notice these tasks are fairly large. You should pay candidates for their time. Love this comment in the article regarding hiring via a time consuming vetting process. I think that's what bothers me most about technology hiring these days. There is more testing and mini-projects than ever. It's not uncommon to spend half a day just going through first rounds for companies. I'd love something like: make it to the second round and we will compensate you for your time going through the vetting process. Then I'd know they value my time and are serious.
- grwthckrmstr 6y agoHuge congratulations on your success Sarah and the Canny team. Been following you since 2018 and love how you guys grew slowly but deliberately. All the best for your future goals and roadmap :)
- knotknotone 6y agoI am not sure I understand product. What is it that Trello or JIRA cannot track that you are offering? I looked at the product and it appears like you can track which feedback (whether product or employee) is bubbling up based on popular vote. How do you offer to track users? Do you expect me to make my board public for collecting feedback or something else? BTW, you had a great milestone. As someone in infancy of building my product, $1MM ARR souunds really good. Now, to add to what other users are saying, it appears like you both (Hum and Rasmussen) worked at FB before. I would imagine you made a bank (aka $500k at least) between you before jumping the ship. A few questions - 1. How did you find first few customers? 2. How did you convince them to buy over existing products with fair degree of overlap such as Trello, JIRA, ProductPlan, RoadMunk etc. 3. Who do you consider your competitors? TIA for answering!
- jerrygoyal 6y agoI know canny from clickup. It's a public feedback forum where users can request or upvote features/bugs. Intuitive thing I found is that you get notified by email whenever features you upvoted for gets implemented.
- ab-dm 6y agoThis is inspiring and depressing to see (more inspiring). I've spent the last 4 years getting a bootsrapped saas off the ground. It's taken every ounce of my being to get us profitable, but we wouldn't be close to hitting 1 mil (USD) ARR for at least 2 more years. Every year that passes I suspect it becomes more and more impossible to get anything off the ground without at least a little bit of funding. If I had my time again, I don't think I'd go bootstrapped. Seed funding seems to be a great compromise between bootstrapped and angel/VC. TinySeed are doing some great things on that front. Props to you guys and gals for making it work! It looks like a great product and a great team.
- nathan_f77 6y agoYes, I'm also feeling the same mix of inspiration and depression. Especially since I did actually take some funding (from Earnest Capital), I launched around the same time as them, and I'm still nowhere close to $1M ARR. The Canny founders are absolutely phenomenal startup founders, with a world-class background in product design and engineering background. They executed extremely well, chose an excellent target market, built an incredible product, and marketed it extremely well by sharing their story and progress. This is like comparing yourself to a star basketball player in the NBA. (Especially considering that the founders came from careers at Facebook.) Meanwhile, most of us are just regular software engineers who are trying to make things work as a solo founder. I don't have a strong background in design and UX, and I've made a lot of mistakes. I'm still proud of my achievements and I think I'm building a great company at a sustainable pace, but it can still be a bit depressing when you see people executing perfectly and growing at an incredible rate. "Marathons" are an over-used metaphor, but it's a good metaphor. You're almost certainly not going to finish first, even if you're a world-class athlete. But even if you finish last, I think that's still something to be proud of. (Where "finish" could mean achieving profitability, or having an exit.)
- mmaunder 6y agoCongrats. My wife and I built our infosec biz which now has a team of 40 and self funds. A few thoughts on going significantly beyond $1MM in my experience: North of 1m I started focusing more on brand marketing. Think Red Bull and creating a feeling around your brand, what space you occupy in people’s minds and why. This kind of marketing is hard to measure and becomes more feasible as your budget expands. Consider getting an excellent HR consultant to deal with complex issues that will emerge as the team expands. You haven’t seen it all. Get a kick ass law firm on your side. You’ll need them for day to day and not so day to day stuff like asserting your trademark rights. As execs, get friendly with a partner at the firm and try to do the occasional lunch. They’ll be an amazing source of network and a counselor when you get your first offer for acquisition. Get a great firm of accountants, even if you do your own books. They’ll also be excellent advisors. Try to promote internally and invest in your team with education allowances and subsidies. Once your business is humming, your existing people know the customer, product and culture. This has worked extremely well for us. Avoid hiring a “seasoned executive” or manager. They bring little value, will only give you a sense of comfort and are very expensive. Assemble a leadership team of trusted lieutenants and get good at trusting and delegating. Learn as leaders (talking to the founders) that you aren’t one of the team anymore. You’ll learn this the first time you walk up to your crew at a conference as you see them happily chatting with each other, and as they see you they’ll stop and all eyes will turn to you. Then you’ll pretend you just came over to say hi and were going to sit somewhere else. And you’ll go sit somewhere else because you don’t want to interfere with the important team bonding that is happening. Say no to your first few acquisition offers. You’re bootstrapped and cash flow positive which is lightning in a bottle. Congrats!! You can always say yes later. Don’t feel insecure about just repeating the things that work, but at larger scale, all the way to 9 figures. Business is surprisingly basic. Don’t take funding if you can avoid it. You’ll be amateurs entering the ring with prize fighters who negotiate funding deals every day and you’ll regret it on many levels. Focus the energy on growing that cash flow and use that for funding. Build a war chest that’ll carry you for 6 months without layoffs if your revenue completely stops. This will take a few years. Monitor your cashflow religiously and get good at predicting expected performance so that you can catch slow downs early and react soon. Early detection is key. When your revenue dips, don’t panic and make the hard calls fast. Congrats again and you can DM me on Twitter @mmaunder if you have specific questions e.g want supplier recommendations. Best of luck. ~Mark
- peter_d_sherman 6y ago>"We launched in March 2017, so it took us just under 3.5 years to get to $1m ARR We’re bootstrapped, meaning we’ve never taken any money from investors." [...] >What problem do you solve? We help software companies build better products by doing a better job of collecting and understanding user feedback." [...] >"LESSON LEARNED Be focused—don’t try to solve every problem for every business. Build an amazing product for a small group of people instead of a mediocre product for everyone."
- iosroot73 6y agoMany accounts are new or fairly new commending! I signed up and found it to be meh! It's a terrible product. Here we come selling yet another Trello with email. Also, both has worked at fb making $$$$ and using fb network to aggressively market. It means that they had safety net to fall back which many founders don't. If you are married or at age of having kids, problems multiply multifold. Are they bribing fb internal teams or someone ? I don't have ounce of a doubt that this mediocore product is making $1 MM ARR without sleazy tactics when better products can't. You always find out after 2 years. Look what happened to recent startups imploded. This blog post is just humblebrag. Look how they took out "resume screening" details when commenters here started calling them out. Why mention you are a couple. Like we care? Lol. Has it become easier and easier to game hacker news? Or is game allowed when its someone white or a woman or allocate bonus points if asian woman?
- Existenceblinks 6y agoIt's been already quite easy to game HN, especially from YC launch compared to lots of cooler projects from independent developers. Brand name or big guys or tech celeb always outperform in marketing regardless of product features. The tech industry is no different than old business cabal. Are you well-known in this city? If no, you have to start lobby someone in town and grow from there.
- dang 6y agoYC launches aren't gaming HN - they're specifically placed on the front page. This is one of the three things that HN formally gives back to HN in exchange for funding it. All this is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. If you think it's easy to game HN, please tell us who's doing it (with links) so we can investigate. We put a lot of effort into trying to prevent that.
- RhodoYolo 6y ago>We never did any outbound marketing only inbound Maybe this is just semantics but "Reaching out to product people for feedback" is the best outbound marketing there is.