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How I got to $9.99 MRR after 7 years
- scott31 6y agoIPO when?
- nacs 6y agoToo early for that. OP needs to show a yearly net loss of at least a few million before doing that.
- fiddlerwoaroof 6y agoWhen you think about it this way, $0 MRR is a good outcome: all my unfinished side projects are successful startups.
- strin 6y agoFollow a normal SaaS growth curve this will IPO in 25 years!
- wwv25 6y agoTruly inspiring. Thanks for sharing!
- snow_mac 6y agoIs that $9.99 or $9 million?
- gjsman-1000 6y agoLiterally $9.99. This isn't really a success story. I'd actually say it's a little... embarrassing? EDIT: Clearly a joke, I took it literally at first.
- hydroxideOH- 6y agoIt's a joke.
- abhinav22 6y agoErhmmmm congrats I guess? Jokes aside - funny article :p I liked it
- tekstar 6y agoWhat a grand journey!
- mindfulplay 6y agoDid you max out your credit cards and have an VC walk out in the middle of a smoothie lunch? Because that's apparently the secret to success based on the AirBnBs of the world... But still very laudable!
- ignoramous 6y agoMade me chuckle but I can't help but point out you're soaking in the wrong lessons.
- ljm 6y ago"How I maxed out my credit builder card with a limit of £250 after half a week of building my product on AWS."
- Cyph0n 6y agoYou missed an impressive and crucial detail: they had a whole binder full of credit cards!
- riantogo 6y agoThat sounds like a giant corporation compared to my many side gigs over the years. I love the development phase because it is something I control. Once the product is developed it also hits it's grave at the same time. Because I don't have the skills to get initial users.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- laurent92 6y agoGo to the Atlassian Marketplace, build a Forge app, publish it in March. Atlassian brings the customers. Enterprise customers. I’m perhaps being too optimistic, but at least you won’t have to do the customer part.
- radihuq 6y agoWhy March?
- ndespres 6y agoNot sure if they are referring specifically to this, but as of February 2021, Atlassian will stop selling new on-premise Confluence licenses. I expect a lot of companies will have to transition their on-prem servers to the Atlassian Cloud hosting environment, opening up a lot of new customers to the Marketplace.
- InitialLastName 6y agoBecause everyone's going to be looking for ways to keep their team running when they all switch to working remotely... wait...
- cosmodisk 6y agoThis is underrated advice. There are quite a few platforms,like Salesforce AppExchange, where enterprise users are willing to pay top dollar for what often seems absurdly simple functionality. Much better than trying to compete with 2 million apps on Google/Apple app store.
- hydroxideOH- 6y agoIf you were a really successful startup, you'd be at $-100M MRR. Step up your game.
- royaltjames 6y agoMight as well bootstrap to ripping up handfuls of $100s in a cold shower on full blast
- bogwog 6y agoI've never been so inspired.
- orliesaurus 6y agoI'm a serious angel investor and I was moved by your story, wanna chat further? twitter in my HN profile. /s
- tylfin 6y agoIs it too early for an acquisition?
- c2me 6y agoSo this qualifies as humor for you weirdos or soyboys?
- oshea64bit 6y agoBig man Chad, comin' through.
- Stierlitz 6y agoWhat is it they're selling, a domain name reselling service?
- m1ckey 6y agoConfigure-Cloudflare-as-a-Service ^^
- toast0 6y agoI misread this as how I got my $9.99 MIR (mail in rebate) after 7 years.
- __jf__ 6y agoAlso did lots of things that didn’t scale!
- dvt 6y agoHonestly, I get that HN and startup culture glorifies one-hit-wonders and survivorship-biased unicorns, but articles like this just feel like pointless cynicism. It's not even that funny. There are plenty of people out there that make a comfortable living with one-person online startups. The weird idea that only the "super-privileged" can do this is just flat-out wrong. In fact, the internet has allowed many people outside of typical Coastal/SV/yuppie bubbles to make much more than their immediate circumstances allow. Instead of ragging on Slack, or AirBnB, or YC/pg for being proud of them -- yeah, yeah, with a lot of hyperbole and rosy hindsight -- just close your browser, open that terminal, and build something. Isn't that the whole point?
- theplague42 6y agoI think this is satirizing things like Failory rather than unicorns.
- deeviant 6y ago> The weird idea that only the "super-privileged" can do this is just flat-out wrong. It's not that YOU HAVE TO BE super-privileged to be able to quit your job and take a whack at the start-up lyfe, it's just that you are much more likely than the average person to be super-privileged. That's how stereotypes work.
- spoonjim 6y agoYou don’t need to quit your job to start a online business. I make 30K a year from a website that takes me about 10 hours a year and took about 1000 hours to build during which I learned a lot and had a lot of fun.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- superimposition 6y agoAuthority based affiliate website?
- hartator 6y ago> $9.99 so far. Next month, if all goes well, it's looking like I'll have $19.98 in my bank account. I know he's been sarcastic but it's actually how we started at serpapi.com. Even less. First month was $9.97, second month was $19.94. (Double the revenue!) And now, we are a real business, profitable, with a 8-9 strong team.
- newsbinator 6y agoThis is off-topic, but I really liked being able to purchase packs of credits on serpapi for my one-off projects. When you folks switched to monthly packages only, that's when I had to walk away. I recognize that's the best way for you to get to MRR of course.
- hartator 6y agoThat's interesting to know! Yes, MRR allows us to budget things for the long term whereas credits felt like more liabilities to honor. Sent you an email (julien at serpapi.com). I am sure we can figure something.
- qrohlf 6y agoThis is obviously marketing disguised as satire, but in the interest of maybe providing some info that's useful to someone in the comments section I'm going to jump in here with a middle-of-the road story. I make ~$500/mo off my side project. It's nice money that I can use to explore more side projects. I'm not going to quit my day job with it. You don't have to make $5k MRR for a side project to be profitable/useful, and you can successfully scale a small idea without pouring 40hrs/wk into it. The above TLDR is really all you need to know but if you're interested in more I wrote a longer article about how this all happened here: https://medium.com/@qrohlf/i-sell-triangles-on-the-internet-113bb8590613 https://medium.com/@qrohlf/i-sell-triangles-on-the-internet-...
- Exuma 6y agoUhhhhhhh........
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- encoderer 6y agoThis is sad to me. This guy seems to have written a genuine post about growing his business to $400 MRR [1], but it leads with self deprecation, and then he follows it with this take down of... himself? Louis, I don't know you, I've not come across Cloakist before, but you've done something solid here, and MRR is truly a long slope of soul crushing growth and you're playing the game fine. Keep it up. Five months in on Cronitor we were at $410 MRR. [1] https://cloak.ist/blog/how-we-got-to-400-mrr-in-5-months/ https://cloak.ist/blog/how-we-got-to-400-mrr-in-5-months/
- soulofmischief 6y agoAt the bottom of the article, he says: > And if you'd like to read a true, but much more boring story about getting MRR, go here.
- louisbarclay 6y agoThanks a lot! Just to clarify, I’m not taking myself down (I’m really happy with where Cloakist is at) - I just felt like writing some satire to mock all similar serious articles in that genre, including my own. And congrats on the awesome work at Cronitor!
- klerpi 6y agoIt's also an annoying writing style.
- sosodev 6y agoPersonally I think this is a really funny post. Kinda surprised how many comments seem to be taking it seriously.
- ag56 6y agoAfter laughing and upvoting this brilliant satire, coming to the comments was like a second meta-joke.
- Brian_K_White 6y agoI always contended the funniest part of Landover Baptist was the guest book.
- pjc50 6y agoHN really doesn't have a sense of humor. Or rather, a joke can get some up voters if tailored to the wry geek sense of humor, but any post which contains humor or subtext or sarcasm will absolutely get an outraged reply from somebody who has taken it literally.
- gzer0 6y agoWell, now everyone can see the massive network of "bot" accounts that HN has. It's a growing trend on posts; you'll see them interacting with each other; they like to work in nodes to boost the comment count and therefore somehow increase the chances of making front page. Even if they don't hit front page, the comment itself adds to the longer term plan of these accounts. I don't doubt for a second that someone has, or is currently manipulating a lot of the traffic and comments for certain posts. This is easily established via networks of rotating residentials; or better yet, real humans in Ukraine [1]: something that cannot be defeated unless you start nodal map chaining. High likelihood that these troll farm/serious commenters algos are not equipped to deal with such complexities such as human satire yet, which is a reasonable conclusion as to why there are so many "serious" posts [1] https://www.occrp.org/en/investigations/inside-a-ukrainian-troll-farm https://www.occrp.org/en/investigations/inside-a-ukrainian-t... [2] https://snap.stanford.edu/data/ego-Twitter.html https://snap.stanford.edu/data/ego-Twitter.html
- combatentropy 6y agoMRR: Monthly Recurring Revenue
- Scoundreller 6y agoI was happy to make $3-$4 in MRR from a 4 minute YouTube video. It took some months to hit 10k views to enable monetization, but monetization for that amount of work was great. Then Youtube said fuck you. Your 1-video account doesn’t have 1000 subscribers, no more monetization for you!
- nyghtly 6y ago"Don't be evil." https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/19/youtube-will-put-ads-on-non-partner-videos-but-wont-pay-the-creators.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/19/youtube-will-put-ads-on-non-...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jrururufuf666 6y agoit sure helps if you in the bay area and gay.
- Grustaf 6y agoNo offense pal but you can’t claim to have MRR after one month. Come back when the 9.99 is actually recurring!
- sethammons 6y agoSatire man, satire.
- Grustaf 6y agoWhat do you think my comment was?
- sethammons 6y agoReading intent is hard, and I didn’t detect levity in your comment. Many of the comments here play along, acknowledging the satire (“when’s the IPO!?”). Your comment, to me, seemed to be taking the post seriously by saying op has not reached MRR yet, but that is part of the joke. Insert link to Poe’s Law.
- Grustaf 6y agoApparently it is.
- SoSoRoCoCo 6y agoThought this was gonna be a Darius Kazemi prank, close tho. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_F9jxsfGCw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_F9jxsfGCw
- throwaway99997 6y agohate to be that guy - but I don't think it's a great idea to MITM anything with a login page included.
- cryptica 6y agoWow, that's impressive considering that the author did it all on their own without free money from the government.
- say_it_as_it_is 6y agoand it was at that moment that I looked at my partner and smiled because we knew that Cloakist was onto something big
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dang 6y agoThis is not a valid Show HN. Please read the rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html. Note how blog posts are specifically excluded. Otherwise every submission might as well say "Show HN". I've taken that out of the title now.
- louisbarclay 6y agoAh, this is my bad. Sorry. I thought I saw a Show HN the other day that linked to a blog post. And I also did it because the ‘How’ got removed from the title when I tried it originally, which I guess is house style. Is this why the post has been taken down from front page? If so, is that fair given it was an honest mistake?
- dang 6y agoIt got more upvotes because of the errant Show HN than it would have otherwise. More significantly though, this doesn't feel very on topic for HN—more like a joke riff on a cliché category of article. Am I missing something?
- louisbarclay 6y ago> It got more upvotes because of the errant Show HN than it would have otherwise. I'll trust you on that and reiterate my apologies. I have never thought that Show HNs get more votes by default (look at the Show HNs in my history, you'll see they got absolutely nowhere), and was not trying to game the system. > More significantly though, this doesn't feel very on topic for HN I thought that this was mostly determined by whether or not the HN community upvotes a link. I personally do think there's a role for (perhaps infrequent) satire about certain quite cringe-inducing types of articles you get here. I saw a similar piece the other day - can't recall the link though.
- dang 6y agoManaging ontopicness is more complicated than just upvotes. It's a complex interaction between community input (upvotes and flags), software, and human moderation. Upvotes alone would produce a front page consisting of sensationalism and the same few hot stories repeated over and over. Upvotes are great, because the entire point of HN is to be interesting to the community. But moderators and software are needed too. If the site were determined only by upvotes, ironically it would soon cease to be interesting to the community. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22upvotes%20alone%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... By the way, this isn't primarily because moderators are smarter or more competent than community members. It's because we're in a position to give HN our full attention and think about the global optimum. Users are giving much less attention to the site (at least I hope they are) and reacting quickly to the specific things they run across. I wrote about that here if anyone is interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22863209 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22863209.
- pilsetnieks 6y agoHow is a "custom domain" different from a regular one? What's customized about this one?
- borishn 6y agoNice!, Onion worthy :)
- stormcode 6y agoI'm about this MRR life. I should call my Mom...
- AnonHP 6y agoI very much enjoyed reading this and the other post about the $400 MRR, Louis. Thanks for the humor combined with the harder lessons that many people tend to not see (survivorship bias). I’m sharing this elsewhere to help people who may be dejected on their ideas and execution of the ideas not picking up as much as they’d wish for them to. All the best for Cloakist and any other ventures you come up with!