10 ms·
Steps To $5,000 In Monthly Recurring Revenue
- pallandt 13y agoGood read, congrats on your success btw!
- JeremyMorgan 13y agoSomewhat broad, but good information. Congrats on your success.
- pkamb 13y agoSuffers from the classic "clicking big `statuspage.io` logo takes you to `blog.statuspage.io`" problem.
- drpancake 13y agoI'm not an expert, but it's also better to use something like /blog rather than a subdomain, for SEO reasons. http://moz.com/learn/seo/domain http://moz.com/learn/seo/domain
- weisser 13y agoDharmesh had mentioned it really wasn't that big of a difference either way. Personally I have no idea outside of a short exchange with him about it.
- wasd 13y agoI didn't know that. Thanks for that heads up.
- petercooper 13y agoIt is, but bear in mind many companies have different architectures or even hosts behind their blogs vs their main site (or even product). For example, a Rails or Django app for the main site, PHP/Tumblr/Wordpress.com for the blog. There are some proxying shenanigans you can do with mod_rewrite but I'd certainly not want a PHP-based blog anywhere near my main site/app if I could get away with it due to the security risks.
- mercer 13y agoThat's pretty trivial to do with nginx though, isn't it? I have a server that can run php on certain subdomains AND folders, node.js on others and I suppose ruby would be pretty easy too. In fact, on one domain nginx sends part of the traffice /static/ directly to that actual directory, and anything else gets picked up by node.js. Or is what I'm doing really stupid? I'm not currently running anything significant on my servers, and this is not my primary domain of interest, so I've never checked how risky my setup is. Maybe you could tell me if that's the case?
- gregd 13y agoI did this exact thing. Wanted to see what statuspage.io was all about. Clicked logo and wouldn't you know it..they only blog.
- stephanos2k 13y agoI totally agree. I always roll my eyes when that happens. And then there is a 50/50 chance I search for the actual link - if I'm REALLY interested I edit the URL manually.
- xauronx 13y agoYep! I always wondered if that bugged anyone else. I imagine the purpose of people spending the effort to blog and advertise it was to drive traffic to their company. Then I have to jump through hoops to get to the actual company's page.
- dannyolinsky 13y agoMaking the change.
- yogo 13y agoThis is the most annoying thing about most blogs, and like others on HN I don't bother to visit the main page since I'm usually in reading mode (hand on mouse, away from keyboard). To their credit there is also an About StatusPage button (not sure if that was added after the fact).
- vowelless 13y agoSeems to have been fixed.
- adamcanady 13y agoIn a bout of realtime support, it looks like they've fixed this now!
- dylangs1030 13y agoI'm glad this worked, so congrats on that. However, I don't agree that this is good, actionable advice. 1. Find a problem. 2. Get to hacking. 3. Soft launch. 4. Synthesize feedback, build more. 5. Expand the funnel (user acquisition). 6. Aha/Win/Rich/Yay ...That's the formula for any startup/technology service. It's literally those steps, a little individual secret sauce, and you win or you die (figuratively speaking). I know it worked for you, but things like >"In our minds, there is no better way to build a product that people want than to be the customer you plan to sell to." ...aren't very helpful. It's a broad characterization of how to put yourself in that mindset. But in any case, good explanation of what you did for your own project :)
- honzzz 13y agoExactly. The problem I see with these 'guides' is repeatability. You cannot just follow the steps and get there... the substantial part is missing. Find A Problem Worth Solving... well everybody knows that, right? Is anyone here intentionally trying to solve problem that is not worth solving? I have to admit that I am actually little annoyed when I see title like '5 Steps to $5,000 in Monthly Recurring Revenue' because to me it seems a bit misleading. These are not really steps to $5,000/month... if they told me _how_ to find problem worth 5k than maybe that could be useful. But this is like, ehm... do you want to be successful with the ladies? Here is one simple step... be awesome!
- tracker1 13y agoIs anyone here intentionally trying to solve problem that is not worth solving? You might just be surprised by that... I find this happens a lot in business, where they will do custom ground up development something that could be an extension to their existing ERP solution, or other off the shelf solutions already do better.
- dannyolinsky 13y agoI agree that just reading the headlines of the sections themselves is meaningless. What we tried to do with the post is identify tactical things we did to increase our MRR. Things like personally reaching out to every user, hand-holding them through the sign up process, figuring out where they abandoned the product, identifying the core feature set to build from our first batch of signups, figuring out how to deliver value within 5 minutes of signup. There's never going to be a do x,y,z and you'll make $5k since every business is different, but instead tips like ours from what we've seen work for us. Agreed on the title, a better one could have been, 'Our 5 Steps to $5k in MRR' to clarify.
- mijustin 13y ago> From the initial connections and users we picked up from the post, we were able to convert 20 users into $50/month paying customers. On first take, I was surprised you were able to pick up 20 paying users just from an HN post. But then I went back and read the first part: > First, being in the community, we had a bunch of friends that were great customer candidates. It would be interesting to know the breakdown for those first 20 customers: how many came from personal connections?
- scootklein 13y agoanecdotally, probably half and half. even personal connections can be slow and are super busy :). the other 10 were cold signups that surprised us, but enjoyed what we were doing.
- nawitus 13y agoI hope those pseudo-personal emails don't get more frequent. I don't need more "spam", and it makes me feel a little rude not answering direct questions in an email.
- dannyolinsky 13y agoHey nawitus, thanks for the feedback. From what we've seen so far, the majority of signups have reacted positively to the personal emails. Usually, there's some type of question that we can help out with off the bat.
- rubikcube 13y agoMore meaningful would be to check if the all services are available. i.e. work with each company and check the services every few time intervals [i.e ping services are pre determined interval]. Frontend looks sleek, and maybe useful. But there does not seem to be a lot of money in it. Myself , internally, I use something similar to http://www.twikstik.com/live?q=24&id=0&ch=statuspage http://www.twikstik.com/live?q=24&id=0&ch=statuspage , which tracks my all different services. simple solution for my monitoring needs. And yes, I auto-surf reddit. http://www.twikstik.com/live?q=24&id=0&ch=enjoy%20reddit http://www.twikstik.com/live?q=24&id=0&ch=enjoy%20reddit!
- jhuckestein 13y agoThe best part about their $5,000 is that most of it will be profit. I'm pretty happy with my own SaaS application, but because I provide a telephone service I have pretty low margins. This is by far the most annoying thing about my business (it affects me more than taxes), especially considering that it would have been just as much work to make a SaaS with negligible marginal costs. The lesson is, if you have the choice and don't want hypergrowth + venture funding, provide a service that costs you next to nothing to provide. Another disadvantage of providing a service that has high marginal costs is that your bigger competitors will usually be able to outprice you. If all you need is a few servers, you can differentiate based on product alone and charge accordingly.
- ChuckMcM 13y ago> The best part about their $5,000 is that most of it will be profit. How do you reason to that statement?
- thesis 13y agoThere are lots of telephony services out there with great margins.
- josh2600 13y agoTelecom geek here: why do you have low margins? Where are you buying your DIDs and Routes? What switch are you using? I'd love to help, I literally eat sleep and breathe this stuff. There's no way your margins should be skinny unless you're playing LCR games, in which case you make it up on volume. Source: I work at 2600hz, the bootstrapped open source telecom cloud company. We've bootstrapped to 30+ employees on a pure telecom business so I have some experience here.
- secondmod 13y agoThanks for sharing. I wrote similar post here on HN sometime back, would like to share here to add value : After 30 days of launch, I managed to get 7000+ active users, about 100 paying users and $6129 in revenues. My learnings : 1. Build your first main feature really well 2. Dont launch with 100s of features, keep the product simple 3. Make sure to have some influencers on your board as users from day one and make them super happy 4. Use tweet button very smartly - this is make or break up for your side project 5. Dont hurry up into making money, let your users ask you for more feature and then roll out paid features. Shared here : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5600281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5600281
- vincvinc 13y ago> 4. Use tweet button very smartly - this is make or break up for your side project Could you explain this a bit more?
- secondmod 13y agoWhenever I build apps, along with giving best possible product, my focus is always on K-factor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-factor_(marketing) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-factor_(marketing)). Viral Factor, K = No. of invites X Conversion rate As long as, K >1, your app is growing. And best way I figured out to do that was to make people tweet and make that tweet provoking enough to let her users click on that tweet. Example, I encourage people to boast about number of repins or followers they got because of Pinwoot and tweet reads something like : 1) I got 954 repins on #Pinterest using @Pinwoot. Add your pin here https://pinwoot.com https://pinwoot.com 2) Try @Pinwoot.com to get free followers on #Pinterest https://pinwoot.com https://pinwoot.com Tweet Copy 1 performed 267% better than Tweet Copy 2 in getting new users.
- DanielRibeiro 13y agoDon't forget viral cycle: http://www.quora.com/Viral-Growth-and-Analytics/What-is-the-definitive-way-to-calculate-viral-coefficient-for-a-social-game http://www.quora.com/Viral-Growth-and-Analytics/What-is-the-...
- brandnewlow 13y agoThe StatusPage folks are executing incredibly well on adressing a tangible pain point. It's been a lot of fun to watch.
- 7Figures2Commas 13y agostatuspage.io might have a great product (I'm not a customer), and I can see the value in some of the things they offer (like the ability to pull in data from third party monitoring services), but if operating a useful status page is a "tangible pain point" worth paying $79/month plus for, Silicon Valley is in trouble. I appreciate that companies don't want to build everything, nor should they, but pushing every piece of non-core functionality onto a SaaS is just insane. The worrisome thing for many but not all of the SaaS startups primarily targeting other startups is that when the next downturn arrives, the number of companies eager to spend hundreds/thousands of dollars a month on a portfolio of SaaS services for just about every function will likely decrease substantially.
- redguava 13y agoIf I build it myself, it will cost me a lot more and be a lot worse product. This is their area of expertise, their passion and their business. They'll make a better status page than I would.
- 7Figures2Commas 13y ago> If I build it myself, it will cost me a lot more and be a lot worse product. Your status page is not your product (hopefully). If you run an online service, the purpose of a status page is to inform your customers of downtime and other issues that may affect their use of your service. Like I said, I am not questioning whether statuspage.io has built a better status page than what most companies would be motivated to build themselves. What I am pointing out is that spending $xx or $xxx each month on a SaaS for every little piece of functionality you don't want to build internally adds up. As for the costs of building internally, I would suggest that a half-decent engineer could build a satisfactory status page with email/SMS notification functionality in 2-3 days. If you want to be generous and say it would take a week, and your engineer is paid $110,000/year (~$2300/week), you're still ahead of statuspage.io's $249/month plan, which costs $3,000/year and limits you to just 2,500 subscribers. If you operate, say, an API that is critical to your business and keeping consumers of that API informed about status is important, there's no reason not to invest engineering time in owning the status page functionality. On the flip side, if your status page isn't all that important, paying $xx or $xxx/month for a robust status page service instead of, say, rolling a status page of your own using [insert popular open-source CMS of your choice] doesn't make a lot of sense.
- t0 13y agoCan this strategy be duplicated? It seems like your main traffic source has been press coverage, but that isn't something that you can plan to have or rely on. Would you have gotten this far otherwise?
- dannyolinsky 13y agoI'd say most of the strategy can be duplicated with the right founders. The only significant mainstream press we've had was the TechCrunch article and while it for sure helped out to accelerate growth, I think we would still have hit $5k a couple months later without it.
- csomar 13y agoFor Passive income dreamers, I think it's important to mention 1. This is revenue, not profit. 2. 3 guys. So $1600/person. 3. Seems like they don't have jobs (means taking this full time, probably with consulting). Still a pretty good job, and I'll be interested to see their growth.
- stevenklein 13y agoWe've averaged about 18% week over week growth for the past few months so we're well on our way to being profitable before the new year..even with a decent amount of slowed growth. Here's to hoping it keeps up!
- csomar 13y agoI'm not critizing your business model. I think you are doing good. However, I'm interested in passive income streams. This is not one, and the title (while not misleading) gives the impression that it's a blog post about a passive income stream. So it's simply a note to Passive income dreamers.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- stevewilhelm 13y agoJust marked my calendar to check back and see how statuspage.io is doing in a year's time.
- KMBredt 13y agoYou could just subscribe to their status-page located here: http://meta.statuspage.io/ http://meta.statuspage.io/ ;-)
- applecore 13y agoI'm impressed that a soft launch[1] brought in twenty users on a $50/month plan ($1,000 MRR.) They really launched with a solid product. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5401470 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5401470
- ddewaele 13y agoNice write-up. When did you guys actually started working on this and how did you transition from a day-to-day consultancy mode (no doubt bringing in a multitude of that $5000 revenue) into working on this full-time. Your blog posts don't seem to contain a creation date :) Did you fund the initial development with your own savings or did you get angel investors on board early on ? I can imagine that after taxes and deducting costs there is little or no profit left but it's a great psychological barrier to cross ! I wish you guys the best of luck ! Great idea and great to see people using it (and paying for it)
- dannyolinsky 13y agoThanks for the comment. Work on the product started in October with a 3 week on product vs. 1 week consulting model (http://blog.statuspage.io/funding-your-startup-with-a-one-week-on-three-weeks-off-setup http://blog.statuspage.io/funding-your-startup-with-a-one-we...).
- rexreed 13y agoGoing from zero to $5000/mo is definitely great as that means you've created some value somewhere. But $5k is not really sustainable as a business for three people. It's a great side-job for one person, or good total income for one person who lives in a low-rent / low-cost area. But for a team of 3 people, you can do much better than $5k just selling your time in consulting. It's not clear how you'll get from $5k/mo (nice side-job income) to $50k/mo (Good bootstrapping income for team of 3) to $500k/mo (ok, now you have a business that scales). I'm not being critical here -- It's just that SaaS math has me scratching my head wondering if all that work for all those customers with such small amounts to show for it is worth it. Would you rather service 200 people for a total of $5k a month with 3 bodies to support or one solid consulting customer @ $5k+/month with just yourself to support? I'd imagine that you'd want more revenue so you can have a business and not just lifestyle income to support one person. Going from 0 to $5k is one thing -- the advice here is good for that. But getting from $5k to $50k, where you need to be to have sustainable business for 3 people, will require much more substantial effort that's not clear you can achieve with these methods. Indeed, it is not even clear what your margins are at the $5k/mo revenue point and whether that will even be sustainable given the amount you'll need to spend on Customer Acquisition, Customer Support, and slaying the Customer Churn demons to retain your necessary high monthly subscription rates. This is where most SaaS companies die -- trying to achieve this necessary transition.
- peterjancelis 13y agoTrue, but $5K recurring with predictable funnel and churn also means freedom, even if split by 3 people. Depending on what you decide to do, it can mean any of the following: - Paying the rent/mortgage and good food on the table. Nothing fancy but you'll survive even in the Bay Area as long as you live together. - Ability to be picky with consulting clients or invest in longer sales cycles. - Living in luxury on a beach in SE Asia while you figure out how to bootstrap the business. All of the above are pretty fantastic imo. Not a finish line by any means but way more optionality than 98+% of the population.
- dannyolinsky 13y agoAs bryanh mentioned, $5k isn't the goal. It's the first milestone. Agree that getting from $5k to $50k will be a completely different undertaking so you'll see another post like this one once we get there
- timharding 13y agoFascinating. Thanks for the post. Not sure what your unfair advantage is here, perhaps being part of the community? What barriers do you have to competition from a one or two person company w/ lower costs? This is an excellent talk about what it takes to get out there and find the set of customers outside this bubble that will get you to $50k/mo. http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman-constant-contact-how-to-negotiate-the-long-slow-saas-ramp-of-death/ http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman-constant-...
- shimms 13y agoWow the negativity here is astonishing. $5000 recurring revenue is an amazing accomplishment, and something that most startups never see. Kudos on this achievement, for taking the time to share it, and for the hard work behind it. Wishing you guys the best of success in getting to the next milestone.
- dannyolinsky 13y agoMuch appreciated shimms.
- originofspecie 13y agoCall me a jaded but 60k a year in revenue isn't won't pay the mortgage or put food on the table or clothes on your back. And if you wanted all three... forget about it.
- skeletonjelly 13y ago> As we continue to grow and hopefully reach $25,000, $50,000 and $100,000 in monthly recurring revenue
- wusatiuk 13y agoI also think that this is another awesome example how it could work including the steps you should go. There are thousands of ideas out there but most of them never go productive because out of whatever reason so you guys, as all other startups with paying clients, have my biggest respect.
- Jamie452 13y agoSo who fancies giving me a pain point which I can get on with? That's my pain point.. trying to find a pain point to start developing!
- philhill 13y agoSo you started charging for the service very early (almost day 1). that's not the traditional startup approach of build a biggish user base, work out the product beyond MVP and then monetize. I like hearing you got to rev early so props but is there a downside to future growth (even in the short term)?