I’m extremely proud to announce that our Personal CRM made it to 100$ MRR (monthly recurring revenue).
This is the goal we set ourselves about 7 months ago when we reached 10$ MRR. You can read more about our plan back then on my personal blog.
While being just a symbolic number, recurring revenue of 100$ is an important milestone for a bootstrapped business: you go from nothing to something.
From nothing to something.
100$ MRR is still not enough to quit everything, but it’s enough to dig deeper. We’ve proven that there is something, now we need to prove that there is a real business to be built here.
Looking back on my personal entrepreneurial journey, this is as far as I’ve ever made it with any of my projects, from now on, I’m in unchartered territories.
Here is what we learned as a team that you can apply to your bootstrapped business.
Grow your funnel
Personal CRMs (still) being a relatively niche thing, it’s amazing how differently people react. I’ve have had calls with potential customers who would totally not get it and get me pretty frustrated. On the other side, I’ve had calls with people who just got it and wanted me to stop talking so that they could subscribe.
If you get unlucky and meet many people who just don’t get it first, it can get really demotivating so make sure to talk to many people from different industries and backgrounds.
Instead of changing your product to try to satisfy unhappy leads, find people who like your current product.
This means content creation. A lot of it. Explore different channels and persevere. SEO takes years, so by starting now you’re doing your future self a favour!
Make it easy to subscribe
We were so not confident in our own product that we did not believe anyone would subscribe and pay us. This massively impacted our design and development roadmap making it hard for potential customers to start paying us.
Don’t do that.
Let people sign up on their own and start paying you on their own, you might wake up to happy surprises!
Hire a designer
Our team was initially only backend developers and a marketer: No designer. When an old friend of mine offered to help out with the design, I said yes without thinking.
Now that our new app is out with her design, things have changed massively! The perceived value of our app has gone through the roof and we’re now perceived like a real company and not some weird MVP.
Customers are also much more generous and forgiving with a well designed app.
Do calls with potential customers
As small young businesses. we have to fight very hard to earn our customer’s trust and a great way to get there is to get them to know you. 8 out of our 10 paying customers did at least one call with me.
Hope that helps! In the next post, I’ll share our plan to reach out next milestone: $1000 MRR.