How we reached $6250 monthly recurring revenue in 77 days from launch
We built this product because we had tried the two other main players in the market and felt that these products are 1)expensive 2)complex
On 2nd Dec'19, we launched on PH. Kept following things in mind:
1.Use GIF in the thumbnail 2.Product screenshots 3.Post close to 12:00 am PST 4.Never indulge in fake voting
We ended that day @ 4th position! Coming in top 5 on Product Hunt opens a lot of early PR opportunities. So, we go covered by number of niche blogs.
We spent $1k on SEO & $200 in FB Ads targeting job profiles like Support Manager, HR Manager etc. To break some users (similar to us) from existing players, we built 1-click account migration for both Front and Help Scout from day 1. Also, we built few other integrations (Stripe, Twilio, Pipedrive etc.) to get some distribution going for us as early as possible.
We signed up 500+ users within 1st week. We priced the product the way we wanted it to be as a customer of other shared inbox offerings in the market. And, the pricing was also partly influenced by our love for Basecamp. So, we have 2 plans - free and $99/m for unlimited users.
When you have a free plan, it is very important to design that free plan smartly. If you don't put the controls on features at the right trigger point, you will miss out on the upgrades. Hence, we spent more time on planning our free plan than our paid plan. The idea really was to figure out the stage at which a small startup feels the pain of email chaos and is ready to pay for the solutuon. So, we offer the product for free for up to 5 team members. If you need anything more than that, pay $99/m.
In 77 days, we have converted 52 accounts (4% of signups) into paid @ avg $120/month.
Hope this is useful for some of you.
19 comments
[ 5.8 ms ] story [ 53.8 ms ] threadFB has never really worked for us in terms of conversions but we use them mostly for initial traction & visibility. FB ads work well for us for upselling or converting free to paid using retargeting.
Any plans on adding a SAML integration and 2FA? I work for an SI that has done some SAML SSO integrations with SAASPASS for customers using Frontapp etc...
- May I know how long it took to develop the product with how many ppl?
- Any Tips on what is the best time to release SaaS products like monthend, weekend etc??
- It took us 2 months and 3 people to build and launch the product along with all content and SEO work.
- I personally find Monday as the best day for launch and beginning of month.
Are you working on other ideas at the moment, or focusing on this one?
Were you actively ideating, or was it more of a "I have this problem. Wow, this software is expensive and too complex, I just need a simple solution" and then you built it?
We have couple of other products in cloud telephony and call tracking space. And, one product in the making.
We are big time bullish on these 3 themes: 1) remote work is growing 2) companies adopting automation in every process 3) all businesses will eventually move to cloud
So, we are always open to ideas that satisfy these three themes. We were using these shared inbox softwares for other product for over an year or so and knew about all the problems that our team members were facing. So, few events (missed emails, poor integration & rapid increase in our bill due to hiring) triggered the decision to build a better and affordable solution.