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Comment by the_bear | Hacker News Reader

This seems really aggressive, especially for bootstrapped companies. My startup took 31 months to hit $10k MRR, and now we're at ~$130k MRR. I'm really glad I didn't quit after three months. I barely even had the product built after three months.

I think that for most people, if they abandon anything that's not already a huge success three months in, they'll just end up bouncing from one thing to the next and never seeing anything through. It's virtually impossible to bootstrap that quickly, and I'd be surprised if many of the big VC-backed startups we've heard of hit that either (certainly not Google or Facebook who weren't even monetizing yet at that point).

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I strongly agree. Let's do the math: With a brand new un-proven product with an unproven pricing model, how many customers does it take to get to $10K MRR? In three months, how many qualified leads can you find and reach, and what percentage of those will close? (with an unproven product in an unproven market, 2% is probably a realistic estimate).

Of course there are scenarios where $10K MRR is possible quickly, but there's no way that is what most successful software businesses look like in 3 months.

It's certainly not a hard goal -- I wouldn't pretend that even SaaS businesses are all that similar. (The degree of reassessment after 3 months is up to you, after all.)

It's really a way to frame the product launch by forcing you to ask hard questions about what you're doing. If you don't even see a way for the product to reach $10k/month with a short-term plan, maybe it's a side project rather than a startup? Or maybe the product niche is too vague or unprofitable, and you need to work on that first?

Have you already accomplished such a goal?

Yes, but no thanks to myself. I wasted about a decade being a crap entrepreneur that didn't have such goals. It was easy to rationalize spending time on the work I liked doing under the pretense that I was improving the product's fundamentals. In retrospect, I would have been much better off facing my fears and doing clearly delineated 3-month efforts with revenue targets rather than persisting with products that don't quite work.

I'm still a crap entrepreneur, but I've become slightly better at teaming up with people who can make it happen.

Have you started a side project and after 3 months you were making 10k per month?

No, but I've been in a startup that got to $10k MRR in under three months after launching the product... And that opened my eyes to what all the talk about the mythical "traction" actually meant.

If it's a side project, that's a different game. A side project doesn't need traction to be successful for its creator.

3 months after launch is a lot more specific, your first comment suggests 3 months after starting...

(I can't edit the parent comment anymore, so a clarification: when I wrote "not a hard goal", I meant that the $10k number is just a rough ballpark -- not that the goal would be somehow easy to accomplish.)

Yeah, while this may be good advice for some types of markets/businesses/circumstances, there's no way that it's useful as general advice, especially not for side projects or small companies that only need to support one person. Getting that initial traction is the hardest part. Quitting after 3 months is silly.

I don't know how much Atlassian made in its first three months, but they are one of the only bootstrapped tech companies to go public in the last 2 decades. It took them 15 years. While this is not necessarily the fastest path to success, I 100% believe it deserves immense respect. They're one of the biggest success stories in tech as far as I'm concerned.

(Of note, Atlassian has mainly focused on enterprise markets)

I think the $10k goal is sort of a brain hack. From my understanding, the real goal here is to force you think differently.

I think $10k MRR is a good target. It's basically a limit of ramen profitability for a small team of 2-4 (depending on the family etc. responsibilities of the team), plus a little bit of extra to run the business. When you hit that, it's possible to commit full-time without extra financing and you don't run out of your savings.

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