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Comment by matrix | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.)

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