Startups that have hit more than $1K MRR in about 12-24 months

Thankyou.

Exactly. This is for all those people who would love to have their first sweet spot of achieving $1K MRR to start with.

For Silicon Valley/New York, ofcourse $1K MRR is nothing. But we have lot examples who went on nomad life style travelling countries and working from places with cheaper cost of living and in those case $1K MRR is still big.

It IS a milestone, but 1k a month is not a meaningful amount in any rich country. Remember, it's revenue for your company, not your net salary. Not even your gross salary.

Depends on how much time you have to spend to make it work - if it's a full time thing 1k MRR is >7$/hour if you spend 160 hours a month on it - if you can code anywhere in the world that's below lowest tier remote coding gigs, triple that and you approach low end remote gigs.

I wouldn't consider the revenue streams of any of these companies to be meaningfully representative of potential market size in any way. Pretty much any niche market you can think of will be 100's of times larger. You can literally put pretty rocks you pick up in a streambed and generate higher revenues. With a little hard work and luck, some of the companies listed will grow 1000's of times in the future (but they'll still be considered "small businesses").

To argue the other side, an old boss of mine would say that some of the products listed are really features. One of his favorite mantras was: "A feature is not a product and a product is not a company."

To respond to the "is it really just this hard", well... yes and no. If you are unwilling to market/promote/sell your product or just give most of the value away, then sure, it's very very hard. However, if you're willing to hustle on the "business" side of things, then it may not be that hard. One thing that too many techies get wrong is that they try to be innovative in everything. Don't -- just innovate along one axis. For everything else, just copy best practices and you'll be fine.

Side note: commission driven sales is a viable strategy for some product categories in some markets. But for most, it's not. Remember, in business, almost everything is context dependent. Any good tactical advice of "do X" is also bad advice in a different context. And vice versa.

Or it could just be that so many of them are fishing in the same pond?

A lot of them seem like run of the mill productivity software, it is a crowded market with big incumbents.

The ones with unique offerings may just be too marginal to garner a large enough customer base, business customers ultimately want full feature suite products.

People always say "A bad product still survives with good marketing but a good product can't survive with bad marketing"

May be correct that a good salesperson could make a diff.

Would love to hear the product that came close to your side project. Interested to know.

There's one which seems to be a planning tool for junior military officers:

https://mgrs-mapper.com/

I mean the Pentagon spends billions on things like latrines and office supplies. Assuming this does what it says it does, why is it making pennies?

Depends on what the price point is. I don’t think it makes sense to do sales for a product under $49-99/mo. Huge time sync. Better off marketing self service and scale from there.

>There's one there that's pretty close to a side project of mine - not even a grand.

I mean quite a few are significantly more than a grand, and there are a few that if I got that much for my side project I think it totally makes sense to go for it.

Is it not also possible that there simply aren't many people who want to pay for things, but will happily use it for free?

> $1k MRR is nothing to brag about.

Going from $0 to any number greater than $0 is an accomplishment IF your product is genuinely something new, where product market fit is unknown. It means you've found a customer. Which is very difficult. Many startups never find even a single customer.

Obviously finding your first customers is nothing to brag about if you're mowing lawns, because everyone on the planet is aware that anyone with grass in front of their house knows someone occasionally needs to mow it. Same with anyone who has hair on their head.

> even $10k a month isn't impressive after 24 months

> might be better of leetcoding and getting a job at one of the FAANGs

I don't think the point is to maximize lifetime income. But you're absolutely right that if your life goal is to maximize lifetime income, statistically speaking, you shouldn't start a startup.

Forgot to say in my other comment: a huge difference between those businesses and a SaaS product is margin. A $10k MRR SaaS product at 85%+ margins, requires no equipment other than a laptop to maintain, is vastly superior to a lawn mowing company IMO, which will have a truck, a mower, labour, etc. So from a margin perspective, you'd vastly prefer the SaaS product.

This seems like totally random and unfocused feedback. The fact is, for ANY business $1mm MRR is SOMETHING, which could be brought to the bank for a loan to continue business, as well as a proposal to investors. It's a sign that a least at some level your business is WORKING.

I fail to see the point of this negativity.

You're underestimating the profit margin and the benefit of not having to do the work yourself.

Mowing lawns, I'll be busy for those $1k MRR. If I have a SaaS with optimized implementation and a halfway solid foundation, those $1k MRR might be equivalent to $950 gross profit. And I'll get those $950 even if I don't do a thing.

So those $950 are additive. I can still mow the lawn to turn them into $1950 monthly.

I had the same initial reaction. A SaaS product taking that long to get to $10K ARR is not exciting from an ambition perspective - maybe from a side-project POV, though, it would be.

While the traditional VC yardsticks* are both way too reductionist AND now well out-dated, they at least provide a rough sense of how good of an opportunity you have.

* I've heard these are the perquisites for VC SaaS funding rounds (note this is probably 5 years out of date, and they are likely much higher now): $10k MRR for Seed, $100k MRR for Series A, $500K - $1M MRR for Series B.

That all said, I like how Jason Lemkin talks about this. Basically, "I don't care how long it took you to get to $1M ARR - could be 10 years. But I need to see a clear path to getting to $100M ARR in 5 years from when you hit $1M". Paraphrasing. Obviously this is only for VC-scale businesses/approaches, not denigrating other ways of building a business.

> If you're that skilled and can't figure out how to make money fast, you really might be better of leetcoding and getting a job at one of the FAANGs or well paying SV companies.

Unless of course, you prefer to have the freedom to work on whatever you want to work on.

>> If you started a business mowing lawn, cutting hair, you better be way past $1K revenue in 6 months.

Depends. If you are doing the mowing, cutting then i'd agree -- because it isnt a "product/platform/marketplace business" as much as a service, so you should earn the market rate of the service, less your independence discount.

If you are not doing the mowing, cutting but instead have a scalable business that could grow beyond the 24hrs you can work yourself, then you may not have made $1k in 6mo because you're investing for growth.

Since the article is about MRR, i'm assuming they are talking about the second category, which is true MRR.

Maybe it's nothing to brag about to some, but I'd say it's nothing to scoff at, either. Getting from zero to one is a major hurdle that many (perhaps most) people fail to achieve.

$12k a year sounds like a terrible job but that’s because you’re comparing it with an entirely different job and career path. It’s like saying, why be a math professor, just go work on Wall Street. Different pursuits!

Aside from being negative, this is pretty off-base for a couple of reasons:

- Many of these are side projects.

- Any company that sells in increments < $1k/mo will at some point be making "only" $1k/mo. This is as true of the companies presented here as it is of Mailchimp or Twilio. The only way to get bigger is to grow through $1k/mo.

- $0-$1k MRR is the hardest step for many businesses. Once you hit $1k/mo, it's likely a smoother path to $10k and beyond.

Well, you can't compare $10K/m day job and $1K MRR. Some time $1K MRR is better if you want more freedom. You must have heard of story of Daniel Vassallo.

Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.

15$/hr * 40 hr/wk * 50 wk/yr / 12 months/yr = $2500 MRR. Assumes 2 weeks unpaid vacation. And that's assuming $0 expenses, so all revenue can go into your own crap salary. $1k MRR is $6/hr, below minimum wage anywhere in the US. If all you're getting is $1kMRR, you might as well just get a job at McDonalds, you'll have a nice pay raise.

You shouldn't go into computer programming. Typical code looks way worse.

Would love to hear some good domain names you got :)

Rarely does someone come up with a solution in a domain space they know nothing about — it happens sometimes but still rare. Don’t forget that business is ultimately just selling a solution to a problem. This is very simplified but my thoughts: Find an interesting niche domain or area of interest, dive deeply and learn about the problems and challenges, find vendors and individuals in that domain and talk to them about their problems, research some solutions, create landing pages and validate some of the ideas and solutions you come up with, get a nice customer pipeline who will pay you real money for a solution, build the solution and ship the solution, profit off that solution.

I agree with your vitamin vs painkiller analogy.

There are successful products that started catering to a finite set of audience and still making a lot of money.

For example, one from my list is ChurchCo making $45K/month just by doing websites for Churches. Can you believe?

So, just by picking unique features and niching down the audience, you can still place a safe bet without spending a few years and hundreds of dollars.

Maybe create something of value first.

If you came up with a transporter you could make trillions in the shipping industry.

If you are part of a small group who knows the person who created a transporter you can be the first setting up services around that and make billions.

If you are the last person to discover you have to beat everyone before or discover something new.

If Zuckerberg said that because myspace existed, where would he be?

> I feel that every problem I try to tackle is not a real problem. It’s a vitamin and not an ibuprofen.

Maybe you should push forward with the problems you want to tackle. Vitamins sell. A lot.

As mentioned in my other comments,

Yes. This is all real data. No false data. All data taken from various sources like stripe, paddle, baremetrics data. Only thing to note is - this is before expenditure deduction.

Its revenue. Not profit. But with most of these typically sass and lean startups, I would say 80%-90% would be profits, may be.

Don't forget to check the reverse of your findings with failed companies

Using a bunch of data from startups that succeeded is baking in a survivorship bias

Without external audits, there's no reason to believe any of the startups on this list are giving real numbers.

In addition, third parties like analytics SDKs or payment processors, which in principle have the capability to easily audit usage and financial data, seem to never do this business.

Then there are non-primary-data-source firms like SensorTower and AppAnnie. They are always reactive to (not predictive of) "download counts" - they almost certainly take money to rank higher in their charts, or such a mechanism exists through whatever flawed data gathering approach they take. Anyone who can afford to pay AppAnnie and SensorTower is already well capitalized to some extent, and it is definitely effective to arbitrage $1m of cheap fake downloads through AppAnnie into a $10m investment from dumb money.

Compare to Steam, which publishes realtime concurrent player counts and sales data that is irrefutably true, with rare exceptions caused by bugs. (1) There are always big surprises in the Steam data, especially when you compare the genres that lead the charts to the genres that giant companies most aggressively market. Such transparency has been instrumental to the continued success of indie game developers on that platform. Steam has the fattest tails in the business, at least in terms of something we can actually validate, so it's still your best bet for information.

Despite the information, there is still not a viable venture capital model around Steam games. You'll never see a Y Combinator gaming startup list on Steam, and the ones that do, they'll fail to raise money because all that investors will talk about is "how many users u got?" It's a vicious cycle

The problem is lack of simple ideas for analyzing this data, something so simple and straightforward that the kind of people who become Managing Directors can process in a deck.

Anyway, a startup is never going to release numbers it can't fudge.

(1) https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/aflabl/psa_stop_hypi...

You'd need a lot of controls.

See a startup with 50k MRR after 12 months and 10m followers? Those 10m followers must have really helped! Oh wait that company actually raised 10m and spent 2m on advertising...

Could you make the source spreadsheet a view-only Google Sheet? I'd rather look at this in a sortable, searchable sheet if possible. :)

Thankyou.

Oops... MRR - Monthly Recurring Revenue (before expenses typically)

Monthly Recurring Revenue - aka subscriptions.

I think it is Monthly Recurring Revenue.

Monthly recurring revenue

Yes. This is all real data. No false data. All data taken from various sources like their stripe, paddle, baremtrics data.

Only thing to note is - this is before expenditure deduction.

Its revenue. Not profit. But with most of these typically sass and lean startups, I would say 80%-90% would be profits, may be.

My startup has 0 MRR and I’ve been working on it for 7 years. What should I do?

Not really. Most people trying to reach $1K MRR in 24 months might have been already working in a day job.

So, infact, apart from their day job, this $1K MRR is an add-on if not life changing.

You got downvoted because this is a tech oriented audience, but you are sadly correct.

You bring up a few good points with your post. First is that expenses are crucial in helping to determine how the company is doing. You might have mortgage and maintenance expenses that put you in the red, despite your greater than $1k MRR. Same with the startups in the list. Second, the growth potential: your real estate business has a fairly well understood long term revenue growth profile, assuming it is located in a mature economy, with obvious caveats of neighborhood changes in popularity, infrastructure, beneficial and detrimental facilities, while a startup at $1k/MRR can be already capped in growth or have an unknown growth potential, depending on the type of business and the market it is in.