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Comment by segmondy | Hacker News Reader

$1k MRR is nothing to brag about. Seriously, we need to start aiming much higher. If this was "My 1hr a day side project hitting $1kMRR in 12months", then it's impressive. But I often see these non side projects and I just want to voice that it's absolutely not impressive.

If you started a business mowing lawn, cutting hair, you better be way past $1K revenue in 6 months. If you're fully committed to building a startup and 100% vested in it, even $10k a month isn't impressive after 24 months. MY OPINION. 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.

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> $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.

I have to side with the poster of the comment you're responding to. If $1k per month is pure profit and doesn't require more than 2hrs per week of work, bravo. However, if it's your main gig and you're dumping anything more than 15hrs a week into it... yeah I don't really see the purpose. You could make more selling "magic" rocks on Etsy.

In most case with SAAS, its 90% profits if you grew organically without spending hella lot of money on ads.

Now with everyone moving to cloud and managed services, the infra cost is too less.

If someone is able to automate most things and working like 1 hour a day and still makes $1K MRR, its still good assuming its growing slowly.

I agree, but in 2020 expecting to grow "entirely organically" or by word of mouth without ads is a falsehood. This is honestly one of my biggest qualms with Indie Hackers. They claim that design and marketing isn't needed if you just "try long enough" and tell dev friends about your project. Granted, this depends on your target audience, but if your product isn't targeting developers the calculus just doesn't quite compute.

There are still many people who are Indie Hacking and still seeing some success.

For example, one of my SAAS products starting making revenue this month without spending a dime on ads until now. Agreed it takes some time.

I am not disagreeing on Ads part. These days most people are spinning landing pages, spending money on ads and validating real quick.

That's awesome! I totally agree that in certain cases a passive approach can be better, however given you can write off advertising as a business expense certain projects can benefit substantially from relatively small targeted ad campaigns. Granted, as a developer it's been incredibly tough to learn how to advertise and write effectively for marketing.

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.

Correct. And with everyone adopting cloud, serverless, managed services I wouldn't be surprised if its 90% margin.

Specifically if the architecture is purely written on front end, it would be much cheaper.

In the case of the lawn mowing company, you don't have employees showing up at customer houses drunk. You don't have to deal with your employees running into houses and cars with their trailers, trucks etc.

Lots more head aches with in person businesses than SaaS. I have a neighbour who switched from lawn care to SaaS (selling other peoples tools), says it doesn't matter how much you pay him, he wouldn't go back.

It's only 85% margin if your time is valued at $0/hr. IMO, that's just a silly way to look at it.

Most SaaS companies have significant operational costs (cloud spend, operations people, developers fixing bugs, etc.) The small, single person SaaS with huge margins (and real revenue) is largely mythical.

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.

Are we talking about $1,000 or $1,000,000?

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.

Right, for something at VC-sclare ofcourse it should in millions of $$$.

Here we are talking about purely small indie hacking companies that are growing big. :)

> $10k MRR for Seed, $100k MRR for Series A, $500K - $1M MRR for Series B.

If u are at $10K/month, you are probably at break-even or ramen profitable or whatever.

A $500K seed, $3M valuation, in a central tech hub - that seems kind of low to me ?

> they are likely much higher now

Surely the bar has gone DOWN ? With many more options? Maybe your growth rate can really change the valuation?

> 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.

I was just quoting the same in another comment where Daniel Vassallo quit his high paying job.

>> 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.

Agree. Yes, I am talking about a true MRR.

It always makes happy to get a MRR even if its a small amount when you are just starting up.

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.

The hardest thing for indie hacker is to get the first sale. I echo with you.

$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!

Ok. Let me put it this way. In most cases, these are built by indiehackers who automate most of the stuff and work like 5-6 hours a week.

I think its still a deal if I am making $1K MRR with 1 hour work per day and if its growing.

Isn't it more like 50 or 60 hours a week and trying to get it from $1k to $2k?

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 might as well just get a job at McDonalds, you'll have a nice pay raise.

What you’ll also have: little opportunity for growth, barely any valuable experience, skills, or learning opportunities, an intellectually boring job, nothing to show off to potential future employers, and you’re giving up working for yourself to sell your time.

And that’s ignoring your massive assumption that all these startups are full time jobs.

What a simplistic viewpoint.

Except:

- a $1k/mo MRR business generally has some fungibility to be sold. For a SaaS business @ $1k/mo MRR with a working product, I could easily see that being worth $30k+ to any number of buyers. (Because you have de-risked the problem significantly by going from $0 -> revenue.)

- You can potentially 10x that $1k/mo in a very short period by spending time (and money, if available) on customer acquisition.

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