$8600 MRR business on Airtable
founderbeats.com
founderbeats.com
A couple of people have been confused by 'on Airtable' in the title. Data Fetcher (https://datafetcher.com/) is an extension built (with code) on Airtable's marketplace in the same way you'd build on the App/ Play Store. It's not a no-code app built using Airtable.
MRR is up to $9400 since I did this interview, and should hit $10k in the next month.
I thought you should know.
Independent of Airtable so if they cancelled their Airtable they can still cancel on datafetcher.com.
- right place at the right time (almost certainly a factor here)
- actually building and releasing something
- promoting it, letting the world know about him/it
These success stories are really nice, but it's important to recognize that it usually takes all three of these key elements to be successful.
Obviously if you don't do anything, you cannot get success. But if you do something, and the timing or market is wrong, you may not get much or any success. And if you do something but never make an effort to let the world know, then you may get a little growth but not real success.
We can't control the market timing so much, mainly because we can't accurately predict the future. With some research, maybe we can improve on this, but it's still no guarantee.
So, the best policy is to just stay in forward motion. Built a thing, promote it, and repeat. Maybe with 5 things in current operation, one of them catches.
The way I manufactured right place/ right time was using this framework: https://twitter.com/clokehead/status/1340949414081392640?s=2...
You don’t have to create the wave. Find an existing wave grab a surf board and figure out a way to ride it.
What is becoming a problem is the super low quality, autogenerated derivatives. But those are more a symptom of a broken internet (youtube/google search) than anything else. Now that garbage on youtube cannot be downvoted, and since youtube does not (has never?) shown up/down rating numbers on content before you click to view it, it's exceedingly difficult for the viewers to find the good stuff.
Too many (most?) apps are built without spending any time researching whether it solves a real problem people have (and are willing to pay for). I get it, we want to build things, not do market research.
Most people think that to build a successful app, you just have to "come up" with a brilliant idea and then go build it. That's not the case at all (while it does occasionally work, THAT is pure luck). Successful apps usually happen because the founder(s) saw a real pain point or gap in the market, and then build something to solve that.
You'll notice that the approaches are almost completely opposite:
- Build something and hope that people need it - Find a problem that people actually have and build a solution that solves it well
Of course, this doesn't guarantee success (nothing does), but it vastly increases your chances of not wasting time building something nobody wants.
Also, I'm not naive about the different backgrounds/privileges people have; of course luck plays a factor here. I'm speaking directly about people who are already in a position to create an app (i.e. a lot of HN readers)
forget who said it, but I like the quote "Action produces information". If you just try a lot of stuff, at the very least you will learn what works and what doesn't.
At $8600 MRR * 12 ~= $103k. Obviously some level of expenses here but let's assume very high margins.
$8600 / $40 plan = 215 customers.
Given all that, how much time does it take to service 215 customers' support needs? Assuming profit would be in the $80-90k range, that's multiples lower than what a developer could make in a job, so is this a full-time work load or is it pretty minimal and could operate as a side-gig? It sounds like the plan here is to continue to grow well beyond the current state but just curious about this particular moment in the business and how sustainable it is if it doesn't grow.
$80-90k isn't actually that much less than a developer salary (in U.K., not U.S.), but it's an interesting question what I'd do if it didn't grow any more.
I'd probably put it into maintenance-mode, and start another micro-saas, as I love the freedom of working where/when/how I want. I'm hopeful of hitting $150k ARR by end of year though, and $250k next year.
I probably work 30-40 hours a week total.
for context, i'm at ~$400k MRR/just shy of ~$5M ARR and i make way less (in cash) now than i did at $40k MRR. don't get me wrong, the enterprise value has supposedly gone up but that's a lottery ticket versus the consistent cash in your pocket.
I basically look at entrepreneurship as trying to create my perfect job: make $200-500k/ year, work on what I want with smart people, don't have a boss etc. So a lifestyle business. But maybe I'll get bored and want to take a bigger swing, who knows.
HN really lives in a bubble. $90k USD per year is more than double the median income in the highest earning countries in the world [0]. There are very few places in the world you could not live extremely comfortably on that income.
Even for software engineering specifically, there are only two countries where the median is > $90k USD. [1]
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income 1. https://codesubmit.io/blog/software-engineer-salary-by-count...
That's definitely the biggest risk to the business (other than competition).
Airtable seem committed to being a platform that third-party developers can build businesses on, in the same way Shopify are. So I think (hope) they'd acquire me, rather than just cloning it, to maintain their reputation as a platform. But they definitely could do this and it's pretty scary!
For now, my strategy is to try and grow to $350k+ ARR and diversify the profits into index funds etc. I also have a couple of other micro-saas ideas that aren't platform-dependent that I'll launch in the next couple of years.
They also had a ton of restrictions that made sense for Google (e.g. mostly only supporting their own cloud products as a source), but didn't make sense for most customers. Not a single one of our customers has said "we're using the built in Google features" as a reason for cancelling.
Airtable is likely better then Google is this respect (will listen more closely to their customers), but probably not much. They are still a big company and you can do better.
ps - charge more!
Probably not going to charge more any time soon. I'm in the prosumer space, not B2B, and people are more price sensitive than you might expect.
Raising prices from $18/mo to $24 has massively reduced support, but we get a fair few people cancelling due to price, so any higher would probably be pushing it.
It could be interesting to integrate a prediction market like PredictIt [1] (although I heard they got into some trouble recently.) I also started to worry about getting in trouble with the SEC, in case people start to win bets by using insider information.
Anyway, does anyone have any predictions about the next IPO window? E.g. When do you think Stripe might have an IPO?
The frontend is React.js, TypeScript and Airtable's Blocks SDK.
Not that it is not impressive getting up a 8600 mrr business, so congrats.
Content marketing - look at common customer use cases and turn them into blog posts and YouTube videos.
Check out our blog, https://datafetcher.com/blog, and YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnED2FBe_jzntrCiB759y9w/vid..., for examples!
I've now hired 2 freelancers to produce these, so I can focus on product/ support.
i.e. https://nextdns.io/ gives the option: Block domains registered less than 30 days ago. Those domains are known to be favored by threat actors to launch malicious campaigns
Equivalents exist on corp firewalls, etc. Something like 70% of malware and phishing points to domains registered in the last 30 days. So it is an easy way to mitigate the risk of the majority of attacks.
But good to know this. In anycase, founderbeats.com is legitimate
URL: https://archive.ph/nsO2H URL Categories: Anonymizing Utilities, Internet Services Reputation: Minimal Risk
It does get more expension if you have lots of collaborators ($24/ month/ user), but if you can use a tool like Softr to build user-facing portals without adding all your end-users as Airtable collaborators.
https://community.airtable.com
I didn't do anything with the info as I didn't have extra time to devote to a new product.
I'm sure other unicorn startups will have communities around them or subreddits.
But kind of yes, syncing/moving data between Apps.
> Today, 30%-40% of my customers come through our YouTube videos or blog posts
Could you talk about how you get the other 60% to 70% of customers?
Thanks!
For example, I'm using airtable to track my job applications. I save the job ad, my cover letter and the resume I used as a pdf and attach them to the row in a column designed for attaching files. You can't do that in excel (at least not that I've seen).
If it was reproducible, then every VC would be doing this.
No they wouldn't. $8600 MRR is a lifestyle business, not a startup that can potentially 100x. To borrow an old Google saying, VCs have forgotten how to count that low.
There's a lot of space for bootstrapped independent entrepreneurs at that level because VCs just don't care about a business that small. It's pocket change. The VCs will be focusing on finding the next platform (AirTable), not add-ons for existing platforms (this).
VCs don't care about anything that isn't going to deliver a sure-fire IPO.
Find 1,000 half decent devs. Fund them for 1 year at 50K or so, with promise of 60% of company. Sprinkle over decent marketeers / designer / product mgrs.
Cost is now 50M USD + change.
Get to 10K MRR and its 120K pa, maybe 20-30K profit.
Does it matter which ones are just paying back their investment over two years, and the 1/1000 that might be a unicorn?
I just don't think VCs are playing the odds.