My First $500 MRR – My thoughts and learnings
This is the 6th Project I build, the first one to have meaningful revenue, however you could consider 500€MRR as little revenue, but for me it's great progress. I'm not here to say that this is a lot, just here to share my thoughts on how I got here and what I learned. I know I still have a lot to learn.
1st: FitMe - 30 Users, 0$, Failure (Built for 6 months, launched, 0 user feedback, was so tired and sick of it, extremely technically challenge. I built something that was "cool" not that I wanted) 2nd: Pickpocket Alert - 0$, Failure. 32,000 users. (Didn't know how to monetize.) 3rd: Nationality Guesser - 9€MRR, Failure. 22,000 users. (terrible pricing, feel kind of guilty the app is a bit racist so I stopped.) 4th: Ultra Mega Chad (AI Aggregator) - 0$, Failure. 50 users. To be fair I just wanted to learn how LLM api's/prompting work, i think this has potential and have seen competitors rise. 5h: Feasty AI - 0$, Failure 0 users. I realised quickly: What the FK am i doing? What the FK am I building. Who even asked for this? Nobody. I need to stop building things I find cool and ONLY build shit people NEED. 6th: AEO Checker - 3,000 Users - 500MRR€, Success? Current project AEO Checker
1. Finding Ideas Go on Google Trends/Tiktok trends, what's growing, what's being talked about, are there some but not too many competitors? Are the keywords on Google low competition? Ok go for it.
2. Launch ASAP, just build 1 feature. That's all you need, 1 feature. Are people paying for it? Yes -> continue. No -> Go next idea. Build something in 1-2 weeks and see if someone buys.
3. Build for MRR not for users Do not chase more users, chase more PAID users. I got 32k users in my Pickpocket Alert app, yet I made 0 money. Nationality Guesser got 22,000 users yet only 3 paid. Don't waste your time chasing the increased users. Don't even track it. Only track paid users. AEO Checker has way less yet it pays 500x more than any other project I've built.
4. Pricing Raise your prices. Just do it. I started with 3€ a week or 9€ a month and got a few subscribers. Then I raised prices 9-25-55 and got two people who bought 55€ which equates to 6 people getting my previous highest 9€. The rich users will buy your highest tier ANYWAYS, so just price it higher. I'm even thinking of pricing even higher, my competitors already are..
5. Free Trials Remove them at first. People who need your product will buy it anyways. People who don't need it will just use the free trial and not convert anyways. Unless your product is so insanely good that even users who wouldn't pay end up paying, don't do it. If you're building a saas its not worth imo.
6. Onboarding/Conversions Have some sort of flow or onboarding where users need to commit to something your site offers, then at the end give them what they want behind a paywall.
7. SEO It's so hard, there are so many experts and competitors will buy ads anyways. The most important instant SEO boost IMO is your domain name. Stop using stupid domain names, just straight up name your domain/project what it does or what users search. (i.e. for me, I know users will search AEO Check hence my domain aeochecker.ai )
8. X Twitter/X is so powerful, start posting on there with your own account about build in public, random 2-3 posts a day and you get referrals from there.
9. Reddit Use reddit to promote but do it smart, DO NOT plaster your product you'll get instantly banned and its pointless. Find super niche and super small sub-reddits. That's how I got a 18k views post in a subreddit with 1k members.
Other topics I need to learn more about: Ads, UGC, Pricing (need to improve), X shitposting. What do you guys think of these, I'd love to hear more from more successful people. Perhaps what I found isn't actually good advice and I just got lucky, idk.