Ask HN: My SaaS is stuck at $10K MRR, now what?

Some ideas below in no particular order. Pick the lowest hanging fruit.

- upsell to your customers. Looks like on the average each customer pays $10 per month. Is there anything you can do to give more value to the customers and charge more. (depends completely on your business and customer profile)

- look at new customer acquisition channels - adwords, facebook, retargetting, forums sales threads, affiliates etc

- increase spending on current customer acquisition channels. If you have a good idea on your customer LTV, you can figure out how much you can afford to spend to get a single customer.

- decrease churn - if your churn rate is high, you could analyze why it is so and focus on reducing it. Apart from increasing MRR, reducing churn automatically increase customer LTV and thereby justifies higher market spend.

- increase number of plans - if you have three plans, add a fourth plan priced at 2X-5X relative to the third plan (offering something of value to customers who can afford to pay more - e.g. phone support).

- increase pricing across the board - there is no way to know whether you are undercharging without actually increasing the pricing and seeing no change in customer acquisition numbers. The largest plan in my SaaS business has gone from X to 2X over the last 6 months (in three price increments), with no customers complaining of the price being too high. I plan to keep doing this until a decent number of customers tell me that the price is indeed too high. (do remember to grandfather in existing customers)

There was an interesting take on TechCrunch this morning on the same topic. I think it applies well to this situation, even though the numbers are different. What is your target market? SMB, consumer, enterprise? I'm guessing SMB or consumer based on average deal size.

http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/26/back-to-the-future-in-enterprise-saas-selling/

If your average deal size is $10.00 per month. Any way to increase the average deal size? 1000 customers is great. Can you get $20.00 per month out of them upselling or crosselling? More?

If it's an SMB product. I would say you need to hire in the right spots. You mentioned not wanting to raise money but also are looking to take it to the next level. You don't need to raise much, but $500k - $1m at good terms would be enough runway to hire 2-3 sales and 1 support person. From there, you can make the sales commission structure friendly so when they make money, you make money.

If it's consumer, I'm not an expert here. I would focus on marketing vs sales people.

The simplest explanation for the plateau in a SaaS business is that you're likely at the point where churn eats growth, which you can quickly verify by looking at the math. (e.g. If you have 5% monthly churn, which you'd be doing well to have at your price point, then you need to find 50 new accounts every month. If it's card-up-front then that's 100 trials. If you convert 2% of visitors that's 5,000 visits. Just to tread water.)

Your solutions include less churn and more growth. Both of these are deep topics.

That said, given that you have an average account value of around $10 per month, I'd be looking for some way to move upmarket. It's just brutally difficult to build a business at $10 a month unless you have massive Dropboxian scale on the back of a very viral product.

What you can do depends on what you've got. If the service is consumer facing then growing to 10k paying customers is practical (iff the product is actually viable) and largely a matter of marketing.

On the other hand, if the service is business (e.g. developer) facing, then growing users is a tougher path to growing revenues and the main route is going to be via higher prices (iff the product is actually viable).

If the burn rate is $10k and the income is $10k then it's not really a lifestyle business unless that lifestyle is poverty. Reducing expenses could turn it into a modest source of income, but probably not enough to pay a full time developer in a place like the US.

Good luck.