How we hit our $30k ARR milestone
Published in 2019, this chronicle by @AdriaanvRossum details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing. Key verified financial milestone: $30k ARR.
The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.
Curious about the focus on revenue versus profitability. I get that most VC-backed businesses are measured primarily against revenue targets, but this seems like a bootstrapped startup and I'd think they'd be more interested in metrics that factor in margins, profitability, etc.
I totally get that when people see "$30K ARR" in the title of an article, they know what it's about. Are there other metrics that relate more to sustainability that we can use/popularize? Not trying to be critical of this founder — just thinking of ways we can change the conversation to be more relevant to/appropriate for bootstrapped startups.
Congrats on the milestone. As I’ve grown a SaaS over the last 5 years I’ve found there are enough MRR and ARR milestones that we can celebrate something real every few months. It’s a great feedback loop. (Eg 10k arr, 1k mrr, 25k arr, 3k mrr, 50k arr, etc)
Advice given to me, taken in my own way, and now I’m passing on: to get from 1k mrr to 10k mrr double down on everything that has worked for you. Once you hit 1k (or in your case about 3k) you obviously have at least one thing that is working.
After 10k we were forced to get more creative. (Feeder products, paid advertising, etc)
This is the era of the Micro SaaS.
Adriaan
Did you ever compare traffic results between GA and Simpleanalytics?
I know that many times GA has a difficult time recognizing traffic from Reddit and HN so it shows it only as direct.
I have Jetpack on a few of my sites and it shows completely different results than GA, mainly because I think GA can filter by default bots traffic which is kinda common on bookmark sites (when a post becomes viral)
Will try your tool... looks great
Congrats on the huge milestone!
I really like how you respect the Do Not Track flag. I wish companies had done this before browser makers started removing the feature.
https://www.macrumors.com/2019/02/06/apple-removes-safari-do-not-track-option/
We (my startup in my profile) switched over to Simple Analytics when we redid our website. While they don't have all the features we might want, the experience and privacy guarantees are fantastic.
Major congratulations to the team!
I think it would be interesting for Hacker News to know what happened with the company that they made famous from the start: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18024277