10+ paying customers, $100+ MRR, Lessons so far

A few days ago, my co-founder and I woke up to our 10th #payments notification in Slack, bringing us to $100+ MRR!

I've been building (and failing to sell) SaaS products for most of 2020, so this is huge for me.

Here is a reflection of some things which have and haven't worked well for Cloakist thus far:

Good things we've done

Targeting a problem which we personally witnessed hundreds (yes, hundreds) of people complaining about. Notice that I don't just say "we solved a real problem". That's the typical advice you see around and it's caused a lot of confusion for me. Walking in circles thinking of reasons why your problem is in fact a problem is not good. If you witness people complaining about something, there's no room to theorize about whether or not there is in fact a problem. People are publicly upset — of course there's a real problem!

Whether or not you can solve the problem is a different story. However, being stuck with a list of problems that you're not immediately sure how to solve is better than being stuck with a theoretical, unvalidated problem which you immediately know how to solve.
Writing as little code (and devops) as possible. This has helped us do everything fast - serving customers, adding features, experimenting, etc. You likely don't need self-serve, auth and a polished deployment pipeline to onboard your first few customers. Just do it manually via email. If you're getting just a few new users every week, it really won't be a problem for you to set them up manually. In fact, it'll be good to talk to them more.
Using a no-code platform for our landing page. I used to create a new Gatsby project each time I needed a landing page. This always ended up taking 2+ days instead of a couple hours. We now use Landen, a no-code platform for landing pages. This saves a tonne of time.

Bad things we've done

Forgetting about problems due to excitement. We started off with a problem that many people are complaining about. This was going well, until the excitement led to suggestions like "it's working here, so surely it'll work there too!" Validating your initial problem doesn't mean you've graduated from problem-oriented thinking. Every action going forward should stem from something that potential customers are saying or doing. This mistake caused us to spend time on variations and extensions of our product that no one cares about.
Assuming that "people complaining" === "people willing to pay". Seeing a lot of people complaining about something is a good hunch that there's a problem whose solution is worth money. However, that hunch might be completely off. If people are complaining about a problem with an expensive platform (e.g. Airtable), there's a decent chance they'll be willing to pay (a lot) for your solution. After all, they're already in the paying mood and are okay with expensive prices. If people are complaining about a problem with a free (or very cheap) platform (e.g. Google Forms), there's a decent chance they won't pay (or won't pay enough). Aside from price anchoring, people might not be willing to pay for a multitude of reasons. Maybe they don't like the idea of solving their problem with a third party service, or maybe they just don't like your landing page. This points to a big advantage of starting with many people complaining about something - it filters out the few customers you'll never understand for arbitrary reasons.

That's all for now, but we're planning to post many more updates going forward. We've been slacking with our milestone write-ups!

For context, our product - Cloakist - gives you custom domains and branding for any public site/page. If you're using a platform which doesn't let you put your public pages at yoursite.com (e.g. Notion), you can use Cloakist to solve that. Also, it's not just a redirect - your custom domain stays in the URL bar after the page has loaded.