Enterprise Customer ($14k - Motionbox)

Hey IH, it's your favorite underdog founder Michael here still chipping away at growing Motionbox into a multi million dollar company.

Being that this is my first venture, I've failed more than most and it's why I believe I continue to succeed with these small wins. These failures have truly built me up into a better founder and engineer -- quit paying attention to all the big wins other people are achieving and focus on your small private wins. Keep getting better and soon enough you will have a big win.

It's taken awhile, through grinding and being patient, I have brought Motionbox close to $6k MRR (small win). The past day I have been able to increase our revenue close to 20% -- overnight (another small win).

Here is how I did it...

I worked incredibly hard on making Motionbox a great tool -- thats it! Haha, no only part of it. I truly believe in product, it matters. More importantly designing products that are robust and can be connected into other ecosystems.

Designing your product in such a way gives you the ability to sell to enterprise teams though integrations and package components in a way that you can sell.

For example our video rendering engine, I treat it as its own entity. Our UI acts as it's own entity, and by taking this approach I am able to sell our SDK in a headless fashion.

If users need the UI layer then we can package up the components however they need. I feel like this advice might go against the grain, and it takes a long time of pain to get here.

Most advice about pre-selling etc, is to help avoid the pain and giving up to soon.

My aspiration was to build something hard, so that a very small percentage of people would be able to compete with me and to build an asset that I could leverage -- even if it took longer. Which I think is a good way to think about things. Combine that with the mindset of pre-selling, validating, building a community, etc -- the things I failed at.

With these forces combined, iterating quickly, building community, and also accepting hard challenges that take time -- I truly feel like you can build something timeless, as long as you hang in there.

1.5 years of grinding to get this product to a healthy place is all it took. Now that I have 8 or 9 out of 10 expert knowledge and a brand behind me is where the fun begins.

We recently closed an enterprise deal yielding us $14k in yearly cashflow, which is not a crazy amount, but this shows you what is possible with hard work. The exciting thing is we can close 2,3,10,50 more of these deals and hit $1m ARR with 40 more of these deals.

Moving up market seems to be a great move for us, and despite having tons of competition, enterprise can be quite niche, and even just giving your customer more attention than the bigger fish can be enough to help you close deals.

So think about how you can position your product for a package that you can charge $1k-$10k per month and get 50-100 people paying for it. This doesn't mean you have to limit yourself to enterprise, but by having it you can build a great business.

Michael out