How Philip Grew His SaaS Side-Project to $5,000 MRR
Creating and growing a successful side-project is no easy task.
I recently interview Philip Baretto about his side-project Tiiny.host that has now reached the $5,000 MRR mark.
Here are parts of his story that could be useful for fellow entrepreneurs and side-hustlers.
THE IDEA
In mid-2019, Philip had an idea. He noticed that it was pretty hard to put static files on the internet. However, the process was fairly simple once you knew what you were doing.
So he decided to build a solution for it. That solution eventually turned into what Tiiny.host is now.
Instead of doing extensive market research and competitive analysis, Philip just built the product and put it out there. All within 3 weeks.
Doing just that alone served him 2 purposes:
- He could build a potentially scalable SaaS product;
- He could spend time developing marketing skills.
Treat your side-project with the utmost respect, but try to advance your skills at the same time. It's a great area to explore, learn and upgrade your skill arsenal.
FIRST USERS
Every startup, every side-project struggles to gain initial traction.
To get the first users for Tiiny.host, Philip tried spreading the word through online communities like:
*Reddit;
*HackerNews;
*IndieHackers.
IndieHackers turned out the most pivotal of them all.
The first paying customer came after their ProductHunt launch:
"We approached ProductHunt launch fairly strategically - we designed our profile the right way, followed every rule in the book, and chose a strategically correct day to launch."
If you want to see how to execute ProductHunt launch perfectly, MarketingExamples has got you covered.
UNLOCKING SEO
SEO quickly became Tiiny.host's main customer acquisition channel. What's better than a continuous flow of traffic from Google, eh?
However, they only saw their first real inflow of traffic 6 months after starting to focus on SEO.
Tiiny.host's strategy is to create specific landing pages based on what people are searching for. They use ahrefs to determine the keywords, their difficulty, and search volume.
Philip now has 2-3 outsourced writers who produce at least 2 articles each week. Now, Tiiny.host gets 30,000 unique visitors each month from their SEO efforts.
ADVISE TO ENTREPRENEURS
Most people are not looking to build unicorns or raise $350 Million rounds ala Adam Neumann. A lifestyle business can be much more rewarding.
For that, Philip has some words of wisdom:
"Build small, ship early, launch. Then - market, market, market.
If you're just starting out, try combining trends with your skillsets. Merge that with something you're interested in or that you have a background in.
If you're building a tool, really focus on SEO and do it early. It'll save you time for the future."
If you're interested in the full interview, you can read it here.
