My Step-by-Step Guide to $15K MRR

Here’s my exact step by step guide to build a SaaS from scratch and scale to >$15K MRR.

Steps

1. Solve your own painful problem
2. Validate: Get initial users for free (do not charge)
3. Iterate until great
4. Launch paid plan
5. Scale
6. What doesn’t matter

Solve your own painful problem

@levelsio famously talks about this in his book, makeBOOK. Highly recommend it.

Ultimately building startups is about solving problems, not cool solutions.

Unfortunately our monkey brain is pretty bad at being honest with itself, you are the easiest person to fool. Especially when it’s a new idea.

An easy way to resolve this issue is actually build the product for yourself not others, solve your own problem.

Most importantly, a painful one.

Validate: Get initial users for free

Getting users should not be hard.

If it’s hard, it’s likely not a useful product OR it’s too complicated, thus no one can understand what it is when they hit your landing page.

The more valuable your product and the lower the barrier to entry, the easier it is to get users.

This first step is critical, this is your feedback from the market. Try to get users from day one. To quote Elon Musk:

“You should take the approach that you, the entrepreneur, are wrong. Your goal is to be less wrong.”

How do you get these users? Well you can use Product Hunt, Hacker News & Reddit. But in my experience, these get almost always the wrong users or very little users.

In my experience the best method, is the slow direct DMs on Twitter and Facebook Groups niched to your target market.

Ideally a 30 second video of you demoing the product (use Loom) and a short message e.g. “Hi XYZ, I know [painful problem], so I built this app yesterday, it [solution to very painful problem], would you like to try it? (it’s free)”

Your focus should NOT be getting as many users as possible and a big LAUNCH.

Your goal should be building a product people really really LOVE.

That means adapting and changing to make a product users LOVE. You need to be flexible on the approach.

Be careful though, some users give very negative feedback. It’s two options: either they are negative themselves / the wrong target market (useless feedback) OR this really isn’t a big problem and at this point you must move on to another idea.

This is hard to judge, but in my experience, if you solve a real problem, it’s really not hard to convince people to try out your product.

Iterate until great

What is “GREAT”?

Well, great is not flashy or sexy.

The product I built that makes up 95% of my MRR was the ugliest/buggiest thing I ever built, it was thrown together, not even a landing page.

It doesn’t matter. The core product offering was so immensely valuable (30 minute task reduces to 3 second task), I got 100s of users in 1 week just from a Facebook Group with 500 users.

Now is the critical point to iterate fast, constantly talk to your users via DMs, Facebook, WhatsApp, email. The faster the feedback loop and iteration speed. The faster you get to the 🤑.

Move fast, fuck the code quality, fuck everything else. Make the product so valuable that your users could not afford for it to be closed down.
You can make your life hard or easy, if you take this approach everything will be much easier.

Build a product people LOVE.

Launch paid plan
Converting these users into paying customers will be easy if you followed the steps above. How long should you wait to charge?

Well, I think around 4-8 weeks MAX. If longer, it’s likely your product is too complicated or the problem is too large to really solve.

You want the sweet spot where it’s not easy to replicate your product, but not insanely hard otherwise you’ll likely waste your time.

How do you convert these users? Well explain to them from day one this is a SaaS product, and you will charge for it at some point when it’s useful enough.

I’m compressing a big process into one post so forgive the lack of details here.

Free trials really matter, if you require your users to enter credit card details and pay from day one, this can work but in most cases it does not. The best balance is a free trial for 7-30 days without the need to enter card details to sign up.

This keeps your barrier to entry low for new customers.

SCALE

This is where everyone fails. And where I continue to fail.

Scale is the hardest problem, it’s not a problem when you have a product with zero churn and huge natural word of mouth. But the world isn’t perfect, it’s messy.

How do I recommend for you to scale your SaaS?
Well it depends on the product, ultimately you need a marketing engine (unfortunately). This can work with normal paid ads, but I’ve personally never seen it work.

Here’s the only approaches I have seen work for me and others:

• SEO (valuable, medium difficulty, long time) - blogs/articles on your own website that are super valuable and naturally bring in lots of organic traffic, that converts to new users
• Social Media (transient, very hard, long time)
• Referral Programmes (best, exponential growth) - pay other users to refer other users
• Targeted Newsletter Ads - if your product is valuable, a simple paid ad in a newsletter can be very high converting

Almost 90% of new signups to my SaaS, dealsourcr.com comes from our referral programme. We don’t do any active marketing/sales and we get $30K+ worth of new signups every month, unfortunately our conversions are quite low but without this our revenue would likely have dropped this year.

What doesn't matter?

There is so much more I could say. But I leave you with this. Focus on building a great useful product that solves a very painful problem, charge users for it when it’s good enough, try all options to scale it, but don’t worry about these points:

• UI/UX design
• Long list of features (less is more)
• Charging from day one (start free)
• Product Hunt, Hacker News and Reddit
• What your friends & family think

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Thanks!
Ash.