Our bootstrapped startup crossed $500k ARR, here our main growth tips and channels.

Yesterday we posted that papermark.com crossed $500k ARR.

After we were asked a lot by our startup friends especially by COSS (open source) startups : "What we did to make it take off?"

This is the kind of hardest question out there, not only for open source startups but for all. So, I gather here my top tips for our founders and open source friends:

From 0 to 10 customers

1. Personal messages to people we know
2. Posting on twitter practically every day (like updates, features)
3. Launch on Product Hunt
4. Posting on Reddit (for OS it can be just weekly- monthly updates, like change log)
5. Dev to posts (This really helped a lot in the beginning)

→ What it gave us?
First awareness, but the also STRENGTH to our domain, which lay a background for the next SEO efforts

From 10 to 100 customers
I think this is when it really took off. And attracted not people we know but just people with problem who search in Google. And the channel is SEO.

1. Alternatives pages
   If you open source, and you come as alternative to some existing company USE it. Your goal rank first. Both alternatives and alternative. Just rank from your main page as alternative, or create separate page.
2. List of tools
   Look which type of tools your product belong to and create listicle articles, like listing top 10 tools, this is a quick win. We have a lot of conversions from them.
3. Create how to guides
   Involving your product of course
4. Localise landing page on different languages
   I was not sure before about it, and would not recommend do it as a fist thing, but after you already more confident in your content game, it can be good addition. People who don't speak English are underserved.

Step by step to get quick SEO results for open source and not only:

1. Check your traffic on Semrush or similar
   Are you perform for some terms already?
2. Set up Posthog or similar to see from which pages people convert.
   Without that you had no idea, if pages you create will convert.
3. Create alternatives and list of tools pages.
   Spend just one week on it no more. The faster you publish them the better. For the blog we use mdx files, so make it simple. Have no blog? Create just pages for now, they will perform even better.
4. Clear pricing and your SaaS offering.
   I notice many COSS startups neglect their pricing offering, expecting only customers for self-hosted product. Reality is that most of your customers will use your hosted version.
5. Make easy for people to pay
   Also one of the things i notice for coss companies, the conversion flows are not always build or take not so much attention. Result: people just don't understand how to pay. If you do SEO efforts make it easy to pay or call with you.

Don't be obsessed with tracking in the beginning, create your SEO pages today. And than you have your 5 pages ready, you have payment available and support open than expect results in next 4 weeks 🚀