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How we built a $1M ARR SaaS startup

canny.io

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Re: How we built a $1M ARR SaaS startup

#2

Post by tiffanyh »

An amazing and massive accomplishment.

What should be highlighted here is just how difficult it is to hit $1M in ARR (took them 3.5 years and they have a staff of 9 employees ... which is only ~$110k in revenue per employee)

Re: How we built a $1M ARR SaaS startup

#3

Post by bkruse »

Love Canny

We use them at CommentSold for feature ideas, bug reports, and even top 1% feature ideas. The ability to tie it into our product and see the features voted on from an MRR aggregate not a vote-aggregate is phenomenal

Re: How we built a $1M ARR SaaS startup

#4

Post by codegeek »

tiffanyh wrote: post #2

An amazing and massive accomplishment. What should be highlighted here is just how difficult it is to hit $1M in ARR (took them 3.5 years and they have a staff of 9 employees ... which is only ~$110k in revenue per employee)

To be honest, 3.5 years to hit 1M ARR is pretty impressive if you are bootstrapped. Were they bootstrapped ?

Re: How we built a $1M ARR SaaS startup

#5

Post by otoburb »

codegeek wrote: post #4
tiffanyh wrote: post #2

An amazing and massive accomplishment. What should be highlighted here is just how difficult it is to hit $1M in ARR (took them 3.5 years and they have a staff of 9 employees ... which is only ~$110k in revenue per employee)

To be honest, 3.5 years to hit 1M ARR is pretty impressive if you are bootstrapped. Were they bootstrapped ?

Yes, they bootstrapped their way entirely to $1M ARR. Huge accomplishment. HN hug of death on the original link so it's hard to read that right now.

Re: How we built a $1M ARR SaaS startup

#7

Post by ghiculescu »

Congratulations to the Canny team. It's a great product, apparently we've been happy customers since they were 20x smaller :)

I found the note about luck in the Zero to One section interesting. I don't know anyone who runs a bootstrapped SaaS that's made it past 1M, who doesn't feel like they got super lucky with their first customer. We did exactly the same thing - a random connection that just happened to work out. And yet, most people starting new companies don't seem to focus much on making this luck happen.

Re: How we built a $1M ARR SaaS startup

#10

Post by a13n »

ghiculescu wrote: post #7

Congratulations to the Canny team. It's a great product, apparently we've been happy customers since they were 20x smaller :) I found the note about luck in the Zero to One section interesting. I don't know anyone who runs a bootstrapped SaaS that's made it past 1M, who doesn't feel like they got super lucky with their first customer. We did exactly the same thing - a random connection that just happened to work out.…

Thanks so much for being a customer!

And yeah, it always feels bad to write that "we got lucky", as it isn't really that repeatable/helpful. But it's true.

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