Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Startups that have hit more than $1K MRR in about 12-24 months

openstartups.listt.xyz

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 113 posts

Re: Startups that have hit more than $1K MRR in about 12-24 months

#71

Post by upen946 »

encoderer wrote: post #57
segmondy wrote: post #37

$1k MRR is nothing to brag about. Seriously, we need to start aiming much higher. If this was "My 1hr a day side project hitting $1kMRR in 12months", then it's impressive. But I often see these non side projects and I just want to voice that it's absolutely not impressive. If you started a business mowing lawn, cutting hair, you better be way past $1K revenue in 6 months. If you're fully committed to building a start…

$12k a year sounds like a terrible job but that’s because you’re comparing it with an entirely different job and career path. It’s like saying, why be a math professor, just go work on Wall Street. Different pursuits!

Ok. Let me put it this way. In most cases, these are built by indiehackers who automate most of the stuff and work like 5-6 hours a week.

I think its still a deal if I am making $1K MRR with 1 hour work per day and if its growing.

Re: Startups that have hit more than $1K MRR in about 12-24 months

#72

Post by upen946 »

z3t4 wrote: post #42
upen946 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the reverse is true in current days. Run of the mill doesn't work anymore I guess. Most products now needs some unique features or build something for a niche.

Entering a market that has economy of scale (serving 1000 users cost the same as serving 1 user) need a big marketing budget and a sales team and it can take years until you have enough users to become profitable. So unless you have a lot of money beforehand compete at something that doesn't scale (for anyone right now). So it will cost the same ballpark to serve your first user as it will cost an established busines…

What about the popular indiehacking phrase - "Do things that dont scale"?

Re: Startups that have hit more than $1K MRR in about 12-24 months

#73

Post by runako »

segmondy wrote: post #37

$1k MRR is nothing to brag about. Seriously, we need to start aiming much higher. If this was "My 1hr a day side project hitting $1kMRR in 12months", then it's impressive. But I often see these non side projects and I just want to voice that it's absolutely not impressive. If you started a business mowing lawn, cutting hair, you better be way past $1K revenue in 6 months. If you're fully committed to building a start…

Aside from being negative, this is pretty off-base for a couple of reasons:

- Many of these are side projects.

- Any company that sells in increments through $1k/mo.

- $0-$1k MRR is the hardest step for many businesses. Once you hit $1k/mo, it's likely a smoother path to $10k and beyond.

Re: Startups that have hit more than $1K MRR in about 12-24 months

#74

Post by RedditKon »

segmondy wrote: post #37

$1k MRR is nothing to brag about. Seriously, we need to start aiming much higher. If this was "My 1hr a day side project hitting $1kMRR in 12months", then it's impressive. But I often see these non side projects and I just want to voice that it's absolutely not impressive. If you started a business mowing lawn, cutting hair, you better be way past $1K revenue in 6 months. If you're fully committed to building a start…

Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.

Re: Startups that have hit more than $1K MRR in about 12-24 months

#75

Post by runako »

SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #53
segmondy wrote: post #37

$1k MRR is nothing to brag about. Seriously, we need to start aiming much higher. If this was "My 1hr a day side project hitting $1kMRR in 12months", then it's impressive. But I often see these non side projects and I just want to voice that it's absolutely not impressive. If you started a business mowing lawn, cutting hair, you better be way past $1K revenue in 6 months. If you're fully committed to building a start…

15$/hr * 40 hr/wk * 50 wk/yr / 12 months/yr = $2500 MRR. Assumes 2 weeks unpaid vacation. And that's assuming $0 expenses, so all revenue can go into your own crap salary. $1k MRR is $6/hr, below minimum wage anywhere in the US. If all you're getting is $1kMRR, you might as well just get a job at McDonalds, you'll have a nice pay raise.

Except:

- a $1k/mo MRR business generally has some fungibility to be sold. For a SaaS business @ $1k/mo MRR with a working product, I could easily see that being worth $30k+ to any number of buyers. (Because you have de-risked the problem significantly by going from $0 -> revenue.)

- You can potentially 10x that $1k/mo in a very short period by spending time (and money, if available) on customer acquisition.

Re: Startups that have hit more than $1K MRR in about 12-24 months

#76

Post by upen946 »

d33lio wrote: post #70
upen946 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In most case with SAAS, its 90% profits if you grew organically without spending hella lot of money on ads. Now with everyone moving to cloud and managed services, the infra cost is too less. If someone is able to automate most things and working like 1 hour a day and still makes $1K MRR, its still good assuming its growing slowly.

I agree, but in 2020 expecting to grow "entirely organically" or by word of mouth without ads is a falsehood. This is honestly one of my biggest qualms with Indie Hackers. They claim that design and marketing isn't needed if you just "try long enough" and tell dev friends about your project. Granted, this depends on your target audience, but if your product isn't targeting developers the calculus just doesn't quite c…

There are still many people who are Indie Hacking and still seeing some success.

For example, one of my SAAS products starting making revenue this month without spending a dime on ads until now. Agreed it takes some time.

I am not disagreeing on Ads part. These days most people are spinning landing pages, spending money on ads and validating real quick.

Re: Startups that have hit more than $1K MRR in about 12-24 months

#77

Post by thursday0987 »

my investment property, a residential duplex in the midwest, has a better MRR than most of these.

total cost? a month of my time looking at houses and negotiating, which i enjoyed, and about 45k downpayment.

plus i get all the tax writeoffs that property ownership brings.

most of these "startups" seem like more work than they are worth.

Re: Startups that have hit more than $1K MRR in about 12-24 months

#78

Post by carnivor »

upen946 wrote: post #31
carnivor wrote: post #30

I've seen a similar website before with IndieHacker or ProductHunt verified revenues (forgot which). Maybe I missed it here but how are these reoccurring revenues verified, and as others mentioned here, are they audited?

As mentioned in my other comments, Yes. This is all real data. No false data. All data taken from various sources like stripe, paddle, baremetrics data. Only thing to note is - this is before expenditure deduction. Its revenue. Not profit. But with most of these typically sass and lean startups, I would say 80%-90% would be profits, may be.

>Yes. This is all real data. No false data. All data taken from various sources like stripe, paddle, baremetrics data.

I get that, but the owner of the site reiterating the validity does not really verify anything. At least a page on the website that explains the methodology of arriving at these numbers would be better, maybe with some anonymized screenshots even.

Re: Startups that have hit more than $1K MRR in about 12-24 months

#79

Post by troughway »

upen946 wrote: post #72
z3t4 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Entering a market that has economy of scale (serving 1000 users cost the same as serving 1 user) need a big marketing budget and a sales team and it can take years until you have enough users to become profitable. So unless you have a lot of money beforehand compete at something that doesn't scale (for anyone right now). So it will cost the same ballpark to serve your first user as it will cost an established busines…

What about the popular indiehacking phrase - "Do things that dont scale"?

That used to work back when more people were building things to scratch an itch and didn't have a good sense of business and marketing.

Today, you can expect a product that launches to be extremely polished and have a very calculated marketing strategy from the original pitch, to some kind of an invitation list of early adopters, a lot of blogging time invested, and lastly, a sales team of some sort. A lot of them will have some kind of financial backing. And best of all, you won't even know to what degree their image and branding is curated to sell one story ("We're a small shop") vs reality ("We are very well connected with decision makers at important companies", etc).

Basically, it was taken from a fun side project and perfected to a business science on an industry-wide scale when the sharks smelled how much money was on the table.

Re: Startups that have hit more than $1K MRR in about 12-24 months

#80

Post by DVassallo »

carnivor wrote: post #78
upen946 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As mentioned in my other comments, Yes. This is all real data. No false data. All data taken from various sources like stripe, paddle, baremetrics data. Only thing to note is - this is before expenditure deduction. Its revenue. Not profit. But with most of these typically sass and lean startups, I would say 80%-90% would be profits, may be.

>Yes. This is all real data. No false data. All data taken from various sources like stripe, paddle, baremetrics data. I get that, but the owner of the site reiterating the validity does not really verify anything. At least a page on the website that explains the methodology of arriving at these numbers would be better, maybe with some anonymized screenshots even.

The methodology is in the sentence you quoted.
Post reply on HN