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$8600 MRR business on Airtable

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Re: $8600 MRR business on Airtable

#61

Post by andycloke »

rexreed wrote: post #58
andycloke wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Support is roughly 10 hours per week and we're now up to 270 customers. The rest of the time is spent on product, reviewing marketing content and occasionaly sales. I've been full-time since $5k MRR as trying to juggle all this with a full time job was miserably + slowed down growth. $80-90k isn't actually that much less than a developer salary (in U.K., not U.S.), but it's an interesting question what I'd do if it d…

What customer support needs generally take up the most of your time? By rest of your time, are you talking 40 hour weeks? 60 hr weeks? Just trying to understand the time commitment for this amount of MRR

People finding bugs - it's a super flexible tool so lots of edge case bugs. Helping people set up their requests (e.g. no-coders who don't totally understand APIs or DF). Then boring stuff like billing queries/refunds etc.

I probably work 30-40 hours a week total.

Re: $8600 MRR business on Airtable

#62

Post by andycloke »

rexreed wrote: post #48
andycloke wrote: post #29

Founder here! Happy to answer any questions people have. I'm also building in public here: https://twitter.com/clokehead A couple of people have been confused by 'on Airtable' in the title. Data Fetcher ( https://datafetcher.com/ ) is an extension built (with code) on Airtable's marketplace in the same way you'd build on the App/ Play Store. It's not a no-code app built using Airtable. MRR is up to $9400 since I did…

Do you handle payments outside of Airtable? Just curious how the payment system works and who controls the customer relationship and what Airtable takes as a cut, who handles the recurring payments, etc.

Airtable don't have billing for the marketplace so I handle everything, have a direct relationship with customers and pay no cut to Airtable.

Re: $8600 MRR business on Airtable

#64

Post by andycloke »

mritchie712 wrote: post #47
andycloke wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Founder here) That's definitely the biggest risk to the business (other than competition). Airtable seem committed to being a platform that third-party developers can build businesses on, in the same way Shopify are. So I think (hope) they'd acquire me, rather than just cloning it, to maintain their reputation as a platform. But they definitely could do this and it's pretty scary! For now, my strategy is to try and…

you can probably worry about this less. I had the same worry when building seekwell.io and it turned out to not matter at all. Google did eventually launch some things you could use instead of us, but they sucked and by the time they launched it we were way ahead in features. They also had a ton of restrictions that made sense for Google (e.g. mostly only supporting their own cloud products as a source), but didn't m…

Interesting, thanks!

Probably not going to charge more any time soon. I'm in the prosumer space, not B2B, and people are more price sensitive than you might expect.

Raising prices from $18/mo to $24 has massively reduced support, but we get a fair few people cancelling due to price, so any higher would probably be pushing it.

Re: $8600 MRR business on Airtable

#65

Post by andycloke »

ElevenLathe wrote: post #60
andycloke wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Founder here. I use this site to find new platforms/ trends! https://explodingtopics.com/ then build them into tools using my framework: https://twitter.com/clokehead/status/1340949414081392640?s=2...

Is explodingtopics.com another project of yours?

No! https://marker.medium.com/how-my-show-hn-project-got-acquire...

Re: $8600 MRR business on Airtable

#66

Post by [deleted] »

andycloke wrote: post #54
ssharp wrote: post #46

I'm curious how much time customer support takes for products around this price and how much impacts the viability of a business this size. At $8600 MRR * 12 ~= $103k. Obviously some level of expenses here but let's assume very high margins. $8600 / $40 plan = 215 customers. Given all that, how much time does it take to service 215 customers' support needs? Assuming profit would be in the $80-90k range, that's multip…

Support is roughly 10 hours per week and we're now up to 270 customers. The rest of the time is spent on product, reviewing marketing content and occasionaly sales. I've been full-time since $5k MRR as trying to juggle all this with a full time job was miserably + slowed down growth. $80-90k isn't actually that much less than a developer salary (in U.K., not U.S.), but it's an interesting question what I'd do if it d…

[deleted]

Re: $8600 MRR business on Airtable

#67

Post by tnolet »

andycloke wrote: post #43
callmekatootie wrote: post #36

I have always wondered how does one go about restricting user actions based on which pricing plan they have selected? Do they have to code it manually or is there a SaaS / library that does the job?

I coded it manually as the business logic is so Data Fetcher specific I don't think a library would help much. This blog post does an amazing job of explaining the approach you need: https://blog.checklyhq.com/building-a-multi-tenant-saas-data...

Cool to see that post pop up (I'm the author). Glad it helped!

Re: $8600 MRR business on Airtable

#68

Post by taylorhou »

andycloke wrote: post #54
ssharp wrote: post #46

I'm curious how much time customer support takes for products around this price and how much impacts the viability of a business this size. At $8600 MRR * 12 ~= $103k. Obviously some level of expenses here but let's assume very high margins. $8600 / $40 plan = 215 customers. Given all that, how much time does it take to service 215 customers' support needs? Assuming profit would be in the $80-90k range, that's multip…

Support is roughly 10 hours per week and we're now up to 270 customers. The rest of the time is spent on product, reviewing marketing content and occasionaly sales. I've been full-time since $5k MRR as trying to juggle all this with a full time job was miserably + slowed down growth. $80-90k isn't actually that much less than a developer salary (in U.K., not U.S.), but it's an interesting question what I'd do if it d…

super cool to see the maturity in knowing what you want. i realize now that i was wayyyyy more profitable (cash money in my pocket) when my startup was literally 10x smaller. for those aspiring to be the next big blow up, as you grow/scale, overhead and the need to manage your own people start taking over from building product and supporting/making your customers happy.

for context, i'm at ~$400k MRR/just shy of ~$5M ARR and i make way less (in cash) now than i did at $40k MRR. don't get me wrong, the enterprise value has supposedly gone up but that's a lottery ticket versus the consistent cash in your pocket.

Re: $8600 MRR business on Airtable

#69

Post by rchaud »

auspex wrote: post #59
andycloke wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Founder here - that's a great analysis. The way I manufactured right place/ right time was using this framework: https://twitter.com/clokehead/status/1340949414081392640?s=2...

I got similar advice early in my career. You don’t have to create the wave. Find an existing wave grab a surf board and figure out a way to ride it.

This is why we have a glut of indistinguishable "50-hour video courses" on every micro-topic imaginable. Everyone's trying to sell a shovel.

Re: $8600 MRR business on Airtable

#70

Post by rexreed »

andycloke wrote: post #62
rexreed wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you handle payments outside of Airtable? Just curious how the payment system works and who controls the customer relationship and what Airtable takes as a cut, who handles the recurring payments, etc.

Airtable don't have billing for the marketplace so I handle everything, have a direct relationship with customers and pay no cut to Airtable.

How does the subscription / onboarding process work, especially if they cancel their AirTable, etc? Did you already write any posts about how that flow works?
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