71–80 of 90 posts
Reminder: Just because this person did it, does not mean his actions are reproducible. If it was reproducible, then every VC would be doing this.
VCs don't care about anything that isn't going to deliver a sure-fire IPO.
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…
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…
I basically look at entrepreneurship as trying to create my perfect job: make $200-500k/ year, work on what I want with smart people, don't have a boss etc. So a lifestyle business. But maybe I'll get bored and want to take a bigger swing, who knows.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
What is becoming a problem is the super low quality, autogenerated derivatives. But those are more a symptom of a broken internet (youtube/google search) than anything else. Now that garbage on youtube cannot be downvoted, and since youtube does not (has never?) shown up/down rating numbers on content before you click to view it, it's exceedingly difficult for the viewers to find the good stuff.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Independent of Airtable so if they cancelled their Airtable they can still cancel on datafetcher.com.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Out of interest, do you see that work increasing linearly with your number of customers?
Reminder: Just because this person did it, does not mean his actions are reproducible. If it was reproducible, then every VC would be doing this.
Find 1,000 half decent devs. Fund them for 1 year at 50K or so, with promise of 60% of company. Sprinkle over decent marketeers / designer / product mgrs.
Cost is now 50M USD + change.
Get to 10K MRR and its 120K pa, maybe 20-30K profit.
Does it matter which ones are just paying back their investment over two years, and the 1/1000 that might be a unicorn?
I just don't think VCs are playing the odds.
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…
I'd be interested in the IPO alerts newsletter he mentioned at the beginning. I was recently thinking about building an IPO prediction website and newsletter, where users could vote on the probability that startups will have an IPO during a given year. (e.g. Q1 2023, Q2, Q3) It could be interesting to integrate a prediction market like PredictIt [1] (although I heard they got into some trouble recently.) I also start…