131–140 of 150 posts
>$1 million by itself isn’t a big thing. Don't be so humble. $1 million ARR is f hard. Take credit where credit is due.
Thanks! It feels that you are speaking from your own experience. Indeed, it's hard. But not everyone understands this.
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To be honest, the whole secret is in the product itself. At the very beginning we wanted to do everything faster - more features, more blog posts, more visitors, more backlinks etc. Did not work well. Then we decided to stop - pause any ads and promotion and 100% concentrate on the product, improve everything we have, do not add any big features. We talked a lot with our customers, found out what they liked/disliked…
> We talked a lot with our customers, can you say a bit more about your product and were you went to find relevant customers to talk to? thanks.
We were listed here before even had a product. Collected mailing list. After public release, this service brought us about (I don't remember exactly) 700 or 900 signups.
Try to spend a few hundred or thousands $$ on Google ads and add Intercom or Drift on your landing. Try to chat with visitors. I think you'll get some insight.
Be sure to read reviews about existing products on the market. What pros and cons their users write (Capterra, G2Crowd, TrustPilot, TrustRadius).
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Yep, that's true. I would also advise you to devote some time and collect feedback on such sites as Capterra, G2Crowd, TrustPilot, TrustRadius. Firstly, people search and read reviews before making their final decision. Secondly, reading about the competitors, they will find you. Third, sometimes bloggers use these sites to select the top 10 tools they will write about. If you are there - awesome. And finally, these…
Have you had any success with Capterra? I've been considering investing some time/money there, but I have doubts as to whether any customers actually visit those sites.
wow what a short, on point and helpful article. very impressive story too. good luck guys, not that you need it:) keep kicking ass!
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Yes, I think $1MM is enough to pay 7 people, although it depends a lot on the specifics. My business makes $2.2MM ARR and has 17 employees (counting the founders). We're profitable, although we try to put about as much money as we can afford back into growth, so we're right around break even. There are a number of factors to consider when thinking about whether this is "enough" money. Location - We're based in St. Lo…
hi I actually grew up in STL (now doing tech in SF) so its very exciting to hear your company is doing well over there. How's the tech community in st Louis these days?
St. Louis has a tech community, but it's pretty small, and there aren't very many people who have already experienced success. As a result, while there are a lot of the normal startup things like co-working spaces, networking events, etc., it isn't a particularly big part of life unless you really want it to be. It's easy to meet people who work in other industries, and I think people generally don't link their personal identity to their employer as much. I also think more people find satisfaction in non-tech work (like customer service, teaching, etc.). I consider this to be a more healthy and hopefully sustainable environment.
Having said that, it's a bit funny because many people in the tech scene here haven't experienced the Bay Area and they think STL is sort of "the next silicon valley" which is just so hilariously not true. I view that as a good thing because I left SF for a reason, but I do wish people would stop pretending that it's a first-class tech hub. It's just a great mid-sized city with roughly the same number of tech jobs as any other mid-sized city.
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FTA: > 5) The advantages of annual billing How do you encourage customers to choose annual billing?
No special tricks. Firstly, it's cheaper and we try to emphasize this in our interface, and secondly, some do not want to receive an invoice each month, they want to pay only once.
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1mm is their revenue . It will be reduced by cost of goods sold, rent/electricity, taxes, payment for services like AWS, etc. before employees are paid.
Yes. They are a belarus company, selling to mostly US companies, so probably pay little sales taxes. other taxes are paid on profit, so explicitly after employee salaries are paid. Salaries are usually the largest expense in many IT companies. They don't collect monitoring data or otherwise huge ingest of data from users, their server costs are probably low. Their main channel of acquisition is partners, I believe Ba…
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1mm is their revenue . It will be reduced by cost of goods sold, rent/electricity, taxes, payment for services like AWS, etc. before employees are paid.
Margins in software businesses are high. All those things combined (especially in Belarus) aren't going to run higher than say 20% of revenue.
> $1 million by itself isn’t a big thing. 0-1 is a huge thing! Very humble presentation, great job. One of the very, very, very few medium posts that are worthwhile to read. I find this very impressive with only 7 people because probably 5 of them are engineers and/or actually support the product. That leaves only 2 people for the marketing aspects, which are difficult. It would be more enlightening if you would post…
1) Actually right now we don't have anyone dedicated to marketing :) Our team structure is the following: CTO and COO (two other co-founders), me (design, product and marketing), 1 customer success, 2 front-end devs, 1 back-end dev. We'll hire a few more people soon, but this is how our team looks today. 2) I agree, many successful companies grew via freemium modal. So our case can't be applied to everyone.
Who drafted the layout for your landing page + integrations pages + wrote the content? They are very, very good and look like the work of multiple people, not just one person.