Getting to $400 MRR

There’s still a long road ahead until we’ve built a sustainable business, but if I’ve learned anything from starting a company it’s to celebrate the small wins.

A few months in to starting a social media scheduling service, we had 300 users and $0 in revenue.

I think the logical next step would be finding a way to monetize or up-sell those 300 users. But, it turns out, a majority of them were just tire kickers interested in trying out something new with no intention of paying for it.

It’s a great vanity metric, but other than that, tracking free users wasn’t an indication of much for us.

Since we had 0 conversions from free to paid, we decided to remove the free plan on October 17th. This gave us the opportunity to focus on providing a great experience for a small number of people that were actually interested in paying.

I began focusing on scheduling demos, having one-on-one conversations, and figuring out what customers are actually looking for. When customers said no, I asked why, and circled back in a couple weeks when the feature they desired was built. Being a small startup, we have the advantage of being able to build quickly and accommodate custom requests.

People like to be heard. The most powerful way to lead a demo or sales conversation is asking about a potential customer’s problems. Figure out what they need solved, then pitch your product from that angle.

By taking this approach, we replaced 300 tire kickers with 15 paying customers. Support requests have decreased, the product is improving from feedback, and we are making more money.

My biggest piece of advice is to first figure out how you can sell one on one and use early feedback to improve the product, then focus on marketing.

Once you’re ready to start marketing, give Cloud Campaign a try for managing your social media accounts. It saves you both time and effort by intelligently recycling your top-performing content.