Hi, I'm Jono, and I'm on a journey from $0 – $10K in MRR

Introductions
#1

Hey everyone,

Great to find this community. I’m the founder of Zibbet, which is self funded with a SaaS business model. I’ve grown this to $15K in MRR.

I’ve started a new project called BTMetrics, which helps SaaS companies extract actionable insights from their Braintree account. We’ve just launched today, so we currently we have zero customers! We’re documenting our journey to $10K in MRR (and hopefully beyond), via our blog. It should be a fun ride, and we hope to help give other founders some good insights they can apply to their own startups.

We’ve been lucky enough to get input from Hiten Shah (KISSmetrics), Jason Cohen (WPEngine), Andrew Warner (Mixergy), Joel Gascoigne (Buffer), Alex Turnbull (Groove) and others, on our first post. They’ve also been sharing it, which is driving us a great amount of traffic! If you’re interested to follow along in our journey, you should check it out: blog.btmetrics.com

If you have any feedback about the blog, or BTMetrics, or even my other startup, Zibbet, I’d love to hear it! Looking forward to getting involved in the community here.

Cheers,
Jono

#2

http://blog.btmetrics.com/ if anyone is interested.

Good luck! Keep us updated here, not just on the blog. (Have added to feedly)

#3

Awesome, thanks Richard! Will definitely keep you guys updated.

#4

Love it! I’d love to do something like this as well at some point. My product income needs to get a bit higher still but I’d love to do something like this with a goal of giving back to the bootstrapper community.

Is your first startup an ecommerce site?

#5

Nice article. One suggestion: Move that email signup box right above your social sharing icons. It’s too far down to notice and when your discussion gets long, you’ll have even fewer signups. Make it easy for folks to join in the revolution. :wink:

#6

Hey Kalen, you should totally do it! The earlier the better I think. I’m sure there’s been plenty of learnings so far that you could have shared? It’s definitely a time investment though, you have to be prepared for that.

Yes, Zibbet is focused on ecommerce. We’re a marketplace for indie artists, crafters and vintage collectors and we’re almost 50,000 strong right now. Rather than charge listing fees and transaction fees like a normal marketplace business model, we chose to charge monthly/annual fees. As a bootstrapped company, that allowed us to make revenue straight away and keep reinvesting that to grow the company. We’re at $15K MRR now, but still slaying the churn beast!

1 Like
#7

Hey Dave, good thought! We’ll look at moving it, or putting a nice clear CTA button that links down to that sign up box. Thanks for that.

#8

Offtopic, but does anyone know if this community layout is open sourced? The UX is really quite nice. We’re currently using Ning for Zibbet, and it’s pretty terrible.

#9

Its built with http://www.discourse.org/

#10

Ah, awesome! Thanks @Rhino!

#11

From what I remember there’s a Bootstrapped.fm podcast discussing how Discourse is quite expensive to run because it eats resources, so test it out before committing.

(Thanks @ian for paying for our nice forum :slight_smile: )

1 Like
#12

Thanks for the tip @Richard . Checked it out and does seem expensive!

#13

It’s open source though - you can host it on your own server(s). I have my own on a 2gb ram server on Linode.

(edit: I suppose I should #growthhack and mention my video on setting it up: https://serversforhackers.com/video/installing-discourse-with-docker)

1 Like
#14

You can also use these guys: https://www.discoursehosting.com/

$20/month isn’t that expensive, as it saves you a lot of hassle doing it yourself.

2 Likes
#15

Thanks guys, would definitely go that route! @fideloper @shantnu