Just hit $1,000 Monthly Recurring Revenue!

Discussions
#1

As some of you may know, since September last year, I’ve been working full time on my bootstrapped start up BugMuncher. Up until that point BugMuncher had been a side project, with 16 paying customers bringing in $551 / month.

Well today I hit my first milestone on the way to profitability - $1,000 MRR! I’m ecstatic right now, it’s amazing to see the difference working full time on BugMuncher has made.

I’ve been keeping all of BugMuncher’s financial details open and transparent, and writing about my progress, if you’re interested the blog posts start here - https://blog.bugmuncher.com/2015/10/22/from-side-project-to-profitable-start-up-part-1.html

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#2

Well done, that’s great news.

#3

Yayuh!!! Good stuff man. Keep going!!

#4

nicely done!!

I’m following your blog, its really inspiring. Love the transparency! One question I have: How do you acquire new customers? Your blog seems to be more targeted to fellow bootstrappers, I can’t really imagine you getting a lot of signups through content marketing? Is it mostly through articles written about BugmMuncher on other blogs?

#5

Congrats, Matt!

Have been enjoying the blog posts as well.

You’ve essentially doubled your revenue in just a few months. Soo…what’s your secret? :wink:

#6

Congrats Matt, its great to see how going full time transformed your business!

Looking back, do you think taking 1-2 months off to finish/launch an app one is working on could help kick-start it even if the person is then going back to work?

#7

Thanks everyone, it still takes me by surprise that this crazy plan of mine is working :confounded:

@wnm Most of my sign ups come from Google. When I first launched BugMuncher I put a fair bit of effort into SEO, so BugMuncher has always been on the first page for terms like ‘feedback tab’ ‘feedback widget’ etc. I’ve had a few blogs write about BugMuncher, which has obviously helped, and I was lucky enough to get a post in The Next Web when I first launched. Posts to Hacker News, Reddit, etc have also been fruitful.

@shanelabs I wish I knew. More marketing efforts, improvements to BugMuncher itself, and better onboarding have definitely helped. But I think the main thing is simply being full time has allowed me to respond quicker to customers and provide the kind of customer service that bigger companies can’t/won’t offer.

@michal_hantl I think that would definitely be better than keeping it as a side-project. However, knowing that I have no job or freelance customers to go back to, so failure is not an option, has really helped give me the drive to make it work at all costs.

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#8

This is important. A person who seems to know this stuff well told me that if you answer a support query from a prospect within an hour or two, you dramatically increase the probability of the prospect converting to a paying customer.

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#9

Great post Matt — I’ve been a lurker — just wanted to constructively say I read your logo read as PugMuncher on first glance. I knew it was BugMuncher just brains doing brain things.

#10

Just had that experience on Twitter, from random question to trial to paid subscription in an hour

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#11

On the SEO side of things, any recommendations on where I can learn more about that? I’ve a project (just crossed the $1k mark as well!) which is doing all OK from SEO right now but could do a lot better.

#12

You’re not the first person to do that :slight_smile:

I would like to change the name, or at least get a new logo (I made that in Gimp 4 years ago, and I’m really not a great designer) but there’s always more important things on which to spend time and money…

#13

Re: what @brendanfalkowski - samesies

Also FYI Brendan is an incredibly talented frontend/ux-guy/all-around-wizard-of-the-internet. I’d take his UX feedback without any grains of salt. Literally zero grains of salt.

Also congrats on that sweet sweet 1k milestone!!!

#14

Congrats :slight_smile: It’s a big goal for myself too with Klart.co!

#15

Huge congrats. We recently just passed this milestone as well. It was a massive win for us =)

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#16

Happened to me too. Might be something to look into :slight_smile:

#17

@mattbearman that rocks, congrats! any updates since this initial post is from about 1 year ago? Would love to hear your progress since then…

#18

Wow, been a while since I posted here, I’ve not really been keeping up with the discussion boards as much as I should. I think “be more actively social” will be my resolution :slight_smile: There has in fact been some awesome progress in the last year - I reached profitability!

There’s full details in November’s income report - https://www.bugmuncher.com/blog/from-side-project-to-profitable-start-up-part-23/

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#19

Congrats on hitting that milestone! Aside from going full time what do you think is the largest contributing factor to steady increase?

#20

Raising my prices definitely helped a lot, in fact my average subscription value has nearly doubled from $34.44 / month when I first started full time on BugMuncher to $61.23 now. Of course I grandfathered all existing subscriptions.

I think the other biggest factor is giving awesome customer support. It’s one of the few advantages small companies have over big enterprises :slight_smile:

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