Thread by @hipreetam93

🔥 How I grew my Shopify micro-SaaS to $25k MRR and 20,000 users in 14 months 🔥

Read for the entrepreneur ride along, or if you're building a Shopify app or a micro-SaaS app.

Full article: preetamnath.com/blog/grow-shop…

THREAD 👇

14 months ago, my co-founder Sankalp and I set out to build a business that can sustain our livelihood while allowing us the freedom to live life on our terms.

When we started, we each had roughly 12 months of savings to survive on, assuming we made $0.

Hence our minimum goal was to make $1,500/mo and the case where we would be celebrating with champagne was set to $3,000/mo.

We launched our app on April 24, 2019. The first paid plan was launched on June 4, 2019. We also got featured by Shopify.

https://twitter.com/hipreetam93/status/1136576887658913793

14 months later, we grew past $25,000 in MRR while remaining a 2 person team.

I’m so proud of what we have built here.

Screenshot note: Earnings reflect after a 1 month delay in Shopify payouts

Here's what we've been up to in the 14 months since launch:

• 20,000 active users on the app
• 1,500+ paying customers
• 450,000 automated WhatsApp msgs sent in June
• 2.2 million WhatsApp chat messages initiated in June
• 5.0 🌟 "WhatsApp" app with 500+ reviews

We did a lot of things right, but we also messed up here and there. I've tried to capture an honest and accurate account of our journey so far.

11 key learnings and mistakes from our journey

1- Learning: Always keep moving the needle

Running your own business and having 100% freedom and flexibility is a gift or a curse, depending on how you use it.

For every decision related to your business, run it through a set of questions that help you filter out good ideas.

• Does it help our app get more users
• Does it help convert more users to paying customers
• Does it help users derive more value and ROI from the app
• Does it reduce our support ticket load

Ultimately, you want to be making decisions that move the needle for your business

2- Learning: Help users realise value as soon as possible

We learnt from research that Shopify merchants are mainly solopreneurs or teams of 2-10. Always time and resource crunched.

So we made sure setting up our app was as one-click-ready as possible.

3- Learning: Care about your users, they can feel it

From day 1, we were clear on providing the best possible support.

Our users would be thrilled to see bug fixes deployed in 15 minutes, WhatsApp & email replies in 5 minutes, and so on. We were fast, we were responsive.

We’ve had users who prefer using our app instead of competitors because

A- We reply quickly

B- We proactively provide information beyond the immediate premise of the query

Your users can feel when you genuinely care about them.

4- Learning: Be smart about managing and reducing support ticket volume

You want to be a customer support hero, but you also don’t want to spend most of your time replying to customers.

1- Embed FAQs within the product
2- Fix repetitive bugs early
3- Email only support

Our efforts paid off 🎉

We spend only about 15-30 minutes per day on customer support despite our current scale.

5- Learning: Say No, often

Users ask for all sorts of functionality. It doesn’t mean you should build them.

Ask yourself:

1- how many times do we receive the same request
2- does the feature align with the rest of our product
3- does the feature add core value to the user

In the past year, we have received tons of business proposals, partnerships, integration requests, collaborative marketing invitations etc.

Saying No allowed us to remain focused on what’s really important.

6 - Mistake: Optimise top of the funnel

I was under the impression that during build phase, we shouldn’t focus too much on optimisation.

After all, you don’t want to get busy squeezing another 10% when the potential is to 10x.

I made the wrong call in one place.

Until March 2020, users would install the app and directly land on the chat settings page. We were getting a steady flow of 10-15 paid trials initiated per day.

When we added a step of friction, which asked the user upfront to select the Free or Paid plan, daily trials DOUBLED!

My takeaway here is - always keep your eyes open for bottlenecks at the top of funnel.

If there’s copy on your website, or a specific sign up flow that might be holding you back from getting 2x the users, you need to unblock it early and realise compounded gains over time.

7- Mistake: Competition will copy, don’t completely ignore them

Don't pay too much attention to your competitors, but don't ignore them entirely either. You always want to remain informed about your competitor’s moves

Split your attention: 95% to your users, 5% to competition.

There's more:

8- Mistake: Charge according to customer value
9- Mistake: Don’t get complacent
10- Mistake: Expand your distribution channels
11- Learning: Keep your expectations low, and keep surpassing them

Read it all here 👇

preetamnath.com/blog/grow-shop…

I sincerely hope this post will help new entrepreneurs who are building a Shopify app, or a micro-SaaS product to grow their business. And also give ideas to help entrepreneurs who like us are somewhere in the messy middle.

If you enjoyed this post, do share your thoughts below.

shape of post title \_/

oddly satisfying 😆

Some of you asked about how to find Shopify app ideas.

Here is a compiled spreadsheet of all the Shopify app ideas we had researched last year, I hope it benefits some of you

docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d…

For people who are just starting out or about to make the jump into building a business, I cannot recommend the @IndieHackers community enough.

👉 indiehackers.com

Join in, share your struggles and learnings, meet like minded folkd who are in the same boat.

Traction on my blog post, 16 hours in

https://twitter.com/hipreetam93/status/1279615118905675776