Thread by @SimonHoiberg

3 things we are extremely proud of as SaaS founders:

🔸 We are bootstrapped 💪
🔸 We've been driving sales from day 1
🔸 We had product-market-fit from day 1

How did we do that? 👇🧵

🔸 We are bootstrapped

Even though we generated revenue from the beginning, we were not profitable.

Of course, it costs money to get started.

There are two main reasons why this was possible to us 👇

1. Both my Co-Founder, @SimonGronborg and I are software developers with a lot of experience.

No doubt! When running a SaaS business, paying engineers to build your product will be the biggest expense for a long time!

In our case, we've been able to do that part ourselves.

2. @SimonGronborg and I are both freelancers and have been running each our own consulting business for a while.

With a yearly revenue of up to $300,000 and a profit margin of almost 100%, this allowed us to set aside a fair amount of cash to get us started.

🔸 We've been driving sales from day 1

I started building the MVP of FeedHive in December 2020.
After only 10 days of developing, I onboarded the first group of users.

I did this to make sure that I was building something that the users would be willing to pay for, eventually.

I made an announcement tweet on January 3, 2021 - only about a month after I started building the MVP.

Again. I did this to make sure that there was public interest in my product.
Also from a broader range of my audience.

https://twitter.com/SimonHoiberg/status/1345761314833117186

I build the beta version of FeedHive during January with a closed beta group of 25 people.

Note how I say "build *with* my users". Not "build *for* my users".
This is an important factor.

I kept posting about FeedHive during January to create hype and expectations.

On February 6, 2021, I launched FeedHive in public beta.

I had collected a waiting list of around 800 emails, and my announcement tweet went viral.

+50 people immediately upgraded to the paid plan this day.

https://twitter.com/SimonHoiberg/status/1358083624927715329

If you want to hear about this part of the journey in more details, check out the YouTube video below 👇

🔸 We had product-market-fit from day 1

@SimonGronborg had been working with me secretly for a bit but joined FeedHive as a Co-Founder officially during February.

We kept building in close collaboration with our users, and we still are today.

This makes up 1 of 2 main reasons why we had product-market-fit from day 1.

1. We are a fully community-led tech startup.
We barely ever touch the keyboard before having validated that there's interest in what we build.

We talk to our users every single day 👇

While we do "eat our own dog food" and use FeedHive ourselves - we allow very few preferences of our own.

Our users solely dictate how FeedHive should look, feel, how they should use it to solve problems, which problems are the most important to solve, and so on.

2. We picked an already established market.

While it can be tough to enter a market that's already extremely competitive, you do get some huge advantages.

One of them being, that you know there's already a market to fit.
You just have to push your product in there.

In general, building a product to fit an already established market offers you a lot of shortcuts.

It sounds much more intimidating than it is.

If you're still en doubt, check out this video where I explain the benefits in more details 👇

We are around 6 months old now.

We have more than 3,000 users, and FeedHive delivers more than 250 posts every single day.

It generates more than $3,000 in recurring monthly revenue and is actively growing.

We are happy and proud as f**k! 💪
And we're just getting started.

I hope you enjoyed reading this thread!
I sure did enjoy writing it 🤩

If you got inspired, motivated, or intrigued - please, jump back to the first tweet and hit the like + retweet button 🙏

Thank you.