From 48 hours to 6 months - A short story of a MicroSaaS [FreelancerCRM - AMA]

In this article, I will tell you the 6-month story of Freelancer CRM. My business partner @kemalserbet and I attended the MicroSaas hackathon organized by Komunite in January 2022. In this hackathon we participated, we had to develop a micro saas product within 48 hours. Since we both have Freelancer backgrounds (before agency and Start-Up), and we were a part of Turkey's most important Freelancer community, BirlikteIhracat, which was founded by @zekeriyamulbay , we knew for whom and what kind of product we should develop.

In our preliminary study, we realized that it was an area where the competition was not very intense, CRM systems focus on Freelancers, especially on the mobile application side.

Even though we had a lot of difficulty, we managed to produce the product in 48 hours. Then you can click on the links below for the stream and post.

Final Presentation Stream : https://youtu.be/FBFw6O4l71k?t=2657
Tweet Flood : https://twitter.com/mfurkanyilmazzz/status/1487297609752793091

The product working after a hard weekend, but we didn't have enough time to launch the product, because we were the Co-Founder and Co-CTO of an VC-Backed Start-Up (Omnicourse) at that time.

So we have started to settings up the asynchronous working model on our agency - Etrexio. If you curious on what is the asynchronous working model, here is the link below.

Freelancer CRM getting ready in two month with Etrexio asynchronous team and went live. It was a very proud time for us. When we announced Freelancer CRM as an output of the asynchronous working system, we felt the happiness of proving that alternative systems to the generally accepted working systems can also work.

We were keeping our role as CTO during the initial release of the product, so we didn't have time to make any tangible progress on the marketing or product side. In June 2022, when we left the Omnicourse, we were excited to realize many of our different ideas/projects.

Many of these are already known by our followers, however, no one knows how Freelancer CRM is important for us. It deserves special attention as a product that stands out among all the other products we publish, both in terms of interaction and benefits. Also, it was our debt to the Freelancer community.

With our team that we have just started to establish in our new office, we were adding new features, fixing errors, and performing marketing activities. We were working hard, according to the feedback we received for Freelancer CRM to satisfy our community.

The most common feedback we received was that the mobile app was inadequate for business management, and many people felt more comfortable on their computers while managing their Freelance business.

We gave attention to these feedbacks and released the macOS version of our desktop application, which we have been working on for the last month, last weekend.

In addition, in this version we published, we made a significant change in our business model. We switched to a model where we will work with Free Trial for 14 days instead of the Freemium structure. And the result is that we reached 2 new paid users on the first day we published this change. I think we will go towards much more efficient and sustainable results with this new system!

In addition, instead of receiving payments via macOS directly, we have shortened the development time of the entire payment system with a mobile-only payment structure and facilitated its control by receiving payments from a single channel. We aimed to prevent compatibility problems that we may experience when windows and Linux versions are released later by intervening in advance.

Especially in the last 2 months, we talked to many people and companies working on Freelancers in the international arena. In fact, we are in close negotiations with an important Freelancer platform for partnership.

It seems that the number of these talks will continue to increase. We will continue to share the results of these meetings. As a SAAS project that has completed its first 6 months, Freelancer CRM has incredible potential. It is managed by a team that believes in realizing this potential. Also, many studies predict that by 2027, working as a freelancer will outnumber normal work. In this direction, we aim to be the first choice of freelancers, whose number is increasing day by day, to manage their businesses, and we evaluate and implement the feedback we receive from this point of view.

Some graphics :

What are our goals?

• An All-In One application that will work on all desktop OS - currently only running on macOS-
     *  Publishing the web version
• Reaching more people with important partnerships in many different fields    
  *  Increasing the number of integrations and making the solution usable by the entire ecosystem
• To become a self-sustaining SAAS by the end of this year by increasing the number of users     
  *  To become an important marketing tool for platforms by increasing our brand awareness
  *  Strengthening re-marketing efforts by completing our e-mail automation 
  *  Collecting more feedbacks until being very useful

While we are taking firm steps toward all these goals, I wanted to summarize the process we have gone through so far and also for the records. Finally, I would like to thank all my teammates, especially @kemalserbet and @galiperkin , for their efforts! The days when we will announce even greater achievements are close!

** Freelancer CRM Desktop Download Link
** Freelancer CRM Mobile App Download Link
** Freelancer CRM Website