I reached $25k ARR ($2,090 MRR) in 8 months. AMA

Asking the right questions. Completely different ball game when building from scratch without an audience.

3225

What tech stack did you use?

I am using Remix + Cloudflare Workers

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How much time it took to launch the beta?

It took more than 2 months

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Is this your first product? If not, what were your last products? Are they successful?

It's my 4th product.

1. The first product was an ed-tech product (course management-like learning platform) which didn't go anywhere. At that time, I was working with someone else as a cofounder. The product idea and vision were the other person's. I was just taking care of tech stuff.

Later we parted ways and started to work on our own things.

From there onwards, I started to work solo.

2. My next product was MDX.one.

That is also a notion-based blogging platform very similar to Feather.

But my server costs became super high. One month, I got a $10k server bill and I only had around 20 paying customers and ~$200 MRR

So, it was not sustainable at all. So, I closed off signups and started figuring out ways to optimize the infrastructure.

3. My next product came as a result of my optimization work. This product is still live at https://usenotioncms.com. This product right now only has two users. So even this did not go anywhere.

4. Finally, comes Feather. Feather is a complete rebrand and rewrite of my first solo product MDX.one. I made it in such a way that it can scale easily without super high server costs and redesigned and rewrote everything from scratch.

The end product became so different from MDX.one that I decided to rebrand it to Feather and launch it as a completely new product.

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Are you looking to sell it in future?

May be. May not be. I don't know yet.

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How you validated the idea? Did you pivoted it in past?

I built it for my own use case. So I did not do any kind of validation. I just put up a waiting list and started building it in public.

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Is this product #buildinginpublic?

Not sure what you mean by that hashtag. But if you are asking if I built this product in public, then yes, I did. I shared my journey of building it on Twitter.

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Some strategies to grow on Twitter, and gain attention on your product?

I don't think I am the right person to answer this question. But one thing that worked for me is I always try to include my product URL in every tweet I make about the product. Every tweet will have a link to feather.so

It helped me to get some eyeballs on my product.

I don't think I can give any advice to anyone. Each person's case is different.

But for me, I never want to go back to work. There is a reason why I quit even though I am relatively earning a lot in my previous job.

I am just not cut out for the 9-5 job. I want to work on my own terms and work for myself. It's something inbuilt into me. So, I had to make this indie hacking thing work. That was the only way for me. There was no backup option. In the worst case, I would just take up freelancing/contract work for 1 or 2 months, earn money and with that money, continue indie hacking for another 12 months.

But I don't think I would ever go back to traditional 9-5 job again.

Thanks for the share

I don't exactly remember why I chose Umami. I think I saw a few others who were using Umami for their apps. So, I just thought it must be good and used it. So far, I am fine with it. No major complaints.

For self-hosting, Umami docs have a detailed guide on how to self-host.

This guide is the one I used to host on Railway.
https://umami.is/docs/running-on-railway

Yes, I am self hosting Umami and providing analytics to the blogs of all the customers.

So, every blog created on Feather will automatically have its own analytics dashboard.

It’s all Cloudflare. Even ssl certificates are generated by Cloudflare.

The first year after I quit my job, I was working on some other product with someone else I know.

It was the first time I was building an entire product from scratch. So, I learned a lot during that first year.

I started blogging all of it during that time on my blog at that time.

My workflow for publishing posts at that time was:

1. I write everything on Notion
2. I export it to Markdown and upload it to the blog platform that I am using.
3. I will then add images separately fix the markdown etc.

It used to take some good 20-30 mins to do this process everytime.

So, I made Feather to just sort of simplify this process. I wanted to create a blogging platform. But a blogging platform needs an editor. I really like Notion editor and I know whatever editor I build won't even be close to what Notion has.

So, I started exploring if there was a way to directly use Notion as the editor.

That's primarily how I came up with the idea.

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It took 2-3 months.

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Tech stack is React / Remix + Cloudflare Workers

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I think I will start monetizing it sooner. In the case of Feather, after I got my first customer, everything became simpler (relatively).

Instead of building blindly, I started to build things that first user needed. Then came the second user, the third and so on.

So, I think if I had to start over, I will try to quickly get that first paying user who actually wants to use the product.

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These days, there are so many notion website builders. When I was building it, there weren't as many. I don't have any particular insight to share. But instead of creating a generic website builder, I would probably niche down. In my case, my whole SaaS is around blogs. So, I could only build things that made sense for a blog.

50-60% of my traffic comes from Twitter.

The rest of the traffic is spread up from various sources every month.

I think Twitter is still the best acquisition channel for Feather. It's not like I am forcefully trying to get customers through Twitter by outreaching out via DMs or anything.

It's just that every time I ask a customer where they have come from, they will usually reply back saying that they have come from Twitter.

Thanks Dago 😀

You can check the previous AMA I did a few months back. Someone asked the exact same question.

https://www.indiehackers.com/post/i-reached-10k-arr-843-mrr-in-2-5-months-ama-f8f004d910

Feather is a blogging platform where you can create your own blogs.

There is no community feed right now where all the published articles are posted. Your blog will be your own and will be on your own domain.

Feather just takes care of optimizing everything for SEO - things like setting proper meta tags, canonical links, generating a dynamic sitemap, adding relevant JSON LD schema markup, etc.

But in the end, you have to write content that is useful to get exposure. Feather just lets you focus on content and takes care of all the technical things.

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It's 8 months since the launch. I built the product for another 2-3 months before launching.

I was blogging a lot during my first year of building things after I quit my job. I have used Notion to blog and then export it to markdown and upload it to the blogging platform that I was using. It took a good 20-30 mins to do that every time.

So, when I wanted to build something new, I thought to build a blogging platform. A blogging platform needs an editor to write blog posts. But I really like using Notion. There is no way I can build an editor that is as good as Notion editor. So, I decided to directly use Notion as the editor for the blogging platform.

That's how it all started.

To be honest, there is no strategy.

I just share what I do every day in the form of tweets, and people like it and visit the website to see what I am talking about every day on Twitter.

They then discover that Feather is a blogging platform and they can create blogs with it.

Then when they actually have a need for a blog, they remember me and then go sign up.

It's all kinda organic.

Now, I am trying to intentionally get visitors to my site through SEO. Started to focus on SEO more. But my twitter account and tweets will still be me just sharing what I am doing.

Haven't done any optimizations yet. The conversion rate for visitor -> trial is terrible right now at 0.3%

In my case, after building the minimum usable product, I tried to find a potential user who wants to use the product.

Then I started building the product for them. They eventually ended up becoming a customer.

My point is the work became so much simpler and the direction became so clear once I had the actual customers who are using the product. I stopped guessing what to build and started building what they wanted.

I think my Trial -> Paid is not low. It's a good conversion rate.

But I feel like my visitor -> trial conversion rate is low.

Currently, Twitter is the only place where I am active. But I am slowly starting to focus on SEO. That's my next big bet.

I tried the free plan thing before. Had a very bad experience with it. Same with free trials without cc.

Now, the only thing I want to do is a free trial with cc. That's why even for Feather, it was a free trial with cc right from the start.

This way, I get sign-ups from only those who really have a need for a blog.

Visitor -> Trial will get affected a lot because of upfront cc.

My visitor -> trial conversion rate is around 0.3-0.5%

But my trial -> paid conversion rate is around 40-60%.

I haven't launched it on PH yet. Will launch it in a month or two.

I’m one man team. But I hire a contractor occasionally for designs. Other than that, it’s all me currently.

For Feather, I got my first customer even before I launched it (officially).

But Feather is not my first product. It's my 4th one. I have been doing this for 3 years now, and there are some people who have been following my journey from the first year.

So, even though technically it took 0 days to get my first customer, it's zero because of all the things that I did in the past 3 years.

I don't know if it's a good idea or not, but that's exactly what I did.

I did not build an audience.

Instead, I just shared my journey of building in public.

Right from the idea stage, to creating a landing page, adding waitlist, getting waitlist users, finalizing features, working on features, fixing bugs, getting some visitors, getting some users, getting some customers, handling churn, checking retention, ...

I did everything in public. That's how I got an audience on Twitter. I did not try to build an audience and then started working on a product. Both went hand in hand to me.

I don't know if this is what you have to do. But this is what I did.

I wrote my first line of code in 2015.

Yeah, this is my full time thing. I quit my software dev job exactly 3 years ago.

I don’t spend crazy amount of times on it. Maybe 10-15 hours per week. Most of the time is spent doing customer support.

It’s all organic. I haven’t used any special tools.

People are paying for it. So I assume it’s not a lot…

Right now, I’m still trying to figure out who my target audience is. It’s still a little broad at the moment.

For analytics, I just use self hosted Umami.

https://www.indiehackers.com/post/i-reached-10k-arr-843-mrr-in-2-5-months-ama-f8f004d910

I did another AMA a few months back. You can go there and read through my replies.

In short, I got interest from many Wordpress users wanting to migrate to feather, but they said the only thing stopping them to migrate to feather is that there are so many posts to move to Notion. So I spent hours and hours just copy pasting each post from their Wordpress to Notion and created a blog for them. The first few customers have been a lot of hard work. But it all paid off in the end now.

No. I just build everything in public. They then go and visit Feather through one of my tweets. If they need a blog, they will sign up and convert to a customer.

Also, many of my customers tweet about Feather on Twitter all on their own. So people discover it through those tweets too.

Also, when someone asks for recommendations about a blogging platform, many of my twitter friends and customers reply to those tweets asking them to check out Feather.

That is another way how I get customers through Twitter.

Had to Google what you meant by OPEX haha. Right now, the costs are around $500/month I think. I have to check again.

Not sure what you mean? Whose content?

Feather is a blogging platform. People can login, connect their Notion, create their blog, assign their custom domain to it.

They will then get an optimised blog with everything they ever need.

All the content/articles they write, they still do it on their own Notion docs. Feather automatically fetches those Notion pages and publishes them to their blog that they created.

Cloudflare is awesome. I am really liking it. I use Remix, not Nextjs. Remix has an official cloudflare adapter. So it was very easy for me to use Remix and deploy on Cloudflare.

I’m active only on Twitter. My majority of traffic is coming from Twitter. So I’m sure a lot of people are atleast discovering Feather through Twitter.

But I can’t exactly say if all the customers are also coming from Twitter.

I’m not doing any kind of outbound marketing.

So, that’s why I said it’s through Twitter, word of mouth and Google.

I see many people recommend Feather to others all on their own on Twitter. That helps a lot too.

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It is already possible to collect emails with Feather. On top of that, people can also embed their own newsletter form on their feather blog (from whatever platform they are using like substack, covert kit, Beehiiv etc) even today.

But yeah, eventually I have plans to have a complete newsletter functionality where people can send emails through Notion itself. That’s the logical next step for Feather.