First 8 steps to $110K MRR

Once upon a time, Josh Pigford decided to create a company.

Here are his first steps that allowed him to build Baremetrics that makes over $100K a month:

1. He decided to figure out a pain big enough that’s worth solving.

2. He focused on one specific audience – his favorite audience – IT entrepreneurs.

3. Instead of talking to them via social networks, mass emails, blog content, he did real 1-on-1 conversations via phone.

4. While talking, he was figuring out:
4.1. What they hate about running their business.
4.2. What they spend time doing that could be automated.
4.3. What type of things they’d like to learn more about when it comes to their customers or their own business.
Result: Turned out the audience needed more stats about their finances.

5. In 8 days! the first version of Baremetrics was built and the first $2,000 in monthly recurring revenue came from that!
Attention:
+ A lot of conversations to figure out the pain you can solve through automation + 8 days of working on the first version of the startup = $2000 MRR
– It’s very different to a few conversations to figure out something that looks like a pain + 2 years of working on the first version = $100K burned out and $0 MRR by the end of the day.

6. Then he talked again to the PAYING customers (not to everybody but to the ones that pay) and asked for their feedback.

7. Based on the 2 months of feedback (not 2 hours), he scrapped the entire first version of Baremetrics and created the new version that provided much more value (what I often see, when people invest 2 years into building the first version, they stick to it, and try to push customers to it, they consider it a baby that everybody must love, instead of iterating fast towards the needs of the audience and start everything from scratch, if needed).

8. The second version didn’t have the setup process, no settings to fiddle with, no code to integrate with your app. You click one button and you get a dashboard full of meaningful metrics, imported from your Stripe account. You don’t have to wait for events to roll in so you have data to calculate days or months later. You instantly gain insight in to your entire history with Stripe… insight that many of our customers have never seen before in any capacity.

That has an intense “wow” reaction.

This intense “wow” reaction + a huge pain solved, motivated people to talk about Baremetrics. Result: $110K MRR

Source: baremetrics.com/blog/first-100-customers