From $0 to $5K MRR (solo-founder, $0 funds)

How this solo-founder managed to grow his company from $0 to $5K MRR in a year, by investing $0…

Sergey Zuev, a solo-founder from Ukraine created a couple of startups and failed.

Then he followed another approach and grew his startup from $0 to $5K MRR without investment.

Here’s how he did it:

1. While talking to potential clients (from his failed startup), he discovered their pain. They were willing to pay for a solution to this pain.

2. So he created a landing page describing a solution (that he didn‘t have yet) (Connect your sales software with Google Analytics and track your website visitors all the way to a physical sale).

3. Sergey started promoting it on Quora and Adwords.

4. As a result, he got his first client from New Zealand, who pre-paid him $3K to create the first version.

5. The client told him exactly how to build this solution.

6. After successfully delivering the solution to the first customer, he started selling the solution to new customers. One of them recently was a Fortune 250 company.

Result:
$5K MRR in a year (and 95% of customers are paying for the whole year upfront).

All of this without an investor – without putting his own money and time upfront to build it.

P.S. As I love to say: “If people have real pain they will prepay you for the solution, otherwise they won’t pay even after you create it.”