Bootstrapper Success 🥾
👋 Welcome!
Today we kick off with some bootstrapped success! VEED, the video editing SaaS, has grown from $0 to $1m ARR one year after setting up a paywall for the service! The business is 100% self-funded, not a penny of external funding! Co-founder Sabba Keynejad shares some valuable insights from their journey. Although having roughly 30K MAU when they introduced the paywall, there was little communication with the community. So growth started slowly. But with compounding growth, things move faster after they reached the first $100K. Bootstrapping is tough work, but with time it gets easier. Bit this easiness is heavily influenced by the speed you grow. To achieve success, Sabba names three key elements. Firstly, get your MVP out into the world ASAP. Secondly, validate quickly. Lastly, work out early on how you are going to charge for your product. He admits that a large factor for success is luck. One of the most difficult things has been the changing responsibilities, moving from maker to manager. But staying 100% focused on building their product, learning from their users and growing the company has helped achieve success. Read the full story with helpful links for further reading.
😺 Products of the Day
July 15, 2020
🥇 Projector 2.0: Graphic design for the Instagram age.
🥈 SnoopReport: Instagram activity tracker- see anyone's likes and follows.
🥉 Clerk 2.0: SMS for Slack.
🚀 Maker News
Creator Legal Support
Over the past months, Substack has been working with Tim Hwang, Lea Rosen and Michael Wolfe from rw&h attorneys. They have been piloting a program providing legal defence to writers. The “Substack Defender” program will now be more widely available, covering pre-publication legal reviews of stories as well as responses to cease-and-desist letters. The goal is to oppose bad-faith efforts against the work of its independent writers. The platform plans to launch more support initiatives in the future. These will look at healthcare, taxes, editing, design, and co-working spaces. “Being independent shouldn’t mean being alone.” Read more here.
Make NoCode Mainstream
In this thread, Jens Lennartsson shares his ambition how we can make NoCode more mainstream in 2021. The more we can make businesses see the value in NoCode, the more opportunities will arise for all Makers. It will not be done by explaining how amazing NoCode with all its integrations is, but by explaining the core benefits to business, such as lower development costs. For this, we need to create better case studies and more examples. Jens rightly points out, that the reason why a company chooses NoCode must easy and IMO must be a no brainer! Read the full thread.
Content & SEO
For Snappa, a focus on content and SEO since 2016 has paid off well. Christopher Gimmer, a co-founder of the company, gives us some valuable insights on how to grow traffic with SEO. Firstly it takes time, but you should be able to start seeing results after 2-3 months. As you will start with low domain authority, it will be easier to rank for one piece of content on Google. Therefore, focus efforts on 1 - 3 core pieces of content. Find keywords with high search volume and low enough competition and make sure your content is better than your competitors. You will need to promote your content and build backlinks through outreach and guest posting. To help scale your efforts, start building an email list early on. You will notice that as your domain authority and email list grow, it will become easier to rank for keywords. This is when you can start to increase the frequency of new content. Read the full thread.
💭 Afterthought
To finish the day, some insights from Leo. It builds on the words I have mentioned frequently from Bill Gurley and others, and IMO it’s a critical factor for success. Don’t be afraid of sharing your ideas! It can give you valuable feedback from potential customers, on pricing strategy or how to build your product. In Summary, “sharing pays off in multiples.” Take care and see you tomorrow!
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