$1k MRR may not sound impressive in Silicon Valley / New York etc., but 1) it's actually pretty good in other places in the world - the world is just too big, too diverse; 2) not many people have the skill to make $1k MRR without working for an established companies, and not many people have the time / energy to do side hustles or have guts to quit their job to find time to do so.
$1k MRR is a milestone. You can grow it to $2k, $5k, $10k down the road. Your efforts can directly affect the financial outcome.
Exactly. This is for all those people who would love to have their first sweet spot of achieving $1K MRR to start with.
For Silicon Valley/New York, ofcourse $1K MRR is nothing. But we have lot examples who went on nomad life style travelling countries and working from places with cheaper cost of living and in those case $1K MRR is still big.
Nice list, mate! As the founder of SaaSHub, I'd suggest adding it to the list, too. The current MRR is ~$2.4k, and it's been about a bit more than a year since I quit my job and started working full-time on it. https://www.saashub.com/open
It IS a milestone, but 1k a month is not a meaningful amount in any rich country. Remember, it's revenue for your company, not your net salary. Not even your gross salary.
Depends on how much time you have to spend to make it work - if it's a full time thing 1k MRR is >7$/hour if you spend 160 hours a month on it - if you can code anywhere in the world that's below lowest tier remote coding gigs, triple that and you approach low end remote gigs.
Wow. There's a lot of projects here that must have taken a lot of work - and look really good - but the MRR is just dismal. There's one there that's pretty close to a side project of mine - not even a grand. Somewhat offputting.
Does this mean that many of these projects could stand to put a lot more effort into sales? Would that make a reliable difference? Or is it really just this hard? Or a bit of both?
I feel like for some of these, giving the best salesperson you know a huge commission, just getting the ball rolling, could make quite a big difference.
I wouldn't consider the revenue streams of any of these companies to be meaningfully representative of potential market size in any way. Pretty much any niche market you can think of will be 100's of times larger. You can literally put pretty rocks you pick up in a streambed and generate higher revenues. With a little hard work and luck, some of the companies listed will grow 1000's of times in the future (but they'll still be considered "small businesses").
To argue the other side, an old boss of mine would say that some of the products listed are really features. One of his favorite mantras was: "A feature is not a product and a product is not a company."
To respond to the "is it really just this hard", well... yes and no. If you are unwilling to market/promote/sell your product or just give most of the value away, then sure, it's very very hard. However, if you're willing to hustle on the "business" side of things, then it may not be that hard. One thing that too many techies get wrong is that they try to be innovative in everything. Don't -- just innovate along one axis. For everything else, just copy best practices and you'll be fine.
Side note: commission driven sales is a viable strategy for some product categories in some markets. But for most, it's not. Remember, in business, almost everything is context dependent. Any good tactical advice of "do X" is also bad advice in a different context. And vice versa.
Or it could just be that so many of them are fishing in the same pond?
A lot of them seem like run of the mill productivity software, it is a crowded market with big incumbents.
The ones with unique offerings may just be too marginal to garner a large enough customer base, business customers ultimately want full feature suite products.
With some exceptions, most appear to be developers selling developer stuff to other developers. It's like a microeconomy based around people trying to make a living by taking in each others' laundry. If I'd hazard a guess, it's because they have the technical chops to build things, but lack the experience/connections to build things people outside of tech actually need.
Entering a market that has economy of scale (serving 1000 users cost the same as serving 1 user) need a big marketing budget and a sales team and it can take years until you have enough users to become profitable.
So unless you have a lot of money beforehand compete at something that doesn't scale (for anyone right now). So it will cost the same ballpark to serve your first user as it will cost an established business to serve +1 user.
That used to work back when more people were building things to scratch an itch and didn't have a good sense of business and marketing.
Today, you can expect a product that launches to be extremely polished and have a very calculated marketing strategy from the original pitch, to some kind of an invitation list of early adopters, a lot of blogging time invested, and lastly, a sales team of some sort. A lot of them will have some kind of financial backing. And best of all, you won't even know to what degree their image and branding is curated to sell one story ("We're a small shop") vs reality ("We are very well connected with decision makers at important companies", etc).
Basically, it was taken from a fun side project and perfected to a business science on an industry-wide scale when the sharks smelled how much money was on the table.
"Do things that dont scale" - that's good advice because it will make it harder for the big bullies to eat your lunch. But what can't scale today, might scale tomorrow as technology catch up, so if you are lucky you will have a profitable business and domain expertise and be ready to grab the opportunity if/when it arrives.
Because this is one of the (thousands of) features in Palantir's government product? And this one is manual, just dragging things around a canvas -- Palantir's software places them automatically and intelligently based on available data.
Well obviously not, but that's the point - it seems a few products in this list actually do provide something valuable but are either not being sold to the right customers, or if they are are being sold for peanuts given their worth.
Depends on what the price point is. I don’t think it makes sense to do sales for a product under $49-99/mo. Huge time sync. Better off marketing self service and scale from there.
In my view, until you make $500-$1K MRR, do it safe without burning a lot of money. Once you hit your sweet spot of $1K MRR, doubledown on sales/marketing either by brining in someone or allocating more time yourself.
>There's one there that's pretty close to a side project of mine - not even a grand.
I mean quite a few are significantly more than a grand, and there are a few that if I got that much for my side project I think it totally makes sense to go for it.
There are different models. For example tools like social media automation or website builder, in a free plan they display the actual product url. So sometimes, free plan also bring in users and some of them can turn into paid customers.
$1k MRR is nothing to brag about. Seriously, we need to start aiming much higher. If this was "My 1hr a day side project hitting $1kMRR in 12months", then it's impressive. But I often see these non side projects and I just want to voice that it's absolutely not impressive.
If you started a business mowing lawn, cutting hair, you better be way past $1K revenue in 6 months. If you're fully committed to building a startup and 100% vested in it, even $10k a month isn't impressive after 24 months. MY OPINION. If you're that skilled and can't figure out how to make money fast, you really might be better of leetcoding and getting a job at one of the FAANGs or well paying SV companies.
Going from $0 to any number greater than $0 is an accomplishment IF your product is genuinely something new, where product market fit is unknown. It means you've found a customer. Which is very difficult. Many startups never find even a single customer.
Obviously finding your first customers is nothing to brag about if you're mowing lawns, because everyone on the planet is aware that anyone with grass in front of their house knows someone occasionally needs to mow it. Same with anyone who has hair on their head.
> even $10k a month isn't impressive after 24 months
> might be better of leetcoding and getting a job at one of the FAANGs
I don't think the point is to maximize lifetime income. But you're absolutely right that if your life goal is to maximize lifetime income, statistically speaking, you shouldn't start a startup.
I have to side with the poster of the comment you're responding to. If $1k per month is pure profit and doesn't require more than 2hrs per week of work, bravo. However, if it's your main gig and you're dumping anything more than 15hrs a week into it... yeah I don't really see the purpose. You could make more selling "magic" rocks on Etsy.
I agree, but in 2020 expecting to grow "entirely organically" or by word of mouth without ads is a falsehood. This is honestly one of my biggest qualms with Indie Hackers. They claim that design and marketing isn't needed if you just "try long enough" and tell dev friends about your project. Granted, this depends on your target audience, but if your product isn't targeting developers the calculus just doesn't quite compute.
That's awesome! I totally agree that in certain cases a passive approach can be better, however given you can write off advertising as a business expense certain projects can benefit substantially from relatively small targeted ad campaigns. Granted, as a developer it's been incredibly tough to learn how to advertise and write effectively for marketing.
Forgot to say in my other comment: a huge difference between those businesses and a SaaS product is margin. A $10k MRR SaaS product at 85%+ margins, requires no equipment other than a laptop to maintain, is vastly superior to a lawn mowing company IMO, which will have a truck, a mower, labour, etc. So from a margin perspective, you'd vastly prefer the SaaS product.
Most SaaS companies have significant operational costs (cloud spend, operations people, developers fixing bugs, etc.) The small, single person SaaS with huge margins (and real revenue) is largely mythical.
In the case of the lawn mowing company, you don't have employees showing up at customer houses drunk. You don't have to deal with your employees running into houses and cars with their trailers, trucks etc.
Lots more head aches with in person businesses than SaaS. I have a neighbour who switched from lawn care to SaaS (selling other peoples tools), says it doesn't matter how much you pay him, he wouldn't go back.
This seems like totally random and unfocused feedback. The fact is, for ANY business $1mm MRR is SOMETHING, which could be brought to the bank for a loan to continue business, as well as a proposal to investors. It's a sign that a least at some level your business is WORKING.
You're underestimating the profit margin and the benefit of not having to do the work yourself.
Mowing lawns, I'll be busy for those $1k MRR. If I have a SaaS with optimized implementation and a halfway solid foundation, those $1k MRR might be equivalent to $950 gross profit. And I'll get those $950 even if I don't do a thing.
So those $950 are additive. I can still mow the lawn to turn them into $1950 monthly.
I had the same initial reaction. A SaaS product taking that long to get to $10K ARR is not exciting from an ambition perspective - maybe from a side-project POV, though, it would be.
While the traditional VC yardsticks* are both way too reductionist AND now well out-dated, they at least provide a rough sense of how good of an opportunity you have.
* I've heard these are the perquisites for VC SaaS funding rounds (note this is probably 5 years out of date, and they are likely much higher now): $10k MRR for Seed, $100k MRR for Series A, $500K - $1M MRR for Series B.
That all said, I like how Jason Lemkin talks about this. Basically, "I don't care how long it took you to get to $1M ARR - could be 10 years. But I need to see a clear path to getting to $100M ARR in 5 years from when you hit $1M". Paraphrasing. Obviously this is only for VC-scale businesses/approaches, not denigrating other ways of building a business.
> If you're that skilled and can't figure out how to make money fast, you really might be better of leetcoding and getting a job at one of the FAANGs or well paying SV companies.
Unless of course, you prefer to have the freedom to work on whatever you want to work on.
>> If you started a business mowing lawn, cutting hair, you better be way past $1K revenue in 6 months.
Depends. If you are doing the mowing, cutting then i'd agree -- because it isnt a "product/platform/marketplace business" as much as a service, so you should earn the market rate of the service, less your independence discount.
If you are not doing the mowing, cutting but instead have a scalable business that could grow beyond the 24hrs you can work yourself, then you may not have made $1k in 6mo because you're investing for growth.
Since the article is about MRR, i'm assuming they are talking about the second category, which is true MRR.
Maybe it's nothing to brag about to some, but I'd say it's nothing to scoff at, either. Getting from zero to one is a major hurdle that many (perhaps most) people fail to achieve.
$12k a year sounds like a terrible job but that’s because you’re comparing it with an entirely different job and career path. It’s like saying, why be a math professor, just go work on Wall Street. Different pursuits!
Aside from being negative, this is pretty off-base for a couple of reasons:
- Many of these are side projects.
- Any company that sells in increments < $1k/mo will at some point be making "only" $1k/mo. This is as true of the companies presented here as it is of Mailchimp or Twilio. The only way to get bigger is to grow through $1k/mo.
- $0-$1k MRR is the hardest step for many businesses. Once you hit $1k/mo, it's likely a smoother path to $10k and beyond.
Well, you can't compare $10K/m day job and $1K MRR. Some time $1K MRR is better if you want more freedom. You must have heard of story of Daniel Vassallo.
15$/hr * 40 hr/wk * 50 wk/yr / 12 months/yr = $2500 MRR. Assumes 2 weeks unpaid vacation. And that's assuming $0 expenses, so all revenue can go into your own crap salary. $1k MRR is $6/hr, below minimum wage anywhere in the US. If all you're getting is $1kMRR, you might as well just get a job at McDonalds, you'll have a nice pay raise.
> you might as well just get a job at McDonalds, you'll have a nice pay raise.
What you’ll also have: little opportunity for growth, barely any valuable experience, skills, or learning opportunities, an intellectually boring job, nothing to show off to potential future employers, and you’re giving up working for yourself to sell your time.
And that’s ignoring your massive assumption that all these startups are full time jobs.
- a $1k/mo MRR business generally has some fungibility to be sold. For a SaaS business @ $1k/mo MRR with a working product, I could easily see that being worth $30k+ to any number of buyers. (Because you have de-risked the problem significantly by going from $0 -> revenue.)
- You can potentially 10x that $1k/mo in a very short period by spending time (and money, if available) on customer acquisition.
The Church Co - $199/month for ultimate package. You can probably charge churches more since there is lack of technical knowledge. Are founders and employees of Church Co religious or not? Is there any moral barrier in helping churches to collect donations?
In a sea of startups/products, where everything feels as if it is already created - how does one come up with a product idea?
I feel that every problem I try to tackle is not a real problem. It’s a vitamin and not an ibuprofen. The real problems already have a solution - which means that I’d need to spend a few years and a few hundred thousand dollars to just get a chance to maybe make a profitable product.
Rarely does someone come up with a solution in a domain space they know nothing about — it happens sometimes but still rare. Don’t forget that business is ultimately just selling a solution to a problem. This is very simplified but my thoughts: Find an interesting niche domain or area of interest, dive deeply and learn about the problems and challenges, find vendors and individuals in that domain and talk to them about their problems, research some solutions, create landing pages and validate some of the ideas and solutions you come up with, get a nice customer pipeline who will pay you real money for a solution, build the solution and ship the solution, profit off that solution.
There are successful products that started catering to a finite set of audience and still making a lot of money.
For example, one from my list is ChurchCo making $45K/month just by doing websites for Churches. Can you believe?
So, just by picking unique features and niching down the audience, you can still place a safe bet without spending a few years and hundreds of dollars.
ChurchCo is just an unbundling of Squarespace it seems like with a specific niche. I guess we've reached the point where Squarespace is now big enough, with so much configuration options, that it's confusing for people who "Just want a good looking church website".
Small fish in a huge market seems like a great strategy.
If you came up with a transporter you could make trillions in the shipping industry.
If you are part of a small group who knows the person who created a transporter you can be the first setting up services around that and make billions.
If you are the last person to discover you have to beat everyone before or discover something new.
I've seen a similar website before with IndieHacker or ProductHunt verified revenues (forgot which). Maybe I missed it here but how are these reoccurring revenues verified, and as others mentioned here, are they audited?
Yes. This is all real data. No false data. All data taken from various sources like stripe, paddle, baremetrics data.
Only thing to note is - this is before expenditure deduction.
Its revenue. Not profit. But with most of these typically sass and lean startups, I would say 80%-90% would be profits, may be.
>Yes. This is all real data. No false data. All data taken from various sources like stripe, paddle, baremetrics data.
I get that, but the owner of the site reiterating the validity does not really verify anything. At least a page on the website that explains the methodology of arriving at these numbers would be better, maybe with some anonymized screenshots even.
Listing payment processors does not explain methodology. Did the startup owners send screenshots of their revenues from these processors to listt.xyz? Or did listt.xyz reach out to stripe, paddle, baremetrics ask to verify revenue data?
If the whole premise of listt.xyz is showcasing financials of private businesses, I wouldn't trust the data integrity so blindly without at least some credible explanation of how those numbers came to be.
Private business can still opt to display their revenues via comapnies like baremetrics.
So, companies like baremetrics pulls this data from their stripe,paddle accounts. Business will give access to baremetrics/similar companies to pull this data. Listt uses data from this kind of sources.
Survivorship bias is one of the biggest things we can't ignore.
In my view, survivorship bias is the main reason , some projects fail as the founders dont see the main reason behind the success for the product they copied.
There could be hundred reasons for a product to work for someone at sometime because of something.
Probably I should make a list of product that died after making $1K MRR(in 12-24 months)
Without external audits, there's no reason to believe any of the startups on this list are giving real numbers.
In addition, third parties like analytics SDKs or payment processors, which in principle have the capability to easily audit usage and financial data, seem to never do this business.
Then there are non-primary-data-source firms like SensorTower and AppAnnie. They are always reactive to (not predictive of) "download counts" - they almost certainly take money to rank higher in their charts, or such a mechanism exists through whatever flawed data gathering approach they take. Anyone who can afford to pay AppAnnie and SensorTower is already well capitalized to some extent, and it is definitely effective to arbitrage $1m of cheap fake downloads through AppAnnie into a $10m investment from dumb money.
Compare to Steam, which publishes realtime concurrent player counts and sales data that is irrefutably true, with rare exceptions caused by bugs. (1) There are always big surprises in the Steam data, especially when you compare the genres that lead the charts to the genres that giant companies most aggressively market. Such transparency has been instrumental to the continued success of indie game developers on that platform. Steam has the fattest tails in the business, at least in terms of something we can actually validate, so it's still your best bet for information.
Despite the information, there is still not a viable venture capital model around Steam games. You'll never see a Y Combinator gaming startup list on Steam, and the ones that do, they'll fail to raise money because all that investors will talk about is "how many users u got?" It's a vicious cycle
The problem is lack of simple ideas for analyzing this data, something so simple and straightforward that the kind of people who become Managing Directors can process in a deck.
Anyway, a startup is never going to release numbers it can't fudge.
If you think how games are similar to music and movies, you can see a similar pattern on Steam. Money can to an extend guarantee top quality production but you still need "entertainment/wow" factor from the movie/game/music.
99% of this list is verified and trusted. These are not self published revenues on the blogs. This data is coming verified via stripe, paddle, baremetrics etc.
So, I would say this data is real.
But only point to note is the figures are without expenses deducted. Not profits. But only revenues.
See a startup with 50k MRR after 12 months and 10m followers? Those 10m followers must have really helped! Oh wait that company actually raised 10m and spent 2m on advertising...
Hi,
Nice list and good work! I am curious to understand how this data was made available using Stripe, Peddle, Baremetrics. Do these companies make data publicly available or was it something else. Let me know.
You bring up a few good points with your post. First is that expenses are crucial in helping to determine how the company is doing. You might have mortgage and maintenance expenses that put you in the red, despite your greater than $1k MRR. Same with the startups in the list. Second, the growth potential: your real estate business has a fairly well understood long term revenue growth profile, assuming it is located in a mature economy, with obvious caveats of neighborhood changes in popularity, infrastructure, beneficial and detrimental facilities, while a startup at $1k/MRR can be already capped in growth or have an unknown growth potential, depending on the type of business and the market it is in.
$1k MRR may not sound impressive in Silicon Valley / New York etc., but 1) it's actually pretty good in other places in the world - the world is just too big, too diverse; 2) not many people have the skill to make $1k MRR without working for an established companies, and not many people have the time / energy to do side hustles or have guts to quit their job to find time to do so.
$1k MRR is a milestone. You can grow it to $2k, $5k, $10k down the road. Your efforts can directly affect the financial outcome.