My First $500 MRR – My thoughts and learnings
I will keep this as straight to the point and no BS as possible.
This is the 6th Project I build, the first one to have meaningful revenue, however you could consider 500€MRR as little revenue, but for me it's great progress. I'm not here to say that this is a lot, just here to share my thoughts on how I got here and what I learned. I know I still have a lot to learn.
1st: FitMe - 30 Users, 0$, Failure (Built for 6 months, launched, 0 user feedback, was so tired and sick of it, extremely technically challenge. I built something that was "cool" not that I wanted) 2nd: Pickpocket Alert - 0$, Failure. 32,000 users. (Didn't know how to monetize.) 3rd: Nationality Guesser - 9€MRR, Failure. 22,000 users. (terrible pricing, feel kind of guilty the app is a bit racist so I stopped.) 4th: Ultra Mega Chad (AI Aggregator) - 0$, Failure. 50 users. To be fair I just wanted to learn how LLM api's/prompting work, i think this has potential and have seen competitors rise. 5h: Feasty AI - 0$, Failure 0 users. I realised quickly: What the FK am i doing? What the FK am I building. Who even asked for this? Nobody. I need to stop building things I find cool and ONLY build shit people NEED. 6th: AEO Checker - 3,000 Users - 500MRR€, Success? Current project AEO Checker
1. Finding Ideas Go on Google Trends/Tiktok trends, what's growing, what's being talked about, are there some but not too many competitors? Are the keywords on Google low competition? Ok go for it.
2. Launch ASAP, just build 1 feature. That's all you need, 1 feature. Are people paying for it? Yes -> continue. No -> Go next idea. Build something in 1-2 weeks and see if someone buys.
3. Build for MRR not for users Do not chase more users, chase more PAID users. I got 32k users in my Pickpocket Alert app, yet I made 0 money. Nationality Guesser got 22,000 users yet only 3 paid. Don't waste your time chasing the increased users. Don't even track it. Only track paid users. AEO Checker has way less yet it pays 500x more than any other project I've built.
4. Pricing Raise your prices. Just do it. I started with 3€ a week or 9€ a month and got a few subscribers. Then I raised prices 9-25-55 and got two people who bought 55€ which equates to 6 people getting my previous highest 9€. The rich users will buy your highest tier ANYWAYS, so just price it higher. I'm even thinking of pricing even higher, my competitors already are..
5. Free Trials Remove them at first. People who need your product will buy it anyways. People who don't need it will just use the free trial and not convert anyways. Unless your product is so insanely good that even users who wouldn't pay end up paying, don't do it. If you're building a saas its not worth imo.
6. Onboarding/Conversions Have some sort of flow or onboarding where users need to commit to something your site offers, then at the end give them what they want behind a paywall.
7. SEO It's so hard, there are so many experts and competitors will buy ads anyways. The most important instant SEO boost IMO is your domain name. Stop using stupid domain names, just straight up name your domain/project what it does or what users search. (i.e. for me, I know users will search AEO Check hence my domain aeochecker.ai )
8. X Twitter/X is so powerful, start posting on there with your own account about build in public, random 2-3 posts a day and you get referrals from there.
9. Reddit Use reddit to promote but do it smart, DO NOT plaster your product you'll get instantly banned and its pointless. Find super niche and super small sub-reddits. That's how I got a 18k views post in a subreddit with 1k members.
Other topics I need to learn more about: Ads, UGC, Pricing (need to improve), X shitposting. What do you guys think of these, I'd love to hear more from more successful people. Perhaps what I found isn't actually good advice and I just got lucky, idk.
This was such a nice write up that highlighted what I’ve seen in so many “First $X MMR” essays that were too long. Thanks for sticking to the points with short examples.
Wishing you the best!
Thank you!
Congrats on your progress! Looking back, in your earlier projects, what concrete signal would have told you to stop sooner and save time?
Not making any money. Imo it's as simple as that. First project I built for 6 months without even launching, like what a complete idiot. Second I kept thinking oh I'll add monetization later. Others as well not thinking about money first and validating my product with a Paywall. Validation can ONLY happen when people PAY imo.
is social the only way you are doing distribution for these projects or are you doing something else?
beyond posting on niche subreddits, what has been your recipe for getting eyeballs?
do you already have a ton of twitter followers?
I have 200 followers on twitter and get barely any like/comments on my posts so X is not my main distribution. Reddit gets decent views but I don't think I get many PAID users from it anyways.
I think honestly 80% of my users come from my domain name giving me a huge SEO boost. I knew people who need my product would search "AEO Check" or "AEO Checker" hence I named my domain aeochecker.ai, a week after I published my site i was already ranking top 5 in this keyword (also because it was very low competition)
IME the competitiveness of results is probably a much bigger factor, considering exact-match domains are a very old SEO trick and Google doesn't reward them (it penalizes them, actually). "AEO" is a brand new concept so congrats on finding a new wave! Double down on SEO if that's working for you. It's hard enough finding 1 channel that works. The fact that you hit $500 MRR on the open web is actually pretty impressive, and you can likely scale significantly if you're aggressive about growth. Good luck!
Oh didn't know about that, perhaps you're right the keyword was just very low competition. Thanks for the advice, will hard focus on growth now trying to find other channels!
My advice was actually the opposite. It's harder to take a new channel from 0-1 than it is to take an existing channel from 1-2. so in my experience it's better to double down on what's working. only branch out to new channels when you have the resources, or you've maxed out your existing channels. FWIW I don't think your channel is just SEO, it's also content marketing like this HN post. Keep it up!
I want to start doing paid advertisements and maybe try to rank for more competitive keywords with google ads. I'm very new to ads though so I don't know if I'll have much success
How did you achieve such a massive amount of users? (even if they were not paying?
Honestly I think 80% of my users were because of my domain name. I knew people who need my product will search "AEO Check" or "AEO Checker" so I called my domain aeochecker.ai + the fact that this keyword is very low competition
Nice! It was the same for the other projects?
Yeah nationality guesser I got a huge boost because people randomly searched for it
Thanks for sharing. Congrats for the achievement.
Thank you, appreciate it, still need to keep improving though!
Congrats! Keep pushing!!
Thank you, will do!
Good, thanks
>Who even asked for this? Nobody.
I wish more indie hackers thought about this. Literally tons of AI slop with no real use case that someone really wants solved.
100% I now try to always ask myself that, even when I'm just building a feature
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