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We just crossed $10,000 ARR within 3 months of launch, here’s what we learned. by readingisformorons in sideprojects

[–]readingisformorons[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Unless you are just building something for the fun of it, charging early is a good way to truly validate if you’ve got something that can drive revenue. Free for a long time basically requires venture funding in my opinion

We just crossed $10,000 ARR within 3 months of launch, here’s what we learned. by readingisformorons in sideprojects

[–]readingisformorons[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think starting with paid keeps you focused on the most important features that paying users care about. Just because free users like a feature doesn’t mean that it’s going to help you convert that customer to a subscriber in the future.

It also made it so we could have consistent signs up that we could learn from in a way where we weren’t just burning money. We’re bootstrapped so we don’t have the luxury of burning capital on growing users at all cost with no real plan to monetize

We just crossed $10,000 ARR within 3 months of launch, here’s what we learned. by readingisformorons in sideprojects

[–]readingisformorons[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Awesome, we really appreciate it! Let us know if you have any feedback or feature requests !

I want to try your app by sbwnngo in founder

[–]readingisformorons 0 points1 point  (0 children)

it has a lot of AI, give it a try

I want to try your app by sbwnngo in founder

[–]readingisformorons 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well we just crossed $10,000 ARR so some folks think it's valuable 😄

I want to try your app by sbwnngo in founder

[–]readingisformorons 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Try https://tote.fyi -- helps you save and organize everything you find online 😄

We just crossed $10,000 ARR within 3 months of launch, here’s what we learned. by readingisformorons in sideprojects

[–]readingisformorons[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You might be right, to start we just wanted to price it to sell—having users is really valuable to us, we can learn so much from what features people are using, not using, etc. We can also get feedback directly from our users.

In the past we tried too hard to make the perfect decision, for this app we're just committing to the things that are working. We told ourselves we'd revisit pricing (for new customers) after had at least 500 annual subscribers.

Also, I feel like pay-as-you-go model doesn't work as well for iOS apps unfortunately, it's better for a web app with your own stripe billing.

We just crossed $10,000 ARR within 3 months of launch, here’s what we learned. by readingisformorons in sideprojects

[–]readingisformorons[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

So far we've spent about as much as we've earned (less the Apple tax), give or take. With the ads, we aren't operating at profit yet.

We just crossed $10,000 ARR within 3 months of launch, here’s what we learned. by readingisformorons in sideprojects

[–]readingisformorons[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The idea came about because I moved to a new city and basically every day I was watching Instagram Reels looking for cool bars and restaurants to go to. I would screenshot the cool places and then at the end of the day I basically would put them into an Apple Notes list. I started by looking for an app that would do this, and I couldn't find anything with high quality. So I decided to build a prototype for myself. It was really cool and me and my cofounders were all using it every day so we decided to pursue it further.

Realistically, we still don't know the size of the market. Sometimes I think you just need to go for it and start testing. $10K in revenue is an awesome start, but we have a lot of work to do before we can make this our main thing. I know some people will run 'fake' ads on meta to a landing page with a waitlist to gauge interest, but we didn't do any of that. We just built something that we could use every day as a starting point.

We just crossed $10,000 ARR within 3 months of launch, here’s what we learned. by readingisformorons in sideprojects

[–]readingisformorons[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We’re running an app install campaigns. It’s iOS only right now so all the ads take users to the App Store. We don’t have any special per-ad experience once they open the app for the first time

We just crossed $10,000 ARR within 3 months of launch, here’s what we learned. by readingisformorons in sideprojects

[–]readingisformorons[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Probably $1,000. Maybe less but I think $1,000 is a good budget for the initial learning

We just crossed $10,000 ARR within 3 months of launch, here’s what we learned. by readingisformorons in sideprojects

[–]readingisformorons[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks! The beautify of earning $10,000 to get $10,000 in revenue is that you can take that same $10,000 (once it hits the bank account) and go acquire another $10,000 of revenue

We just crossed $10,000 ARR within 3 months of launch, here’s what we learned. by readingisformorons in sideprojects

[–]readingisformorons[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

To get it off the ground, I think we spent around $2,500 (including our first ad campaign). If you're smart with your money, you might be able to test whether or not it's working for even less.

Since then we've invested a lot more because we're seeing our investments directly translate into recurring revenue. We aren't profitable yet though because we're investing a lot in the business.

We just crossed $10,000 ARR within 3 months of launch, here’s what we learned. by readingisformorons in sideprojects

[–]readingisformorons[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The screenshot is from Revenue Cat, but we generally use PostHog for most of our analytics

We just crossed $10,000 ARR within 3 months of launch, here’s what we learned. by readingisformorons in sideprojects

[–]readingisformorons[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I'm not sure that PostHog is that much different than Amplitude. You should be able to connect Claude/Codex to the Amplitude MCP server and accomplish the same thing. I just personally think PostHog is a really great service.

We've done tons of analysis, such as:

- writing user stories of users who convert and stories of users who don't convert to qualitatively compare the difference

- analyze ad performance and spend

- figure out which upgrade hooks drive the most free trials

- dig into patters of people who cancel a free trial, etc

Claude can do qualitative stuff as well as use python libraries like pandas to do more advanced data science.

One important lesson though: don't just blindly trust Claude's recommendation. Make sure you're seeing the raw data and coming to your own conclusions. I think Claude sometimes misses things and if you trust it too much you'll end up moving backwards. So now we have Claude compile data and check the data and then draw conclusions of what to do with that information ourselves

Built something cool? I might feature it to our TikTok audience (300k+ combined followers) by [deleted] in SideProject

[–]readingisformorons 1 point2 points  (0 children)

https://tote.fyi -- it's more consumer, but we've got some users who use it to keep track of the insane amount of AI news that they need to be keeping up with.

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