Step by step guide to $1,000 in MRR

During the past 2 years, I have built 3 SaaS.

After a few months, one reached $2,000 in MRR, the other reached $3,000 in MRR, and the latest reached over $20,000 in MRR.

These numbers may sound like a few or a lot, depending on where you're at.

I have always applied the exact blueprint I will share today.

1. Launch a product

While this can sound obvious, most people love the ideation process and can stay in this tarpit for many months. Here are some rules:

• Try to launch in weeks, not months.

• Don't fall in love with your code.

• Don't try to rebuild everything yourself.

• Use as many tools as possible to save time. Some of them:

  • Auth: Kobble.io

  • Stripe payment + quotas and permissions: Kobble.io

  • Component libraries: nextui.org, ui.shadcn.com

2. (Try to) Sell it ASAP

Marketing the product is actually the most important blocker for SaaS founders (especially for technical ones).

You have to switch your mindset and think about yourself as a salesman for your company.

Important: Most founders wait for people to come to them, but this rarely happens. You must mix inbound and outbound marketing.

Inbound marketing advice:

1. Use a waterfall pattern: select the main social media to publish posts on (i.e YouTube) and focus 90% of your time on this. Just spend the 10% remaining on one or two other platforms by adapting your main content to them.

2. Write divisive posts only if it helps: if you decide to talk about divisive subject, do it carefully and only if it will help to grow your brand in a positive way.

3. Building in public is most likely the simplest way to create content at no cost: explain what you do, that's it.

Outbound marketing advice:

1. Identify your persona and try to understand where you can find them. For instance, if you're targeting corporate people, you most likely want to reach them out on LinkedIn. Here's a guide on how to grow a SaaS using LinkedIn outreach. You can also do emailing or cold phone calls if it works for your market.

2. Start automating your strategy. As explained in this video, you will lose people at every steps of your funnel. To make sure you end up with enough potential customers, you must contact a lot of people every week. So automate everything using the right tools.

Outbound marketing tools you can use:

• Outreach Automation: Waalaxy.com, Mailead.io

• Scraping: PhantomBuster.com, Kaspr.io

3. Iterate

Most people don't achieve PMF at this stage. Actually, most people never achieve PMF.

You must constantly ship new features and iterate.

Identify your power users, and talk to your users every day.

Pay attention to feedback, understand the problem they have, and genuinely try to solve their problem as best as you can.

Bonus: it's ok to feel bad sometimes

At some point during your journey, you will feel terrible. Building a SaaS is not something easy at all.
Enjoy your journey, but allow yourself to feel bad.

The problem is not to feel bad, the problem is not to accept it sometimes.
If you are feeling uncomfortable with your situation:

1. Accept it

2. Understand why you're feeling that way

3. Solve the problem

4. If the problem cannot be solved, then it probably does not matter to focus on it

Those are my 2 cents :)