How we reached $6250 monthly recurring revenue in 77 days from launch

[saasfounder]

I build SaaS products for living and recently, launched Helpwise (https://helpwise.io) - shared inbox for teams to manage team emails like help@, jobs@ etc. Here I'm going to share how we reached $6k MRR within 77 days of launch.

We built this product because we had tried the two other main players in the market and felt that these products are 1)expensive 2)complex

On 2nd Dec'19, we launched on PH. Kept following things in mind:

1.Use GIF in the thumbnail 2.Product screenshots 3.Post close to 12:00 am PST 4.Never indulge in fake voting

We ended that day @ 4th position! Coming in top 5 on Product Hunt opens a lot of early PR opportunities. So, we go covered by number of niche blogs.

We spent $1k on SEO & $200 in FB Ads targeting job profiles like Support Manager, HR Manager etc. To break some users (similar to us) from existing players, we built 1-click account migration for both Front and Help Scout from day 1. Also, we built few other integrations (Stripe, Twilio, Pipedrive etc.) to get some distribution going for us as early as possible.

We signed up 500+ users within 1st week. We priced the product the way we wanted it to be as a customer of other shared inbox offerings in the market. And, the pricing was also partly influenced by our love for Basecamp. So, we have 2 plans - free and $99/m for unlimited users.

When you have a free plan, it is very important to design that free plan smartly. If you don't put the controls on features at the right trigger point, you will miss out on the upgrades. Hence, we spent more time on planning our free plan than our paid plan. The idea really was to figure out the stage at which a small startup feels the pain of email chaos and is ready to pay for the solutuon. So, we offer the product for free for up to 5 team members. If you need anything more than that, pay $99/m.

In 77 days, we have converted 52 accounts (4% of signups) into paid @ avg $120/month.

Hope this is useful for some of you.

[medialucky20]

Thank you for sharing. Best of luck on your journey....

- May I know how long it took to develop the product with how many ppl?

- Any Tips on what is the best time to release SaaS products like monthend, weekend etc??

[saasfounder]

Thanks for the kind wishes.

- It took us 2 months and 3 people to build and launch the product along with all content and SEO work.

- I personally find Monday as the best day for launch and beginning of month.

[JackPoach]

You may want to take a look how Bitrix24 approaches helpdesk, even though they are free - https://www.bitrix24.com/tools/contact_center/ . The idea behind Front or Helpwise (and it looks like you are inspired by them) is that the biggest problem is routing requests between different people and collecting requests from all available channels in one place. The idea behind Bitrix24 is that 'single inbox' and 'multichannel' is just the beginning. Your helpdesk has to be a part of your communication and marketing machine. Intercom.io is having a similar approach. I believe it's more promising.

[secondmod]

Looks like link was not parsed in your post so here is a clickable link (to save you from copy-paste): https://helpwise.io

[saasfounder]

thanks for the help :)

[ahpearce]

Very useful, and thank you for sharing!

Are you working on other ideas at the moment, or focusing on this one?

Were you actively ideating, or was it more of a "I have this problem. Wow, this software is expensive and too complex, I just need a simple solution" and then you built it?

[saasfounder]

Glad you found this useful.

We have couple of other products in cloud telephony and call tracking space. And, one product in the making.

We are big time bullish on these 3 themes: 1) remote work is growing 2) companies adopting automation in every process 3) all businesses will eventually move to cloud

So, we are always open to ideas that satisfy these three themes. We were using these shared inbox softwares for other product for over an year or so and knew about all the problems that our team members were facing. So, few events (missed emails, poor integration & rapid increase in our bill due to hiring) triggered the decision to build a better and affordable solution.

[rajacombinator]

Nice post and congrats. Thanks for sharing actual numbers. Can I ask how did you spend the SEO money? And did you do any further validation prior to building or simply used your own experience with existing solutions as validation?

[partisan]

I would definitely be interested in hearing about how SEO was done. In house or outsourced? Any particular strategies that can be replicated in a different domain?

[notlukesky]

Good luck on your journey. Who were the two solutions that were pricey by the way?

Any plans on adding a SAML integration and 2FA? I work for an SI that has done some SAML SSO integrations with SAASPASS for customers using Frontapp etc...

[saasfounder]

Thank you :) we used Front and Help Scout. Yup, 2FA and SAML are currently in our pipeline.

[dzej_bi]

Did the Hunter help you a lot on getting early visibility on ProductHunt? I did a quick check on him and he is not on 500 hunters list.

[secondmod]

Great insights! Which traffic source converted the best for you?

[saasfounder]

The best performer is always and always SEO. After that niche blogs and then, PH.

FB has never really worked for us in terms of conversions but we use them mostly for initial traction & visibility. FB ads work well for us for upselling or converting free to paid using retargeting.

[ismailk]

Awesome work! What stack did you use to create this?

[thedangler]

How did you get so many integration? Zapier?

[boghy8823]

Congrats!

[avipars]

try posting in indiehackers

[saasfounder]

done :)