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Starting this week, every Tuesday we will bring your more insights from founders building profitable Micro SaaS products - “Micro SaaS Founder Insights Series”.

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Founder Insights Series from Profitable Founders:

We believe that there is so much story from each founder building profitable products. These stories are not about founders building million dollar businesses. These founder insights are from founders who picked a trend that is exponentially growing and built profitable products with a few hundreds to thousands in MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue)

Let’s see some of the founder insights from founders building profitable products.

Andy Cloke Shares How He Grew Data Fetcher - a No-Code Tool for Airtable - to $8600 MRR

Andy Cloke Is the founder of Data Fetcher - a tool to import data from anywhere into Airtable with no-code.

Tell us about your product and what inspired you to start it?

I was trying to build an IPO alerts newsletter and manage the content from Airtable. I found an API with data about IPOs but there weren't any simple ways to connect to this in Airtable.

A couple of months later I was browsing Product Hunt and saw a successful Google Sheets extension called 'API Connector', which let you connect to any API within sheets. I remembered my Airtable pain point with the IPOs use case and decided to build an equivalent extension for Airtable.

It was great timing - Airtable were just opening up their extension marketplace to any third-party developer. So Data Fetcher was one of the first extensions on there, and I've been riding the no-code/ Airtable wave ever since.

How long did it take you to acquire your first 50 customers, and what was your growth strategy?

It took about six months to reach the first 50 customers. Initially, I launched on forums, Product Hunt, Reddit etc. which got a handful of users.

Being early to a marketplace like Airtable means you get a handful of new users each day, even without doing any marketing. I think a big factor in converting these people was choosing a freemium pricing model. Some people would try Data Fetcher out on the free plan for months, then finally convert when they had a concrete use case.

A few months in, I realised Data Fetcher wasn't going to grow properly unless I found a more scalable marketing channel. As for many bootstrapped products, this turned out to be SEO. Specifically, I would take common Data Fetcher use cases and create YouTube videos & written tutorials.

Today, 30%-40% of my customers come through our YouTube videos or blog posts, and this % has steadily increased. The interesting thing is the number of views on the videos/ blog posts is tiny (e.g. <1000 total views for most videos), but the intent is super high, so the conversion rate is high.

Which technology stack are you using and what challenges and limitations does it pose?

The backend is written in Node.js, TypeScript, PostgresQL, GraphQL and hosted on Heroku. The frontend is React.js, TypeScript and Airtable's Blocks SDK.

I chose this stack because I was already familiar with it, which is the approach I'd advise anyone to take.

There haven't been any serious limitations, but there have certainly been some Heroku growing pains, now that Data Fetcher users are doing 10,000s of runs (an import/export) per day. I've had to upgrade Heroku servers/ database in a hurry and add lots of monitoring to try and see this coming.

The backend relies on Airtable's REST API. It's solid enough but has some quirks I've had to build around. e.g. it uses names for tables rather than ids, which means when a user changes a table name their scheduled runs start failing. So gracious error handling and alerting the user has been very important.

What are some of the most essential tools that you use for your business?

• Airtable, obviously - I use the kanban view for my product backlog and content marketing pipeline.

• Sendgrid. I love their dynamic templates feature for sending transactional emails

• Mailerlite for email newsletters

• PgMustard for understanding slow database queries

What have been some of the biggest insights you've gained since starting your entrepreneurial journey?

The big one was doing more user testing. i.e. give someone a task to do in your app and watch them do it. It sounds obvious, but there's a lot of advice that says 'Don't talk about your product, just talk about people's problems', and I'd kind of taken that too far and was just speaking to users at quite an abstract level. Once I started doing more nitty-gritty testing of the actual extension, the UX improved immeasurably.

The next thing is that it's often better to focus on keeping customers than trying to find new customers. This means doing boring stuff like fixing edge case bugs, improving error messages and writing help docs. The combined effect of making dozens of minor improvements to your product means your bucket becomes less leaky - customers stick around longer.

The last thing is that it's easy to procrastinate on a big feature because it seems intimidating, even though it's actually very achievable. This has happened a few times, e.g. with my recent webhooks feature. The best strategy I've found to avoid this is to do a quick technical spike (investigation) of big features that are commonly requested, so you can properly estimate them.

See full interview → FounderBeats interview around Micro SaaS Airtable Product Data Fetcher

More Insights about this founder and product:

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Goutham Jay Building FameWall from Scratch and Acquiring 4 Paying Users in 2 Months

Goutham Jay is the founder of famewall.io - a tool to collect & embed testimonials on customizable walls of fame entirely with no-code!

Tell us about your product and what inspired you to start it?

I began building a lot of businesses 1.5 years ago but ended up facing failures in a lot of them. I then followed the approach of validating before building. So that got me interested in researching problems in the user onboarding space in the month of February.

I tried out a lot of testimonial tools but found that they were quite slow & had limited customization options along with brand appeal. I wanted to innovate entirely on that front & as a solo founder, I started building Famewall -A tool to collect & embed social media, video testimonials on customizable walls which can be embedded on landing pages in under 1 minute with no-code!

How long did it take you to acquire your first 50 customers, and what was your growth strategy?

At the moment, I have 4 paying customers. I launched the product in the month of March 2022.

I was building in public on Twitter, Indie Hackers so that garnered some attention for my product. But I got my first paying customer only in the first week of April who was kind enough to give me some feedback as well :)

Since then I started doubling down on social media marketing on reddit, twitter, IH, Product Hunt since my product provides integrations with most of those platforms. I then started getting even more paying customers a month later.

Which technology stack are you using and what challenges and limitations does it pose?

I'm currently using the MERN stack to build my project. I haven't found technical limitations as such since most of them could be solved with the help of online forums & it's been working smoothly

But the biggest challenge for me is to manage each of these stacks as a solo founder. Since my time & attention are limited, I'm only able to work on those frontend/backend/DB tasks which are absolutely necessary :)

What are some of the most essential tools that you use for your business?

I'm using unicorn platform, Pirsch Analytics for page view analytics, stripe for payments, sendgrid for emails but will soon be switching to my own product -> mailboat.io :)

What have been some of the biggest insights you've gained since starting your entrepreneurial journey?

The biggest takeaway for me as an entrepreneur is to hone & practice a lot of patience. While this sounds so simple, practically it's really hard.

We're living in a world of instant gratification where we're used to getting everything we want quickly. That affected my entrepreneurial journey too where I was getting stressed in the first month when there were no sales

I lost a lot of confidence & spent those time feeling low. But the fear of failure kept me going & I put myself together when approaching people about my product. Luckily I got my first paying customer in the second month which instilled a lot of confidence in me.

Ever since then I've always seen patience & tenacity as the highest virtues for entrepreneurs :)

Your recommended books/podcasts/newsletters etc.:

Obviously Awesome by April Dunford was a recent read which I found insightful for the SaaS journey.

My all-time favorite books are Alamanac of Naval Ravikant & Skin in the Game

Indie Bites Podcast & Wannabe Entrepreneurs Podcasts are really great for entrepreneurs

What other products are you working on? (if any)

I've currently started building mailboat.io after facing a problem when building Famewall. At that time, I found it quite difficult to send emails to my customers who were using the SaaS product - Famewall.

Mailboat is an email tool that makes it extremely easy to send email campaigns to customers using a Rich text editor & setup email automation

Mailboat.io is currently under development. Will soon be launching the Private Beta for the product in a month :)

See full interview → FounderBeats interview around Micro SaaS Testimonials Product Famewall

More Insights about this founder and product:

👉 🔒[ Only available in Pro access]

Alexandro Martínez Built SaaSRock - a SaaS Starter Framework - with $3800 in MRR

Alexandro Martinez is the founder of SaasRock - The Remix starter to easily build your SaaS

Tell us about your product and what inspired you to start it?

I’ve created 5 SaaS boilerplates with Vue2, Vue3, Svelte and React with a .NET backend. But after I learned about Remix my building speed got x100! So I created a shell to quickly launch Enterprise-Ready MVPs.

How long did it take you to acquire your first 50 customers, and what was your growth strategy?

One month. My strategy was building an audience by giving v0.0.1 for free for 24 hours, this way I got 1,000 emails. 

This first release was built in a week, so you can imagine how Remix gave me so much development speed. The other boilerplates combined barely made it to 50 customers in 1 year.

Which technology stack are you using and what challenges and limitations does it pose?

Remix: JavaScript framework.

Tailwind CSS: CSS framework.

Prisma: ORM.

These 3 tools are the pillars of SaasRock.

I honestly haven’t found one issue with them. 

Maybe utility-first design (Tailwind) has a longer learning curve if you’re used to pre-built components (Bootstrap), but it’s 100% worth it. Also, the Tailwind Labs team have Tailwind UI with tons of useful UI components.

What are some of the most essential tools that you use for your business?

GumRoad to manage SaasRock customers.

Stripe for Subscriptions and Payments.

Postmark for Transactional Emails.

ConvertKit for Marketing Emails.

Crisp Chat for Customer Messaging.

Loom for making quick tutorials/demos.

Camtasia for making longer videos.

Canva for Thumbnail, Logo and Illustrations.

Twitter for quick updates.

Medium, IH and Dev.to for blog posts.

What have been some of the biggest insights you've gained since starting your entrepreneurial journey?

Making videos is a must for this type of Product/Service. Tech Twitter gives you a lot of leads. Getting out of my comfort zone is something that I ended up enjoying, e.g. DM’ing people, putting my face out there.

I’m building a SaaS on top of SaasRock that I plan to launch at the end of the month. I’m documenting every step on my YouTube channel.

Starting this series is one of the best decision I’ve made since 1) I publicly share what is being added to the SaaS framework and 2) I enjoy it so much. I was afraid that people would not like my videos because I’m not an English native speaker, and my main audience speaks English.

Your recommended books/podcasts/newsletters etc.:

The RefactoringUI book, from Adam and Steve, gave me strong design skills.

See full interview → FounderBeats interview around Micro SaaS Starter Kit

More Insights about this founder and product:

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