📂 The First $1k MRR (& Beyond): Cartfuel

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This is The First $1k MRR (& Beyond), a series about how founders got traction for their startups, told by the founders themselves.

Product: Cartfuel

Website: https://cartfuel.io

Founder(s): Jelani

Launched: October 2020

Current MRR range: $1k – $10k

What does Cartfuel do?

Cartfuel is a payment form builder that helps businesses and entrepreneurs sell digital one-time and subscription products. Users connect their Stripe or PayPal account and can create payment forms that can be embedded on their website. Most customers use Cartfuel to sell courses, consulting, coaching, memberships or tickets.

What makes Cartfuel valuable is you can use your own website to accept payments. You don’t need to use a complex funnel or website builder that limits you. You create the payment form and then embed it on your existing website.

We also allow users to create order bumps and one-click upsells to increase customer average order value.

How did you get the first $1k MRR for Cartfuel?

When we launched Cartfuel we launched a lifetime deal. We were able to make our first few thousand dollars but then switched to MRR.

When we switched we had only 1 customer the first few months. MRR stagnated at $24-$48 for months.

We didn’t make any real money until we did two things:

1. We increased our prices across all plans
2. Listed Cartfuel on the HubSpot marketplace

When our MRR was $24-$48/mo the prices was $24/mo for all plans.

I split the plans into three. Lite Plan, Growth Plan, Pro Plan.

The lite plan was $17/mo.

The growth plan was $24/mo.

The pro plan was $97/mo.

When we launched on HubSpot we made sure that the HubSpot integration only came with the Pro plan.

So if users found us on HubSpot and wanted to use Cartfuel, they would have to use our most expensive plan, automatically boosting MRR.

We wanted to launch on HubSpot because we knew that users on that platform spent money on marketing and were use to paying for tools $97/mo and above.

The theory proved true as MRR started to increase pretty much immediately when we launched on HubSpot.

Before listing on HubSpot marketplace the main distribution avenue we tried was SEO. SEO did work and still works, but it takes longer to build a solid foundation.

We didn’t get any users from our SEO efforts until maybe 6-12 months after our first few YouTube videos and blog posts.

Between SEO and HubSpot marketplace we have found a solid play in growing now.

Since HubSpot has 100,000 paying users we can utilize the marketplace as a way to get distribution. But because we are on the HubSpot marketplace we can make SEO content for HubSpot users who are looking for our solution…
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And because we’re on the HubSpot marketplace more users will trust that we are the an authority figure since to be listed on HubSpot you have to pass certain criteria.

We have tried cold emailing and jumping on calls but that hasn’t moved the needle as much as creating valuable content for specific users or platforms.

How have you scaled Cartfuel beyond $1k MRR?

Once we reached $1k MRR, we doubled down on the things that we identified to work, which was SEO.

We asked our current active paying customers or trial users how they found us and the answer 9/10 is Google or YouTube.

So we’re going to continue with SEO as our long term growth play.

p.s. do you want 2023 to be your best year of growth yet? Let's make that ARR chart go up and to the right. Check out the Swipe Files membership →​

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