Swipe Files - 📂 The First $1k MRR (& Beyond): Reform

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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: Reform

Website: https://www.reform.app

Founder(s): Peter Suhm & Bjørn Lindholm

Launched: April of 2021

Current MRR range: $1k – $10k

What does Reform do?

Reform is a form builder that makes it simple to create clean-looking, on-brand forms such as feedback surveys, sign-up forms, application forms etc. It’s competing with tools like Typeform and Google Forms and the typical customers are founders, marketers, and product managers.

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

When we first had the idea for Reform, we knew that it would take some time to build a form builder that was better than the competition. We knew that if we built a simple MVP and launched it, it wouldn’t be very impressive and probably wouldn’t work. Instead, we decided to put together a well-designed landing page showing some Figma mockups of the end product (the forms) we had envisioned. Together with the website, we hardcoded an early access form as a demo of the product. This worked well because everyone who signed up essentially got a demo of the form builder.

In order to make sure the design and copy was really strong, we kept sending the Figma file to other founder friends for feedback. Each time we got feedback, we iterated on the copy. After 20-30 of these iterations, we could tell that the copy was starting to resonate with folks and felt good about sharing it more widely. We told everyone who gave us feedback that we were planning to launch our idea soon. On the day we launched the idea for Reform on Twitter, we made sure to ask everyone of those people if they would help spread the word. We also tweeted out in advance asking people to share our announcement when we made it (this really helps). Once we had made the announcement on Twitter we held a launch party on Twitter Spaces, which was a new platform at the time. More than 100 people showed up at the Twitter Spaces event and we got about 500 signups to our early access form.

I was constantly reaching out to people on our early access list, and lined up people who had simple enough use cases that they could use an early version of the product. After about a month I rebuilt our own early access form in Reform and 2 weeks after that, we brought on the first customer. The first $400-500 of MRR came from bringing on people from the early access list one by one.

3 months after getting our first paying customer, we felt ready to launch publicly. Again, we made sure we felt really good about the website and copy and prepared a launch post to share on Twitter. I made sure that everyone knew we were going to launch that day. When we finally launched, our launch tweet got more than 100,000 impressions! Launching publicly finally got us to $1k MRR over a couple of months.

How have you scaled Reform beyond $1k MRR?

Once we reached $1k MRR and about 75 paying customers, we felt good enough about Reform to launch on Product Hunt. We put a lot of work into our Product Hunt launch and with 75 customers, we had a nice group of people we could pull for testimonials etc. on the big day. I think a lot of people launch on Product Hunt too early, instead of waiting until the have enough customers to really get a strong momentum. Our work paid off and we became the number one product of the day and week on Product Hunt. Launching on Product Hunt got us to around $2k MRR and we still get traffic from it every day, 7 months later.

After Product Hunt, we took a step back to really focus on making the product better, since our churn was quite high. We still didn’t feel like we had product-market fit. We also knew that now was the time to start to search for more scalable marketing channels. Today, we are mostly focusing on partnerships and SEO. We also launched a free version of Reform recently that we hope will serve as a traffic driver in the future.

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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