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

​

​

Today's newsletter is proudly supported by The Juice 🙌

You're gonna love this... The Juice is essentially Spotify for marketing & sales content. If you're anything like me and you can't get enough blog posts, podcasts, case studies, videos, and ebooks on marketing, look no further.

I'm partnering with them to aggregate all Swipe Files content to concurrently live on The Juice platform, and if you're creating content for your company, you should too. I have three(ish) words for you: built-in distribution.

And if you're a marketing nerd like me, go create a free account and start exploring their already massive library to take your marketing game to the next level.

​

​

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

Product: Approximated

Website: https://approximated.app​

Founder(s): Carter Bryden

Launched: March of 2021

Current MRR range: $1k – $10k

What does Approximated do?

Approximated lets you connect unlimited custom domains (or subdomains) to your app with a really easy API, then secures them with SSL and monitors them for you. It's very useful for any developer or an agency but it’s hugely valuable for SAAS and marketplace apps.

For many SAAS and marketplaces, it's become table stakes to let your end users connect their own domains to the app - ie. using your own domain for a Shopify store or with a blog host.

They need to be SSL secured, fast, reliable, and monitored. Otherwise it turns from a great feature to a support nightmare quickly. In a lot of cases, apps are running on globally distributed servers and serving a global user base, so the custom domains feature needs to be optimized for that too, which can be really difficult to engineer.

To solve that problem:

• Approximated lets you spin up dedicated reverse proxy clusters with a couple of clicks.
• Each cluster can be globally distributed out of the box, and is priced on a flat rate by how many global regions you’d like it to operate in.
• It comes with a dedicated Anycast IPv4 and IPv6 address so that custom domains can be pointed with a single A record if they’d like, instead of requiring a subdomain or nameserver change for their users.
• Anycast IP addresses automatically route through the region nearest the end user, so that request latency is as low as possible.

Connecting a custom domain to your app (or an IP address, domain, page, etc.) is one API call, and Approximated takes care of the rest. It completely eliminates a huge chunk of engineering and ongoing maintenance for customers, and provides constant monitoring as well for every custom domain automatically.

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

The first thing I did was reach out to founders I followed on social media who were still in the early stages of their apps, who either mentioned custom domains or who I thought would likely need them sooner or later.

Most of them told me that they either had no idea how to make that feature work or that they'd be searching for a solution without any luck. Approximated wasn't even finished yet so I rushed to get the minimum feature set up and then on-boarded about 3 people manually right away without setting up any kind of billing. I told them they could use it for a while and see if it covered what they needed before we figured out billing. They were all happy to pay after a short time, most asked me to before I came to them.

I got my first 10 customers reaching out that way, and most of them turned it into a major premium feature, often top billed on their marketing pages. I later added subscription billing so that people could self onboard, and now people I've never heard of start trials without my involvement at all.

During this, my second child arrived, and I started a new full time job at a startup. So I had roughly zero time to spend on it, but I managed to still grow slowly in a few ways:

1. By using a social media and community monitoring tool (Syften) to find mentions of certain keywords and phrases, so that I could jump in and talk to them, hopefully at exactly the right time. This works remarkably well and these are really worth your time. Each new subscription is worth 3-5x their annual payments (or more) if you ever decide to sell the company. So a $50/month subscription is really worth at least $1800-$3000. Striking up a conversation is low effort and they're usually so happy to have a solution to a hard problem.
2. Posting and replying in a few key communities like Indiehackers when the topic came up. Those posts are still one of the best sources of traffic. Daily hits ever since.
3. By being friendly and helpful with no expectations in public when I could. DIY is a major competitor for most products. By helping people figure out how they can do it themselves, they often decide they'd like to have someone else handle it. And even if not, I've really helped someone out and made a friend.
4. Offering deals if people blogged or posted about how they integrated it. Bonus if they did it as a tutorial. Most of these people are new to building their own business and would much rather spend time than money. They're very light users of the product, so it works out with expenses. And it helps them boost their own brand and presence. This brings in good traffic too. Win win.

I also tried sponsoring a podcast without getting any hits (that I could tell anyways). And finally I joined a few business groups/communities like megamaker and microconf where people like me hang out. While selling on those is not the goal at all, it lead to some of the better sales as they tend to be ideal customers for this and it's a hard problem to solve so they came to me.

How have you scaled Approximated beyond $1k MRR?

It's only recently crossed $1k MRR so I'm short on experience here, but I have a few plans:

1. The nature of Approximated is that it's a critical core piece of customer apps. Some customers have expressed a lot of interest in enterprise level plans that include some more control or self hosting to some degree, and they're willing to spend a lot more to get that. They also want longer term contracts and potentially paid SLA plans, which if handled right can be a huge revenue jump.
2. Well targeted marketing pages. So far I've gotten by with a single landing page on Carrd and zero other marketing pages, which is leaving a lot on the table. Comparison pages, tutorials, and landing pages targeted at specific app types and communities will likely do really well here, if I post them in the right places. I've already seen simple replies in threads bring in traffic daily for months, this would likely ramp that up quite a bit if the SEO is done well.
3. Integrations. There's a huge number of really large and growing platforms out there that have users who pretty desperately want a solution for this, but who may not be able to integrate it themselves. Particularly no code platforms. Building integrations and listing/promoting them could be a huge channel.
4. Being nimble and zigging when major competitors zag. Approximated has a few competitors but the only one that comes up consistently is a huge company. When they commit to some new feature or pricing, changing course is incredibly difficult for them, like turning a large cargo ship. So I'll be looking for the tradeoffs that they've given up and the customers those decisions leave behind in their wake. Then I can build the counter-feature to theirs, or use a different pricing model and become the best alternative for those people.

Fun fact: it's called Approximated because it's a play on Automated Proxy.

Hot tip: Don't use 5 syllable app names.

p.s. use the code BF2022 for $100 off your Swipe Files membership through Friday, 12/2. Check out the Swipe Files membership →​

Thanks again to our featured sponsors:

1. ​Agorapulse: “The Zappos of social media management platforms” helps you plan, schedule, and report on your social presence.
2. ​Ahrefs: Ahrefs Webmaster Tools is a free SEO toolset to help you build backlinks, improve your site, and rank for keywords.
3. ​The Juice: “Spotify for marketing & sales content” to discover blogs, podcasts, and videos to help you grow your business.
4. ​42/Agency: My #1 recommended demand generation agency for SaaS to help you drive demos and signups.
5. ​Supermetrics: Get all your marketing data into your reporting tool of choice. Push data from 70+ integrations into Google Data Studio, Sheets, and more.

​

​

​