📂 The First $1k MRR (& Beyond): Magic Sales Bot

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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: Magic Sales Bot

Website: https://magicsalesbot.com

Founder(s): Ryan Doyle

Launched: November of 2021

Current MRR range: $1k

What does Magic Sales Bot do?

MSB is a signal tracker for inside sales teams at B2B companies. It consolidates and automates research that reps spend a lot of time on, so they can get back to selling with high-value intel.

Reps upload their account list to the tool, and we scour the internet daily for funding, hiring, news, financials, and new employees they might care about. Then, we integrate with their sending tools to make prospecting quick and painless.

How did you get the first $1k MRR for Magic Sales Bot?

I’ve actually grown Magic Sales Bot to $1k MRR - twice.

The first was when I launched with a totally different solution under the same name. It used GPT-3 to automate writing cold emails. I launched on product hunt at the intersection of GPT-3 hype and interest in new projects, about February 2021.

By April, it popped up to $1,300 MRR almost entirely on the hype of the Product Hunt launch. It was also a function of how interesting GPT projects were at the time. People were starving for new GPT tools because so few people had access to the AI. I’d talk about what I was building and how I was building it on Twitter, and people would follow the link in my bio to my site. It also solved a real problem: how can we make good outreach take less time and effort?

But it failed to solve a repeatable pain for a core cadre of users. My customers were mostly new tech fanatics who are very open to trying new things, but only a few were professional salespeople. And by how I was solving the problem, users would sign up for a few months and cancel after they had written more emails than they could conceivably use in a lifetime.

By October of 2021, churn took me back down to about $300 MRR. It was rough. I felt rough. But I had a few users that I kept speaking with who were using the tool in an unexpected way: They would use the tool to write the emails, but then dissect it to glean the background data I was feeding to GPT-3. Then, they were using that to write their own sales emails.

It began to dawn on me. The tool in its current state sucked, because even I wasn’t using it for its intended purpose. But what if I changed the intended purpose? My next bet, in November of 2021, was to strip away all GPT-3 features. I changed the workflow to have users upload all of their accounts. Every day, I’d check the data sources and email them with new updates on their accounts.

I sent a few emails to friends in sales. My one friend booked a call with me because I asked to onboard him personally. In that onboarding call, as data started to populate on his accounts, he saw a “signal” he had missed in his research. He had sent an email to that prospect during our call, and ended up booking a $70k deal from that one little data point.

My confidence about the problem I was solving began to grow. I had one story, and I wanted more. Since then, I operate in a cycle: I come up with an idea of what type of company can use MSB. I upload a list of them into my own tool. I wake up every day and prospect based on the signals I’ve generated in the tool.

This way, when I eventually get them on a demo, they can see that it works because the conversation was a direct result of the tool. Using the tool to sell the tool has led to almost all of my customers. Others have come through my usage of GummySearch, where I can hop into Reddit conversations with salespeople who are asking about prospecting research.

In either scenario, I try to get every user on a call, onboard them personally, and talk to them about their signals. I still send many users emails every week about signals I’m seeing, and what they should write to their prospects.

So it’s come about mostly by hustle, and probably will as I go from 20 customers to 100.

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