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

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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: CloudForecast

Website: https://www.cloudforecast.io

Founder(s): Tony Chan and Francois Lagier

Launched: July 2017

Current MRR range: $100k – $1M

What does CloudForecast do?

CloudForecast helps busy engineering teams get better visibility into their AWS cost through easy-to-understand reports that can be sent via Email, Slack or Microsoft Teams. Our features and reports help them quickly manage AWS cost across different teams, prevent any overspends, rapidly respond to possible day-over-day cost anomalies, and promote opportunities to save costs.

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

$150 MRR

The VERY first thing we did was a sprint on an MVP to present to potential users for feedback. We knew from the start that we needed to tap into our personal network to get our first users. Since this was a problem we’ve faced at our previous jobs, we were very familiar with the problem itself and potential users. We knew exactly how to describe the problem and the pain point that CloudForecast will solve for those users.

With that focus in mind, Francois reached out to the VP of Engineering at his wife’s then-employer and also to a friend who was on the infrastructure team at another company. In addition, Kacy reached out to his former boss, who was the CTO. All three were very receptive to giving us direct feedback to help us iterate on our MVP.

We spent roughly 2 months gathering feedback via emails and calls to refine what we had. We did our best to listen, build a strong relationship with them, understand their problems and move fast on feedback. Once the prototype was in a good place it was a soft sell to let them know that the beta would end in 30 days, and we asked them if it was now valuable enough for them to pay for a subscription. All three saw the value in our product, and they became the first three customers of CloudForecast.

$150 to $800 MRR

The next step was to do a “Show HN” post to see how receptive the public was to CloudForecast as an official launch. Since our users are technical, we figured Hacker News was a place many of them would hang out on.

There was a bit of luck involved with this launch, but we ended up on the front page that day in the second spot: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17551796. This netted us roughly 75 sign-ups, solid exposure to our audience, and good (and ofc toxic) feedback via the comments.

We ran the same exact play book for these sign-ups as we did for our first three users; be highly engaged by jumping on calls with them, build trust, provide excellent customer support, and move fast on their feedback. We did things that did not scale with our initial users. All in all, this netted us about ~$650 MRR in the preceding months.

$800 to $1700 MRR

The ShowHN post continued to pay dividends well beyond the post date as we continued to get organic inbound sign-ups via search through that post.

The next channel we shifted our focus on was Cold Outbound Outreach. This channel netted us our first enterprise customer at $900 MRR in its first week! Here’s the email we used:

Unfortunately, we were unable to replicate that success to make it a predictable channel that kept performing. We slowly learned that cold outbound outreach is a super tedious channel that requires a huge time commitment and focus. It was super difficult for me to balance working on that channel along with the other priorities I have on the business side.

Do I regret wasting time on this channel and placing our bets on this? Absolutely not! That’s just part of being a startup founder….making the best decision possible on the limited data you have. Despite the setback with this, we learned A LOT from the calls, conversions, and the countless rejections received (“go F yourselves” emails). Also, I know A LOT more about cold outbound outreach than I did before. We do however plan to revisit this channel again in the near future.

There wasn’t one magic bullet that got us to $1k MRR. It was a lot of scrapping, a bit of luck, doing things that don’t scale, testing channels (even if they fail), and offering amazing customer support which led to a feedback loop to iterate on our product.

How have you scaled CloudForecast beyond $1k MRR?

As we learned more about our users and as we received more sign-ups, it was clear that search (googling things) was a primary driver of sign ups and free trials. This led us to invest heavily in SEO and Content Marketing as a channel and try to learn everything there is to know about that channel. With a developer audience, Francois established the following principles for every CloudForecast article published:

1. Must be related to the problem we’re solving, AWS cost monitoring and management.
2. Must be in–depth, practical, interesting, and valuable
3. Decent KW Volume and low KW difficult %

With these three principles in mind, Francois and I mapped out a few known problem areas related to AWS cost, used Ahrefs to double-check KW volume and difficulty %, and leveraged a technical content agency to help develop these pieces. The first successful piece of article was a 3 part series on AWS tags, which ended up on the front page of HackerNews. After that, it took roughly 2.5-3 months to see that article rank on the first page of the SERPs.

Today, we’re publishing roughly 2-3 articles per month on AWS cost related articles.

Referrals and our own personal network have also been another strong area of revenue and customer growth. That can be attributed back to making sure all our users feel loved and taken care of, doing things that don’t scale. We still run a similar play book from our early days for every qualified sign up and scrap for every bit of MRR. All our sign-ups still get a personalized email from me throughout their free trial journey to ensure they are 100% taken care of (they might think it’s automated, though).

We’re a small (mostly) self-funded startup so our speed, amazing customer support, and feature velocity are our competitive advantages against our VC backed competitors.. There isn’t one channel that has really “made” it for us, and we’re still figuring out how to market to our audience. The most important lesson after $1k is to stay consistent, put in the reps, fail, learn and try different things even if it may feel uncomfortable. It all comes back to deeply understanding your audience and the problem you’re solving for them to make their lives easier.

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