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

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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: Pareto Security

Website: https://paretosecurity.com/

Founder(s): Neyts Zupan

Launched: September of 2021

Current MRR range: $1k – $10k

What does Pareto Security do?

Pareto Security is an app that regularly checks your Mac's security configuration. It helps you take care of 20% of security tasks that prevent 80% of problems. It’s great for small remote teams and freelancers.

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

The first thing I did was create a dummy sales page for a non-existent Pareto Security app and spread it among my network to see if there was any interest. Sure enough, more than a hundred people signed up to the newsletter: let the coding begin!

The first beta version was ready in about two months, and the code was released on GitHub. I emailed the people on the waiting list newsletter and got the first couple of users.

The second thing I did was to reach out to the india maker community to share my story. I got on a couple of smaller podcasts and interviews, such as https://indiedevmonday.com/issue-74. This got me to the first hundred users.

So far, users only paid for one-off Lifetime licenses, the revenue wasn’t recurring. We reached out to https://setapp.com/ to get included into their MRR-based custom App Store. It took about a month to get through their process and to integrate their SDK. Once we were included I again reached out to my networks and also worked with SetApp for a small promo they did inside their marketplace. MRR shot up to several hundred € in a couple of weeks.

Next, it was time to get outside my immediate networks. I splurged on a monthly fee for https://prowly.com/pricing/ and sent over 700 cold emails to journalists around the World. As a result we got featured in over 20 news outlets (https://paretosecurity.com/press#articles), bringing a few thousand eyeballs to our sales page.

Finally, it was time to launch our recurring subscription for businesses: Pareto Security for Teams. Another email to our existing userbase, the people on the newsletter and my personal networks and we sold the first few MRR plans.

Adding MRR has mostly been a manual labour of finding people I know or can relate to, reaching out, and selling them the ease of security that Pareto Security can bring to their team. It’s tedious & slow, but as long as the MRR graph keeps going up, I’ll keep at it!

With SetApp and our Teams plan, we reached $1k MRR about 9 months into the project.

How have you scaled Pareto Security beyond $1k MRR?

We only just reached $1k MRR, so nothing really changed much. I’m still manually reaching out to members of the remote & digital nomads community, going on interviews and podcasts, and talking with users to understand what feature or bugfix is needed next. And lots of manual selling to founders like myself.

SetApp daily revenue graph:

Teams MRR graph:

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