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

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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: Prezly

Website: https://www.prezly.com

Founder(s): Jesse Wynants & Gijs Nelissen

Launched: October of 2010

Current MRR range: $1M+

What does Prezly do?

Prezly is a storytelling platform that helps organizations publish, distribute and own their stories with the goal of creating fans.

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

The first thing we did was get our current employers to use it. Which was easy, because we built Prezly specifically because we found out that need while working there.

The second thing we did was invite the competitors of our then-employers to start using it, which they did since they saw how my ex-employer was publishing their news, press releases and stories.

Then we built an aggregator showing all news off companies in that same sector using Prezly to publish news.

How have you scaled Prezly beyond $1k MRR?

Once we reached $1k MRR, we started to venture into slightly different type of organisation. We started with advertising agencies, since we both happen to work at an advertising agency at that time. But by accident we figured out our solution was even more valuable for PR agencies, who send out press releases every single day.

From there the customers of those PR agencies started wondering what their agencies were using to send out stories, and reached out as well.

So it although we raised past the first 1k MRR quite easily and organically as described above, it took a lot more effort to get to ramen profitability, so we could start paying ourselves. This required a combination of selling bigger enterprise deals for more custom plans with a lot of personal outreach within our network or via the network of our current customers.

Once we got to ramen profitability, we started investing in a content strategy, and from that moment till this day 90% of customers come in through either organic or referral.

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