Karma bot is a simple Slack bot doing $33K MRR.

Your business doesn’t have to be complicated.

It doesn’t have to be unique

It doesn’t have to be ground breaking tech

It doesn’t even need AI 🤷🏻

It just has to solve a painful problem.

Like Karma Bot does.

• Karma Bot’s value proposition is very clear from their landing page - the help improve connection in remote teams, and help with retention.
• They even have a savings calculator on their website - The money that teams can save because of staff turnover.

Interesting Lessons from their journey:

• From the revenue graph above, you can see the business peaked during COVID, and then they had a dip.
• They rode on the remote work trend, then fell off. But revenue is picking up again. So this IS the new normal.
• It was started as a side project, bootstrapped by a 2 person team.
• It is a 6 year old project - so NOT an overnight success by any means.
• They get most of their traffic from the Slack and MS teams apps marketplaces. As I’ve said before - go where money is already changing hands. (Read - Money making ideas for more marketplaces to consider building for)
• Their ARPU is $100, so with just 350 users they could reach $35K MRR. As we’ve discussed before, there’s way more value in selling to “higher ups”​

Read more in this interview they did back in 2021 -

• ​Karma Bot on Get Latka​

One last lesson -

I found this review on G2 which highlighted their value proposition beautifully -

Next time, you come up with a new idea, think about how you can get your users to give such reviews.

Hope you found this useful.

Here's a web version of this post to bookmark and share.

Cheers 🙌

From the vault -

3 random post from the Superframeworks archives -

• ​$250K in 1 year as a solo founder​
• ​$34K MRR - Simple chatbot builder tool​
• ​Why sell to “higher-ups”?​

🔗 Super Links

Useful links you don’t want to miss -

• ​new essay: someday - Shaan Puri
• ​Marketing cheat code for first time founders - me
• ​Organic Growth Formula to go from $700K to $3M - Karthik Sridharan
• ​22 rules from YC that every founder must know - Abhishek
• ​I don't think freemium is a good model for bootstrappers to leverage - Asia Orangio

Last week's top link -

• ​How To Use Data To Build a $10M+ Business Online - MFM Pod | YT

🤗 How can I help?

Whenever you’re ready, here’s how I can help you -

• ​Join the tiny community of for yoru big dreams -
  • Feedback sessions/Demo Days to get personalized feedback 📝
  • Co-working sessions and a peer accountability group with weekly checkins 💪
  • Courses, Tutorials, Workshops on topics like SEO, Copywriting, Landing Pages, and more so that you keep growing 🚀
  • And lots more!
• We support, inform, educate and inspire each other every day. We are a tight knit group of indie hackers and solopreneurs working on our projects. We would love to have you. Entrepreneurship is hard, don’t do it alone. Come join us!​

Thanks,

Ayush 🙏