How Nathan Barry Built ConvertKit to $2.1 Million Per Month 

Even if you know Nathan Barry's story (author starts growing a following online, gets enamored with email marketing, builds a SaaS, becomes a bootstrapped success story), you're likely going to find value in this interview — particularly if you need the motivation to start or keep building. 

There's a lot here about the value of doing things that don't scale and how efforts in business compound over time. Today, ConvertKit has close to 34,000 active users. 

Noteworthy insights:

• Nathan was highly influenced by a sentiment he heard from content marketing guy Sean McCabe: Show up every day for two years.
• Nathan documented the process of building ConvertKit and set a goal of reaching $5,000 MRR within 6 months. He didn't meet that goal: He reached around $2k MRR after half a year.
• From talking to customers in the early days, Nathan learned that they didn't want to deal with the process of switching from their current email software provider. So he started offering to do it for them for free — a process that could take up to 8 hours. He views the time spent doing that as an investment in the business. 
• ConvertKit has launched a paid newsletter product. Nathan shares how the vision for it differs from Substack, which he compares to Amazon — end-to-end solution w/limited customization. He thinks of ConvertKit's newsletter monetization product more like Shopify — simple to use, but with a lot of options to customize. 

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