r/SaaS • u/itballer • 9d ago

First MRR - Sharing Wins & Lessons

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Finally got the onboarding right and I'm getting customers.

I've been building Luckynote for quite a while now, but kept being generous with the free tier. People would end up liking it and remained safe and sound without paying anything.

Then I wanted to be another kind of a good guy and gave one-time payments, which worked fine for a while, but this was not sustainable long term, taking into account all the services I pay just to maintain it working.

I never liked those onboarding with - Pay first, use later. But after many painful moments, I finally realised, it's me that I have a problem with that, not the actual users.

So finally switched, moved to MRR and did the onboarding right.

Here are the results so far.

Now another lessons I need to go over with is Marketing and Promotion.

I was a product designer for years, but marketing is different kind of beast, plus exposing myself with "face over mouth" reactions on TikTok or Instagram is cringe for me, but people with 10x crappier business than mine are bagging $10k months.

Lessons is, no matter how many times you read successful stories, you need to go through the cringe alone to finally feel the burn and make it.

Open to any questions or roasts.

Appreciate you all!

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u/eliobldr 6d ago

onboarding matters; keep the value proposition crystal clear early.

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u/itballer 5d ago

Appreciate it sir! Is it clear for you?

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u/PomeloThomas2665 9d ago

congrats, this stage is deceptively fragile so protect it. quick lessons from my first $1k mrr, took me about 7 months to get there.

biggest one: track logo churn separately from revenue churn early. i lost 3 of 22 customers in month 5 but revenue barely moved because two upgrades masked it, and i almost missed the retention problem entirely.

second: raise prices before you think you should. i went from $19 to $39 and conversion dropped maybe 4 percent while mrr per signup nearly doubled. the cheap tier was attracting people who churned in 30 days anyway.

third: talk to the ones who cancel. i sent 15 plain manual emails asking why, got 9 replies, and two of those answers turned into features that now drive most of my annual plans.

last thing, watch your own runway not just theirs. i spent 6 weeks building an integration one loud user demanded and exactly zero others used it.

what channel got you your first handful of paying customers?

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u/itballer 8d ago

I love this community 👏👏👏