How we Bootstrapped from Zero to $15k MRR in 12 Months: 4 Lessons we Learned

This is the headline I wrote in my head a year ago.

I didn’t know at the time if I would actually write it, but me and my co-founder made a joke at the time about posting something like this on LinkedIn.

We were already four months into building the Cliently MVP, having bootstrapped it entirely after leaving a senior role at a fast-growing company.

We knew from the very beginning that we wanted to build a customer-validated business. Coming from other startups, we've seen how important it is to have a growing number of users agree to take out their card and say “yes, this is worth my money” before we went out and raised VC funds.

Rewind back to early 2015, when I was in charge of global sales for PandaDoc, a Document automation startup. We had grown nearly 2,500% in less than 2 years, and raised over $6M in Seed and Series A. We were growing at a sufficient rate to even be able to take venture debt, which was our other source of financing - as opposed to a Series B.

At the time it was very common for people to come up to me and ask what the magic was to bring more clients on board. My answer was based on something I had patched together myself - there wasn't a tool out there that had the features I needed: prospect lists that are up-to-date or CRMs that let you do more than just schedule emails. That's when I knew there might be an opportunity.

Still, despite “feeling the pain” and seeing the opportunity for a powerful and accurate lead generation and sales automation tool, the trend was - and still is - all about focusing on marketing and media products. So when we started building Cliently's core product, in November 2015, it was twice as important for us to validate our vision through our users first, and investors second.

Fast forward to February 1st 2016. On that day, less than 5 hours from our pre-alpha release and our first sign-up, we got our first paying user. That's when we knew we weren't delusional and we were really on to something: by the end of 2016, we had already hit $7k MRR.

Once we got our first paying user, we knew we weren't delusional and we were really on to something.

And even as we're looking at an $15k MRR for the past month, it didn't come easy. In fact, these past 12 months have been some of the most humbling ones in my entire professional career.

First, we learned to stop making assumptions about who our customers were or what they wanted.

We thought Cliently will be a tool particularly useful for freelancers, but as we launched, tested, and grew, it turned out small sales teams and even bigger marketing agencies or consulting firms are much more interested in us.

When we launched Cliently, we had a vision of an all-in-one service: a place where you can get fresh leads, contact them, and manage the entire sales process. As it turns out, many of our customers like to do each of these things separately - and so we allow them to. We thought our users liked to focus on social media leads, but it turned out they valued our company database more. In a sense, these were things we knew, and were the basis of our original vision, but somewhere along the way we got caught up in the latest “martech buzz”. It was refreshing to be reminded over and over again of what matters for our customers.

Second, we learned to focus on revenue and revenue alone.

That meant doing things that brought in paying users today. Publishing general-purpose content or attending tech conferences took a step back to doing sales the traditional way: calling potential partners, signing up clients, and focusing on customer service - of course, while using our own product.

I learned to say no to anything that deviated Cliently or myself from our core focus on sustainable growth and customer satisfaction. We considered adding marketing-type features to our tool: there are already better options for that, and that's not what our customers needed anyway. We played with machine learning integrations: helpful, but we had to leave them for another day. We considered outsourcing some of the lead qualification work we do as part of our premium plan: our clients trusted us with their sales process, so we decided to do it in-house. Saying no is an ongoing skill I learn and relearn, and preach to my team as well.

Third, we learned that a business is only as valuable as the team behind it.

Some of our early hires thrived and stayed on while others didn't quite work out. For each, the most important factor that made the difference was not their ideas or even their skills, but their eagerness to implement these ideas, to test them out first, and to be comfortable rejecting them if these ideas were not in line with what our customers wanted from us.

Fourth, we learned that we have to live what we preach.

We preach workflow automation and most importantly efficiency. Our Slack has custom channels with plugins installed that ping our team based on different triggers. We use PandaDoc to quickly create proposals from pre-made templates allowing us to focus more time on using our platform to find and engage with prospects and close more deals. Stripe automates all things subscription-related for us: it stays on top of recurring billing so that we don’t have to. And we use our own Zapier integration to streamline our lead to prospect process.

We advocate direct contact with prospects and customers instead of soulless email marketing campaigns. That's why the only real ‘growth hack’ we have used is our own system. We use our company database to target our ideal customer and begin engaging with our workflows. It works like a charm. That's the same reason we use Intercom, essentially a customer support tool, to keeps track of sign-ups, and also to engage with potential clients, offer live chat support, and to send updates and newsletters.

We feel strongly about doing business digitally - and so our team works from all over the world. That has its own challenges, but we've learned to address them quickly and efficiently: each team has daily check-ins and weekly calls. We even do a company-wide weekly call - there's nothing a quick call with your teammate won't fix.

There's nothing a quick call with your teammate won't fix.

These past 12 months have been an incredible ride, but we're not done yet. We're approaching the moment were we need to invest in more advanced technology so that we can serve our customers even better. We plan to allow more workflow actions, add more lead sources, and also to invest in machine learning and artificial intelligence to give our clients key insights and actionable items for their own leads.

Internally, we're getting there: we hired an amazing new CTO, we are on track to triple our revenue and hit 50k MRR by the end of 2017, and we are already in discussions with select VCs to further fund our product development.

If you're an entrepreneur, let me know how this resonates to your story. And don't forget to hit me up for a free trial of Cliently!