How To Reach $10,000/Month Revenue with MVP and Be Profitable
About 90% of startups fail. Either you can be in 10% of winners having your own company with an expensive headquarter and smoothies in your office, or you can lose and look for a new job on LinkedIn.
If you want to be in those 10%, you have to pass at least a milestone of validating your MVP in a market and avoid deadly traps.
Let me show you how.
But why should you care what some random cofounder has to say about MVP?
I’ve been a cofounder from scratch for a few years now and we managed to reach a $10,000/month revenue.
In short, I know how MVP stage startup works.
Let’s see how you can get these results and how we got it with our startup Bumpy.
Technical startup for technical founders
If you don’t want to rob your bank account with a 90% risk of failing, at least you have to have a 1 cofounder who will be in charge of technical aspects or your startup will probably die.
In our scenario, both me and my cofounder are technical founders.Trust me it helped us a lot. Otherwise the process would be too slow and we’d end up making lots of mistakes.
So be a technical cofounder or find one. It dramatically decreases your chance of losing.
If I needed to find a co-founder, I’d go to a community like this to send my request.
Launch your MVP as faster as possible
The main goal of MVP is to find out if people need your product? That’s simply it.
Don’t overestimate your startup. Even your Mom says it’s cool. But, you don’t know if someone really needs your product or it’s just your unrealistic dreams.
Launch as fast as possible, even if it doesn’t have “fancy” functionalities yet or it has bugs. The most important aspect is to validate your idea and launch with fundamental functionalities.
We did our launch after 1 year of development. And you know what? It failed. It wasn’t in demand at all as we expected.
YCombinator described perfectly why a fast launch is essential. I recommend to watch/read their article about it.
Focus on 1 channel of growth
The fastest way to fail with your startup is to burn your money on ads. At least if you don’t have a positive ROI. Probably you don’t.
It’s not a secret that the best customer is an organic customer.
We got 215.000+ users just from one App Store page after 1.5 years, 99% organically.
We only fueled ASO by ads with a small amount of money, around $250–500 per month.
Don’t try to scale before you reach a product-market fit. Ads are an addictive machine for burning your money.
I’d recommend at least 1 cofounder to focus on ASO or SEO, depending on your product.
In our case, I worked on ASO from scratch and then delegated it when it went vital.
Be lean as possible
Payrolls are the main character of your burn rate.
Don’t try to hire someone if it’s not necessary. It can be a a trap to try to scale when MVP is not validated yet.
You should follow ramen profitability as much as possible before reaching product-market fit.
Better invest money in yourself in order to be able to quit your job and be 100% focused on your startup.
We hired, we fired. It was not easy. Trust me.
The best book of my founder’s life is The Lean Startup. Get it if you’re a technical founder like me and don’t have startup experience. It’s the Grail of the startup world.
Make a pivot to survive
After the launch of our product, for 1 year we’ve been trying to continue to build the product without any significant changes. But still, nobody wanted it.
What was a mistake? We didn’t know what a pivot is and how it works.
A pivot is a “structured course correction designed to test a new fundamental hypothesis about the product, strategy, and engine of growth.” — The Lean Startup.
I studied The Lean Startup about a pivot. The product was almost dead, but there were only few people who paid for it. I found that users hacked the product and used it in different way.
So we decided to make a pivot as fast as possible before it would be too late.
As a result, we analyzed our active users, who paid for the product and decided to change it in terms how they use it.
We changed our marketing message on Bumpy’s App Store page, and made a few minor changes to the product. Then, boom, we reached $1,000 revenue from almost zero after 1–2 months.
Tons of code and time almost got us thrown out and it wasn’t our last pivot at that time.
My recommendation is to have a strong belief about your product and don’t give up even if the product doesn’t meet your expectations or it looks like no one is interested.
Get more info about pivoting here.
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To find out what our product looks like, go to our stores App Store & Google Play or a webpage.
