This seems really aggressive, especially for bootstrapped companies. My startup took 31 months to hit $10k MRR, and now we're at ~$130k MRR. I'm really glad I didn't quit after three months. I barely even had the product built after three months.

I think that for most people, if they abandon anything that's not already a huge success three months in, they'll just end up bouncing from one thing to the next and never seeing anything through. It's virtually impossible to bootstrap that quickly, and I'd be surprised if many of the big VC-backed startups we've heard of hit that either (certainly not Google or Facebook who weren't even monetizing yet at that point).

I strongly agree. Let's do the math: With a brand new un-proven product with an unproven pricing model, how many customers does it take to get to $10K MRR? In three months, how many qualified leads can you find and reach, and what percentage of those will close? (with an unproven product in an unproven market, 2% is probably a realistic estimate).

Of course there are scenarios where $10K MRR is possible quickly, but there's no way that is what most successful software businesses look like in 3 months.

It's certainly not a hard goal -- I wouldn't pretend that even SaaS businesses are all that similar. (The degree of reassessment after 3 months is up to you, after all.)

It's really a way to frame the product launch by forcing you to ask hard questions about what you're doing. If you don't even see a way for the product to reach $10k/month with a short-term plan, maybe it's a side project rather than a startup? Or maybe the product niche is too vague or unprofitable, and you need to work on that first?

(I can't edit the parent comment anymore, so a clarification: when I wrote "not a hard goal", I meant that the $10k number is just a rough ballpark -- not that the goal would be somehow easy to accomplish.)

Have you already accomplished such a goal?

Yes, but no thanks to myself. I wasted about a decade being a crap entrepreneur that didn't have such goals. It was easy to rationalize spending time on the work I liked doing under the pretense that I was improving the product's fundamentals. In retrospect, I would have been much better off facing my fears and doing clearly delineated 3-month efforts with revenue targets rather than persisting with products that don't quite work.

I'm still a crap entrepreneur, but I've become slightly better at teaming up with people who can make it happen.

Have you started a side project and after 3 months you were making 10k per month?

No, but I've been in a startup that got to $10k MRR in under three months after launching the product... And that opened my eyes to what all the talk about the mythical "traction" actually meant.

If it's a side project, that's a different game. A side project doesn't need traction to be successful for its creator.

3 months after launch is a lot more specific, your first comment suggests 3 months after starting...

Yeah, while this may be good advice for some types of markets/businesses/circumstances, there's no way that it's useful as general advice, especially not for side projects or small companies that only need to support one person. Getting that initial traction is the hardest part. Quitting after 3 months is silly.

I don't know how much Atlassian made in its first three months, but they are one of the only bootstrapped tech companies to go public in the last 2 decades. It took them 15 years. While this is not necessarily the fastest path to success, I 100% believe it deserves immense respect. They're one of the biggest success stories in tech as far as I'm concerned.

(Of note, Atlassian has mainly focused on enterprise markets)

I think the $10k goal is sort of a brain hack. From my understanding, the real goal here is to force you think differently.

I think $10k MRR is a good target. It's basically a limit of ramen profitability for a small team of 2-4 (depending on the family etc. responsibilities of the team), plus a little bit of extra to run the business. When you hit that, it's possible to commit full-time without extra financing and you don't run out of your savings.

I wish all my competitors would take this advice.

$10k MRR in 3 months seems like a lofty goal to me. Is that from product launch? or from day 0? with or without investment?

From product launch. The point is to launch something that you can imagine selling $10k/month; that you have some kind of plan how to get to that level of sales; and that you'll hold yourself accountable after three months if it fails (and figure out what to do next, not just stick to the thing that wasn't working).

$10k MMR sounds like a lot of money, but it is not. Most people who have never run a business fail to realize how much overhead there is - costs that the business has to pay that isn't labor or obvious materials. If you make a widget from iron it is easy to calculate the cost of the iron in the widget. Did you ever consider how much toilet bowl cleaner is in each widget though, what about your time to clean the toilet? (once you are making more money you pay someone else to clean the toilet, but you still have to account for your time checking that they actually clean it) $10k MMR sounds like a lot, but after overhead I would expect it would give you the equivalent of $50k/year in salary - I think most people reading this make more than that.

To answer your question: The day all your other investment dries up in the worst case. If you have no job or savings you can probably live 3 months on things like your credit cards and not paying the landlord - after those 3 months you better have enough income to start paying your personal debt. That is you need to send the landlord a check for at least 1.5 months rent and with a promise to pay the rest off soon. Likewise you need to be able to buy your groceries with cash and pay down the credit card dept you ran up. It should go without saying that in those 3 months your personal bills should be just enough to stay alive.

Note that the above is the worse case. If you are in month two of the above situation and realize that you won't make the $10kMMR number you should cut your losses, declare bankruptcy and find a day job.

You probably have some savings to live off of though. This means that you have some flexibility. If you are in month 2 and realize you won't make the 10kMMM you can decide if you cut your losses now or not. You have an idea of what your overhead is, who your real competition is and what your leads are (and thus likely future MMR - though don't get over optimistic), if you think things will get better continue, if not cut your losses: you can probably sell to a competitor for a small price and make everyone happy.

If you have investors who are any good at all they have considered your business plan. Sometimes they will insist on the 10kMMR or they will exit, other times they will agree to fund a plan that won't make money for months - but the plan covers that and you have enough income from the investors to live.

There are always other considerations to. 10kMMR is a good number, but you have to figure out how it applies. If your target market is snow plows you should expect your entire income to come during the 3 winter months, and 0 the rest of the year. Thus in winter your MMR needs to be at least 40kMMR, and you need a savings plan of some sort to get through summer.

Don't forget that you can sometimes moonlight. Maybe your ideal is only worth $2kMMR. If you can support this business working only 8 hours a month you keep (or find) a day job for most of your income. That extra 8 hours a month works out to $100/hour after overhead. This again changes the calculations.

> You need to get your company to 10k USD monthly product revenue within three months.

You probably need to add how much you can spend on customers acquisition to your equation.

Generally speaking, I'd say $10k MRR in three months from a dead start is only really doable if your "product" is in large part a service....e.g., a visualization tool for enterprise customers so they can better understand their data sets (requiring extensive setup and bespoke integrations), or something like that.

I'm sorry but I find this advice deeply misguided. Few startups get to $1k MRR in their first quarter, let alone 10X that. Three months is a good timeframe for a first release and hopefully a few paying customers, but this is unrealistic.

I think this is a rough rule of thumb, obviously there's nothing magical about the $10K figure, but it does get you thinking in the right direction.

Really interested in hearing more about this. Do you have any examples of who is pitching this?

Pitching? I don't know if there's really anything to pitch here. It's the kind of thing I've been told over lunch a few times, and seen happen in practice. That's all.