super cool to see the maturity in knowing what you want. i realize now that i was wayyyyy more profitable (cash money in my pocket) when my startup was literally 10x smaller. for those aspiring to be the next big blow up, as you grow/scale, overhead and the need to manage your own people start taking over from building product and supporting/making your customers happy.
for context, i'm at ~$400k MRR/just shy of ~$5M ARR and i make way less (in cash) now than i did at $40k MRR. don't get me wrong, the enterprise value has supposedly gone up but that's a lottery ticket versus the consistent cash in your pocket.
Thanks! Super interesting example. Do you prefer the day to day challenges now or when you were at $40k MRR?
I basically look at entrepreneurship as trying to create my perfect job: make $200-500k/ year, work on what I want with smart people, don't have a boss etc. So a lifestyle business. But maybe I'll get bored and want to take a bigger swing, who knows.
What customer support needs generally take up the most of your time? By rest of your time, are you talking 40 hour weeks? 60 hr weeks? Just trying to understand the time commitment for this amount of MRR
People finding bugs - it's a super flexible tool so lots of edge case bugs. Helping people set up their requests (e.g. no-coders who don't totally understand APIs or DF). Then boring stuff like billing queries/refunds etc.
I probably work 30-40 hours a week total.
Out of interest, do you see that work increasing linearly with your number of customers?
Probably but I’ll be able to hire someone to help with it soon!
$80-90k isn't actually that much less than a developer salary (in U.K., not U.S.), but it's an interesting question what I'd do if it didn't grow any more.
I'd probably put it into maintenance-mode, and start another micro-saas, as I love the freedom of working where/when/how I want. I'm hopeful of hitting $150k ARR by end of year though, and $250k next year.