Jon Yongfook @yongfook Twitter profile

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Jon Yongfook

8 months

Life of an indie SaaS founder: - 9am sit down to work - ok lets build this cool feature today - oh some support requests first - dangit a bug needs fixing - ugh that took longer than expected - 1pm ok time for lunch - welp guess I'll build that cool feature tomorrow

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

2 years

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

1 year

My salary over the last 20 years

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

3 years

I'm a dev. My app makes $22k / mo. I just revealed that my server costs are $1200 / mo. Typical dev response: you could save money if you <massive migration to XYZ platform> Reality check: I'm not looking to save a few hundred bucks per month. I'm looking to grow my business.

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

6 months

Every startup who built a wrapper around ChatGPT right now.

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

3 years

This grew into a $12 billion business. Ship your MVP.

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

1 year

AI startups building on GPT realizing that new GPT basically replaces their product offering.

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

2 years

StRaTegY

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

10 months

Taylor Swift will make $10 million *on each day* of her upcoming Eras tour. But the crazy thing? Most people are using Notion entirely wrong. Here’s 10 ways to bootstrap your AI startup to $8 MRR. 🧵👀

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

1 year

I'm 42 years old. I run an indie SaaS doing $550,000 / year. This is my daily routine:

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

11 months

I’m 17 years old. 3 months ago I launched a SaaS business that now makes over $10 million per month. And the crazy thing? 6 months ago I didn’t even know what a computer was. Here are the 7 todolist apps that I use daily to run my empire:

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

4 years

My SaaS paid for my rent this month. Bootstrapping milestone!

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

3 years

Salesforce made $17 billion in 2020 revenue and is a single php file. No frameworks. No libraries.

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

1 year

Here’s why I’m not worried about AI. On the left is a Player Piano. They can cost as little as $2000 and they play themselves. This one was in a mall, and everyone was ignoring it. On the right is a human playing a piano in a mall.

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

3 years

I’m about $500 MRR away from my bootstrapped startup revenue equaling my previous corporate salary. I think it will happen this month. 3 years of grinding.

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

3 years

How @zapier got started. Now serving 100,000+ paying customers and doing $50 million in ARR.

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

9 months

If you calculate the correct values for nested radii you have launched too late.

Aleks

@aleksliving

9 months

quick tip for nested radii → your corners will look a lot better if you set the outer radius to the sum of the inner radius + padding

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

9 months

Today’s office #digitalnomad I cannot see shit.

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

2 years

Churn is brutal this month and new business is slow. MBA consultant: have you considered decreasing churn and increasing new business?

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

4 years

A year ago my SaaS startup was making $40 MRR. Now it’s on $7000+ MRR. A lot can happen in a year. Don’t give up too early. (Amounts are in Singapore dollars)

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

2 years

I'm lost for words! ❤️ just got sent these 3D renders from Stripe as a congrats for passing $35k MRR. It's my yellow vespa with some Bannerbear customization! Thank you so much @stripe @sammcallister @juliamarzochi I love it! 🐻🛵

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

10 months

“Grew my last business to $100 million and now I sell courses for $27” - typical Twitter coach bio

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

3 years

Just hit $100k in ARR with @bannerbearHQ in time before the new year. There it is folks! It’s possible to go from 0 to 100k ARR in one year by shipping every day and having a little patience! 🥳 full data ➡️

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

3 years

The longer you’re in the startup game the more you realize how big the gulf is between people who talk and people who execute.

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

3 years

SaaS is not passive income. When I stop shipping new features and/or stop marketing, I feel sales slowing. SaaS is something you have to keep working on. The only people who talk about SaaS as passive income are folks trying to sell you their passive income SaaS course!

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

4 years

Me: experienced full stack dev with 20+ public projects launched Also me: googles "how to check checkbox is checked javascript"

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

9 years

How startups work, explained in 14 lines of JavaScript http://t.co/HYd2l20Ish

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

1 year

Those who will get rich in the AI gold rush: 1) OpenAI 2) People selling courses on how to get rich in the AI gold rush

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

3 years

Passive income is a lie told by people who want to sell you courses. The truth is: If you’re not improving your product someone will eventually build a better one. If you’re not marketing your product eventually no one will hear about it.

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

11 months

Guys we did it.

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

3 years

My solo, bootstrapped startup @bannerbearHQ has just reached $20K MRR. Here's a quick pep-talk from one of my favourite billionaire investors to mark the occasion!

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

2 years

Bannerbear just hit $40,000 MRR Fully bootstrapped, 490 customers, 6 full time team members, 2.5 years after starting from zero 🐻

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

2 years

Nobody: Hacker News: why does <thing> exist as a paid product when you can achieve the same for free by using <several obscure open source tools>

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

3 years

How to start a SaaS company: Take the most tedious tech task at your job. Automate it and sell it for $99 per month. There are many, many companies who would gladly pay $100 to get back some of their dev team's time per month.

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

2 years

I’m about $500 MRR away from $500,000 ARR. it’s wacky to think that my business is making half a million bucks a year and that I was on the verge of going broke a few years ago 😅

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

2 years

In your heart you know it to be true.

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

3 years

Important milestone! my solo bootstrapped startup is now earning more MRR than my salary at my last job. For anyone who has left a job to pursue an idea or try to build something from scratch, this is a moment to remember. It has taken 3 years 🥲

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

3 years

Just deleted Postman. Such a bloated, buggy piece of software. Started off so simple and performant.

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

11 months

Lots of folks don't realise that: 1 hour call = 1 full day of lost productivity for a dev Esp if it's in the middle of the day, it throws a wrench in everything. If I have to take a call, I try to do it at the very start of the day so I have the rest to sling code 👨‍💻

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

3 years

RIP all the startups who were quickly building an alternative to OnlyFans.

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

6 months

“I refuse to pay $1 a year for this app I use every day!” *sips $17 latte* - every B2C user

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

4 years

Friday reality check! I started building SaaS products 2 years ago. They all failed. It all changed when (1) I focused on one thing, and (2) I chose a space I'm passionate about. Focus, passion, perseverance. Those are the 3 things you need to get you business off the ground.

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

1 year

Me returning to coding after a 1 week holiday

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

3 years

Developer founders be like: “Ok after THIS feature I’m going to go full on marketing mode” *starts building a new feature* “Ok after THIS...”

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

1 year

They surely can’t be unaware that there is already a much-loved product with this name 🧐

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

1 year

Feels like 90% of the indie hacker apps on my feed lately is some form of prompting GPT, sending the response to the user, and charging $$$ for it. I miss when solo founders were working on unique products or even better, unique IP. I don't think any of this is sustainable.

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

1 year

This year has been a bit of a grind but we finally hit $50k 🐻 Bootstrapped, profitable and proud!

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

2 years

I know “money doesn’t buy happiness” and all, but after hitting $40K MRR I am absolutely more happy, more confident in my daily life, and have more freedom to do basically anything I want. Maybe it doesn’t directly buy happiness but it sure as hell unlocks it.

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

2 years

Twitter: recession is coming. Buckle up folks. Pieter Levels: makes $10k in one day selling AI avatars of your face.

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

3 months

End of an era, but I have removed the /open revenue numbers from my site, and removed the real-time MRR update to my twitter bio (it’s hard-coded for now but I may even remove it altogether). Last year we hit $53K MRR but we’ve shrank $3k MRR since November. It doesn’t sound…

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

1 year

There’s 8 billion people on the planet. You need 500 customers. Stop worrying about competitors or people “stealing” your idea.

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

1 year

2018: quit job, take risk, try to build a tech business 2022: built tech business into something sustainable 2023: AI makes all tech work obsolete

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

4 years

My SaaS @bannerbearHQ just reached $50,000 ARR 📈 Halfway point to my initial goal of $100k which I set almost a year ago 🤯 My number one piece of advice for new SaaS founders is: you must be prepared to commit for the long term!

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

2 years

Bannerbear just hit $500K ARR Halfway to $1MM! 🐻🚀

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

3 years

1 year ago I set a goal to grow my SaaS to $100k ARR in a year. I'm ending the year at $91k ARR, pretty happy with that! No secret recipe, I just got up every day and worked on product and marketing for 365 days.

Open Startup Metrics

Bannerbear is an open startup

www.bannerbear.com

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

10 months

There's no such thing as passive income. SaaS? support, new features, etc Property? maintenance, problem tenants, etc Book? tours, podcasts, etc Everyone has to work for their money.

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

5 months

One of my competitors has raised a $1.5 million round of funding from VCs. Meanwhile, we have made $1.75 million in revenue from customers who use our product 😉 Proud to be bootstrapped, independent and profitable.

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

5 years

There is no better feeling than a @stripe payment notification coming in for something you’ve built. Especially when you’ve had a crappy day, seeing that someone on the other side of the world wants to pay to use your product - it’s the ultimate entrepreneur happy pill.

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

1 year

2023 startup landing pages what they say: "our state of the art AI" what they mean: "our http request to chatgpt"

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

1 year

My SaaS makes $50,000 MRR and is built on vanilla Ruby on Rails (not even using Hotwire) and jQuery. You probably don’t need to learn <new framework du jour> to launch your business.

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

3 years

Bannerbear just hit $200k annual revenue. Assuming a 5x multiple, does that mean I’m a paper millionaire now? 😅

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

4 years

Built my last 20+ projects with Ruby on Rails. I ship fast with it, and exactly zero of my customers have ever cared what tech stack I’m using 👍🏻🚂

Florian Dee

@flowdee

4 years

🤔 Just wondering what's the programming language you folks used to build your #SaaS or similar online platforms with? 👨‍🏫 Feel like I'm open to learn a new programming language for future projects now. 👀 What's your recommendation? #webdev

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

6 months

I was laid off today from Open AI along with my boss Sam. I was the guy in charge of copy pasting answers from Stack Overflow in reply to your coding questions on ChatGPT. Truly thankful for this incredible journey.

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

2 years

Passed $30K MRR this morning. May dip down later in the month, but feels good to pass another milestone! $50K MRR is the target this year 🐻🚀🚀🚀

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

3 years

A year ago I was on $533 MRR. What a difference a year makes!

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

10 months

"Oh so your app makes $600,000 a month? cute little biz you got there" - Hacker News commenter making $0 MRR

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

2 years

Broadly speaking I think it’s possible for *any* B2B SaaS product to reach $10k MRR and beyond. If you have good product-founder fit, you price sensibly, spend 50% of your time on marketing, and don’t give up too early, I think it’s basically an inevitability.

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

2 years

I've coded every inch an app that makes $26k MRR but now I'm making a public SDK for it which is open source and I have massive imposter syndrome... what if they realise my code is crap!

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

2 years

Me: any heroku alternatives? Tech Twitter: so first to build your own server you’re going to need a CPU, some RAM, a motherboard…

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

7 months

me: 20+ years writing code, $52k MRR SaaS also me: googles "javascript array unique"

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

10 months

If your startup has a copyright year in the footer that is dynamically generated according to the current timestamp, you have launched too late.

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

2 years

New SaaS revenue goal! Journey to $1 Million ARR. I have put a 40 minute loom video recapping the last 3 years of growth here, give it a watch if you're also bootstrapping a SaaS startup:

Journey to $1 Million ARR

Join me as I document bootstrapping a small SaaS company to $1 million annual recurring revenue

www.bannerbear.com

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

7 months

Me: entrepreneur, $600k ARR, 100% ownership, worth $2 million (on paper) Bank: "best we can do is offer you an $8 line of credit"

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

3 years

Learn git. It's not hard. These are the only 6 commands I have ever needed for like the last 10+ years. git init git add git commit git branch git merge git push

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

11 months

Just learned about wow, one of those “why didn’t I think of this” ideas. You prerecord interview questions and candidates record video answers in their own time. Async interviews, this would have saved me so much time when hiring!

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

2 years

New home! Moved house last week. House hunting in Bali is absolutely brutal. Very fragmented, very fast moving. You’ll view a place, decide you like it, call the agent, then find out someone took it half an hour earlier. Happy I found this quiet little oasis.

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

2 years

pls help @levelsio lol

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

2 years

The uncomfortable truth of why Levels is more successful than most of us, is he simply works way harder than most of us.

@levelsio

2 years

"You're just lucky"

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

1 year

Hot take: Eventually the world realized the only thing crypto did well was scamming people, and we turned against it. Eventually the world will realise the only thing AI does well is create fake content, and we will turn against that too.

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

3 years

Big news! The Bannerbear team has grown from 1 person (me) to 4 people. Still 100% bootstrapped. Having other people to share the workload with, or assume full responsibility of specific areas, is a massive weight off my mind. Handing in my indiehacker card 🥲

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

3 years

Someone should really write a book or course about SaaS marketing. Something simple like, here's 100 things you can try. It's the number 1 question I get asked. Everyone knows how to build an app but nobody knows what to do after that point.

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

4 years

Another mini milestone today. After pretty much a whole year with no money going into my personal bank account, I made a small transfer today from my business account to my personal. Just a few hundred dollars, a bootstrapper's salary 😅 The sweetest dollars I have ever tasted!

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

11 months

Bootstrapping to $10k MRR is not hard. 1) create something people want 2) don't price too low 3) build in public 4) don't forget about expansion revenue 5) create free tools for SEO 6) sign your previous employer for a $10k / month plan Why do people overcomplicate this.

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

2 years

"If you can't handle me at my worst, you don't deserve me at my best" - people who are always at their worst

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

8 months

People's reaction to me running a small, profitable indie company: "he's probably broke 🥴" People's reaction to a VC-funded founder with no revenue: "what an impressive entrepreneur! 👏"

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

1 year

You can jump on every new trend like crypto, web3, AI. Or you can slowly build something “boring” like a CRM for veterinarians. You can make money doing both, but as an older entrepreneur I prefer the slow approach 🐢

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

11 months

My response to any customer who needs docs or meetings for their compliance / infosec team is that they need to go to a bigger provider. 1 meeting and the inevitable followups just sucks all the profit out of a $99 / mo subscription. It just doesn't make business sense.

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

3 years

Kissed $25k MRR today. It will probably fall under over the next few days but hopefully I’ll close out the month above 25k. Haven’t changed my way of working for over a year now. 1 week of code, 1 week of marketing.

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

3 years

My life before $10k MRR: - coding - coding - coding - design My life after $20k MRR: - emailing people - signing up for SaaS tools - reviewing candidates - hiring for adhoc stuff on upwork - coding

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

11 months

You too can achieve this simply by applying the following framework: 1) Increase signups 2) Decrease churn 3) Edit the stripe dashboard HTML

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

3 years

"oh wow I would totally pay for that!"... is one of the most misleading false positives an entrepreneur can get. Get people to actually pay, not just say that they will.

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

6 months

If you want maximum MRR you have to build that into your code. Only use programming languages or libraries that use dollar signs. PHP and JQuery. This is why @levelsio is so successful. Few understand this. $MRR

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

1 year

I run a $50,000 MRR SaaS business. Here are my 3 tips so you can do the same. 1) Increase revenue 2) Decrease churn 3) 100 pushups

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

3 years

Bannerbear has hit $10K MRR! 🚀 For many SaaS bootstrappers, this is a major milestone! I'm going to try to document the last 1+ years as best I can and put it all in one place. The content isn't ready yet but you can sign up to get notified here:

Here's How I Bootstrapped a SaaS to $10k MRR

Startups are hard, bootstrapping is harder! Here's how I bootstrapped a SaaS product to $10k MRR over the course of 2 years.

www.bannerbear.com

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

4 years

Bannerbear just hit $6000 MRR. I've noticed in the last couple of months my work is less of a frantic scrabble and now much more a routine of: - get customer feedback - build new features - document new features Honestly it feels great! 🐻

Reached $6000 MRR

Just hit $6k MRR roughly a year after launching. Imgur In between the launch a year ago and now, there has been a pivot, a rebrand, and a whole bunch of...

www.indiehackers.com

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

3 years

It's live! This is my timeline of bootstrapping @bannerbearHQ from zero to $10K MRR. For each time period I have summarised what I was doing, with some tweets, blog posts and lessons learned. If you're growing a startup, I hope you find this useful!

Here's How I Bootstrapped a SaaS to $10k MRR

Startups are hard, bootstrapping is harder! Here's how I bootstrapped a SaaS product to $10k MRR over the course of 2 years.

www.bannerbear.com

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

2 years

Just got my results from - this is fascinating / scary / hilarious all at once. I want to see more! congrats @levelsio on such a compelling MVP!

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

11 months

OMG @stripe made me a Bannerbear motorcycle helmet to celebrate my $1 million milestone 🥹🥹🥹 thank you @caitbhri and team I love it 💛

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

1 month

My view on "launch a unique new idea" vs "enter a market with lots of existing solutions" has flipped over the last few years. I used to think you needed something new. Be first to market, get all the customers! Now I think the existing markets are a better bet, here's why...

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Jon Yongfook

@yongfook

4 years

90% of successful founders I really want to learn from are far too busy running real businesses to share advice. 90% of “entrepreneur advice” out there is written by writers whose main skill is writing, not business. There must be a way to reconcile these two things.

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