Hey everyone,
It’s Andrei, from Inspo Stories!
I love to do deep researches and interviews with successful founders and their businesses on how they got started.
Today, I have a super inspiring study on Typefully Bootstrapped SaaS: From $0 to $113K MRR
How was the idea born?
Typefully exists now because Fabrizio (co-founder) wanted a tool to write Twitter Threads. So he started building one 4+ years ago.
How the cofounders met
They met through Twitter in 2011. They were part of the same bubble of Italian teenagers interested in tech (specifically Apple at the time). They had tons of micro-interactions throughout the years via Twitter and were both passioned about apps and great UX.
Fabrizio reached out to Francesco about building a camera app for iOS. He took the offer but, after a short collab, they dropped the project. Nothing came out of it in the end.
After that, they kept following and interacting with each other for months.
At some point in 2015, Fabrizio tweeted about a concept of a Mac app wrapping Inbox by Gmail and Francesco DM’d him a prototype after a few hours.
That project was Bboxysuite, their first successful project together. They sold it with a good exit 🎉
After that, they kept working together on bigger and bigger projects.
Getting first 1000 users in one day
Launch day: 16k page visits, 1,432 Signups, $155 Revenue
The traffic breakdown reveals what happened:
- Hacker News: 6.3k
- Twitter: 2.1k
- ProductHunt: 1.9k
And they also managed to hit the Hacker News frontpage.
The perfect formula was:
- Interesting product
- No-bullshit title
- Sparking a controversial discussion in the comments
When it comes to Twitter, we have been building a following there for some time, so it was a matter of publishing the right tweet, at the right time, and getting the right people to retweet it.
For Product Hunt, we partnered with our friend Chris. His followers got a notification when he hunted us, but we also did our part and emailed our lists. That helped to get fast on the front page and to kickstart the discussion.
How they got to the Hacker News front page three times in a row
What’s the point, though?
Those articles took me 1-2 hours to write and resulted in 40k+ visits to this blog, hundreds of signups for Typefully and Mailbrew, and many Twitter followers.
Tips from their experience:
- Select a topic: HN is a community of entrepreneurial hackers, naturally curious about company building, startups, programming, technical topics, and understanding the world. Writing about those topics will help but is not required. In fact, you can write about anything as long as your writing is intellectually honest, in-depth, and does not try to sell something.
- Pick the right title: The title should describe exactly what the post is about. No marketing is allowed. Think of the title more as a commit message than a headline.
- Don’t try to outsmart HN readers: You can safely assume that the average HN reader is smarter than you. They have a radar for bullshit. You are either telling a story, describing a problem, showing something you built, or not getting to the front page. This should influence your title and style of writing. Not trying to teach anything.
- Be responsive in the comments: Engaging with people in the comments is the funniest part of the front-page experience. I usually write in a void and getting the diverse feedback that HN delivers is a ton of fun. I believe starting a discussion is also key in getting people to click and upvote your post. I don’t take comments too seriously or personally. While the average HN reader may be smarter than me, there is a lot of variance.
- Dance like nobody’s watching: I write for myself, and when I get a good feeling about a post, I submit it, trying not to overthink it.
Read the full Story here
We put 4 hours into this research and it’s covering mostly all aspects:
- Free to Paid conversions improvement hack
- 30 days challenge, Black Friday & Twitter Growth Strategies
- 100k MRR SaaS Tech stack Detailed, $3K/m costs
- Hiring
- Twitter is the ultimate opportunity finder
Final Thoughts
This story is personally inspiring me, I love growth and building profitable businesses, so I hope you will feel the same energy from it!
