July 2023: $6K MRR – getting back on recurring revenue
small updates from me in July 2023
This tweet from Emil sums up what I’ve done in the last few months pretty well: I’m in love with building Typing Mind to be the best AI chat app out there 😍
111 free updates since release.
New update on average 1.3 days.
So, in this month’s issue, I don’t really have much update other than working on the same thing: Typing Mind.
Here are some updates & my thoughts on how to improve Typing Mind further.
$6K Monthly Recurring Revenue
The Typing Mind Custom version is doing pretty well!
It’s another product line of Typing Mind that allows people to create a custom version of Typing Mind for their team. It costs $79/month.
I’ve reached $6K MRR a few days ago.
I haven’t put much effort into marketing for this one yet, as I feel it is not quite ready. The only place I’m advertising this is in the footer of Typing Mind:
It’s nice to know that I still get customers signup from this almost every day.
I also created a completely new landing page with Framer (first time using a no-code landing page builder!): custom.typingmind.com
Focusing on B2B customers
I have secured one contract with a B2B customer for Typing Mind Custom with a contract value of $20K so far.
Turns out, some people want to create a customized, self-hosted, custom-trained version of Typing Mind for their team or to resell it to their customers.
So I’ve been spending the last few weeks trying to make Typing Mind self-hostable: isolating all the service dependencies and technical stack, making it easy to deploy on another infrastructure.
The technical stack of Typing Mind is actually quite simple: one static web app + a cloud sync server. The cloud sync server requires a MySQL database and an SMTP email server to send login emails. That’s it!
I’m looking forward to onboarding more customers to the Custom version soon.
Also, this is the first time I have a “Contact Us” button in the pricing page 😂
I’ve always hated the “Contact Us” button. I wanted everything to be self-served, which is stress-free for me.
So I’ll have to adapt to doing business with B2B customers, a lot of emails & calls. A lot of things to learn.
I still want to make it self-served in the end.
My plan is to get in touch with these businesses, understand what they need, and how to create some good generic packages that can fit most of them, then I’ll sell those packages fully autonomously without the “Contact Us” button.
Really hope this works.
Some questions from Twitter
I asked what I should share more on this issue. Here are the questions I received and the answers.
About Marketing
I build blog for SEO, affiliates, but most traffic comes from Twitter + Google (direct keywords).
About Hiring
I asked friends to introduce me to their friends, so I didn't really have to spend much time on this. (Probably not a helpful answer, I know 😅, but that’s how I hired all of my team)
Validating Product Ideas
All of my ideas are in the “build for myself” category, so in a way, you can say that I validate my ideas on myself.
Then if I can find more people like me (who have the same pain point), it will likely be a successful product.
Some of my successful products: DevUtils (3 years old), Xnapper (1 year old), Black Magic (2 years old), and Typing Mind (6 months old). I still use all of them every day.
For my failed products (see my Twitter banner), I ended up not using them myself. If I don’t even use my own product, who will? 😂
Remember that this is just one way of validating ideas, not the only way. It’s also not the best way, it just works for me (and maybe for you too).
I shared more details on an example of how I validate & build products in previous issues: here is the Xnapper one, the Black Magic one, and here is the Typing Mind one.
That’s all!
Thank you for reading this far!
See you again in the next updates.
Cheers!
Thanks for sharing all these insights, Tony!