From Data Mining to $17K MRR: An Unlikely SaaS Story
What 8 Years of Bootstrapping Actually Looks Like
Adrian Balcan didn’t set out to build a SaaS company. But one unexpected partnership changed everything — and what came next, no one saw coming. Today, global brands trust FeedCheck with some of their most valuable data.
Why it matters: → The best business ideas are hiding in plain sight
Worth your time if: → You’re still looking for your product-market fit moment
The thing to steal: → Sometimes your first customer teaches you more than your business plan ever will
Before we dive in — who are you, and what are you building?
Hello, I am Adrian Balcan the founder of FeedCheck.
https://feedcheck.co
) a company that helps consumer brands to manage their customer reviews. I am from Pitesti (a small town in Romania) and I am 33 years old now.
FeedCheck, the company that I founded, helps global brands like Nestle, Fujitsu, and other well-established companies to listen, analyze, and improve their products based on customer feedback.
You can find the entire story here:
https://medium.com/feedcheck/how-we-build-an-app-that-manages-reviews-for-popular-consumer-brands-989cd0b8c65b
What was the moment that made you think 'this is the business I need to build'?
I started a data mining business right after I graduated from the university. My marketing teacher told me that there is a new thing called data mining and companies use it to find customer insights. That sounds super interesting to me. I also, chose data mining because in high school I worked at a web design agency and some customer interactions were unpleasant discussions about subjective things like colors and so on.
In the beginning, the cash flow was not so great, and were looking to find a product opportunity. I started to collaborate with a smartwatch company (later acquired by Fitbit which was also acquired by Google). At that moment we were providing real-time data like weather forecasts, currency exchange rates, and other information to put on the watch.
They discovered the need to manage customer reviews in a lot of online stores. We started to develop the FeedCheck product. FeedCheck monitors online stores (like Amazon, Walmart, Target, etc.) to search for customer feedback in the form of product reviews. After we bring all reviews to our platform we make a lot of analytics over them.
Take us back to the very beginning — how did you land your first customers?
We started with content marketing. We tried to develop some analytics for famous brands and published this on our website. We started to make comparisons between multiple products in different categories (e.g. phones, headphones, smartwatches) based on customer reviews.
We listed FeedCheck in a lot of directories in order to get some SEO advantage. We also created some social media content. We talked with a lot of people and we tried to obtain meetings with representatives of relevant consumer brands locally. Actually, we tried to do everything that was possible but now, is hard to tell which tactic was the best.
After 11 months of development, a small UK company contacted us. They were willing to pay $5 per month. They were our first customers. The challenge was to split this $5 at 3 (the team size).
How are you growing the business today? What does your marketing actually look like?
We have content creation initiatives. At the beginning of the year, we started "Experts in Spotlight" where we conducted interviews with marketing professionals and we published these interviews on our blog. The purpose was to get more attention from marketing experts.
Let's talk money — how does FeedCheck make it?
In terms of business model, we offer a subscription-based platform (SaaS) to consumer brands and business services (e.g. hotels, restaurants, etc.).
Our customers need continuous data and this is why this monetization option is the best.
Numbers time — what's the business doing today, and what does it cost to run it?
We started about 8 years ago (in 2016) and at this moment we are at $17K MRR. This year we predict a 20% growth.
Last one — where can people find you and follow your work?
I am available on LinkedIn at the following URL: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adrianbalcan/