Making $1,000 monthly from a No-Code SaaS in 12 months

Hello! Can you introduce yourself and tell us about your business?

Hello! My name is Goutham, and I'm the founder of Famewall.

Famewall is a no-code tool that helped entrepreneurs collect testimonials from their customers with a simple link and share them on their websites, emails etc. to increase sales.

The tool was built especially for no-code folks who simply wanted to add testimonials without having to deal with any code.

I’ve been a software developer all my life. I’ve had no person in my family who’s run a business.

But I’ve always been curious about how businesses operate, how people make decisions when purchasing something & how a business scales big I figured that I would learn more about building a business by trying & failing rather than just reading content about it

How did you start this business? Take us through the process.

I've failed numerous times in my life both personally & professionally. At age 18 I tried hard to get into an Ivy League university by putting my heart & soul into it but failed miserably.

At age 22, I tried really hard to get into big tech as a software developer but that didn't turn out well either

At age 23, I first came to learn about entrepreneurship. Being an excited first-time founder I brainstormed with a co-founder from school & built a sophisticated product to help startups hire engineering graduates (since that was the only problem that seemed big to me at that point) You'd probably have guessed - The startup failed! Then I simply went ahead & did freelancing by manually shortlisting engineering grads for startups. This ended up making my first internet money from entrepreneurship - $300

Finally, at age 24, when trying to build a consumer startup, I had cofounders leaving due to their own personal reasons and them not finding entrepreneurship so exciting.

That's precisely when I went all in, quit my software job, and began building Famewall as a solopreneur.

After quitting my job back in June 2022, I took a detour to work on an email product but came back to Famewall in September 2022 when it was growing without any marketing efforts.

And after 4 months of working full time on this idea, I finally managed to hit $330MRR. It was truly exciting because this was the first product I built as a solopreneur which generated this much in recurring revenue and was happy that entrepreneurs & creators found it valuable enough to pay for it.

Initially I built the platform using no-code tools especially like Unicornplatform for the landing page builder but then as I scaled the product, I switched to using in-house systems to increase the results in terms of SEO, like using subdirectories etc

This is just internally but externally Famewall is a simple no-code tool for businesses to manage testimonials without having to deal with any code.

How did you get your first initial customers?

First $100 MRR

As they say, the first few customers are always the hardest. I knew there was always the risk of not getting customers even if your product solved a good problem I kept that in mind and began building Famewall in public right from February of 2022 on Twitter when I had around 100 followers. I posted monthly updates: I had a handful of people interested in the product.

So after launch, I cold DM'd potential people who might find the product useful. From those conversations, I also got a lot of feedback & then finally in March, I got my first paying customer.

It felt so amazing to see the notification from Stripe about the first paying customer I got to $100 MRR by sharing my journey & talking to customers, improving the product & also reaching out to folks who might be interested in the product

$100 MRR - $500 MRR

I originally thought it'd be easy to scale once I reached $100 MRR but at the time, my mind was wavering around I wanted to try my luck at another startup. So I began working on an email product for 2 months However I started to notice that Famewall was getting customers even when I wasn't actively marketing it while things weren't going great with my email product.

So I came back with a lot of rejuvenated interest in Famewall. The growth during this phase happened over a period of 4 months as I relied fully on posting on social media such as Twitter & Linkedin.

The posts were informational about the usefulness of testimonials to business owners & my day-to-day learnings as a solopreneur.

I also improved the in-app onboarding experience by allowing customers to see the value of the product immediately once they log in by helping them create a dedicated collection page This increased the conversion rate from free-to-paid from 2% to 4% since potential customers got to see the value of the product before dropping off I also had conversations with creators who were already customers of Famewall and published their success stories with Famewall as case studies which also showed positive results.

While these seemed to work, I also have to be honest about what didn't work : Ads.

Yep, most people would find success with paid ads on Meta/Google but in my case, it never really worked.

I've spent less than $150 on different types of ads but they didn't really work for me. There could have been a problem with the Ad copy but I wasn't able to figure it out as I was totally new to running ads.

So after running 3 ad campaigns, I just stopped and relied on organic marketing channels instead.

Since launch, what are your marketing strategies or channels to get new customers?

The Road to $1000 MRR

The last $500 MRR was comparatively easier.

There were a significant number of paying customers and there were new signups coming in every week. Since I had well-known creators & entrepreneurs as customers, I used a lot of social proof on the landing page which worked really well in terms of increasing conversions.

The next biggest growth driver was SEO.

I was a software developer still trying to learn marketing, so I felt it would be worth it to invest in learning SEO as I felt like I was running a hedonic treadmill by having to write on social media multiple times a day. It felt like a good idea to diversify marketing channels I started doing small experiments like writing articles on long tail keywords, creating help guides for embedding testimonials in platforms like Wordpress, Notion etc, which garnered website traffic with good search intent.

I also set up an email onboarding sequence that customers received for the first 7 days after signing up and then went on for one email a week. It educated them on how they could use social proof and how they could collect testimonials from customers by sharing questions to ask etc.

This increased the free-to-paid conversion rate even after users abandoned using the product for the first time but later understood the product's value I also noticed an increase in branded-search queries which was a good indicator that people heard about the product from friends/colleagues and most of those who came from recommendations had a higher likelihood to convert to paid users.

How does your business make money?

Famewall makes money through monthly/yearly subscription plans:

The business is currently making $1,000 monthly recurring revenue.

Tools I use to run Famewall:

Vercel for hosting the marketing site, Twitter APIs, Zoho mail, Mux for videos & AWS for hosting the app

It costs me around $170 per month

Before you go, what advice would you give to another who wants to start a business like yours?

Be prepared for the worst. If you think it'll take you 1 year to get to profitability, stash runway for 2 years so that you're prepared for any emergency event

Also, be patient. It takes a lot of time to figure things out and see what sticks. I've come close to quitting several times but something kept me going for a year

And try to get out of your comfort zone. I was an introvert and didn't like expressing myself much. But I changed it one step at a time by writing on social media, blogs etc and now it's totally changed my lifestyle

Where can we go to lean more about you and your business?

Here are some links you can go to learn more:

Famewall's official site: https://famewall.io 

Famewall's blog: https://famewall.io/blog/ 

Personal newsletter: gouthamj.substack.com 

Goutham’s Linkedin page: https://www.linkedin.com/in/goutham-jay-604457140/

Youtube channel: https://youtube.com/@gouterz