Day 24: Our first paying customer!
Day 24 of 30. It finally happened. Someone paid us money.
Day 24 of 30. It finally happened. Someone paid us money.
After 24 days of building, documenting, marketing, and iterating - we have our first paying customer. Okay, we found an issue in our payment module, which was luckily resolved within the hour, oops! And while this is only the first step, for us this is an amazing milestone.
Celebrate the milestone!
The conversation
We emailed our client this morning:
Hi,
Your team has captured over 1,200 screenshots this week. How’s it going? Any issues we should know about?
Also wanted to check: are you ready to move forward with a paid plan, or do you need more time testing?
No pressure either way - happy to extend the trial if needed.
Their response came two hours later:
Hi Erik,
Actually, we’re ready. The API has been stable, the new features you added work well, and we’ve already started migrating some production traffic to it.
Let’s do the Pro plan. We’re probably doing 5-8K screenshots/month, so we have room to grow.
Can you send over the signup link?
We sent her to the billing page. Ten minutes later:
Stripe notification: New subscription - $45.00/month
The feeling
This feeling is hard to describe. It’s not really about the $45 - that barely covers a nice dinner. But it’s validation, and knowing you’re building something which really helps someone out.
Someone we don’t know personally, who has real problems to solve, decided our product was worth paying for. After 24 days of wondering “is anyone going to want this?” - yes. At least one person does!
What convinced them
Our system works on feedback, and we’re building a pretty solid relation with our client by now. So we had to know, and we asked them what made them decide to pay.
Honestly? Three things:
Responsiveness. You shipped features we asked for within 24 hours. Our current vendor takes weeks to respond to support tickets.
Reliability. We’ve done 1,200+ screenshots with zero failures on our end. (A few sites that block bots, but that’s not your fault.)
Pricing. $45 month vs. the $200+ we were quoted elsewhere. This was an easy decision.
Interesting. None of these are about features. They’re about trust, reliability, and economics. Plus, it also shows that perhaps we might have to rethink our pricing, since we might be underselling ourselves. Something to think about for later.
Our revenue
Let’s be honest about the numbers:
MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue): $45
ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue): $540
Customers: 1
This is tiny, but it’s a start. The difference between $0 and $45 is changing the game for us.
What changes now
Having a paying customer changes our mindset:
1. Support matters. If our client has an issue, we need to fix it. They are not a beta tester anymore, but a customer.
2. Reliability is critical. Downtime now costs someone real money. Our monitoring needs to be solid.
3. We have proof. When we talk to other prospects, we can say “we have paying customers.” Social proof matters.
4. Revenue enables reinvestment. $45/month isn’t much, but it can cover some hosting costs. The business is self-sustaining (barely), if we only look at our technology costs.
The next goal
One customer could be a fluke. Two is a coincidence. Three is a pattern.
Our goal, of course, is to get more customers. Our goal for the remaining 6 days:
- Day 25-27: More outreach, content marketing
- Day 28: Week 4 retrospective
- Day 29-30: Full retrospective and what’s next
Target: 3 paying customers by day 30. $135 MRR.
Other traction
While focused on our pilot project, a few other things happened:
- 43 registered users (up from 38)
- 2 more warm leads from outreach
- Dev.to post got picked up by a newsletter, drove 200 visitors
- 3 people captured screenshots and disappeared (typical free tier behavior)
The funnel is working, slowly:
- Visitors → Signups: ~5%
- Signups → Active users: ~30%
- Active → Paid: ??? (1 so far)
Celebrating (briefly)
We took 30 minutes to celebrate:
- Sent a message to friends
- Posted an update on Indie Hackers
- Had a coffee
Then, back to work. One customer is a great start, but let’s overdo it here.
What we’re not doing
We had a few internal discussions on what to do, and what not to do. And we decided that these are the things we’re currently not going to do:
Not adding features. The product works. More features won’t get us more customers - more distribution will. And while we will add some more smaller features here and there, our focus will be on the traction side of things.
We’re also not taking a break. We have 6 days left of our experiment, and momentum matters.
Tomorrow: content marketing push
On day 25 we will double down on content. This dev log series has driven some traffic, and let’s share more of our struggles!
Book of the day
Zero to One by Peter Thiel
Thiel’s core argument: the most important step is going from 0 to 1 - from nothing to something. Going from 1 to n (scaling) is different and easier.
Today we went from 0 to 1: zero revenue to some revenue. Zero customers to one customer. It’s a qualitative leap, not just quantitative.
The book is provocative and contrarian. We don’t think everything Thiel writes is right. But the framing of 0 -> 1 as the fundamental entrepreneurial challenge resonates today.