In a blog post posted in 2013, Walter Chen, founder of VegasTechFund backed iDoneThis, talks about how his company reached $1,000 in recurring revenue.
“When we launched a paid version of iDoneThis, we held our breath — we didn’t know if a single person would sign up,” he wrote in the post. “The waiting, the sweat, the nerves. Finally, the whoosh of a collective sigh of relief. One trailblazer of a person signed up for iDoneThis and put their credit card down. Amidst all that “will they pay?” jitters though, we figured that if just one person signed up, there had to be at least 1,000 more people out there who hadn’t yet heard of us that would be willing to do the same. And that first month, we got $1,000 recurring revenue signups for our service.”
In this post, he outlines how the team did it.
“Despite the overwhelming uncertainty that we felt about convincing people to get out their credit cards, we’d actually prepared for much of the guessing game by doing a lot of legwork, cultivating engagement and paying attention to feedback, and testing for customer enthusiasm,” Walter Chen wrote. “When you know you have a simple solution to an existing pain point, have put in work on selling before building, and go ahead with pricing structures and processes that also uncover information about your market — the sweat and the nerves will probably not go away — but you’ll have a sense of underpinning and foundation to get the ball rolling.”
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