Riley Chase, welcome to the Andy Hackers podcast.
Hey, thanks for having me.
Riley, you are a software engineer living in Michigan.
You are the founder of a company called Hostify,
and you recently had a pretty cool milestone with your business.
You hit $100,000 in annual recurring revenue just last week.
That's a super healthy number, so congratulations.
How does it feel?
Thanks. Definitely feels good.
I'm very surprised that I've made it here in just a little over a year.
One of your very first milestones that you posted to your product page on Andy Hackers
is, I'm reading it now, June 1, 2018.
One paying customer, $5 in monthly recurring revenue.
So that was the very beginning.
And under that, you explained that Hostify's first customer
signed up from 4,000 miles away.
So you seem to know exactly who it was and where they lived.
Tell me about getting to that point of earning your very first dollar for Hostify.
First of all, that customer actually, I didn't know who they were,
and I knew that they signed up from the Netherlands because Stripe told me that.
But I'll always remember when I got that first customer, I remember where I was.
I was in my truck driving to work, and I saw a little notification pop up on my phone
that Stripe had a $5 payment.
It was an awesome feeling when you get your first customer.
First time I sold anything online, really, of my own software product.
Very cool.
Yeah, so getting to that point was several months of struggling.
I never worked as a software engineer.
I was mainly a network engineer, like a phone system engineer kind of guy.
So I knew I had learned programming, like a little bit of Python.
I'd made little projects here and there for a couple of years,
but I'd never built a website really that had authentication and billing
and all these things.
So it actually took me several months too.
That was the hardest part, was figuring out the checkout process and the user dashboard.
What the software actually does, I was pretty confident with writing the Python code for that,
but putting the whole thing together took months.
That's pretty crazy.
You were learning how to code, learning how to be a web developer at the same time
that you were learning to build your business.
I'm curious what kind of expectations you had for yourself at that point,
because just learning web development on its own is a pretty ambitious undertaking,
let alone expecting to build something good enough for people to actually want to use it
and pay you money for it.
Yeah, so my inspiration to start, in particular, a software as a service company
was from reading a book.
It's actually called The Millionaire Fastlane by MJ DeMarco.
It sounds like a really cheesy title, but what the book was about
was about how to create a product instead of a service business.
It was actually written by the founder of limos.com.
He talked about a bunch of different ways about why a product is easier to scale
and it's better than a service business.
One of the things he said in his book was that one of the best things you can do
is start a software company.
What's even better than that is if you can start a software as a service company
because it's recurring revenue.
That really got me thinking about software as a service.
Then I started looking up how to start a software as a service company.
I came across a book called The Microsass E-book by Tyler Tringis.
That was my big inspiration of what ideas to pick
and how to go about doing this software as a service boost or everything.
Sounds like you learned a lot from books and reading.
When you go that route, you end up encountering some of the same advice
over and over again, kind of cliche advice that people are tired of hearing
and yet still don't really follow for some reason.
One of those pieces of advice is to solve your own problem.
I'm wondering if that's what you did with Hostify.
Were you solving your own problem or were you solving a problem for other people?
Exactly, yeah. I was actually solving a problem that I had myself.
One of my ideas that I thought was better was to solve a problem for someone else.
A problem I didn't have, one of my ideas was I had a couple of requests on Upwork.
I had an Upwork profile. I did freelance work and stuff.
A couple of people asked me to build this tool for them to keep track of phone calls
for free PBX phone system.
That was the idea that I was going to go with.
It was a problem I hadn't experienced before.
The reason I chose the problem that I ended up solving with Hostify
was it was something I had experienced and it seemed easier to me as a first project.
I didn't have high expectations for it because it was my first project.
I was just going to be really happy if I could get a couple of customers.
I was going to use this as my learning experience.
I had plans to get my foothold with figuring out how to make a software-to-service company
and then try again with something more quote-unquote complicated.
It just seemed like a really simple idea.
It ended up being the one that worked the first try.
Yeah, that's pretty great.
I love this approach of having low expectations from the beginning
because if you go into your first business thinking,
hey, this is just a learning experience and it's probably going to fail,
then you're in a really good position.
If things work out well, that's a pleasant surprise.
If things don't work out, no big deal, that's exactly what you expected.
In fact, you still accomplished your original goal of learning a lot
and becoming more formidable as a founder for the next time around.
I would go even further in saying that managing your psychology as a founder
is pretty much half the battle.
As long as you can mentally frame things such that you won't get dejected
or overly frustrated, then you won't quit.
And quitting is the reason why businesses fail.
Yeah, I totally agree.
I think that was the biggest thing that got me through was just knowing
that this is just a learning process and not having that high expectation of
or I was never disappointed about not growing or this or that.
I was just like, this is learning process.
And I know that if I keep on doing this,
I'll learn the skills that I need to do something better next time.
Okay, you mentioned something here that I want to talk about,
which is that a software as a service business is one of the best types
of businesses that you can start.
You get monthly recurring revenue.
It's very scalable.
You can reach millions of people with the same amount of code,
whereas a services business is the exact opposite.
It doesn't make money while you sleep.
If you want to take on more customers,
you have to work more hours or hire, et cetera.
But there's a flip side to all this,
which is that a services business is very easy to get started with.
I know people who open web design shops or who do SEO consulting,
and they're making five figures in their very first month.
Whereas with SaaS, you've got kind of a ramp up period.
So it took you a few months just to get your software built
and find your first customer who only really paid you $5.
How did you support yourself?
And how did you stay motivated during this early stage ramp up period
or everything was growing super slowly?
Yes.
So the first question, like how did I support myself?
Like I definitely didn't like read that book and then quit my job
right away and say like, I'm going to start a SaaS business.
I had realistic expectations because I had read Tyler Tringus' story.
StoryMapper was a big inspiration to me and his microSaaS ebook
was a big inspiration.
So like I had realistic expectations.
StoryMapper went on to become probably,
it was $400,000 a year I think when he sold it.
So a big business.
But it took the first year, he only got it to $2,000 a month.
So that was my expectation was if I can get this business,
if I can get this business to $2,000 MRR by the end of the year,
this could be a really great business.
So I mean, that was like my low expectation.
And here it is like a year later and I've got it passed $8,000 a month.
But my expectation was $2,000 being like the best case scenario.
Right.
You probably couldn't quit your job and support yourself off of $2,000 a month.
Yeah.
What about the second half of this question?
What about the motivation?
How did you keep yourself going early on when things were just progressing
so slowly?
The motivation, that part was really hard because it was very like unmotivating.
I struggled a lot.
So like I knew a little bit of Python, but like I said,
I hadn't built like a full blown website with authentication.
I knew HTML and CSS and I built little PHP sites and stuff.
But like the motivation to keep going was really hard
because I actually tried several different Python frameworks like Django,
Flask, and I just had a hell of a time getting things to work.
I actually couldn't get it to work at all.
I ended up doing something pretty unusual.
Like for my stack, my software stack,
I actually ended up getting WordPress with a bunch of plugins.
And then I wrote the Python code, which I was comfortable with,
but I wasn't comfortable with the user dashboard and the billing and all that stuff.
So I had WordPress do all that.
And then to this day, the site's the same.
I'm working on rewriting it, but it still works this way.
Basically, when the user signs up, it gets saved in the database in WordPress.
Python reads that database and then does stuff
and then saves stuff back to the database.
So it's kind of like a unique, weird technology stack.
And it was because I had such a hard time making my own framework
and using Django and Flask and stuff.
One of the cooler patterns I've seen from talking to founders
is that sometimes when you either can't code
or when you're struggling to learn how to code,
you end up building things a lot faster than others
because you're not overly ambitious.
You're not trying to build every feature under the sun.
You're just like,
Hey, I'm trying to get this one feature working.
And if that happens, then I'm good.
I'm golden.
That's all I need.
I wonder if this applies to you.
Do you think that's why you're able to build something
just working nights and weekends on the side of your full-time job?
Yeah, I totally can relate to that.
And like I said, I had more ambitious ideas,
but this was like the simplest idea is basically
create a server, install software on it,
give the login to that server to the customer and their dashboard.
It's literally like, I think I posted,
it was like a thousand lines of code or something.
It was like the total amount of code that I wrote.
But like I said, I didn't know programming that well.
I didn't use a lot of functions.
I didn't do any code tests.
I didn't write any code tests.
I don't know.
I just really just tried to make it work.
How many hours would you estimate that you were working back then?
I definitely put a lot of hours into it during those first couple months.
It'd be hard to quantify how many.
The reason I had a lot of time was
from my girlfriend, then she's my fiance now,
but she was working night shift or like second shift.
So like I'd come home for work.
She wouldn't be there till like 11 o'clock.
So from like after work till like,
so like, you know, five, six hours a day,
you know, from like five to 11 p.m.
I'd work on it and try to get it to work.
So I did that for a couple months.
And there was, I think there's a few weeks in the middle of that
where I gave up and I was like,
maybe I'll try this again in a few years.
And then, you know, I got my motivation back and I gave another try.
So we're definitely going to get into a lot of the things that you tried
that didn't work that were perhaps demotivating.
But let's rewind for a second because we didn't fully flush out
how you came up with the idea for Hostify.
You said it was a problem that you had experienced yourself.
How did you even experience that problem for one?
And number two, how did you know that other people would pay for it
and be interested in a solution?
Oh, yeah. So I forgot to say like,
it was a problem that I had.
And the reason I found that problem is because
I tried to start like my own service business
for like four years before this where I did,
I never went really full-time or I did for a few months here and there,
but I had a service business where it was like IT services
for like businesses and stuff.
And so one of my services that I did was like installing network equipment,
so like routers, switches, wireless access points.
And so one solution I found that was like really cool was, you know,
this unify solution where you can connect all your network devices
to one server and you can manage all your customers from one place.
And so the software is free.
So like the company I ended up starting Hostify,
it provides managed hosting for that.
So that's where the idea came from was from my own,
like it took me like a week or something because I had to like
look on GitHub to find some scripts on how to install the SSL certificate
and create a server on Vulture and like do all these different things.
So and then whenever there's an update that comes out,
you have to like run some commands.
And so I mean, they were like,
and then I had to figure out how to do like backups to another provider.
So there's like a few problems I had to solve on my own,
which took me like some time.
It wasn't a lot of time, but it was something that was easy to automate
for other people.
So they didn't have to spend that initial couple of hours like learning
how to get set up and everything,
assuming that they had the knowledge I have of like using Linux and stuff.
A lot of my customers, they don't know how to like use Linux as well or whatever.
So, you know, it just makes it easier for them.
So I don't know very much about the space that you're in.
I don't know very much about networking software.
I've never heard of Ubiquity,
which is the company that you're sort of building your software for.
How did you think about the size of your market and that kind of stuff
when you first got started?
So it was extremely niche and that was been my biggest concern all along
and why I'm even surprised that I got,
as far as I did with it, $100,000 a year revenue.
Yeah, it's definitely super niche.
It's like a niche within a niche within a niche.
You know, Ubiquity is a billion dollar company.
So they're a pretty big company.
They make network equipment.
They give the software away for free.
And then anyone who buys their hardware is potentially my customer,
but I've kind of targeted one specific group of people
who buy their hardware, which is IT service providers.
So I target them specifically.
So like I said, it's a niche within a niche within a niche.
Yeah.
So tell me about getting your first customer.
Did you have some sort of launch?
Did you just sort of put your website online and cross your fingers?
How did they find your website?
Well, what I did is like the first thing I did was I was targeting home users.
I didn't think, you know, this was before I found product market fit
and found out that my best customers are going to be the IT service providers.
And so I was targeting like home users and stuff.
The first things that I did to launch the site was like, you know,
the site's online.
And then I went out and like started spamming everywhere.
Didn't have any luck with that.
Like I put a post on Reddit.
It got deleted right away.
I put a post on Ubiquity forums and Facebook pages and pretty much every
official Ubiquity channel, I posted something about it and immediately it
was like reprimanded.
You know, they took it down and everyone told me like don't do that again.
You know, that's spamming.
We can't do any self-promotion here, blah, blah, blah.
So yeah, I don't even know how I got my first customer.
But one thing I did was I started reaching out to people on direct message
on the forum.
I sent like on Ubiquity forums, I sent like 25 or 50 people a DM saying,
hey, like I just started this thing.
What do you think about it?
Yeah, I think the direct messaging route is kind of better because number one,
you don't get your posts deleted.
They're not publicly visible and annoying everybody in the forum or group
or wherever you're posting.
But number two, it's just more personal.
So people can actually engage with you in a conversation.
They can tell you why they'll buy or they can tell you why they won't or
what they need.
And you can just like talk to them and have an actual conversation and be
more persuasive because at that point you switched from sort of a mass
marketing-based approach to a sales-based approach.
Yeah, actually, I didn't have any luck with it either though.
So like I think I sent like 25 to 50 DMs, like I said, but maybe like three
or four people wrote me back.
And I think the reason is like I've learned a lot about marketing since then.
But like back then I had like no business marketing sense really.
So I was like thinking like people want the cheapest thing or like, you know,
so I sent like a message just like, hey, we have the cheapest toasting for
this thing.
And I didn't really ask.
I didn't try to make relationships with people and say like, hey,
what do you think about this?
Like I'm an indie software developer and like I made this thing and looking
for feedback.
That's how I would say it today.
You know, but back then I was just like kind of spamming people and not
getting any response and not really knowing why.
So I think I learned a lot from that.
I learned a lot from like realizing, you know, like pricing and talking to
people directly, like how to get a conversation going instead of just
spamming, you know.
Well, you've learned a lot over the last year and I can kind of follow along
on your timeline, on your product page and then the hackers because you've
added milestones for all sorts of things.
So June 1st of last year, you got your first paying customer.
Then I can see on June 13th, June 28th, July 10th, you just kept releasing
feature after feature.
So you weren't just spamming forums.
You're also building your app and making it better.
And then on July 16th, you posted that you got to 25 paying customers and
$300 and monthly recurring revenue.
So it kind of seems like you figured out how to get customers and a
repeatable way.
What happened there?
So I tried a lot of things and I tried to do some advertising like Facebook,
Twitter.
It didn't really work.
But one thing that did work was like Google ads.
So like I started bidding on like search terms for unified hosting.
And I think I got a few customers from that.
And then I think it was like I was trying a lot of different stuff.
One thing that started working for me was Twitter was one of the first
tools that started to work for me.
What I did is I went on Twitter, created a hostify, like a Twitter account
for my company.
And then I went and started liking and following and replying to anyone who
is talking about ubiquity or unified equipment, the specific stuff that I do.
I started to gain like a small following from that.
Trying to think what else.
That was a big one though, because one of the differences between like
Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn is like with a Facebook and a LinkedIn
page, you really don't have that level of interaction.
You can't as a business follow a customer or follow someone on LinkedIn
or Facebook.
So Twitter, it really allowed me to like directly interact with people as a
business.
Yeah, there's a common theme among everything you're saying.
And it's another startup cliche.
We already talked about solving your own problem.
But this particular cliche is to do things that don't scale.
In the beginning of your business, you don't really have to be that clever,
that smart, or even that knowledgeable.
You just have to be willing to put in the hours, put in the effort,
sort of bang your head against the wall.
And it sounds like you definitely kept doing that.
You kept messaging people one-on-one, for example.
And you never really stopped.
Yeah, that was definitely a big one.
One of the hardest things was I didn't know anyone that needed this.
So it wasn't like I could have some friends as my first customers or
something because I really didn't know anyone that needed what I was selling.
So it was really trying to find people online and from reading like Tyler's
on Microsoft, like looking for those places where your people congregate.
And so for me, that was like hashtags or like searching on Twitter
for different things that people were talking about,
trying to find these places where people congregate
that was like an open platform.
Because obviously, they congregate on the Reddit,
they congregate on the Ubiquiti official pages and stuff,
but I don't have access to those.
So I had to find other ways.
Let's talk about your mindset during this phase.
Because I think a lot of people would just quit.
If you're trying to reach out to anyone and everyone
has different watering holes where your customers hang out,
and that's not working, and then you start reaching out to customers
one-on-one trying to sell them on what you're doing,
and that's not really working well either, then that sucks.
It's pretty easy to think at that point, you know what?
This isn't a good idea. It's too niche.
I don't know anybody in the space, so you know what?
I'm going to chalk it up to bad luck.
I learned a lot, but it's time to move on to the next thing.
Why didn't you think that way?
And did you perhaps have some sort of date in mind, like a quit date,
where you would move on if things didn't work out by that time?
I definitely didn't have a quit date in mind.
For me, this was just entirely a learning experiment.
I didn't have expectations at all for it to be a success.
And for me, when I was doing all these things,
it was like, hey, I'm learning about how to do marketing
and doing things I've never done before.
So for me, it was just like, I'm learning how to create a SaaS business.
I'm learning how to find customers.
And I was never really concerned about the fact
that I was spending tons and tons of hours
on something and not getting a return on it.
I think that's the biggest mindset problem
is when you try to relate a SaaS to your hourly
and you're thinking, wow, I'm making $5 a month right now
and I've spent 100 hours on this project.
So you definitely want to get out of that mindset of,
I spent 100 hours and I made $5.
Because that's what it's like.
Let's talk about some of the things that you weren't doing.
Because in order to build this business as a one-person shop,
you have to say no to a lot of things that you want to do.
You have to say no to a lot of things that you're tempted to do.
You can't just go out and waste a whole week
getting a professional logo design, for example,
because it's just not that important.
Are there any decisions that you explicitly remember
not making with Hostify in the early days?
Oh, yeah, definitely.
The logo one's the first one that comes to mind, actually.
I'd already learned my lesson from having a service business
and being obsessed about when I launched my service business
five years ago or whatever.
The first thing I was like, I need a great logo.
I went to a design firm and I paid them $2,500 or something
to make me a logo.
Wow.
A few years later, I was like, why did I do that?
I don't even like this logo.
I went out and I got a cheaper logo for like $300.
I had a crowd-sourced design, like 99 designs do it or something.
This time, I was like, I'm not even going to pay for a logo.
I fired up GIMP.
I didn't even pay for Photoshop.
I got the free version of Photoshop, open-source version.
I just picked the font off Google that I liked and changed the colors.
That was one of the things that...
There's a lot of things that I didn't spend money on.
I didn't hire anyone to help me.
I didn't hire anyone to do marketing for me.
I think that's something that if you're going to do this,
you need to learn how to do all of it yourself.
That way, if it does scale or when it does scale,
you know what to teach other people to.
Because if you hire someone else to do it for you,
then you're not going to know how to do it yourself.
I think one of the things you mentioned earlier
that I want to bring back up is that you weren't really writing unit tests
for your code.
You weren't trying to be an enterprise-grade,
professional software engineer-level programmer.
You were just like, hey, I want to make this work.
If I have to use WordPress or whatever,
and that's good enough, then fine, it works.
This is something I think a lot of people get tripped up on,
being perfectionists about just one part of their business,
zooming in too far.
If you're a founder, you can't do that.
You've got to wear a lot of hats.
You can't just go deep on any one part in isolation.
Related to that, I think your point about not hiring
and just learning to do everything yourself is huge.
Not only do you save the time it would take to find and train somebody,
and not only do you get to learn these valuable skills for yourself,
but also you just save a lot of money.
Hiring is super expensive.
I know you're still a solo founder today, one year later.
What do your expenses look like?
Oh, yeah.
It's profitable, and the expenses for me, for my business,
they scale linearly with the amount of customers I have.
For each customer, unlike a traditional software as a service,
it's not like 100% profit for me or 99% profit or whatever.
Each customer gets their own server, which costs me money.
I'm making $8,300 a month or whatever,
and my expenses are like $2,500, $3,000 a month for servers
and different advertising and things that I'm doing these days.
Yeah, that's still not bad at all.
It's way better than a typical services business,
because you're still at a point where every customer pays for themselves,
and even though it's a little bit expensive, it's still scalable.
You're writing code, you don't have to do a whole bunch of work
when you take on a new customer.
Exactly, yeah.
Let's skip ahead a lot on your timeline.
March 25th, 2019, you posted a milestone that says 200 paying customers,
$4,249, and monthly recurring revenue.
What are some of the things you had to learn to get to that point?
Getting to 200 customers, certain things changed,
and a lot of things changed,
but one of the things that changed growth-wise
is I think it was about six months in,
so towards November, December,
is when I started ranking at Google first page,
and pretty quickly the site went from mid-level first page
to top result for search terms related to unify cloud hosting.
That's been the biggest growth to this day,
and I'm trying to think of what helped that.
I don't know.
Sometimes you just don't know why things work,
but I think when you have a brand new domain name,
it takes a while for it to just get old enough.
The domain had only been registered in May,
and so I think Google doesn't really rank
newly registered domains very well
until they've been around for a while
and they start to get some traffic.
Yeah, I think that's one of the biggest growth drivers for sure.
That makes sense because you said early on
that you were testing out Google AdWords,
and that seemed to work.
The fact that search would still be a good channel today
makes a lot of sense to me.
It seems to be the primary way that people find you.
Yeah, and early on before I had Google ranking,
to 25 customers or something like that,
is a combination of, like I said, Twitter and stuff.
I'm not sure how much that actually worked,
but I know that was helping.
One of the things I did was I searched for
Unify Cloud Hosting, and I saw what the top results were.
Some of them, you can't change other people's websites,
but some of the top results were forum posts
of people asking about Unify Cloud Hosting.
I had access to post as a user,
so I put in my signature about my business,
Unify Cloud Hosting, and I kind of engaged
in the conversation on those threads,
which were getting a lot of views from people
who were searching for the thing that I do.
It was kind of like a hack to get on the front page
before I was on the front page.
That was a slow trickle there.
Then once I got on the front page,
I only have one or two others.
It's such a niche thing.
There's only one or two other people that even do this at all.
They weren't doing it as seriously as I am
as far as how their website looks and stuff.
It was pretty quick that I was able to pass them up
from just getting that traffic
and continuing to focus every day on this.
Yeah, that's like the textbook benefit of choosing a niche.
It's like you don't have a lot of competition.
There aren't a ton of other businesses trying to fight with you
and compete with you on the Google rankings.
Even if you're a tiny one-person indie hacker business,
you can kind of figure things out
and just make a name for yourself.
If you're not worried about all your potential customers
choosing some massive company over you
because they have 100 times more features,
it's really just you.
It's cool to see this play out in your case.
Your strategy of also going to these online forums
and making posts reminds me a lot of the Zapier founders
who did the same thing.
Their software helps people connect one service to another.
There'll be all these people asking questions
about how they can do this and other product support forums.
The Zapier founders will come in and help them out.
It's your drudgework.
It's a lot of comments you have to post.
If you don't do it right,
you're just spamming people and you'll get banned.
But it kind of works
if you're actually helping people solve their problems
one at a time.
Yeah.
I got that idea too from the Microsass e-book.
I pretty much got all my ideas.
I took that as the blueprint for how to do this.
I just really followed everything you said.
That was another thing you said was to post on forums
with your signature and all that stuff.
Let's talk about Tyler Tringis for a second,
the author of the Microsass e-book
and also an investor in your company.
You've raised money from Earnest Capital.
They're one of a new breed of investors
that are funding these indie hacker businesses
who aren't trying to become billion-dollar unicorns
but really want to be profitable
and self-sustaining from day number one.
When did you decide to raise money from Earnest?
What was that process like?
Well, just leading up to it was so exciting
because I think my first tweet that I ever wrote
about launching Hostify,
I tagged Tyler Tringis in it.
I want him to know that he inspired me
from his book and everything.
I kept following him on Twitter and stuff.
I was watching what he was up to.
It wasn't until November that I started to hear about.
I launched in May and then it was later in November
that year, last year, that I started to hear about
he was going to start Earnest Capital.
I was so excited about that because
that was exactly made for what I was doing and everything.
I was following along and I think he did
a live video about talking about it.
I was in there.
I just happened to see that and I jumped in and asked questions.
That was in November where I think he first saw my name
and stuff asking questions about Earnest Capital
and then why I took the investment.
In January, it was all interesting timing.
In January, I got actually fired from my job
as a security analyst because my employer,
they found out about Hostify as my side business.
They didn't like it.
They had already asked me to stop doing side work
and stuff like that.
I had basically ignored it, so they fired me.
That was in January.
That was actually right when Earnest Capital applications opened.
I just applied to it.
I needed the money because obviously it would make it easier for me
now that I had been fired and I was going to plan on going full time.
If I hadn't got the money,
I would have still done everything exactly the way I've done it.
Mainly, I applied for the mentorship.
I was definitely super excited to be a part of what they're doing.
Can you share any details about your deal with Earnest?
How much money you raised and what the terms were, stuff like that?
Yeah.
I don't think they don't like us to talk about the terms
so we can't compare it to other people's terms.
However, you can see they're very transparent about
what the agreement looks like, how it works on their website and stuff.
You can expect low six figures, 100,000 to 250,000.
The amount of money it's to be used by you to make that transition.
They're looking for someone who's at around 2,500 to 5,000 MRR
and they are in a spot where it's a side project
that's starting to consume more of their time.
If they had the money to go full time, they could accelerate growth.
That's what they're looking for.
I was just barely in there.
I was a little bit below 2,500 MRR.
It was just perfect timing.
Well, today things look very different.
You just passed $100,000 in annual recurring revenue.
You're comfortably profitable.
You've got some breathing room, I think, to just make some new decisions
and go in whatever direction you really want to.
What does the future look like for Hostify?
I hope it keeps getting bigger.
Like I said, I've been surprised that it's gotten as far as it did.
I'm narrowing my focus to just do a really good job at this one specific thing
whereas before I was worried that it was too niche.
I had begun starting other projects.
I actually launched two other SaaS businesses and an online community.
But now that I've seen Hostify just continue to grow,
I'm putting all my attention on Hostify for the last few months.
I'm working on a whole new website with a bunch of automation
and more knowledge-based articles.
I just integrated Intercom and just making the onboarding process
really great for the customers and just smoothing things out all around.
What about on a more personal level?
Do you think you'll keep the company small and just one person?
Or do you think you'll hire more people?
Also, are there any revenue goals that you want to hit for yourself?
I've been thinking about where I want to go next with it.
I think taking on investment,
it did make me a little bit more ambitious
where I do want to get to a million dollars MR next.
I do see having a small team.
I need some support help.
I'm hoping that I can get enough money from customers
to justify hiring a few support people to help out.
But yeah, I think just a really small, lean team
and getting to a million dollars a year would be awesome.
Sounds awesome.
Well, anyway, thank you so much, Riley, for coming on the show
and telling us about how you got to $100,000 in annual recurring revenue.
Hopefully, I can have you back on here at some point in the future
to tell us how you got to a million.
Can you let listeners know where they can go to learn more
about what you're up to personally and what's going on with Hostify?
Awesome. Thanks for having me.
You guys to learn more about, follow my journey as an indie hacker.
Obviously, the indie hackers page.
And then I also post updates at rchase.com.
Each month this year, I've been posting updates
about what I worked on this month.
And then my website for my business is hostify.net.
All right. Thanks, Riley.
Thanks.
Quick note for listeners.
If you're interested in coming on to the podcast like Riley
to have a quick chat with me,
go to indiehackers.com slash milestones
and post a milestone about what you're working on.
It can be pretty much anything.
People have posted about launching or finding their first customer.
They posted about growing their mailing list
or hitting 1,000 followers on Twitter.
They posted about getting to $100 or $1,000
or even $100,000 a month in revenue.
The sky's really the limit here.
So whatever you're proud of,
come celebrate it on indiehackers.com slash milestones
and other indie hackers will help you celebrate.
We love supporting each other.
We love encouraging each other when we hit these milestones.
And what I will do is at the end of every week,
I will look at the top milestones posted
and reach out to people to invite them to come onto the podcast
for a quick chat.
So once again, that's indiehackers.com slash milestones.
I'm looking forward to seeing what you post.
Thanks for watching.