From $0 to $1k MRR
$1k MRR is a customer count, not a revenue number. Pick your price and you know exactly how many people you need to find.
Getting to $1k MRR is a customer count problem. Pick your price and the number is fixed: 112 customers at $9, 35 at $29, 21 at $49. Once you see it as a number of people, the plan gets a lot more concrete than "grow revenue".
Slide the price below and watch the grid. Each dot is a paying customer you need at the same time.
Seeing 112 dots next to 21 makes the pricing argument better than any blog post. If you're still deciding, pricing your first SaaS goes through the churn side of it.
Count backwards from $1k MRR to a weekly target
Take the $29 case: 35 customers. Say you want to get there in six months. That's about 6 new customers a month, or 1.5 a week. Add churn. At 5% a month you'll lose one or two along the way, so call it 7 a month.
Now it's a weekly target you can check every Friday. Two new paying customers this week, or not. If not, what did you do this week that was supposed to produce them?
Stage one: 0 to 10 customers
This stage is all manual. You find people with the problem, talk to them, and sign them up one at a time. Free setup, a founder price, a fast fix for a bug they found. None of this scales and none of it needs to. I wrote the full playbook in getting your first 10 customers from X.
The goal here isn't only revenue. It's finding out who buys fastest. By customer 10, you should be able to describe the typical buyer in one sentence. If you can't, keep talking to people before you try to grow.
Stage two: 10 customers to $1k MRR
- →Do more of whatever got the first 10. If it was replies on X, do more replies to the same kind of person. Don't switch channels because you're bored.
- →Rewrite your homepage with your customers' words. The phrase three of them used to describe the problem is your headline.
- →Ask happy customers one question: "Know anyone else who has this problem?" Some will tag a friend. That's your cheapest growth.
- →Add an annual plan. A few people will take it, which helps cash and cuts churn.
- →Fix the one thing that makes people cancel. Ask everyone who leaves, and read the answers every week.
4 months in, 12 paying users, completely stuck. feels like everyone I can reach has already seen it
12 is a real start. The people you can reach are mostly your followers, but your buyers are probably posting about the problem right now without following anyone like you. Try searching for the pain itself, not your category, and answer those posts for two weeks. That's what got me past the same wall.
What doesn't move MRR at this stage
A redesign. A big feature for one prospect who hasn't paid. A new pricing page with three tiers. These feel productive and rarely move the count. SEO content is worth starting, but it pays off over months, so don't count on it to hit a six month target.
Ads are tempting once you have a little revenue. At $29 a month, you can only afford to pay so much per customer before the math stops working, and early on you don't know your churn well enough to know what that number is. I'd wait.
How long it takes
I won't pretend there's a standard timeline. Some products get to $1k MRR in two months, many take a year, plenty never do. The ones I've seen get there fastest had a clear buyer, a price above $20, and a founder who talked to people every single day.
That last part is where KittyLeads fits. It finds people on X posting about your problem, up to 100–200 matched people a day depending on niche, and drafts a reply for each one so the daily habit takes about 20 minutes. The indie hackers page shows what that looks like in practice.
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