Seline is now at $500 MRR, bootstrapped

Six months in and we’ve reached our first important milestone - $500 monthly recurring revenue.

This kind of post is important to me because some time ago when I was just starting out, I was inspired by Tally's blog and 37signals stories and principles. And they weren't just inspiration - they were a source of belief that it's possible: being bootstrapped, thinking long-term, building something people want and enjoy using, and becoming profitable without chasing trends.

We're just getting started, and I'll be sharing more stories along the way.

And by sharing this one I hope to give back and maybe inspire others to start building something similar too.

In this blog post I’ll summarize everything we did to get here. The most content here is taken from my late reddit post, which also contributed to the growth, with some added details.

How we came to build Seline

Seline is a product we always wanted to use ourselves as no simple analytics tool really worked for us. I won't go into detail here, but you can read more about it at our launch blog post.

Let’s go back to the times when we didn’t have any idea about what to build.

What we did was starting with some criterias.

• Not a revolutionary product, there should be plenty of validated competitors - meaning there's a market for it already and you just need to innovate and take your cut.
• People search for it naturally (google, socials, etc.) - meaning there's an opportunity to grow organically. No enterprise deals, cold emails, etc.
• Something that I myself would USE - meaning I need to live and breathe the product = want to improve it for myself too.
• B2B - meaning creating tiktoks is not mandatory.

Seline ticked all the boxes.

Going from 0 to v1 took ~6 months and lots of iterations.

What worked for early traction

Now we can get to what worked for early traction.

We took our time to perfect the design and product quality. I've shared my thoughts about our design process in this X thread for those interested. Tldr is that we focused hard on details, like our mascot and UX.

When we were close to launch I bought ScreenStudio and went on X with my 0 posts and 0 followers account.

I tagged shadcn (maker of the UI components library we use) in a tweet with a quick Seline's interface screen recording. I would've linked it here, but I accidentally deleted it.

People notice things done with care and love, so he reposted it and it blew up. It then got reposted by Vercel CEO and other big accounts, and started growing organically because people loved (humbly said) what they saw.

We were lucky, but this "success" was short-formed, like a wave.

I've grown my following to ~600 people and made some connections. Social media does not come naturally to me, but I continued posting 4-7 times a week.

In a month we jumped on a second wave which was ProductHunt. Although I was pretty skeptical about it and treated it only as a backlink opportunity, we got randomly featured on the main page and got ~300 upvotes. This brought more visits, more attention to the product, and another bit of paying users.

These were two big waves that we've had. What would I do if this didn't happen - if there were no reposts or engagements? I'd make sure to iterate on the product to a point when people want to share it organically and engage with it, make sure these waves actually happen.

I knew that we needed more fundamental marketing directions, so we started to work on SEO from day 0.

And I wish we started it earlier - as soon as I bought the domain.

Now, I'm not a SEO expert. So I knew I needed someone to help me out, and I had some budget going into this.

I've done a competitor and keyword research myself using ahrefs - I needed to understand the basics to have control over what's happening.

What I understood from all my years in startups - never trust marketing people.

That's how I found a person I'm comfortable working with - I looked for SaaS blogs that I like and are performing well, and reached out to people writing them.

My one rule - no *completely* AI-generated content. AI is used for ideation and grammar corrections. Full AI is a way to lose credibility and make your website stinky.

I spend ~$500-2000 on SEO monthly.

Today our domain name is ~4 months old, is at 32 DR, and we already have some traffic coming into our blog and other content pages. It's around a hundred visits a month, but it's growing, and I'm ok with it being a long process.

Our reach on X helped our SEO game too - we got posted to multiple design and startup directories. It brings decent traffic and boosts DR, but it's not really our "target client" traffic.

Funny enough - one of our biggest clients today is someone who came from alternative.to website, right after I've started creating accounts for Seline at all the "free backlink" websites, which was a couple days before we blew up on X and when our domain was at 0 DR. Random things like that is what makes business fun.

Expenses

It’s worth mentioning our expenses. So far it’s not much if we take out SEO, with the most cash going into the servers.

Our servers are heavily underloaded - we'll be able to land many more paying customers without adding resources.

What we do now

We're at ~20 paying clients.

There's plenty of product work now when we have actual people using the product. New features, small fixes, infrastructure improvements.

I continue to post on X. I'm against being *noisy*, so I try to post only when I have important things to share.

We are slowly grinding SEO - writing blogs and other content, applying to directories, reaching out for guest posting.

Our articles bring in ~$500 worth of value according to ahrefs.

Word of mouth works - we've had clients referred by existing clients.

After the social media waves that we've had, it's pretty slow growth here, but it's growth nonetheless and it's picking up. Consistency is the key.

And it gets me excited to my bones to think about where we'll be in a year.