Spending more money

Two weeks ago, we hit a big milestone: €100.000 annual recurring revenue! 

We're still playing minor league, but bootstrapping from €0 to €100k ARR is a big deal. It proves that we're on to something!

I took 19 months and 139 active customers (with an avg. ARR of €720). 

And just last week, we got our biggest customer yet with 11 paying seats, adding an additional €5k on top.

So I decided that it's time we start spending some more money!

We've launched two initiatives.

First, I've started looking for a new full stack php developer. 

I'm trying to "hire when it hurts," meaning that adding new people is the last resort after automating, optimizing, "AI-ifying", and improving everything we can. If whatever we're working on still hurts, it's probably time to add more people.

With nearly 150 paying customers, the amount of work required to do feature requests, bug fixing, server infrastructure, AI integration, etc., is simply more than I can keep up with.

At the same time, we're in a race with time to successfully build AI agents into our product to support the future of customer support.

Adding another developer to the project will (hopefully, more than) double our throughput.

We're in the middle of the hiring process and I hope to share more news about this soon.

Second, we've started working with a new marketing agency. 

Up until now we've worked with different freelancers, which has worked out sort of okay, but not really yielded the results we've hoped for.

To change that, we've signed up with a new agency (I'll share who later) that will manage our SEO and PPC across channels going forward.

And at the same time, we've increased our marketing spend significantly.

So why these changes now?

It's really a combination of two things. One, I want to fix something "that hurts". And two, I believe we've hit something close to product-market-fit (PMF).

I know... There are a thousand definitions of PMF, but to me, it's really about 1) new customers who are not a part of my network are coming in, being onboarded and using the product, 2) they stick around, they pay the bill and don't churn and 3) the cost of getting those new customers is significantly less than what they'll (assumably) pay us during their lifetime with us.

If that's not PMF, I don't know what is.

Spending that extra money has a consequence, though.

We were on track to becoming cash flow positive (meaning that we generate more cash than we spend each month) by June.

With these changes, it'll probably be December or the beginning of 2026 before that happens.

But that's one of the cool things about being bootstrapped, self-funded and owning the business.

Once I'm confident that the plan is solid, it's simply a matter of saying, "Let's go!"

So... LET'S GO! 🚀