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Typefully $113K MRR in 4 years. Growth, Hacks, Secrets

3 May 2024
$113K MRRRevenue MRR
SaasCategory
SubscriptionsBusiness Model
Next.js, Vercel, CloudFrontTech stack
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typefully
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We don't use AI to write articles
All our content is created manually, without using AI to write it (we use it rarely only for grammar corrections). In an era of exponentially increasing useless information, we will stand out by creating high-quality and valuable knowledge

👀 How was the idea born?

Typefully exists now because Fabrizio (co-founder) wanted a tool to write twitter Threads. So he started build one
Origin Tweet
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⭐️ The story of how the cofounders met

We met through Twitter in 2011. We are both Italian 🇮🇹 and were part of the same bubble of Italian teenagers interested in tech (specifically Apple at the time). We had tons of micro-interactions throughout the years via Twitter and we were both passioned about apps and great UX.

> Fabrizio reach out to me about building a camera app for iOS. I took the offer but, after a short collab, we dropped the project. Nothing came out of it in the end. You can consider it our first 'failure'

> After that, we kept following and interacting with each other for months.

At some point in 2015, Fabrizio tweeted about a concept of a Mac app wrapping Inbox by Gmail and I DM’d him a prototype after a few hours.
> That project was Bboxysuite, our first successful project together. 🎉 Bboxysuite (We sold it and we no longer control it.) After that, we kept working together on bigger and bigger projects.

> (We only met in person a few years after our first project together, when we both started working at @bendingspoons.)

> The rest of the story includes building and selling @mailbrew to now be fully focused on scaling @typefully

Insight

💡

Yes, you might not need a co-founder. But you can find one just by doing stuff and telling people about it.
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🚀 Getting first 1000 users in one day

Launch day: 16k page visits, 1,432 Signups, $155 Revenue (more on this at the end).

The traffic breakdown reveals what happened:

  • Hacker News: 6.3k
  • Twitter: 2.1k
  • ProductHunt: 1.9k

Yeah, we finally managed to hit the Hacker News frontpage.

The perfect formula was:

  • interesting product
  • no-bullshit title
  • sparking a controversial discussion in the comments.
When it comes to Twitter, we have been building a following there for some time, so it was a matter of publishing the right tweet, at the right time, and getting the right people to retweet it.
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For Product Hunt, we partnered with our friend Chris. His followers got a notification when he hunted us, but we also did our part and emailed our lists. That helped to get fast on the front page and to kickstart the discussion.

Origin Tweet

We also promoted it to our Mailbrew project.

Inspostories edit: We need to mention here that this trategy may not works already, there are a lot of products already on PH

🤯 How got to the HackerNews front page three times in a row

> In the past month, I managed to get to the Hacker News front page three times in a row:

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> What's the point, though? Those articles took me 1-2 hours to write and resulted in 40k+ visits to this blog, hundreds of signups for Typefully and Mailbrew, and many Twitter followers.

Stats
1. Select a topic: HN is a community of entrepreneurial hackers, naturally curious about company building, startups, programming, technical topics, and understanding the world. Writing about those topics will help but is not required. In fact, you can write about anything as long as your writing is intellectually honest, in-depth, and does not try to sell something.
2. Pick the right title. The title should describe exactly what the post is about. No marketing is allowed. Think of the title more as a commit message than a headline.
3. Don't try to outsmart HN readers. You can safely assume that the average HN reader is smarter than you. They have a radar for bullshit. You are either telling a story, describing a problem, showing something you built, or not getting to the front page. This should influence your title and style of writing. Notice in the titles above and in my writing how I am simply describing my experience, not trying to teach anything.
4. Be responsive in the comments. Engaging with people in the comments is the funniest part of the front-page experience. I usually write in a void and getting the diverse feedback that HN delivers is a ton of fun. I believe starting a discussion is also key in getting people to click and upvote your post. I don't take comments too seriously or personally. While the average HN reader may be smarter than me, there is a lot of variance.
4. Dance like nobody's watching. I write for myself, and when I get a good feeling about a post, I submit it, trying not to overthink it.
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