My 2024 Goal — Can I Hit $1M ARR in Just One Year?
Hi, I'm Samar Kundal, a full-stack developer on a pursuit to build meaningful products from a decade. I currently work at Chisel as the full-stack engineer. I am also the founder of Blogmate and running a public experiment on "Can I hit $1m ARR in just 1 year?"
Yes, you have read it right. In the next 12 months or 52 weeks, I am going to take Blogmate and make it a $1m ARR Company. I can fail or succeed, but I thing I know for sure — that I am going to put my every ounce of strength onto it.
You might be wondering have I done something like this in the past?
Let me take you back to the time when I was in college.
I was born in a middle class family. My father was in the army so we have always had enough but not a penny more than that. When I was growing I would always look at my rich classmates and wonder, when I will have the things that they have. That car, or that fancy phone. I had nothing of that sense.
Fast forward to 10 years, last 10 years I had spent on trying to build a successful business. I succeeded at some, failed at many. But I have learnt a lot. I have made a ton of mistakes but I have also done a few things right.
Now armed with everything those setbacks taught me, I am ready to take the biggest swing of my life. I would start, build and grow Blogmate to $1 Million a Year Business in Just One Year?
And on this website I will document everything from my struggles to milestones and learnings. And even the things that I don't share with my mom. Sorry mom!
The Idea — Blogmate
I love reading. I have always loved blogging. And yes, In the age of videos and 30 second shorts, I still prefer reading long articles. For me, being able to scan the whole article and stop at the part I find interesting is the main reason.
Out of all my business failures one thing was always common. I had started a blog. I have had a blog on resume writing tips, nodejs blog for beginners, apple tech news blog for apple nerds. You name it, I might have a blog on that too.
But all those blogs are now pointed to some expired domain name, lost in the sea of Internet. Blogmate was started out of that pain, that frustration, that regret. What might have happened I had continued? What if I didn't quit? What if I stayed consistent?
So one day, this idea came to my when I was working on my last active company — NodeCompose. I was just wondering if things would have been different if AI was this prominent when I had started.
NodeCompose as struggling due to lack of funds. I am still not sure if had an amazing insight or it was just my mind distracting me form challenges at NodeCompose.
Why me and Why now?
When I was in college, roughly around 2011. I created a blog about latest news in my college. I published a funny and witty blog post about some random girl and it went viral inside my college. That was my first entrepreneurial adventure. I tried to monetize the blog but I lost focus only after writing 3 posts. Those 3 were good posts, btw.
Over next 10 years, I worked on 18 business ideas. And while most of them resulting in a failure, but they helped me learn a lot. I learnt a lot about how to choose ideas, how to embrace change when things do go well. And most important it made me who I am now.
What is Blogmate?
Blogmate is an AI based Virtual blogging assistant platform which helps small businesses build and grow their blog. It solves 3 major problems for blogging content creators.
#1 - Content Plan and Strategy
#2 - Content Writing
#3 - Content Amplification and Distribution
This is how I remind myself about what Blogmate will focus on — "Plan, Write, Amplify"
"Small business owners struggling to put regular content on their blog and are in need of a time-saving, easy-to-use solution that helps them put regular and consistent content to reach more audience and grow blog"
— Target Audience for Blogmate
Based on my personal experience and of those who create content, I highlighted the 3 major problems that people have with blogging.
- Don't know what to write on — Lack of Content Plan and Strategy.
- Don't know how to write — Lacks confidence in their writing.
- Don't know where to share — No Idea how to bring the post in front of right audience.
The idea is simple. Help people find great content ideas, write amazing blog posts and then help them reach the right audience.
My mission with Blogmate
First there is my personal mission with my selfish personal focus. I want to see what happens If I don't get distracted and stay consistent with something for just 1 year. All my life I have been jumping from one thing to another with just lack of focus.
Second, I want to solve the problems that I mentioned for myself and the other, whom we promised to serve. My mission is to give small business owners the tools they need to succeed and level the playing field for all of us.
Focus is on using AI to create a tool that works alongside content creators, not replacing them. Helps them do their work better.
It's all about making tedious tasks simpler, and unlocking creativity, and potential we didn't even know we had.
This is the future of content creation.
The Start — How we started
When I brought this idea to my wife. She immediately felt the need for it. I am not sure did she really liked the idea or she was just too tired to argue. Anyways, It was her who really showed interest in this, and even before I actually started any work on it.
I and My wife are on this, together.
It was in December, 2nd week of 2023 when we wrote the very first line for development. We made a few calls to the GPT APIs and tried to figure how we can use all that to build our initial product. The first version of the product was a CLI tool that takes a topic, writes the articles and saves a markdown file.
It was not something special. But it helped us visualize things.
It was not until 2nd week of January when we had our first version of product ready. We had built a basic MVP that helps plan our content, write articles using AI and do a basic analysis to optimise it for SEO.
That's how we started on this.
Why $1m revenue?
Long before When I started experimenting with SAAS (Software as a service), I had this number in mind. For any SAAS business to achieve a Product-market fit and solve a problem that customers would pay for, $1m is the number.
Surely there are niche products, that are doing well at $50k or even $10k revenue, but based on our market size and pricing, $1m is the goal for us.
Hitting $1M ARR proves Blogmate isn't just a hobby project but it's actually a scalable business with genuine value to customers.
Is $1M ARR really doable?
1 Million Revenue, seems like a very large number. It is actually a very large number. And we often doubt ourselves from time to time, and just think if we can do it. Is it too ambitious undertaking?
Let's first try to understand how many customers do we need to make $1m ARR.
We have 3 Pricing plans for our product.
- $29 per month (Starter plan for small bloggers just starting out)
- $59 per month (Growth plan for businesses scaling their content marketing)
- $119 per month (Scale Plan for Organisations taking content to the next level)
Let's try to understand how many customer we need based on each plan.
$29 - Starter Plan
- Annual Revenue per Customer: $29/month * 12 months = $348
- Customers Needed for $1M ARR: $1,000,000 / $348 = ~2873 customers
$59 - Growth Plan
- Annual Revenue per Customer: $59/month * 12 months = $708
- Customers Needed for $1M ARR: $1,000,000 / $708 = ~1412 customers
$119 - Scale Plan
- Annual Revenue per Customer: $119/month * 12 months = $1428
- Customers Needed for $1M ARR: $1,000,000 / $1428 = ~700 customers
But realistically, not all customers would be buying the Scale Plan. Let's consider, 30% customers buy starter plan, 50% buy the growth plan and rest of 30% buy scale plan.
So the revenue from Starter plan need to be $1m * 0.3 = $3,00,000, growth plan - $1,000,0000 * 0.5 = $5,00,000 and scale plan $1,000,0000 * 0.3 = $3,00,000.
Given this, we need roughly 862 customers for starter plan, 706 customers for growth plan and 210 customers for scale plan. In total - 862 + 706 + 210 = 1778 customers.
Yes, all we need are 1778 customers and we might hit our goal. But this is a real world calculation and in real world, people would cancel their subscription and we would have a churn. Considering 5% average churn rate in SAAS.
1778 * 1.05 = ~ 1867 customers.
The Journey — How we do it
In my 10 years of working on startups and selling things, if I have learnt something. It is. It's very hard to get money from people's wallet or their credit cards, in our case. If you charge $10 dollar, you need to provide value at-least a few folds for them to pay. You need to solve their immediate and very achy pains. Otherwise, you will always be lost looking for your customers.
Start with a problem and solve it well, like really well.
We have the idea, we know the problem, we sort of have a minimalistic product ready. Now what? How do I find customers? How do I sell my product to bring in $1 million revenue as I have committed.
This is where a strategy comes into play. Based on thinking for several hours for several days, I have come up with the first version of what my plan is going to be. Notice the word "first version", because I know for sure that this is going to change a hundred more times, before I actually start getting any results.
How I'm gonna do it? — My Action Plan
Our core goal is Building $1m million ARR in 1 year. This as a whole sounds a very audacious undertaking, we might need to trim it down to sub-goals. And this is how I do it. A few years back I had learned about Macrocycles mesocycles and microcycles. I now use a altered version of the same concept and all my goal planning start with breaking down my goals.
Goal is broken down to phases. And each phase is broken down to Action Steps and several guiding principles.
Based on this I have 4 phases for whole year, Each phase lasts 3 month.
Phase 1: Build MVP & Ruthless Prioritisation
Phase 2: The "Do One Thing Really Well"
Phase 3: Build Acquisition Engine That Scales
Phase 4: Scale to $1m ARR
Let's understand each phase, one by one.
👉 Phase 1 : Build MVP & Ruthless Prioritisation
This phase is all about building a targeted MVP which solves the problem of a very specific niche audience. The goal is to identifying the person who is having the biggest and most painful boil. (And by boil, i mean the problem we solve with out product). He must be in deep pain and is actively looking for a solution to solve this problem. He might try out almost everything to get some relief.
The goal here is to find that person and solve the problem for him. A few principles which might help navigate this phase well.
#1 — Simplicity and Minimalism wins
Focus on the core problem for the most dreaded customer and solve it in the most simple way possible. For us, we will focus on the most common blogging pain points for our customer and provide simple version of features that solve them.
#2 — Early Adopters are Gold
These people who try out the product in the very beginning are most important. They will shape the product and if we solve their problem well, they will become our evangelists later.
#3 — Be Validation-Driven
Don't just assume. Ask your customers. Live along them (not literally). Build in feedback loops to assess your decision making and make sure you are building the right thing. Take customer feedback from surveys, interviews and build the product together with the early adopters.
#4 — Zero in on the Ideal User
By the end of this phase, our goal is to have our ideal user with us. Ideal user is the one who gets the most immediate value from Blogmate. Learn about him. Where he lives on the internet, what he does, how he likes to spend his day. Learn the best way to reach him and double down on marketing within that space.
👉 Phase 2: The "Do One Thing Really Well"
I am a huge fan of the book "The One Thing by Gary Keller". I am a firm believer in the idea of focusing on one most effective task, rather than spreading over a hundred tasks. This phase is all about this ideology. In terms of product, marketing and sales, we will do just one thing but do it really well.
Here are a few principles to help us navigate through this phase.
#1 — Solve one key problem
Our customer might have a lot of problems. He might struggle with a lot of things. Our goal is not to solve all his problem. Our goal is just to solve one problem for him but solve it really well. The feature we provide to solve that one problem need to be better than any competitors out there. It must not solve 99% of that one problem, but it must solve all of it. For example, we could double down on content strategy and provide the best tool to create an exceptional content strategy.
#2 — Master one channel to bring leads
Don't just try out everything. For a bootstrapped company, it's just not feasible. We don't have the resources to try out everything. We will have to prioritise the channels which gives us the best ROI. In this phase, we will identify our key performing marketing channel and put all our effort to master the same channel.
#3 — Our Content as Proof of Concept
The whole point of Blogmate is just a waste if we can't even solve our own problem. The goal is to build a content creation SOPs that help us put high quality engaging content. Our goal is to showcase how integral is Blogmate in our own marketing and content strategy. We just don't ask you to consume food which we don't eat ourselves. Obviously, Blogmate is going to help us reach more and more people.
👉 Phase 3: Build Acquisition Engine That Scales
In the early days, a startup has to do everything it can to survive. It's all about gaining the initial traction. We don't care about if something is scalable or not. But then comes a time when we need to go to the next level. Going door to door or pitching your product is an elevator might not help you scale - you might run out of elevators.
Then it's about building a growth engine which helps you scale to the next level. Our phase 3 is about the same. Our priority is building a scalable engine which we can scale in the next phase.
Here are a few principles which will help us navigate in this phase.
#1 — Improve "Time to Value"
Your first impression might not be the last impression, but it surely makes a lot of things easier or harder. Just like how much you need to wait for waiter in a restaurant builds an impression, how soon you get value in a product also builds an impression. You must focus to provide the value to user, as soon as possible. Don't make the user wait to get the initial value. Bring it to user, the early as possible.
#2 — Focus on "Super Users"
Your super users are the people getting the most out of the platform. These are people who are regularly creating content through Blogmate. These are the users who are willing to provide feedback to you. Always listen to them. What they have to say, might have some great product insights or improvement points. Focus on them. Make them happy and they will reward you later.
#3 — Automate or Outsource
At this stage, your time becomes your greatest asset. While you were doing everything yourself, at the initial stage. Now it's just not possible. You will need to find ways to save time so that you can spend on the most meaningful tasks. Use automation or AI to automate things. And if you can't automate things, just outsource them to someone inside your team or outside the team.
#4 — Tap into the power of Content + SEO
Position yourself as an authority in the space our target audience is living in. Discuss their pain points, provide solutions to their pain points. Become a go to authority when it comes to solutions for the pain points. Don't just solve problems of the audience through content or product. Build small products or side-products to solve their specific problems.
Become a part of my Journey
This is not a quick "How to do X" blog post. This is going to be continuous learning for 1 straight year. My monthly updates on this blog will show the highs, the lows and painful process of building a startup in real-time.
I am not saying I am some super successful guy, who have build several successful business. I have learnt a lot of things from so many failed attempts. This is not going to be some marketing fluff - just some lessons I wish someone had shared with me.
I am going to share an update every month on how we are progressing, what challenges did we face and how did we overcome those.
My goal with this public sharing is that I want to tear the wall and make the process of building a startup as transparent as possible. And Maybe some lessons I learn the hard way can save you time and frustration.
I am going to be very transparent and honest on my Twitter, LinkedIn and on my website - Samarkundal.com