What’s My Plan to Reach €100K MRR?

Five attempts, five failures. Today, I stand on the brink of a sixth entrepreneurial venture. But first, I am writing this article to reflect on the mistakes I’ve made and the lessons I’ve learned from them.

1. What’s the real use of money?

Quickly, who am I? A 24-year-old French software engineer, I work as a freelancer for a company in the United States. I earn 3 to 4 times the median salary of my country, and I live comfortably. I get fairly regular raises at the company where I work, exceeding the targets set for me, all while maintaining a very balanced work and personal life. I choose my own work hours, and I rarely open the work Slack in the evenings or on weekends. Overall, everything is going well.

But beneath this facade of tranquility lies an unsatisfied quest for something more. Since my earliest days, the ambition to become wealthy has always lived within me. I didn’t know how or by what means, but the certainty was there, relentless. Quite quickly, I became interested in programming and went to a higher education institution in this field.

Coding became the conduit to my future fortune and the source around which I initiated and developed personal projects, first during my studies and then alongside my freelance work. Now, I have been developing projects for just over 6 years.

Why aspire to wealth, you might ask?

For the freedom it provides. Of course, my current career already offers me a certain degree of latitude and stability, but for me, that’s the foundation of freedom, not its pinnacle.

I aim for absolute freedom: the freedom to never hesitate over the price of things, the freedom to adopt the latest technological innovations without constraint. Imagine a state-of-the-art virtual office that would allow me to work from anywhere with absolute ease; I want to be able to afford it without a second thought.

Beyond the material, I desire the freedom to live my life to the fullest, to surround myself with professionals — from Michelin-starred chefs to personal trainers — to achieve optimal well-being without sacrificing my precious time. Because in the end, I want to enjoy life, in good health and for as long as possible, while dedicating myself to what truly matters to me.

2. The plan step by step

My plan to achieve this is simple yet difficult. Simple as opposed to complex: my plan consists of only a few steps. Difficult as opposed to easy: each of these steps requires skills, opportunities, and a lot of work to succeed.

1. Continue my freelance work while creating products that help people.
2. Scale a product until it earns more than my freelance work.
3. Leave my freelance job, and continue to create products that help people, but full-time this time.
4. Scale the products that help people to $100,000 per month.
5. Once reaching $100,000 per month, continue to create products because I love doing it, but while taking more regular and longer vacations, and placing my well-being more at the center of my activities.

3. I’ve already made these mistakes, don’t make them again!

3.1 The Isolated Coder

The Project: In early 2019, my second year at school, now I know how to code a full-stack application from A to Z, although it’s not very optimized. At the same time, I need to find an internship for my second year. I see all my classmates finding internships through recommendations from students in higher years, but I’m struggling. So, I learn the importance of networking.

This time I create a platform for top schools that catalogs all the internships at companies offered to students in higher years, to allow schools to argue that they already have a large network of companies which will greatly help students progress in their professional lives. I talk to my school about it; they are enthusiastic. I code for months alone in my corner, I make a beautiful platform.

After that, nothing. I lose motivation, the deadlines are too long, I realize that the project doesn’t excite me, and I’m a bit disgusted to have spent hundreds of hours coding a 100% functional platform that interests no one.

Lessons Learned:

• Do not code alone for months.
• Work on projects that you find fun even in the long term.
• Do not assume that your supposition of someone else’s problem is correct.
• You need to confront the market as quickly as possible.
• Make sure potential customers are not only interested but also willing to pay.

3.2 High Hopes and Hard Lessons : My first 1k€ MRR

The Project: Now in my third year, I’ve further improved my coding skills. I hang out in Facebook entrepreneurship groups, and a sports betting entrepreneur posted a message saying he was looking for a developer to create a comprehensive platform to share his sports predictions with his community. The amount he offered represents two years of tuition fees for me, and I knew I was more than capable of coding the platform he requested.

Instead of accepting his proposal, I thought I could do better, and I decided to create a SaaS in the form of a CMS that allows all sports predictors to create their own highly customizable platform.

The CMS is completely turnkey; the predictor can choose their theme, personalize it, change colors, fonts, texts, and the order of different sections. They even have access to an admin dashboard where they can see their client list, payments, defaults, canceled subscriptions, upcoming payments, etc. From this admin dashboard, they can also create their sports predictions for various sports, select teams from a complete list of all the teams in the world. The predictors’ clients can even follow live scores of soccer and basketball matches directly on the site created by the CMS.

Here is some screenshots, in french :

I spent several months creating the CMS. At the same time, I thought it was time to buy a course on sales and digital marketing. Once the product was completely finished, with multiple themes and a plethora of features, I figured it was time to start pitching to predictors to sell it.

I contacted hundreds of predictors on Instagram, set up a CRM to track conversations and hot leads, and employed Instagram scraping to gather as many predictors as possible.

After several weeks of hard work, I managed to get 20 users. The business model was quite simple: a subscription of 30€/month for the CMS, and a 20% commission on the subscriptions that predictors sold to their clients.

After a few months, I crossed the milestone of 1000€ in revenue per month — a milestone I was eagerly anticipating.

I did some calculations and realized that the beautiful SaaS I had spent more than a year on was actually not profitable. The cost of servers, the time spent coding, client domain names, defaults, and the difficulty of acquiring new clients meant that I had to stop PronoApp and thank all the clients.

Lessons Learned:

• One must research their target audience before spending more than a year working on a project: in France, the majority of predictors are minors, earn little money, have low purchasing power, and are not ready to pay for a platform.
• Ensure that the problem you’re attempting to solve actually exists: predictors were already using Telegram, Discord, or other platforms to monetize their sports predictions.
• Don’t develop a product with 200 features if you haven’t validated the first feature with the market.
• If the project is going to fail, it should fail as quickly as possible.

3.3 The Ghost Widget

The Project: In 2022, I completed my studies, with a master’s degree in hand. I began to take an interest in B2B and the problems businesses face, in hopes of coding a solution that could both assist them and generate income for me. I identified a recurring issue: the collection of feedback.

Companies want to gather feedback from their users to improve their products, and the forms sent by email after a purchase have an extremely low response rate.

I started coding Howsit, a small widget that could appear anywhere and after any action on a website, posing a single, simple question. It was customizable in terms of colors and fonts to match the website’s design scheme.

The widget could be configured to accept different types of responses: multiple choice, free text, or a rating from 1 to 5, etc. There was also an admin dashboard for analytics on the responses, word clouds, charts, response rates, average response time, and so on. It was a small SDK easy to import on any website, whether it was a site from scratch in HTML, React, or created via a CMS like WordPress.

The widget was functional, and it was at this point that a personal event prompted me to take a two-week vacation.

Upon returning from vacation, I had lost all motivation for this SaaS, and I left it to the side, completely functional but never marketed to anyone.

Lessons Learned:

• You can have the best product in the world, but if you show it to no one, it’s useless.

3.4 I was hungry

The Project: At the beginning of 2023, I am now freelancing for a company in Los Angeles, working from home with flexible hours, and I want to dive back into an entrepreneurial venture. I exercise regularly and have started to take an interest in nutrition, calorie counting, and tracking macronutrients to stay in shape despite sitting for 12 hours a day due to my profession.

Soon, I install apps like MyFitnessPal, which helps me measure the number of calories I consume daily and highlight deficiencies in certain macronutrients I might have, especially in protein, which prevents me from making physical progress.

After using MyFitnessPal for a few months, I find the app too complicated, not streamlined enough, and too cumbersome for daily use. I test several other competitors, but none satisfy me.

I then embark on developing my own calorie and macronutrient tracking app, Maarco. (https://www.maarco.io) In a few months of coding, designing, and brainstorming, I have a functional app that I find very sleek, clean, and pleasant to use. I set a price of 3.99€/month for the premium version, while maintaining a free version that can be used indefinitely, but with locked features.

Here is a quick demo, also in french.

I create a blog, a Twitter account, and start on marketing and SEO. But I am very bad at it. With very little result, I then decide to launch an affiliate program, so that fitness influencers talk about my app and take a commission on each premium subscription. I manage to get a small base of 400 users, with about 50 active users daily, and 10 premium users.

I have my first MRR figures on this app, and in parallel, I continue to blog and post on Twitter, but with less and less desire.

The affiliate program doesn’t work very well because with a subscription at 3.99€, the affiliate earns 1.50€/month, which is too little to be attractive.

Gradually, I realize that I don’t have enough interest in nutrition to spend my days talking about it or promoting an app on the subject. I am tired of this application. Today, the application is functional, scalable, clean, and a bit used, and I am looking to sell it for a small sum of money. If you are interested, you can contact me on Twitter (https://twitter.com/robinbuilder).

Lessons Learned:

• Working in a field that you like, or at least don’t get tired of, is a prerequisite for sustaining a project over time.
• Setting up an affiliate offer with too low pricing is pointless.

4. So, what now?

My plan remains the same: to make enough money with one or more SaaS products to be able to quit my job, and then scale these SaaS products to €100,000 in MRR.

I’ve identified my biggest problem: I can code products of fairly good quality and quite quickly, but I’m very bad at selling them.

Fortunately for me, there are people who can’t create products but are excellent at selling them.

This is where Arthur comes in. Arthur is the CEO of a very successful marketing agency. Since his youth, he has excelled in sales, marketing, persuasion techniques, and everything that can trigger a purchase in a potential customer. I met Arthur in mid-2023 on an entrepreneurs’ Discord. After a few calls, we realized that we have very complementary profiles, share a very similar worldview on many aspects, and are both very eager to create products together. We spent some time reflecting on ideas, getting to know each other, when finally an idea more serious than the others came up.

Creating a SaaS to facilitate and improve the lives of marketing agencies. A tool powerful enough to assist the entire process of a marketing agency from A to Z, from gathering information on competitors, products, purchase triggers, purchase barriers, to creating quality output. This is the challenge we are setting ourselves today with Arthur. Me on coding, him on sales.

The promise is crazy, allowing marketing agencies to outsource 90% of their work thanks to a software, to get rid of all the tasks for which there is no added value in having a human do them.

The construction of this project is happening in public, on my Twitter. If you want to follow the adventure, feel free to follow me: https://twitter.com/robinbuilder.