Mike is the Founder of Upvoty, A user feedback tool which he launched as a non-techincal founder
Hey Mike, Tell us more about what you are working on
Hey all! I’m Mike, a serial SaaS entrepreneur currently building Upvoty, a user feedback tool with voting boards, and Feedefy, also a user feedback tool with a main focus on embedding a feedback widget to gather user feedback. I’m also the founder of the Zero to SaaS community and course (PS: readers using the code COURSE50 get 50% off!), which now has over 500 members worldwide. Besides that, I’m also writing a free weekly email in Mike’s Snippets, a newsletter dedicated to sharing what I have learned. And, on top of that, I’m publishing a weekly vlog, also documenting my progress.
But, of all of this, my main focus is Upvoty. It’s now doing over
$50,000 in MRR. Upvoty is basically an all-in-one user feedback tool to collect and manage all of your user feedback in 1 single place. You can collect feedback through feedback boards with a voting feature, letting your users upvote each other’s feedback, and you can communicate and share your product roadmap and publish your latest launch through the Changelog.
Albeit operating in a competitive market, I think I was partly lucky to be one of the first in the space around 4 years ago. We grew a loyal customer and fanbase, and being a user feedback tool, there’s one thing we’re really good at, haha; listening to our users! On top of that, we’re one of the few tools with fair pricing. Most tools charge a lot for the same features that we offer, making us a very interesting option for most.
Tell us More about your background, and how you came up with the idea of Upvoty
So I dropped out of college when I was 19. School just wasn’t for me. Honestly, the time I spent in class was either playing Quake (old-school game!) or working on my first business. I started my first internet business around that time from my parent’s garage. It was an e-commerce store where I’d sell t-shirts with funny prints. It was called “Pimp My Shirt” after the MTV hit show “Pimp My Ride,” lol.
In order to get sales, I needed to learn SEO. After I learned about algorithms and managed to get my site to rank #1 in Google, other businesses started asking me to do SEO for them.
Around that time, I started my SEO agency and quickly scaled it to $100K/year.
It was an easy game, and I could’ve scaled it to $1m if I wanted to, but I just didn’t enjoy working for clients. I wanted my own thing.
That’s when I started an online marketplace where we generated leads and sold those leads to contractors. A major market! Within 3 years, the business did over $1m a year.
But, I kid you not, I wasn’t fulfilled. It was then that I learned about the importance of doing something you love. being passionate about the problem you’re solving. With that marketplace, I wasn’t.
Luckily, at some point, we had so many customers, and we received a lot of feedback, that we needed software to make it easier to collect and manage.
I couldn’t find any great tool out there that was either good enough or had fair pricing.
So, one day, I decided to leave the marketplace and start all over again, which was the birth of Upvoty.
Up to this day, I enjoy working on both Upvoty and my new project Feedefy since it’s operating in a space I love and it solves a problem I’m passionate about: creating great products with the help of user feedback!
How did you get your first customers for Upvoty?
So, while Upvoty was initially built to solve my own problem, I knew from the very start I wanted to market this as a standalone product. Right from the start, I shared the progress online and ramped up a basic website with a signup form to see if others were also interested.
After 100s of people signed up almost overnight, I knew I was on to something.
We started building, and fairly quickly, I opened up the product to the first beta users. They were almost immediately blown away, and I offered them a deal: in exchange for feedback, they’d get the product for free, with some limits, until we launched.
The funny thing is, most were using Upvoty this heavily that they needed to go beyond the restrictions and were happy paying for it.
This actually resulted in the first $1,000 MRR before we even launched publicly!
So, after we finetuned the product based on the feedback of those early beta users, we launched on ProductHunt. Within 3 months we grew to $3,000 in MRR, and we started doing marketing from here.
A couple of things that worked really well:
- Alternative to ads: launching ads in Google targeting the unhappy customers of our competitors
- Comparison pages: writing SEO-optimized comparison pages to target people who were looking for the best user feedback tool
- Participating and engaging with our audience; we invested highly in interacting with our target audience on forums like Reddit, Facebook Groups, IndieHackers, and more.
What Marketing Channels are working for you now?
I’m so glad I had built the experience with SEO before. From the very start, we invested highly in creating quality blog posts that helped answer the questions of our desired target audience.
SEO and content marketing still do very well, and we’re getting 1000s of visitors to our blog each month.
Also something to take into account from the start; building a brand! We invested in a unique brand, partly possible by this amazing mascot:
Can you share a significant pivot or strategic shift your business has undergone?
At first, we thought we could be “a user feedback tool for everyone”, but really only when we started focusing on a smaller and specific target audience, we saw some real results.
The ROI on everything becomes greater when you narrow down your target audience.
Every marketing aspect gets easier as well when you’re writing for a specific niche.
How do you approach competition in your industry?
I’ve learned that you definitely need to keep an eye on your competitors, just for the sake of learning from their mistakes and successes, but to never be too busy giving them your energy.
Almost every month, a new Upvoty copy pops up.
I really don’t care.
Heck, I even welcome them 😉
The thing is, you know so much more about the market, your audience, and the purpose of your product.
It’s like you know where the puck goes and they’re just following it.
How is your business doing now?
We just crossed $50,000 in MRR with over 1,200 customers worldwide like Veed(.io), DirectAdmin, KodeKloud, and more.
We’re growing 6-8% each month.
The focus right now is to get the product right for a growing audience. We are getting bigger and bigger teams on board and while I don’t want to grow into a cluttered product and forget about the “little ones”, we do need to work on new features that make it work for teams to incorporate Upvoty into their workflows.
What has been your biggest achievement in business thus far?
I’d say my biggest and most important achievement is that I’m now able to provide for my family, living a healthy and conscious lifestyle while earning a passive income from multiple revenue streams. Not having to work for a boss, determining my own hours, having both financial- and time freedom, to me, is the most beautiful thing you can achieve.
What were the worst mistakes you’ve made since launching?
Surprisingly, not much went wrong when launching Upvoty. But this was all because I made the classical mistakes earlier while building and scaling the marketplace app.
I’d say the 2 biggest mistakes were:
- Starting without proof of concept: you can validate every aspect of your business. From your idea, to new features, to the growth plan. For example, when we had product-market-fit and wanted to scale, I simply went to an investor and asked for $100,000 when he said we only needed $5,000 to actually validate the growth first. He was right, when we learned that we could actually scale with that $5,000 (getting more out of every dollar spent), we could show, based on “proof of concept” that we were ready.
- Building for everyone: one thing I can’t stress enough about is to narrow down your target audience as much as possible. Solve a particular real-world problem for a small audience first before you expand.
What Tech Stack are you currently using?
Being a non-tech founder, I had to ask my developer about our code stack, haha, but yeah, it consists of:
Front: Vue.js, TailwindCSS, PrimeVue
Back: NestJS, MySQL, AWS
My personal tool stack consists of:
Notion, Beehiiv, Stripe, Hypefury, Feedefy, Crisp chat, and Loom.
Especially Notion is a tool that replaced a lot of the tools I was using before (like Asana, Apple Notes, etc.). It’s my life and business CRM!
What advice would you give to new entrepreneurs?
Execute your ideas, no matter how bad they look like or actually are. You’ll really start to learn once you actually ship something.
What resources do you recommend for entrepreneurs?
The best book to learn SaaS, a book that really helped me as well, is ‘Intercom on Starting Up’ by Des Traynor. Another book I’d recommend is ‘Zero to Sold’ by Arvid Kahl.
I’d plug my own YouTube channel as I’m literally sharing my progress each week 😉
The community I’d recommend, sorry, is my own community Zero to SaaS. It’s packed with fun and inspiring members. Come join!
Lastly, Where can we learn more about you?
Come and connect with me on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube. If you want, feel free to subscribe to my free weekly newsletter.
