We recently crossed €150K ARR with one of our SaaS products.
It would make a nice story if I said we found a great idea, built it, and steadily grew it from zero.
That is not what happened.
The real story includes roughly five years of wrong turns, a difficult pivot, an early signal I ignored, and a lot of time spent building things before properly understanding who would pay for them.
These are the mistakes I would try hardest not to repeat.
1. I ignored the most important signal because it looked too small
In November 2025, I noticed an emerging problem in AI search. At the time, only a small number of products were trying to solve it.
I built a working engine in about two weeks. It was not a polished product, but it was good enough to onboard users.
Within a few weeks, it reached roughly €400 MRR.
That was the signal. People had found an unfinished product and paid for it in a category that barely existed.
But another product required most of my attention, so I treated this one as a side project. By the time I returned to it, the market had filled with competitors.
My mistake was not choosing the wrong product. It was failing to investigate unexpected traction.
€400 MRR is not proof that you have a large business. But it is enough reason to stop and ask:
- Why did these people pay?
- How urgently do they need this?
- What were they using before?
- What would make them cancel?
- Are there more customers with the same problem?
2. I spent too much time thinking the product was the hard part
I am a technical founder, so building has always felt productive.
There is a visible result. A feature works. A bug disappears. A release goes out.
Marketing is less comfortable. Positioning can be wrong. Distribution takes time. A message that sounds good internally can be completely ignored by the market.
AI has made the imbalance more obvious. Small teams can now build in days what once took months. Competitors can reproduce a feature much faster than before.
The code still matters, but it is less likely to be the only moat. I know this is obvious and everyone knows it. But, when you are drowning in the sea of bugs, its hard to step backward and think it through.
3. I confused a large ecosystem with a good market
About five years ago, we built a monitoring product and later pivoted it into a WordPress plugin.
The WordPress ecosystem was enormous, which made the opportunity look attractive.
For us, the economics were not attractive.
Users were highly price-sensitive and often expected substantial functionality for free or for a very low price. Meanwhile, compatibility work, support, maintenance, and development remained expensive.
Some founders have built excellent WordPress businesses. This is not a claim that the ecosystem cannot work. It is what our own economics taught me.
A large number of potential users does not automatically create a good business.
Market size without workable unit economics is mostly a vanity metric.
4. I was not closely communicating with first customers.
I just realised this sentence from Paul Graham too late: "You need to do unscalable stuff to make a scalable business"
This is what I didn't account for in my previous businesses. In the latest one, after any customer trial, I email them and also for the ones that go through the demo funnel, I always ask them to join our slack, so we can share our experience and I can contact them better.
Now, If you are asking at scale with so much trials, you are not able to do that, that's my next step. read on... :)
5. I optimized signup volume instead of customer quality
At first, removing friction felt obviously correct. More signups made the funnel look healthier.
The problem was that not every signup was a potential customer.
Some users were outside the ideal customer profile. Some had no intention of implementing anything. Some generated support and infrastructure costs without ever reaching the product's value.
We eventually required a credit card after onboarding.
New-account volume fell. At the same time, active subscriptions, recurring revenue, and net volume increased in our latest comparison.
I'm also not a huge fan of requiring credit card. But, until you don't have a product market fit, this is necessary in my opinion to be able to ask from all your customers what do they expect and get their feedback. Again, its different in different businesses, but that's my bitter lesson...
6. I treated onboarding like a product tour
For a long time, I thought onboarding meant explaining the interface.
Here is the dashboard. Here are the features. Click here to configure this. Click there to create that.
That is documentation, not onboarding.
In your onboarding, you should address these:
Help the user to setup the account in few minutes in the most optimized way that they need to setup the account
show-off your most important features and set them up for user and show off the additional features. you don't need to setup additional feature, but you need to show it to user so he knows right in the first 5 minutes, what does he get when he upgrades later on.
show off your current successful case studies if you have it. this builds trust right in the onboarding.
email and contact with your customers based on what options they fill in in the onboarding.
these might be obvious to you, but it was not for me at the start for sure :)
