The first sales, in quotes, I guess, were $0 because we just reached out to some friends right here we knew well. I mean, we knew this was something you had to plug into your app, and so there's some risk there. So we wanted people who trusted us to not break their stuff. And, you know, if we did break their stuff, they'd be okay.
They'd be forgiving. Then we reached out to five or six friends and just asked them to try it out. We didn't charge them anything initially. And then we only charged them $1 a month afterwards when we had our billing stuff in place so that we could actually test the billing. The first real customers came about.
probably through my mailing list, like from Rails Kits. I think it probably had maybe a couple thousand people who were on that list because I'd been doing that for four or so years at that point. So I had a little bit of audience and we just emailed them and I said, hey, I'm working on this new thing. Come check it out.
We used Twitter. That helped us out a lot in the early days. People were following us on Twitter because our community connection. So we just said, hey, we're live. I think initial pricing is like $9 a month to get started. This is kind of a no-brainer, really. And people just started signing up. And I think we had paying.
customers within a month or so of actually publicly launching.
So how long was it from you deciding in 2012 to build it to the first launch? May 31st was actually the first commit into our Git repository. By the end of the summer, we had friends and family who were trying it out, our alpha testers. And then I think by September,
October was when we had our first paying customers. When you started to charge first paying customers, like real customers, people who you didn't know, right? What kind of milestones did you have? Maybe, I don't know, like 50 customers or like $1,000? The only milestone that I can remember...
We wanted to make $40,000 a month. That was our first target. Each of the three founders would be able to make $10,000 a month. And we wanted the 25% to be for infrastructure. Every dollar, we said 75% goes to founders, 25% goes to the infrastructure.
I don't remember exactly when we hit that. I think it was sometime in 2014. That's the only real goal. I don't remember having numeric customer goals. We just wanted that magical $10,000 a month figure.
What was the points along the path that made you have conviction that, yes, this is actually progressing towards that? Just having any customers in the beginning was like huge for us. Yeah, we weren't sure what was going to happen. I think we were a little bit lucky.
to be honest, too, that we built this thing at a time when people had a specific frustration. We were basically just replacing something that they loved that was no longer working for them.
That worked really well for us. But still, we weren't sure. We didn't know that going into it, of course. We just knew what we felt.
When people started actually signing up for it, I just remember that was kind of mind blowing to me that people were actually paying for our thing at all. Our growth has always been like slow, just slow and steady. It wasn't like a rocket ship, but it also was pretty steady. More people paying over time.
That gave us some encouragement that we were going the right direction. It wasn't like dropping off. It was slow momentum, but it seemed to be continuing. Thank you for listening.
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