BSSA #72 - $50,000 MRR and how to find an idea 🚀

Hey! What’s up?

We just reached $50,000 MRR.

50K! This is incredible.

I remember in 2017 when it was so hard to reach only $1K per month, and now we’re making that much!

Dealing with a rude customer

Last week I received the following email.

And the first thing I tell myself is: This person is probably going through something complicated.

And this will completely change the way I will handle that user.

Because I’m not thinking anymore “This guy is an asshole, what do I do?” instead I’m thinking “How can I help that person be better?”

And what you have to understand is this user doesn’t have anything against you. It’s not a personal thing so you should deal with the situation the same way.

We ended up refunding this user and that’s it. I didn’t take it personally, even if the user was wrong.

The goal isn’t to be “right”. The goal is for everyone to be happy.

Finding and validating a Shopify App Idea

I was talking to that merchant last week during an e-com event in Paris.

There were probably 20 people: merchants, agencies, and a few SaaS founders.

That guy expected $1.5M in sales for 2023.

And I didn’t really talk about my business during our conversation. Because when he was telling me something about his store, I just asked another question, to go deeper.

Him: “We have 7 people working at the moment”

Me: “Oh really cool, are they all working from France?”

Him: “Yea they are, we have our office in Rouen”

Me: “Awesome, isn’t it expensive to hire everyone in France?”

….

And the more questions I asked, the more information I had about his business and the potential problems he had.

I did this with many people there. Sometimes you get nothing from that conversion, and sometimes you get that golden information…

Him: “…We’ve had problems with this app and we ended up building something for ourselves”

Me: “Really? How did you solve it?”

And he told me. He told me how he used a different system because of many problems with the solutions.

And I kept going deeper into this problem.

My goal was simple: Can I find 1 problem? It is painful enough? Can I solve it with 1 app? Would he use my solution?

And I hit it that thing. He told me some friends also had the same problem.

And he finally told me that if I was building something, he’d give it a try.

Now what??

In a 20-min chat I found a potential customer (and probably more), a potential Shopify App idea and I proved again that my “simple” method works:

1 - You go where merchants are

2 - You talk to as many people as possible

3 - You ask a lot of questions to find a problem

And it works!

Now I don’t have time to work on that idea, but I will keep it somewhere in my head just in case 👀

What happened above is exactly how I built WideBundle and how I built WideReview.

And this idea would be worth nothing without the knowledge and the contact of that person.

I didn’t find 1 idea that I just have to implement for the next month.

Then you have to talk to that user again, validate the MVP, and think about your positioning, and branding, based on the information you have.

So finding an “idea” is not the end. Finding an idea is like you found the entrance of the labyrinth and now you have to figure out how to get out of it by building your own map.

That’s it for today’s email!

I hope you enjoyed it! Feel free to share my newsletter with someone else: https://news.matdesousa.com/

And let me know what you want me to discuss in the next email!

See you next week,

Mat 😁