It’s 2015 in Nashville, Tennessee and AJ is sat at his laptop – making responsive HTML5 themes.
He wakes up, designs things, codes things then publishes things – everyday. And he’s been doing this since the mid 2000’s.
He’s bored.
His templates are extremely popular, he’s charging $19 for 3 months of support and his Twitter popularity is growing.
But he’s still bored. And he wants a challenge.
As he’s scrolling down his backlog of released templates… he notices something – download figures on his one page templates seem to be much more popular than the multi site templates?
“Strange”, he thinks to himself.
“Maybe there is an opportunity here?”
Fast forward to 4 years and Carrd – a single web page site builder hits $30k in MRR, completely bootstrapped with zero employees.
How?
This post explains…
It’s simple.
There are 7 steps that AJ took to grow Carrd from an idea to $30k per month.
But before we jump in, you will probably notice something different about these steps – they are not your typical “5 Steps To Having An Awesome Life” kind of steps. These are nuanced, complicated concepts that at first glance may seem inconsequential… but after time, if they are ingested and meditated upon… will produce great results.
After all, SaaS growth is not formulaic, each business will take a different path based on the choices and experience of the people within.
With that in mind… let’s get started.
Step 1: Learn Relevant skills
Somehow AJ hears about a trend towards responsive web design… something inside AJ tells him that this is going to be big and that he should probably start learning.
He spins up a side hustle called HTML5 UP! and uploads a mobile responsive HTML template for free, you can still see it here:
This was a pivotal moment for AJ.
He took the first step into a world that would engulf him for the next 10 years of his life.
Why did AJ pick responsive web design?
Who knows…
But he probably foresaw that trend with help from his background in computer science and web development.
What next?
Well, AJ spent the next 5 years building and releasing responsive HTML templates – mostly for free.
In his own words:
Which, despite being an incredible learning experience (building responsive templates) — and one that taught me practically everything I know about design and frontend/backend development — was something I had been doing in one form or another for literally years, to the point where it became so easy it almost felt… routine.
Interestingly, you can go here to see AJ’s design and development ability improve with each template.
AJ built a very specific skillset in a high growth niche: responsive web design… and he doubled down.
Step 2: Don’t Trust Yourself – Trust Data
After the third template, HTML5 UP! started gaining traction.
This momentum fueled AJ to dig deeper and create better templates to give away for free, as long as they provided attribution.
And as download counts increased users started coming back with support requests and asking to use the templates without attribution.
With this user data, AJ then created Pixelarity: paid version of HTML5 UP! that enables users to get unlimited access to any template for a 3 month period.
Fast forward a couple of years and Pixelarity is bringing in $10-12k of MRR and AJ is looking for his next challenge.
As mentioned in the intro, AJ noticed that his single page templates had significantly larger download numbers than multi page templates.
In his own words:
I was looking at the download counts of those. And they were huge, like those really caught on like people apparently really liked the one-page stuff, which I had no idea. Like, it wasn’t something that I was looking for. So I had no idea that that was such a big impact.
The key point here is “which I had no idea”… without looking at the data, AJ would not have focused down on his niche, and may have become a business startup failure, failing to compete with the bigger players (if he started anything at all).
So what did he do?
He combined:
- His extensive skillset in responsive, front end design
- A proven SaaS product (e.g. Wix/Squarespace)
- A validated need
And came up with a single page site builder.
Carrd was born.
Step 3: Niche Down
AJ was never going to beat Squarespace or Wix, especially as a bootstrapped founder.
As we have documented previously, a valid approach for a new SaaS business entering an existing market is to win over-served customers by niching down:
Less features = lower development cost = lower prices – AJ even opened up a market for students creating single page sites for their school projects.
Lower prices then requires less marketing time, expense and expertise to find customers – ideal for a solo bootstrapper.
Through this disruptive strategy, AJ created and therefore became the default category owner for “single page site builders”.
Step 4: Compound Audiences For SaaS Growth
AJ has now spent 10 years in the responsive web design space.
When asked on a recent podcast about marketing for Carrd, AJ said he hadn’t done anything apart from release on Twitter and Product Hunt.
I would disagree.
AJ has been creating targeted, high quality content for his audience since 2010. He is an expert content marketer that has selected his one social channel (Twitter) and dominated:
AJ even has relevant, value driven opt-in and social CTA’s on his “lead generation” site:
Though fading now, at its peak HTML5 UP! was bringing in nearly 30k organic sessions per month at an estimated cost of $40k:
Assuming a modest 1% conversion to email subscriber from these two forms:
Would see AJ adding 7.5k subscribers onto his list each month at peak traffic of 770k sessions per month (according to SEMRush).
It would not surprise me if AJ had a 100k opt-in email list rammed full of people that know, like and trust him (we tend to like and trust people that give us free stuff).
In summary, AJ chose one significant and emerging niche, served his audience for a decade and then brought them a product that solved their problem.
So when he dropped this tweet on 7th of March 2016 at 7:02pm:
DONE!
Carrd = a free platform for building simple, fully responsive one-page sites for pretty much anything.https://t.co/6o0oZarLhQ
— aj (@ajlkn) March 7, 2016
It drove a shedload of users…
Step 5: Nail Product Hunt
2 hours and 18 minutes later, AJ launches Carrd on Product Hunt:
Now on @producthunt. Show it some love 🙂https://t.co/gizo8Ll1s6
(thanks @diego_iglesias!)
— aj (@ajlkn) March 7, 2016
And 9 days later, Product Hunt tweet:
Carrd: Simple, responsive, one-page sites for pretty much anything. https://t.co/9ChWt9Zubi by @n33co pic.twitter.com/5SwhI4ST0A
— Product Hunt 😸 🔜 #GoldenKittyAwards2020 🏆 (@ProductHunt) March 16, 2016
Then this happens:
Why did Carrd perform so well?
- The product is perfectly suited to the Product Hunt crowd – techy, well designed and on trend (responsive web design)
- AJ had an existing Twitter following – with the first Tweet, AJ was able to send traffic over to Product Hunt to kickstart engagement. Without that, Product Hunt may not have ended up Tweeting the listing.
I won’t go into detail on Product Hunt launch strategies as there a many comprehensive posts on this topic:
- The Product Hunt Launch Guide: 40+ Things You Need to Know
- Product Hunt 101: How To Launch Your Product From Early Idea To Revenue
- Launch and Rank: Here Is How We Ranked 1st On Product Hunt
- The Ultimate Guide To Launching On Product Hunt
- How to Launch on Product Hunt
One this is for sure… I doubt Carrd would have performed so well on Product Hunt if it wasn’t for their super smooth onboarding process…
Step 6: Open Up Onboarding
It took me 145 seconds to create and publish this site:
My name and email were only required once I had created my site and wanted to publish.
Contrast this to me wrestling with a typical onboarding process:
- Fill out a long form
- Wait for the confirmation email to be sent to me
- Click on confirmation email
- Start trying to build my site
- Realize that it’s actually really un-intuitive and hard to do
- Not complete my site
- Unsubscribe from the re-engagement email from the site builder
- Never use their product again
AJ allows his users to experience the value they can get from Carrd within the first few minutes of arriving on his site by:
- Allowing the user to build their site before requesting and email address
- Incorporating a large number of beautifully designed templates to get started
- Building an incredibly intuitive UI
OK great, it’s easy to make a site once you find Carrd, but how are all these people finding Carrd?
Step 7: User Led Growth
While the paid plans needed to be compelling enough for users to upgrade, I absolutely did not want it to come at the expense of severely crippling the free plan.
AJ understands the concept of User Led Growth and knew that in order to grow… he was going to need some help from his users.
When determining the initial Free Vs Pro plan features, he choose to keep the majority of functionality free… apart from 4 features.
And two of these are of particular interest to the astute SaaS Marketer:
- Ability to use custom domains
- Removal of Carrd branding
Enforcing a user to place their site on the Carrd domain AND to include Carrd branding on their site looks like a “free” plan to any normal human… but a SaaS Marketer knows better.
They know that actually this plan is not free at all.
The user is “paying” for their plan by spreading the Carrd message to anyone that visits their site
Carrd provides an intuitive user interface, bandwidth and hosting services whilst the user is responsible for marketing.
#UserLedGrowth
BONUS Step: Join The Dots After
As the late great Steve Jobs says:
“You can’t connect the dots going forward, you can only connect them looking backwards”
AJ didn’t try to connect the dots going forward, he simply started to learn how to code HTML5 templates and kept improving his skills whilst providing more value to his community.
As AJ said in his own words when reminiscing about starting Carrd:
Random projects aside, my work experience up to this point basically came down to two things:
Designing and coding site templates and… building sites to distribute them (both free and paid)
So that by the time he came round to decide to build Carrd… there was no better person in the world to build a single page, responsive site builder than AJ.
So he did it…
When early stage, hopeful SaaS founders come to me an asks “what SaaS business should I start?”… I now point them in AJ’s direction.
I say:
“AJ did nothing but hone his skills and create value in a growing niche for a decade. Then building his SaaS was a natural extension of that process”.
What did we learn?
- Try to build a reputation and audience in a niche, it will help you when launching future products
- Build a growth mechanism into your product to allow free users to spread the word
- Consider reducing friction from your sign in flow to increase learning, virality and SaaS growth
But before that…
What are your thoughts on Carrd’s growth?
How could you reduce friction in your sign up flow?
Comment below…