How I grew my SaaS to $5K MRR

A year ago, I started DataFast.

The first months were rough. Churn was 33%. It took me 124 days to reach the first $1K MRR.

Today it’s a different story:

• $5,338 MRR growing 22% month-over-month

• 405 paying customers

• Churn at 8.99%

Here are 6 lessons I wish I knew earlier:

1. Pick one problem, and ignore the rest

Analytics is a crowded space. Big, VC-funded startups dominate it. And most people just use free tools like Google Analytics.

Instead of competing with everyone, I narrowed down.

I built DataFast only for entrepreneurs (because that’s who I care about).

And the #1 problem entrepreneurs face with analytics? Revenue attribution. Most tools are either painful to set up or only show vanity metrics like pageviews — which mean nothing without context.

So I positioned DataFast as the revenue-first analytics tool for entrepreneurs.

That simple focus made it easier to stand out, because I was speaking the language of entrepreneurs and solving their problems.

By the way, positioning feels natural when you’re scratching your own itch — which is exactly why I started DataFast.

2. Using info products is a cheat code

Selling SaaS is hard. Most people aren’t ready to commit to a monthly charge right away.

My first batch of DataFast customers came from my course CodeFast and my boilerplate ShipFast — where I upsold my analytics tool.

One-time products are low-commitment, so they convert better. And once someone has already paid you and liked what they got, it’s much easier to upsell them to SaaS. Trust is already built.

3. Build viral features

I designed features to be shareable.

Because people only share what feels valuable and beautiful to them.

It’s a heuristic that forces me to aim for the best. If it isn’t good enough to screenshot, it isn’t good enough.

That’s how I built things like the real-time globe with avatars, customer journeys, and funnels.

By focusing on features worth sharing, it’s win-win: My customers have content to share, and I get free distribution.

4. Let customers decide the roadmap

In May 2025, I added a customer chat box on every page

Instantly, users started sharing what they wanted. Patterns emerged. I turned those into a feedback board where people could vote.

The roadmap became obvious. Instead of building features based on my assumptions, I built what users actually cared about.

5. Cut onboarding down to the AHA moment

Because I let customers decide the roadmap, I ended up building a feature I never thought I needed: Funnels

That’s how I discovered the biggest bottleneck in my SaaS: Onboarding. Only 6% of users who signed up ever started a free trial.

So I went back and stripped the onboarding flow down to the essentials. I removed everything that wasn’t directly helping users reach the “aha” moment (the #1 reason they signed up): Revenue attribution.

This shift had a huge influence on growth. I documented the full breakdown here.

6. Share your progress until people trust you

For a year, I shared daily progress on Twitter.

Most tweets went completely ignored. But every now and then, one post would click and bring in dozens of signups.

The real lesson wasn’t about writing the perfect tweet — it was that consistency beats quality. By showing up every day, I built trust. Even skeptics eventually came back when they saw me making progress.

It doesn’t matter which platform you use. The same approach works on YouTube, where one video turned into my biggest lead magnet. Just be genuine, concise, and consistent.

Final thought

If I had to sum it up:

• Focus on who you’re building for

• Make it easy for them to trust you

• Ship things worth sharing

• Keep talking to your users

• Show up every day

DataFast isn’t big yet. But at $5K MRR, it finally feels like the hard work compounds.

See you at $10K,

— Marc Lou