Hitting $16k MRR after years of failed products
The first success
I'm Nic from Ukraine! I started working as a software engineer at 16 years old. But I eventually realized that I didn't really want to grow in an engineering role. Indie hacking seemed like so much more fun.
It also seemed like a much easier way to earn money. Oh boy, was I wrong.
So, in 2022, I started indie hacking while working a full-time job. I had very few applicable skills. I was a shy introvert. I had no big ideas. And I didn't know any founders. I just knew how to code, and I didn't want to stop.
I spent 1.5 years figuring it out with failed product after failed product. Then, I launched a blog that grew to about $500 in monthly ad revenue. And while working on that blog, I realized that Pinterest is a good channel for driving traffic to websites. I created a tool to automate the process, and that became BlogToPin.
Three weeks after launching, I quit my job. I had no revenue, but I had about a year of runway, so I decided to give it a try. It's currently at ~15k MRR, up from $10k last year.
Recently, I've also been building an email marketing tool for SaaS called Sequenzy. I launched it six months ago, and it's currently at $1k MRR.
Building the product
I built the initial version of BlogToPin in one or two months. But in truth, it took a while before it was working well — it was a very ambitious problem to solve. It probably took me another six months to improve and get users.
I mostly designed it by vibe coding and copy-pasting from Tailwind UI. The technology stack is Next.js + Drizzle. I also used a separate Express.js server to handle long-running tasks, like pin creation, website processing, pin scheduling, and pin uploading.
NextJS
Drizzle
tRPC
shadcn
Express
BullMQ (for jobs)
MySQL on PlanetScale (for data)
It's simple, but AI is good at it.
Churn limits the ceiling
We sell monthly and annual subscriptions at $39, $79, and $179. The majority of people are on the cheapest plan. Approximately 30% choose the annual plan.
Churn is the biggest issue I have right now. People don't consider this when starting out, but churn limits your ceiling. BlogToPin's churn is ~10-15%, which means I need to acquire an extra $2k in MRR each month just to stay even. That's a lot.
When I launched Sequenzy, my top priority was choosing an infrastructure niche — because those have inherently low churn.
Focusing on the easiest growth channels
As far as growth, I think it's mostly because I built a good product. But of course, I spread the word everywhere I can and stick with the channels that are easiest for me.
SEO content: I target "Pinterest marketing tool," so I use that everywhere on the website. I also create listicles and do outreach for backlinks.
Encouraging referrals: I give a generous 30% lifetime commission. It's a very good rate, and there are a lot of people who are happy with the app, so they promote it.
YouTube: I focus on SEO-optimized keywords like "how to not get banned," "how to create AI pins," etc. It gets a few views here and there, and that compounds over time.
Replying on reddit: This is a very slow, manual thing. I don't use a tool. I just try to be genuinely helpful. But reddit is getting harder and harder. Mods are banning people all the time. It's tricky.
Influencer marketing: I reached out to all the influencers in my niche — two people replied. Only one of them brought a lot of customers. It's a numbers game. But importantly, you have to be super open-minded, adjust the product, and try to make it genuinely useful for the influencer.
SEO probably contributes 50%, and it's great because it basically works on autopilot.
Outworking the competition
I've made a lot of dumb mistakes. In fact, I'd say I probably made every single mistake that I could have made.
There's only one reason that my product is where it is: I work 16 hours per day.
It's that simple. I outwork every competitor.
And because I work so much, I can run more experiments, talk to more customers, and ultimately, make a better product. That compounds.
When in doubt, do something
Here's my advice:
Get ready for a long haul.
Ship fast.
Iterate.
Don't quit.
Really. Just don't stop. Whenever you're unsure of what to do next, do something. Improve the product, do marketing, talk to customers. Anything.
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The churn section hit hard. Just launched my first product this week and already thinking about whether monthly vs annual pricing affects long-term sustainability.
Curious — when you were at zero revenue in the early days, what was the one thing that got you your first 10 paying customers? Was it purely SEO or did you do direct outreach too?
1.5 years of failures before the first win. This is what the "overnight success" actually looks like.
The churn math hit me — if you're losing 10-15% monthly you're basically running to stand still. Did you change your pricing model to reduce churn on Sequenzy, or just the niche choice?
That 10-15% churn stat on BlogToPin gave me anxiety just reading it 😅 having to find $2k every month sounds like a treadmill. Curious, are you actually seeing that lower churn play out with the new product so far?
What stands out to me here isn't the $16K MRR — it's the "years of failed products" part. Most people quit somewhere in that window, which means Mykola's advantage wasn't skill or luck, it was just staying in the game long enough for the lessons to compound.
There's also something interesting about having two products now (BlogToPin and Sequenzy). Failed experiments usually leave behind some useful infrastructure — code, audience, distribution instincts — that quietly accelerates the next thing. Curious whether either of those earlier projects laid any groundwork for what's working now.
The "years of failed products" part is the whole story most people skip. What was different about the one that hit $16k vs. the ones that didn't — the idea, or the distribution?
the 16 hours per day observation is honest but worth unpacking. working more hours compounds when you're running the right experiments. it compounds much more slowly when you're working on things that don't move the needle. the reason it worked here is probably that the problem space was real and SEO had genuine leverage. the same work ethic applied to a bad market or a channel without compounding would produce different results. the hours matter less than what the hours are pointed a
Great
Honest pushback - 'outwork the competition' undersells what actually happened. Four years of failing taught you which problem's worth solving. That's the real edge. $15k vs $1k from the same founder proves it.
What stood out to me wasn't the $16k MRR, but the 1.5 years of failed products before finding traction.
A lot of founders see the revenue number and miss the real lesson: persistence, distribution, and solving a problem you discovered firsthand.
Also, the point about churn limiting growth is underrated. Getting new customers is hard, but keeping them is what really raises the ceiling.
Thanks for sharing the honest journey
The most underrated line here isn't the 16-hour days — it's deliberately choosing an infrastructure niche for Sequenzy because of its inherently lower churn. At 10–15% monthly, BlogToPin needs $2k in new MRR just to not shrink. That meta-learning — picking the category based on retention mechanics before writing a line of code — is the kind of thing you can only arrive at by running the first product long enough to feel the treadmill.
Congrat Man
The most valuable line here isn't the 16-hour days. It's choosing an infrastructure niche for the second product because of churn. At 10-15% monthly churn you replace $2k of MRR every month before you grow a dollar, and that treadmill never slows down, you just get more tired. I'd push back on "I outwork every competitor" as the takeaway. Hours don't compound, position does. His own story proves it: same founder, same work ethic, two very different businesses depending on the niche he picked.
Man, "indie hacking is the easy way out" has got to be the biggest lie we all tell ourselves before getting into it—I feel that so much.