I Almost Sold My $9K/Mo Micro-SaaS
This is a follow up story for PDFShift. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published almost 5 years ago, check it out here.
Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.
Hey! I’m Cyril, a French developer working full time on a few projects, including PDFShift, ImprovMX and a recent company, Fernand - a customer support service.
Today, I’ll be talking about PDFShift, an API that converts any HTML documents to PDF (and now even to JPG/PNG/WEBP), with a focus for developers and builders.
I’m happy to be back on StarterStory and share what PDFShift has become since the last interview (spoiler alert: it’s been crazy).
I did two interviews in the past at StarterStory. One four years ago on January 2020 where I was at around 3.5k$ MRR and one on April 2021, where PDFShift had grew to $6.5k MRR
Thinking it has been three years since the last interview is crazy. In the meantime, PDFShift continued to grow a bit but stopped a few months after, in September 2021.
At the time, I was at around 300 customers, and I stayed at that number for …. More than two years! Around 6 months ago, I made a breakthrough about why PDFShift had stopped growing and this is what I want to share with you today!
In the past interviews, I’ve been sharing my Stripe dashboard so I’ll keep the tradition, and this will show when things started to grow again (this is a view over the past 6 months. (The prices are in Euro):
And a broader picture since the last interview:
You can see the plateau on the Active subscribers, which started again around April 2023. The real kick being in November 2023.
Tell us about what you’ve been up to. Has the business been growing?
Growing? Well … it’s complicated.
As I’ve said, the business had been stagnant for more than two years. It’s true that I wasn’t fully focused on growing PDFShift either. I also had to focus on ImprovMX and was working on the core logic of Fernand which was taking most of my time.
On top of that, I still had a smallish growth in terms of MRR, via upgrades done by my existing customers. So it wasn’t very problematic per se.
I did try to pinpoint a few times what exactly happened, but it was hard to tell. I can easily see on Stripe’s graphs where and when the growth stopped, but at the time, I was experimenting on way too many areas.
I had redesigned the website and the dashboard, changed the pricing, I was running ads on Google, Reddit, Twitter, partnering on newsletters, being active on some forums such as IndieHackers, etc.
Finally, around November 2023, I sat down with a friend and we spent some time digging deep on what stopped around September 2021. And we found it!
It turns out that I was working with an agency specialized in Google Ads, and I had stopped working with them a month before September 2021. This was not so easy to figure out because of two main reasons:
First, I was doing way too many changes at the same time, so identifying the main source of acquisition was diluted.
And second, tracking the visitors wasn’t as easy. It turns out that visitors discover PDFShift via Google Ads, come to the website but then close their laptop. They then come back months later - or via another computer - where you cannot track them properly and it looks like they discovered you because of “your amazing SEO skills” ™.
The conversion from Google Ads wasn't good and purely in terms of cost vs revenue, it wasn’t financially viable, so I had stopped working with that agency.
It’s by having a bigger picture that helped me see things more clearly. Understanding that the conversion was not directly linked to Google Ads, but more via obscure, indirect ways, was the light bulb moment. Once I was able to connect the growth at the time with the Ads being run, it made all sense.
As soon as I realized that, I reached out to that company and we restarted the deal in February this year. Since then, we have had a customer base growing at about 8-9% per month compared to the previous 6 months!
Don’t run too many experiences at once. Run them one after the other, after having clearly tested it, reflected on it and had enough time for that test to be validated.
What have been your biggest challenges in the last year?
Around that time last year, my head was at a different place. I had been in discussion with a company to sell PDFShift to them. At the time, I had PDFShift stagnating at 300 customers, with a MRR at around $7,5K and they offered me $500K to acquire PDFShift.
This was a $5.5x exit, and it was very exciting! I accepted the offer and we both signed the Letter Of Intent.
The exchanges spawned over 9 months, with various documents about the number of customers, statistics, growth, acquisition sources, questions about code, infrastructure, various resources, etc.
Then, they started to add some odd constraints on how the deal would go on. Instead of an all cash upfront it would be half now and half a year later. Then, they told me the amount was too high (of course it was, that’s why I had accepted in the first place!) and they lowered it to $400k. 20% discount, just like that!
That was the last straw. I finally told them the deal was off. But my mind was still high on selling and getting some money for a project that was stagnating, so I turned to Acquire.com and listed PDFShift.
I got a few offers, including some serious ones, but nothing close to that 5.5x I had dreamed of.
In retrospect, it makes sense: I was selling PDFShift with no leverage. When buyers were asking about the growth and the traffic, the numbers weren’t crazy. Telling them the product was stagnating for two years wasn’t a great selling point!
While trying to sell PDFShift, I had a small voice in the back of my head that was suggesting to me the opposite: “What if you double down on PDFShift? What if you try to see what’s wrong and fix that?”.
Finally, since I wasn’t able to sell it the way I had hoped, I decided to redesign the website with a focus on SEO, more well-written pages and try to rank better on Google. I also decided to dig in the past to see what worked and what I could do to bring that back. That’s when I stumbled upon that Google Ads discovery.
Redesigning the website was the next challenge I faced last year. It took me way too long to find a good working design and have it integrated the way I wanted. The new version is now live but not fully done yet. I plan to work on case studies with some amazing customers, add other interesting pages related to PDFShift and also improve the documentation.
There is always some work to do.
What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?
The first thing that comes to mind is definitely to not run many experiments at the same time.
If I had been running only Google Ads around 2021, I would have quickly identified that this was the reason why the growth had stopped. But since at the same time I was doing too many experiments, it made it impossible for me to identify the issue for three years! That’s a tough lesson learned here.
The other biggest lesson I learned is to run Google Ads. Now, there is an important thing to consider here: Google Ads works great in my case, but it doesn’t mean it will be for you.
Developers need PDFShift when they search on Google how to convert an HTML document to PDF. So it makes perfect sense for me to be well placed here, at that specific time.
In comparison, running Facebook Ads doesn’t make any sense because it would reach out to developers when they aren’t working, so when they aren’t focused on the problem at hand.
So Google Ads works great for me because it’s the best moment I can target my potential customers, and this is the important lesson here for you and your business: Identify when and where your customers are. Because it’s where you must be.
Most people overestimate what they can do in a day and underestimate what they can do in a year.
What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?
Now that I’ve identified a good way to grow PDFShift, I’m not interested in selling it anymore.
The business is running well and I don’t have that many support requests coming. All in all, I’d say I spend around 2 hours per week on it.
Moreover, running it for more than 6 years now has placed PDFShift in a robust position. Most of the bugs have been resolved and the system is running very smoothly.
With that in mind, and the recents changes applied, I’m hoping to cross the $12k MRR mark this summer and pass the $15k MRR before the end of next year.
I do have a few ideas to add to PDFShift but it’s more on the “nice features” side of things, nothing fancy.
PDFShift is doing one thing, and it does it well. That’s the mantra I had when I started it and I’m happy it does it well.
What’s the best thing you read in the last year?
I really loved reading the last book from Rob Walling: The SaaS playbook.
In it, he gives a lot of great suggestions on how to build, run and manage a SaaS in a way that resonates with me. From finding product-market fit, to identifying your pricing, while managing a potential team and marketing.
Lots of great stuff in it, with a good mentality (and sanity) on how to approach this type of business. I definitely recommend anyone interested in running a SaaS to read this one (and his previous book too: Start small, stay small).
Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?
This one is easy: Don’t run too many experiences at once. Run them one after the
another, after having clearly tested it, reflected on it and had enough time for that test to be validated.
For instance, running Ads can take longer than anticipated. People might see your ads but ignore them, only to come back weeks later thanks to these ads. You might be tempted to jump on the next experiment right after stopping the previous, but your data will be wrong.
I can understand the excitement of wanting to find what works and what doesn’t. It’s very tempting to run many campaigns while applying various changes to your website. You get the feeling that the faster you do that, the faster your service will grow.
But it’s not.
It will slow you down and could eventually make you validate wrong assumptions, like a past experiment leaking to the new one and making you believe that this new experiment is performing well.
I’ll share a tweet I have pinned on my profile to never forget this:
“Most people overestimate what they can do in a day and underestimate what they can do in a year.”
Where can we go to learn more?
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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