I Quit My Full-Time Job After My SaaS Company Grew 8X [Update]

Elston Baretto

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Published: January 5th, 2024

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Elston Baretto

Founder, tiiny.host

$15K

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

tiiny.host

tiiny.host

from London, UK

started July 2019

$15,000

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

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Want more updates on tiiny.host? Check out these stories:

1. How I Turned My Teenage Hobby Into A Profitable Static Web Hosting Service (2021) ➜

This is a follow up story for tiiny.host. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published almost 3 years ago, check it out here.

Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.

Hey everyone, my name’s Philip Baretto and I am the founder of Tiiny Host. It’s great to be back on Starter Story after writing my initial interview back in 2021. It’s been a rollercoaster couple of years since then but a rewarding one. I successfully quit my full-time job and am currently living off my side-project and growing it - a dream come true.

I founded Tiiny.Host back in 2019 which initially started as a side project. Tiiny.Host is a very simple drag & drop web hosting tool. We simplify web hosting for non-technical users. If you want to turn a PDF into a website, upload an HTML or a zip file then we’re the simplest way to do it. Our users are far ranging from restaurant owners needing to upload their menus to real estate companies uploading marketing material and students learning Computer Science.

We currently have ~100,000 visitors every month and just passed $15,000 MRR.

Don’t focus on your competition, focus on what your customers are telling you. It's the competitive edge you have over everyone else. No one else has access to your customer base and knows what they want in a product. Use it as your superpower.

Tell us about what you’ve been up to. Has the business been growing?

Since my last time on Starter Story, I’ve nearly 8x the business. We’re closing in on our 1000th paying subscriber and passed $15,000 MRR with ~100,000 visitors every month. Whilst in hindsight the metrics look like a simple upward trajectory, there were multiple stalls along the way that required me to jumpstart the business. How you grow a business to $1K, 5K & 10K MRR is not necessarily the same.

We’ve essentially stuck to our bread & butter marketing channel - SEO. I think if you’ve found a channel that’s working for you, you really ought to scale that as far as it can go before working on new channels. You can risk spreading yourself too thin otherwise. Our growth has been a combination of product development and an amplified SEO strategy.

On the SEO side, we now have a solid ongoing process. We publish 2 articles every week to our blog targeting “bottom of the funnel” keywords. These are keywords that imply that the user is ready to use your product e.g. “How to share a PDF as a link”.

Our SEO analyst researches these keywords, lists them in a spreadsheet and it’s picked up by our writer who publishes weekly. Finally, we have a back-linker who works on getting our articles linked to other high-quality and relevant blogs. Our blog is responsible for over 100,000 impressions on Google every month. I think our publishing consistency has improved both our domain & topical authority in Google’s eyes.

We have also invested in our YouTube channel which assists with SEO - it’s owned by Google. Google is increasingly featuring more video results in searches so creating good video content can not only unlock a new distribution channel for you (YouTube) but also bolster your existing one.

There are cases where our written content doesn’t rank for a specific targeted keyword in Google but our YouTube video does. I initially created a set of videos a while ago but now have a YouTuber to regularly publish them. Interestingly, some videos that I published over a year ago are only just starting to get traction with 30k+ views. But the content is evergreen like SEO and can bring in a steady stream of customers.

Additionally, we’ve also been improving the product hand-in-hand. Through analyzing what content is uploaded to Tiiny I saw that users were converting a PDF to HTML and then using our service to upload the HTML. So I decided to make their workflows easier by allowing users to directly host PDFs on Tiiny. Today, we’re the simplest and also one of the most popular PDF hosts in the world. We currently rank #1 for “PDF Upload” and it accounts for roughly 40% of our revenue.

Lastly, we recently tweaked our pricing which gave us a huge boost. Conventional advice is to higher your prices - this only works so far. We studied our users and understood that many of them just wanted to host a single link but our pricing plans didn’t accommodate that. So we trialed a new “Lite” plan between our free and then lowest ($18 per month) plan.

I was conscious that this may affect our top line revenue and customers signing up to our $18 plan - but it didn’t. We doubled the number of conversions but also noticed something very interesting. Many customers signed up for our “Lite” plan but then almost immediately upgraded to our $18 per month plan. It’s something I didn’t anticipate but also something we wouldn’t have discovered if we didn’t take the risk.

I could often reach the end of the day completing many small tasks but have not accomplished the work needed to move the business forward. As a result, I decided to hire and reclaim my time from daily operations.

What have been your biggest challenges in the last year?

From a company perspective, our biggest challenge has been increasing our rate of growth to take Tiiny to the next level. We were doing well as a side-project, however, the product needed to evolve to reach new heights and grow faster to hit our 100k MRR goal.

One of the biggest changes I made earlier in the year was switching to a truly freemium business model. Before this, you could only try Tiiny for 7 days. This was a risky move as it meant more users didn’t have to upgrade, but it paid off. Our traffic has tripled since then and it’s put Tiiny on the map amongst some big players in the space.

Why? Because I realized that Tiiny had a built-in viral loop that wasn’t being exploited. Every time someone shared a free Tiiny site, it would be an advertisement for Tiiny - we place a branded “uploaded with Tiiny” banner on each free site. We currently get thousands of click-throughs on our branded banner every week.

However, with growth through freemium comes a new set of challenges. Ours was moderation. Moderation at scale in web hosting is difficult and a problem that you don’t see when you look at such a business from the outside. Businesses like this seem easy to copy but can swiftly be shut down if illegal content isn’t swiftly removed from your platform.

There have been times when our AWS account (which hosts our entire infrastructure) has been on the brink of suspension due to too many bad actors using Tiiny. Additionally, just a couple of bad but widespread links can get your domain into thousands of blocklists across the web and consequently degrade your domain quality. It’s a problem we’re continually working on solving and a bit of a cat and mouse game.

On a personal note, my role has changed as the product has grown. It’s been difficult to juggle design, development, marketing, and customer support. I’ve found myself working “in the business” rather than “on the business” to grow it.

I could often reach the end of the day completing many small tasks but have not accomplished the work needed to move the business forward. As a result, I decided to hire and reclaim my time from daily operations. I hired a VA as well as several contractors in marketing, development & design.

It’s been difficult to delegate especially when your team is new and still learning the ropes. There’s a constant battle between doing it quickly yourself versus being patient and teaching them. However, in the long run, the latter is the better option and I’ve seen the results.

What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?

The same things that you don’t like to do (e.g. for many developers it's marketing) you will still dislike even as you successfully grow. And so, this can often lead you to neglect important aspects of your business to continue growing. I think to combat that it’s important to build processes and routines to make sure you keep doing the important things.

For example, I realized that I was very slow at writing and recording YouTube videos and so often put them off. As a result, I hired help to write and produce these videos to ensure a steady stream of content was released. Master your strengths and outsource your weaknesses. However, the caveat to this is only outsource when you know what works. It’s very hard and expensive to outsource a business function when you don’t have a working strategy for it.

The macro economy slowdown also came into play in 2023 which has affected SaaS growth across the industry. We have grown slower in 2023 than in 2022 however such conditions are out of your control. We have still grown, which is important.

I think in such times focusing on really offering value for the customer you have is critical and you’ll come out of it with a better product because of that. We traditionally hadn’t done as much customer engagement as we should have but it’s something we’ve learned is super critical. Don’t focus on your competition, focus on what your customers are telling you. It's the competitive edge you have over everyone else. No one else has access to your customer base and knows what they want in a product. Use it as your superpower.

On a personal note, going full-time on Tiiny has unlocked travel for me and I’ve been spending a lot more time in a sunnier destination than London - Lisbon, Portugal. It’s improved my overall morale and helped me work hard during the week but properly unwind and refresh on the weekends. The flexibility has been awesome.

What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?

If you look at the current state of hosting it’s still predominantly reserved for technical users who want to host websites or web apps. However, as the web plays a bigger and bigger role in our lives we’ll need to host more things online.

I’ve been continuously surprised by the type of content that has been uploaded to Tiiny and it’s proof that people want to host more than just a website online. So, I’m very excited to make web hosting more accessible to people.

Ultimately, I think Tiiny could be a platform where you could host anything and turn any file into a website. I’d like to grow it to a $1M+ ARR business with a small but very skilled team and well-paid team.

To achieve this Tiiny has to evolve from a company centered around myself and to centered around a talented team. We essentially need to standardize our processes from product development to SEO and customer support. These are a handful of the roles which I currently perform but this needs to change.

As CEO, I need to evolve into finding and recruiting a talented team - you can only achieve so much by yourself. I think all successful CEOs should aim to replace themselves and that’s how I think about growing a team.

The biggest mistake that I still see many founders make is a lack of marketing. This is especially true of engineers who have the power to code. It’s easy to think that you can code or build your way to success. Contrary to the popular saying, if you build it, they will not come.

What’s the best thing you read in the last year?

Best podcast I’ve listened to all year.

Incredible wisdom and hindsight from the founder of a product that has changed our world. Other podcasts in the series are also amazing.

Best book I’ve read all year.

A very good book to read if you’re overwhelmed with growth in your business.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?

I think one of the best things that you can do is find a mentor just ahead of you - it’s very underrated. Not just a mentor who has “made it” but a mentor who has just battled through the challenges that you’re facing now. Because of the number of battles we continuously face as entrepreneurs, we easily forget how we’ve overcome those challenges in the past. We quickly move on to the next set of issues. However, having someone you can easily access with those battles fresh in their head is invaluable.

I’m also a huge believer in community. I wouldn’t be here without the invaluable help from people on X, Indie London, and Ramen Club. A lot of the problems that you may face have likely already been solved by someone else - you just need to ask the right person how they solved it.

The biggest mistake that I still see many founders make is a lack of marketing. This is especially true of engineers who have the power to code. It’s easy to think that you can code or build your way to success. Contrary to the popular saying, if you build it, they will not come. It’s a lesson that you can easily forget but is likely the reason for a lack of growth. In the early stages, you should be spending 50% of your time on product development and 50% of your time on marketing. Be honest and strict about this and biased towards your weaker side.

All in all, going down this route is one of the best decisions I have made in my life. It’s been a long road but the flexibility I have to enjoy life but also work on hard, challenging problems with talented people is incredible. It’s a very rewarding path in life and I don’t think I could ever go back to being employed again. So, if you’re reading this and in the trenches then keep going. The lifestyle that you can unlock down the road is like nothing else.