$23K MRR with a simple todo list

Intend is a simple productivity app that’s doing $23K MRR.

• Solo founder
• Competitive space
• Very opinionated product

Guess when all the peaks in its revenue happen?

Yea, all Januaries!

This time, every year Intend gets a huge boost of new signups. Typical for a productivity app.

But what’s different about intend? How is Malcolm (the founder) able to bootstrap and stand his own ground in a hyper competitive market like this.

With big players like Evernote, Todoist and AnyDo.

Standing Out

Intend stands out from the crowd by being weird!

And by embodying a unique philosophy.

This is an excerpt from an old interview of Malcolm. (Back then Intend was called Complice)

What does being opinionated mean for an app?

In case of Intend, it means “productizing” values in a way that no other app in the market does.

This is from Intend’s “philosophy” page.

Intend prioritises 4 core values -

• Choosing and doing over ogranizing
• Aliveness, instead of exhaustiveness
• Goals over tasks
• Proactiveness over reactiveness

Starting Up

All this is good, but how do you jumpstart an app like this?

How did Intend get it’s first 10 users?

Paid ads? Product Hunt? HackerNews?

No.

By 1:1 outreach.

Malcolm manually sent out emails to his initial customers. No code, no software, no system.

Doing it all manually.

This also helps build a personal connection with your users. And understand their biggest pain points.

Charge from Day 1

It’s easy to think that productivity apps need a freemium model. With PLG being all the hype these days, you may be tempted to offer a toned down version of your app free forever.

But free users don’t mean much, they don’t give any useful insights, and you often end up attracting customers who never intend to pay.

That’s why Malcolm recommends charging from day 1.

Growth Channels

Intend grows via 3 channels primarily -

1. Word of Mouth - mostly happy customers recommending the app to their friends.
2. Online Communities - Malcolm was part of a co-working chatroom for a long time, and after building Intend, he realised that the app would be perfect for this and other similar communities.
3. Competition Integrations - Beeminder is another niche productivity app, but its more metrics driven than intention driven. Intend gets churned users from Beeminder and other such apps for which it builds integrations for.

The goal with online communities and competitor integrations is to embed yourself in places where your ideal customers usually hangout.

Do that long enough and you will start to see people signing up for your product.

Top Lessons from Intend’s success

• Have strong opinions or a philosophy and build the app around that. Don’t be generic and boring.
• Start with unscalable approaches - reach out people 1:1, accept payments directly, send emails manually etc.
• Charge from the beginning - don’t attract freeloaders.
• Grow via online communities - follow the watering holes framework
• Integrations, even with competitors - Integrations are like network effects for micro SaaS products.

Further Reading -

• Turning My Love for Productivity Into a Profitable Business - Malcolm Ocean on Indie Hackers
• The History of Intend - Intend website

SEO is best for engineer founders

If you're an engineer / you have an analytical mind, the best marketing activity you can do is SEO

You can analyze high intent + low competition keywords in your niche

And build small tools or blog posts targeting those keywords

Passive, long term marketing strategy.

This works, without -

• Building a "Personal Brand"
• Posting tons of content on social media
• Trying to game social media algorithms
• DMing a bunch of people
• Following a gurus "secrets"

Doing shit that doesn't align with your personality.

More in this tweet.

From the vault -

3 random post from the Superframeworks archives -

• $293K ARR - stupidly simple bookmarking tool
• 0-$1M ARR in 7 months! | The AI Arbitrage
• 6 Extreme Challenges to try in the new year

🔗 Super Links

Useful links you don't want to miss -

• Impressive SEO by a 100 year old company - Kevin Indig
• Patience is an unfair advantage - me
• SaaS isn’t dying, its exploding - Patrick Campbell’s response to Greg Isenberg
• Bootstrap in a read ocean - Bryan Smith
• 3 Custom GPTs to help you build authority - Mike Cardona

Last week’s top link -

Weekly marketing checklist based on your business stage - me

🤗 How can I help?

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