In hindsight, it makes a lot of sense.

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Take an expert product marketer, mix them with a software dev, and you get a SaaS for marketers (that’s growing through PLG).

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Senja helps you collect testimonials from your customers, it’s fully bootstrapped, and just hit $1m ARR.

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It’s also throwing off decent amounts of cash. 

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🤑

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Current revenue and cashflow

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Here’s their P&L from July last year:

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Revenue is a little higher now, they hit $1m ARR in January of this year.

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They add at least $1,000 in new MRR each week and maintain a manageable churn rate of approximately 4%.

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Trend over time

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It’s a wonderful chart…

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Slow growth to start as you would expect as the product matures and the product led growth loop is slow as there aren’t many users. It took nearly a year of grinding to reach their first $1,000 in MRR. 

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Then, it scaled rapidly:

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Here are those milestones:

• January 2022: Launch ($0 MRR) 
• December 2022: $1,000 MRR ($518 est. profit) - 11 months post-launch
• July 2023: $7,500 MRR ($3,883 est. profit) - Ramen Profitability
• May 2024: $30,000 MRR ($15,531 est. profit) - Scaling Phase
• October 2024: $50,000 MRR ($25,885 est. profit) - Breakthrough
• November 2025: $83,333 MRR ($43,142 est. profit) - $1M ARR

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Why excess profits?

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We believe Senja has been able to generate and sustain profit for a few reasons:

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Reason 1: The “Powered By” Viral Loop

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As you would expect from an expert product marketer… growth is built into the product. Every free widget has a "Powered by Senja" badge. 

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This creates a loop where 30% of signups come from the product itself at no cost. Senja can reduce marketing spend (just $8k spent on $66k of revenue in July last year, 11%) and re-invest those funds into making a better product (to speed up the viral loop), whilst still generating cash.

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Reason 2: Fast Activation

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Senja used to have a 15% activation rate. 

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If only 15% of users are using the product, this will slow growth (see Reason 1). They invested heavily and now users can start collecting reviews in under 60 seconds. This boosted the activation rate to 25%.

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10% more users a. getting more value from the product and b. Bringing other users (see Reason 1).

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Reason 3: Running Lean

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The whole team is remote, I’m not even sure if the two founders have met in person. So they eradicate the office expense, and presumably any local payroll taxes and the team will likely be freelancers.

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Recent use of AI has been noted, which is likely having a positive impact on costs.

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What is the cashflow being used for?

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Here’s what we know:

• Early days - cashflow was first used to achieve "ramen profitability," letting the founders focus 100% on the product without needing external funding.
• Charity - from the start, Senja committed to donating 3% of their MRR to charity.
• Buy out - Wilson has since left the business so we can assume some cashflow is being used towards his payment.

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#1 learning

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Match your business strategy to you and your cofounders strengths:

• Olly - Product marketing legend
• Wilson - Epic dev

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With this in mind, it’s obvious that a bootstrapped marketing tool that has grown through product-led growth would have a good chance of generating sustainable profits.

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We’re excited to see how now solo founder Olly continues to grow Senja up past $1m and beyond…

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For the love of cashflow