(webform SaaS) in 2006.
He learned one single thing from a customer in the early days that changed everything. Since that pivotal day, they have bootstrapped to 5,000 customers and 65 employees.
What was that one thing?
This posts explains…
It’s 2006 and Cedric is having to build a lot of forms at his 9-5 startup job… it’s hard, boring manual development work. Surely there must be a better way?
So he starts building a form building product during his evening and weekends. Once he has something usable he puts it up on Hacker News and gets some initial traction.
He then slaps a price on the thing and starts a slow, 2 years bootstrapped grind to a full-time salary from the product and then a further 11 years to reach 5,000 customers.
In Cedric’s case the one thing was a customer asking him to integrate with Salesforce, he did and then started to focus the whole product on that ecosystem. This proved to be a brilliant move.
and started heavily investing in that program as their business was growing rapidly.
rode that wave. As a bootstrapped SaaS, they needed a cheap, scalable source of customers.
But I’m here to tell you that it wasn’t really the one thing…
The real one thing is the one thing that enabled Cedric to find the one thing.
The real reason
niche, was his consistency.
He executed for 2 years during evening and weekends, consistently making incremental changes to the product. He placed himself in the perfect environment to find “the one thing”.
Without this focus and execution, Cedric would have never experienced the one thing that ultimately leads to
growth.
Find something you believe in and enjoy… and then consistently execute. Because over time, you will find your one thing.