How I turned a basic URL shortener into a profitable SaaS platform (615€/MRR)
Hey, dear Indie Hackers!
My name is Hugo Posnic, a French developer of 24 yo. I've started to learn and build websites and programs since my middle-school years. I've loved to contribute to several open-source projects, mostly Linux-related (don't hesitate to check my GitHub profile).
But my domain of predilection is the web. That's why in May 2019, I have decided to create a side project that could be launched easily and act as a real learning project while being employed for a full-time developer job.
That's how URLR is born.
The start
A new URL shortener among the numerous existing URL shorteners on the web.
It was developed in PHP without any framework. Here's a screenshot of the first version launched in May 2019 (in French).
Basic but functional 😋
My initial goals
By launching URLR, I had some goals in mind:
- learn to maintain a website and improve it step by step
- improve my SEO skills
- be better than the #1-ranked URL shortener on Google in France (urlz)
- try to get some revenue with ads
From there, I've started to add more content on the homepage to have better SEO results and tried to get some back-links - mostly in the "top x URL shorteners" articles 👉 great tip to start from zero.
I've progressively ranked up better in the search results until becoming ranked #1 for the "URL shortener" query in France.
Taking advantage of this first success, I have done a rewrite of the app on Symfony in March 2020 during the first lock-down to start implementing useful features for the growing list of visitors (accounts, links savings, link protection, expiration date,...). I have seen the first signups growing rapidly after that.
Here is a chart of the created links between May 2019 and March 2021:
From 15 reduced links per day to more than 9,000. I was quite impressed by these numbers. Seeing that, I decided to add some ads on the homepage with the help of Google AdSense to test if profits could be made with this traffic.
The response was yes. I was earning approximately 100€ per month at this moment.
The business model
As said above, the business model of URLR was based on the ads at the beginning and I was earning something like ~100€/month.
The problem with that is that I have been suspended several times due to fraudulent clicks from some visitors. So, this was quite dangerous and not stable at all. Moreover, it was difficult to grow this without always growing the number of visitors.
As a result, in April 2021 I've launched subscriptions with Stripe to turn URLR into a true SaaS platform with these plans :
- Free
- Premium - 5€/month (this plan has since been deleted)
- Professional - 15€/month
- Enterprise - 50€/month
Without free-trial at this moment.
It was coming with many new features (API, teams, higher link reduction limits, ...).
And guess what?
It gives me my first paying customer in April 2021 (on the Enterprise plan), just a few days after having launched them.
In July 2021, this first customer has chosen to go with the yearly Professional plan (150€). Followed by three new customers also with yearly plans.
My business model was kind of validated for me at this moment. MRR at this time was like 50€/month. So, less than with the ads but much more stable and much more scalable.
The growth
From this moment, in July 2021, I've decided to contact a childhood friend of mine who is also a developer, Nathan Seva, to ask him to work with me on this project. Why?
- The infrastructure used at that time was quite basic and started to show some weakness. Nathan has really good competencies for these infrastructure subjects.
- He is a skilled developer with solid workflows (unit tests, CI/CD, ...)
- We have already worked together on some projects and it was very productive and fun. Really important to stay motivated along the journey!
We both do development for the platform, but Nathan is more involved in the advanced back-end stuff while I'm trying to concentrate on the marketing/sales side.
The first feature landed by Nathan was the CSV import, which was a feature that our customers have been waiting for to mass-reduce links (and that I was doing by hand with API for some clients 😖).
We were reducing more than 20,000 links per month at this time while having almost 1,000 registered users.
One year later, in July 2022 :
- we have reduced ~1.4 M links and processed ~1.7M redirects 🤯
- we have almost 6,000 registered users (big growth of users since we now require an account to reduce a link due to spam issues - it has caused on the other side a big loss of one-time reductions from the homepage).
- we have 18 awesome customers (several on custom plans for higher needs)
- and finally, we are now at 615€ of MRR!
Our landing page now:
Here is the actual state of comprehension on why our clients choose URLR instead of Bitly for example:
- A strong GDPR policy with data hosted in France.
- An ultra-responsive support (< 1 min on average to get a response on the support chat). The customer experience is our priority and we assist them as much as needed.
- Features built around customer needs and feedback.
- More affordable prices.
- A certain simplicity in the way of doing things.
Next steps
I've made the mistake to build this platform without speaking about it. Customers (almost all) have arrived thanks to our good SEO in France.
Let's fix that! I will now share our progress developing this project publicly to get feedback and reach new people.
Here are my new goals for the next weeks/months:
- Get our first customer outside of France.
- Better explain the benefits of having a custom short domain to run your own URL shortener for your brand.
- Continue to serve more customers and grow this MRR faster to dedicate even more time to this project.
- Build useful and innovative features to continue to deliver even more value.
I'm currently starting my journey on Twitter, don't hesitate to follow me to see my progress with these goals.
👉 Twitter: @hugo_posnic
And the link to URLR:
👉 URLR: https://urlr.me/en
Thank you for taking the time to read my story. I hope that it has helped you understand what I'm currently doing and that it gives you some motivation for your projects.
Can't wait to see your comments!
Nice, respect, keep going )_
That's a great story to show that an indie hacker can win even in an overcrowded market. Also, geography is a niche, too!
It's also really impressive that you managed to get to #1 in less than a year.
Thank you! Yes, it's the message. That, and be on top on support and customer experience.
Now on mission to get to #1 in English, more complicated 😅
Being on top of support is a nice problem to have. I wish I had that many users to fill my support inbox.
Hi Hugo,
I'm a newcomer on IndieHackers and faced your post right away after registration.
There's very tiny chance to catch smth relevant in a few second after registartion, but i my case it was. So here's a story:
Short links is wide used in referral programs, and when URL was shared with recipient - marketing teams quite often isn't pay enough attention on how it'll looks like from recipient device.
I've been CMO of Viber messenger for EMEA & CEE and know that key messengers in France is Viber & Whatsapp. So highly likely - testing of sharing will goes via these channels, but in WeChat/iMessage/Facebook messenger and among others it might looks way different in terms of image preview.
Preview of URL, especially image in my experience giving extra 30-50% to click-through.
But open graph tags processing is super vary among different social channels and imho digging deep into it gave me efficiency uplift.
I didn't have any preview for my very first URLR link and this might be even not a priority for you (all roadmaps are tight) but if you'll find raising click-through interesting, i'll be happy to spread the word about hints&hacks which was found our by myself.
PS
Here's a great app for frequent flyers and business travelers - App in the Air.
It's a cool product and imho tier 1 thing in terms of functionality for travels, but if you'll try to send referral invitation 4 times via Viber, Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger, iMessage - you'll probably get the sense of what i'm talking about even better than reading all below, cause there's space of improvements.
Hi Mike, welcome on IH!
Thank you for such a good feedback.
We already have this "custom metadata/preview" feature in our roadmap since a while. But as you said, we are already very busy and for the moment no customer has asked us for it. So we try to prioritize the evolutions. However, based on your experience, this could perhaps open up new perspectives. I'll have to keep an eye on it!
Thanks again for sharing.
Customers in case it's b2b clients don't understand the importance of correct preview in terms of conversion.
And another trap - in 99% case customer send a test short link to colleague or a friend in order to test in one of any messengers and no one have in mind that it might looks bad in another one.
It very much depends on where to use links - twitter / insta/tiktok bio - its one story, implementing into email as url within a text - another.
I would advice to dedicate a few custed sessions to this, if there's no use case for social sharing - it's ok, but if it is - might be a nice direction to make product better.
thank you so much for a feedback, you're my 1st reply and i glad that u found it useful)
Hi Hugo! Nice write-up. Sounds like you have a lot of volume and potential to scale.
How did you get the back-links? Did you reach out to the authors and ask to be featured?
Thank you for your kind words! 🙏
Yes by contacting authors of these articles either by Twitter or with their contact form.
Nice. Did they add your back-link for free or some asked for money?
I have never paid for any link. So only free links for now :)
In my experience, it all depends on the type of site. if it was created for monetization by selling links - then you will not get anything for free.
nice storry sorry If this message gonna offend you but I want an explanation for why your product is your better than bitly, tinyurl etc. ? I wonder this because I have the same thing in my head I will do something that already done but I want to beat them.
Hey Hugo,
Good story. I like the idea of utilizing the geographic niche - I think it's a good and underestimated approach. I'm Polish and my instinct tells me that instead of creating a service for english-speakers - on a large, highly competitive market, I should just do something simple & local, like translate existing, successful online business into polish and promote it to polish customers. There are probably millions of polish that doesn't know english very well and would be happy to use / pay for the service.
I need to try this approach :)
Hey Robert,
That's a good way to start, and don't forget that you could go larger later.
Start with a small niche and then expand when it becomes easier!
Good luck with your project :)
Exactly, easier to scale up once you already have a niche with active users.
Wish you luck upscaling your business!
Very inspiring! Keep going!
Fore sure, thanks!!
Nice job!
Thanks man!
thanks for story! good luck!
Thank you for your support!
Good job, i really like how you start from scratch and pushing the SEO plus the structure.
Bonne continuation
Glad that you appreciated the process!
Thanks for sharing, it was an inspiring read! I have a beginner question though. How did you go about validating your idea? Was the existence of competitors the only validation you needed to build your MVP or was it something else?
Hey Hugo just wanted to say that I enjoyed reading your story 🙏
From a basic URL shortener to a profitable SaaS platform! Impressive growth, validated business model, and customer-centric approach. Congrats! #IndieHackers
Good read. Simple and functional always wins!
Hello Hugo,
Great Read. Thanks for sharing your story. You should put a post on how you became number one on the search results (and maybe try to monetise that) :)
Great job ! Impressive how you managed to rank top 1 in France in a very short time
c'est genial!! amazing work.
For a market that's saturated with a lot of competitors @hugoposnic, why did you still go through with this project and not start another with less competition?
Also did you personally have trouble with existing url shortener tools?
Pretty cool stuff
Thank you very much :)
Hugo,
That is AMAZING! Thank you so much for sharing your story and progress with us.
This is very inspirational, I recently learned about Micro-SaaS's and trying to read as many articles to learn more, and your journey is very educational.
Thank you again, and I wish you and URLR much success, you will be global in no time.
Take care.
-Ash
So glad to read this message, thanks Ash 🙏
You are most welcome!
Well done!
Not talking about your product while developing it is something I have done as well. I take your story as inspiration!
Best regards from Amsterdam
Yes we must be better on that 😅
I love Amsterdam 🤟
Congrats!
Just curious about this part:
"Better explain the benefits of having a custom short domain to run your own URL shortener for your brand."
Can you explain how this work?
Thank you 🙏
You can choose to reduce your links with your own short domain for better branding.
For example, Lamborghini have this short domain: lam.bo
Don't hesitate to check this page on URLR: https://urlr.me/en/brand-domains
@hugoposnic. Got it, thanks!
Hi Hugo,
Thanks for sharing this, its really inspiring.
Thanks man, appreciate it!
Great move. I just get powered to get product I have in mind out.
I'm really happy to read that :) Good luck for your own project 🔥
Thank you 😊👌👌
How do you differ from Link in bio for istance , do you provide analitics?
We don't have bio page link feature for now. URLR is a generic URL shortener and yes with analytics.
I found your this post while searching for information about blog-related research ... It's a good post .. keep posting and updating information. Thank you so much for this post. This post very useful for me, <a href="https://techyindia.com/free-fire-50000-diamond-hack-without-human-verification-in-2021/">Free Fire 50000 Diamond hack </a>
Good job!! 👍
I'm waiting for your next story to read!
Thank you, really :)
Awesome story! Keep going mate
Thank you :)
impressive!
Thank you Marta!
Congrats on the success and wishing you more success in the future :)
Thank you for this kind message 🙏
Love this post
Thank you!!
Congrats on the success and wishing you more success in the future :)
Where did you end up hosting your SaaS and how much are you spending on that?
Thanks!
On CleverCloud, a French hosting platform: https://www.clever-cloud.com
We spend a bit more than 100€/month for our infra (staging, prod, ...).
Well done 👏
Thank you very much 😁
That's an inspiring story! Thanks for sharing.
Simple, straightforward and honest.
Boosted my confidence in my project as well.
Best of luck in your journey.
Thank you really happy to read that, that's was the goal also 🙏🙏
Wow, Bravo 👏👏👏. Very inspiring and I love the execution.
Thank you 🙏🙏
Curious as to why someone would use this service vs. something like Bitly? Is it because of the fact you offer the page in French?
I've tried to list some potential reasons at the end of the article.
But for the French customers, yes having a France-based company that can assist them is a very strong a argument.
We will continue to work on our proposition to give high-value services to stand out.
Congratulations, it's a really great start!
How did you managed to connect the client custom domain? Did you take care of the technical details yourself?
Thanks! With a CNAME entry. The user has just to add a DNS entry on their domain. We have some documentation for that.
That's great, i'm will try to implement custom domains in my SaaS portfolio maker and i will need to study this. Thanks.
Don't hesitate to send me a DM on Twitter if you need some help :)
Congratulations! Very inspiring story.
Thank you!!
What are your plans for the next three years? Is it even possible to plan something in such a niche?
I don't think that I've the vision for this project for three years yet.
But a lot of marketing and sales 🚀
Nice..!
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Nice!! Can please throw some light on the technology used in the frontend.
Thanks! Symfony for the back and just hand-written HTML and CSS with SASS 😉
Very cool story! Thanks for sharing! I wish you luck in your plans and hope everything will work 🚀
Thank you very much! 🙏
Chapeau ! 🎉 Happy to see success stories like this one. I know that even if it seems as an easy path to success, it had its tough times as you've mentioned, blocked ads account, spam, etc. but the most important thing is to be determined to make it happen, so, bravo 👏
Now, if I may ask you something, as I'm trying to be constructive and helpful, how come you've not used a different URL for the shortlinks, as I can see 2 issues with it :
it seems quite risky to have the spammy links on the same domain as your business website, if you get blacklisted by Google and other entities for spam/phishing it can block your whole business (single point of failure)
having the same domain means that you cannot separate the business website's code from the actual platform (for easy changes for marketing purposes) and don't know exactly how the link creation works when it generates the link ID, can it generate an actual word? for example something like this "careers" or even "Careers1" so in that case the link will be used by a client to redirect to something else instead of you having the possibility to use that URL for your own business or at least to not be able to trick someone with that URL.
Anyway, congratulations again on your achievement and bon courage pour la suite !
Thank you for such a great feedback!
If you want to remove this "!" you have to use your own short domain :)
Thanks for the reply. Happy to hear that you managed to filter out spam, that's something many of us are struggling, for example couple of years ago I've built a marketplace that had free accounts for merchants and at a certain point we've got so many spammy accounts (it was clearly targeted) that we had to close down merchant accounts registration and vet them manually after they were sending us the details about their businesses and we where fact checking them.
For the premium plan with the custom word I still think it's quite risky as there are ways to pay for an account and just create the link /!contact and that can easily trick someone as it's very difficult to spot the ! in the link after a slash / Anyway dont want to seem negative, I'm just trying to give you constructive feedback and maybe help you overcome some potential threats.
If you ever need help spotting sensitive edge cases or any other technical issues just send me a message and will try to help as much as possible. (ou même de prendre un café si jamais tu passes par Antibes ou alentours)
PS: Your site looks great and it's really fast. Bravo 👏
Good luck! 🎉
Very interesting how you took a "local first" approach, offered advantages for this local community, and were able to grow a product that seemed to be taken by bitly or similar big providers.
Much success for the further growth!
Yes maybe it's a technique than can be replicated for some services in specific areas.
Thanks for your kind words!
The story is really inspiring. A wonderful experience of starting from 0 to 1.
🙏🙏
Just starting my journey in the SaaS world, thanks for your inspiring story 🙂
It makes me very happy to read that! Thanks!
This landing page is great. I love to see the support for both french and english. I'd be curious to hear about the differences of marketing each of those in the future.
I have a sort of similar service (https://www.monetized.link) which takes links and converts them into paywalled links, and we have built in the capability of supporting multiple languages/currencies, but have yet to do anything other than our native English. It'd be great to hear more about that aspect in a follow up if you have the interest.
Thank you for your message. Monetize.link seems cool also!
What info do you need as a follow up?
I was interested in learning if the multi-language support opened up new markets and was worth the marketing efforts. No real followup needed, but it's a topic I'm interested in.
In our case the website was only in French at beginning.
So to reach international market we had to translate it in English.
And now when push new MRs, they are always all translated in both languages.
Doing this post without having an English version would surely have been more complicated.
amazing journey towards creating a great saas platform and earn such huge money. Inspirational
Thank you! 🙏
Cool stuff you have and you keep overhaul every one of us https://dicedreamshack.com/
Your story Hugo is very inspiring :)
Did you ever consider to launch on AppSumo or similar platform with a Lifetime offer?
Haven't consider it yet no, but this seems to be the logical thing to do next.
However, I'm not sure that we can provide lifetime offers. The charge of the service depends on the usage and we are obliged to charge the user according to it to make it sustainable. Is it possible to launch with discounts on such platforms instead?
I never saw anything else there sold unless it's LTV.
You can create special plan with total links allowed like 1000 links and 10.000 monthly redirects and sell it for $79 or similar.
Startups consider those lifetime offers as lead magnets. During time people will stop using your service or switch to monthly plan because they need some "premium" feature :)
That's an interesting idea Ivan! Will think about it, thank you for taking the time to explain it :)
Congratulations ! it is inspiring.
Nice to read that!!
Nice work! Hope you'll be able to get business outside of France soon! There's a big target market there! I am gonna have a look too :)
Thank you! That's the main project yes and I think that building on public with the help of Twitter and Indie Hacker can really makes a difference :)
Very inspiring, thanks for sharing!
Thanks, glad to read that! 😁
Hugo, hello. Thank you for this wonderful journey.
You say "The problem with that is that I have been suspended several times due to fraudulent clicks from some visitors". How did you deal with this problem, how did you solve it?
By stopping ads. I've choose to go with subscriptions instead and to have a very strict policy against spam links.
That's motivating... Great milestone...keep it up!
Thank you dude!
Awesome! Cant believe it’s possible to succeed with something like an url shortener.
As long as you provide value to some people I think that you can sell everything 🔥
Bravo !
Merci !
Ultra-responsive support works really well for us as well! Really need to invest more into customer support!
I really believe this solves one of the biggest problems of potential customers.
Just tried it :) https://urlr.me/1NQ6h
Great story, but why did you choose for people to register in order to shorten a url?
Awesome :)
We require the creation of an account to avoid the creation of spam links (phishing mainly). We had a rather critical episode on this subject with a threat from our host to close the site. So we took very strong measures to have a 0-spam policy today.
Excellent story Hugo! 😍 Congrats bro and I wish you the best of luck and more success than you have ever imagined ❤️
Thank you Amer! Best of luck you too ❤️
I'm really interested in getting your thoughts on this story and to get some feedback on the project! 😁
Brilliant and Inspiring. Wish you all the very best going forward.
Very appreciated thanks!! 🙏
Awesome dude! I can't wait to see where you take URLR 🔥
615€ is a massive milestone as far as I'm concerned 😁
Keep it up!
Thank you Maxime! I'm sure you'll be doing a lot more in the near future. 🚀
I had a to-do list for building a URL shortener, but I always thought it will be a tough competition to rank and might not be profitable via ads. Thus, left it as it is and started working on other side hustles.
Hugo, did you run any ads? What was the ROI?
Ads part is on the "My initial goals" section :)
Hello Hugo, did you had a community that you shared your product with ? Were you running ads ? How did you got all that traffic to generate 9k urls/day ?hm
No community no. I've just start my Twitter account.
Ads and traffic subjects are explained in the post :)
But it was mostly thanks to SEO.
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All services have a price 😋 As long as you provide value to your customers.
Link shrinking requires some resources and a very high-availability.
Just imagine being off for two minutes while we manage 1.7 M links...
Hey @hugoposnic I'd love to learn about how manage that. Any advice for someone planning to build a service that is similarly small, but with high scalability demands?
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