JotBot hit $50k MRR after a long, hard pivot

🎉 JotBot hit 50k MRR!

It's been 4 months since we decided to pivot JotBot from a 'cheating tool' that generates essays for students to a writing assistant that writes and researches alongside you.

We did so for three reasons:

1. Our product felt bloated (we had a lot of useless features)
2. We didn't feel like anyone loved the product
3. We wanted to work on something more interesting to us

We came into this pivot fresh off the high of going viral and hitting $25k MRR.

We had worked on quite a few products, but this was Declan and I's first significant product with revenue. And, our first real pivot.

In our heads, we'd switch up some buttons and users would love the new JotBot overnight. We meticulously planned for it to be "smooth" and "strategic".

It was anything but.

Honestly, the entire time we felt like the pivot was a failure

Usage didn't change. We didn't get any of the positive feedback we anticipated.

We had hoped our changes would help our poor conversion rate, but it actually got worse.

We quickly lost the momentum we had come in with. Growth stagnated. (The dip in the screenshot)

We had our first ever unprofitable month, quite scary as a bootstrapped product.

At one point we tried completely cutting our old features and forcing users to our new features. That didn't go well.

At many points, we were tempted to throw in the towel and revert to the previous state of the product. At least we could make some money, we thought.

The timing couldn't be worse, either.

We had just left school to go full-time and wanted to prove ourselves. We also were in the middle of sf2 @buildspace , where we had to present our stagnant graphs each week for exam day.

We wanted to grow, and we also wanted to build, and yet we also wanted to refine -- so we oscillated between different modes of work.

Needless to say what we did wasn't perfect.

In my head I can't really put a finger on a single turning point in this process.

In fact, the best way I can describe it is that every week, we would have a new change that we felt "would change everything." And we would make the change and nothing would happen.

But eventually the product became unrecognizable to the product before, and it certainly didn't happen in one update.

Week after week, I guess those changes started adding up.

Our numbers started improving. Nowhere near the speed and magnitude of what we originally expected, but improvement nonetheless.

We started feeling a bit better about our product each day. A few friends reached out to us about trying and liking JotBot -- this had never happened before.

We brought on a new teammate - Phillip. Together, we began experimenting with growth efforts towards our new features. Our old growth channels started working again, as well as new ones. Our confidence grew.

And so we definitely still have a whole lot of problems:

• Conversion is poor, churn is high (but a bit better)
• We're not sure where exactly the product is going
• We still don't feel great about our product.
• Our first summer is almost here.

But we're having a ton of fun figuring it out along the way.

Wish us luck!