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Revenue Cat

by Jacob EitingLaunched 2017-12via The SaaS Podcast

Revenue Cat is a SaaS platform providing SDKs and APIs that help mobile app developers implement in-app subscriptions without building complex backend infrastructure. Founded by Jacob Eiting and Miguel in 2017, the company grew from $0 MRR with heavy reliance on content marketing (6-12 hours/week writing technical blog posts) to $400 MRR after 2 months of consistent content, then to $7K MRR by late 2018. After joining Y Combinator and raising a $1.5M seed round, Revenue Cat leveraged a smart pricing structure aligned with customer revenue growth and strong word-of-mouth to reach $161K MRR ($1.93M ARR) by July 2020, with continued month-over-month growth driven by expansion revenue and organic adoption within the developer community.

Key Takeaways

  • Used content marketing as primary growth channel
  • Reached product-market fit in approximately 3-4 months
  • Got first customer via A developer found them through Reddit/Hacker News post about their SDK and integrated it into their production app after reading Apple/Google documentation.
  • Most effective channel: content-marketing
  • Monetizes with subscription pricing
  • Currently earning $161k/mo
  • Built initial product in approximately 2 months before first app integration

Revenue

Current MRR$161k
Current ARR$1.9M
Initial Investment$1.5M
Pricing Modelsubscription

Traction

First Customer ChannelA developer found them through Reddit/Hacker News post about their SDK and integrated it into their production app after reading Apple/Google documentation.
Most Effective Channelcontent-marketing
Outreach MethodReddit posts, Hacker News, Twitter, and weekly blog content targeting subscription-related technical problems and SEO keywords
Time to PMFapproximately 3-4 months
Traction Patterncontent-marketing

Tech

Dev Durationapproximately 2 months before first app integration
Tools Used
GrammarlyRedditHacker NewsTwitterGoogle App StoreApple App StoreStripeSlack

Why They Built It

Jacob and his co-founder Miguel experienced significant pain building subscription infrastructure at their previous company (Elevate). They recognized that mobile app developers lacked easy tools to manage in-app subscriptions and analytics, so they built an SDK and API to solve this problem.

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