In September 2014, ConvertKit brought in $1,337. Not for a day. For the month. Its founder, Nathan Barry, had already spent a year on it, had a working product, and was watching revenue go sideways at a level that would embarrass a part-time freelancer.
Thirteen months later, in October 2015, the same product passed $30,000 in monthly recurring revenue. By March 2019 Barry published that ConvertKit had reached $15 million in annual recurring revenue with a team of 38. The product barely changed in the crucial year. Four decisions did, and all four are available to someone with no audience and no budget.
Decision one: stop building, start phoning
Barry's account of that period, published in his post Growing ConvertKit to $30,000 in Monthly Recurring Revenue, describes a process with no technology in it at all.
He built lists of blogs that were visibly using MailChimp, AWeber, or Infusionsoft. The signal was public: a signup form on a blog tells you which tool sits behind it. He emailed the owner, introduced himself, asked what frustrated them about their current tool, and offered to show them an alternative. Anyone who said yes got a calendar link and a 30-minute Skype demo.
That is it. No funnel, no ad spend, no growth hacking. Speaking on the Indie Hackers podcast in March 2017, Barry summarised the phase bluntly: "Direct sales are basically the answer to everything."
The interesting detail is the qualification criterion. Rather than emailing every blog he could find, Barry narrowed to prospects with sizeable lists, eventually focusing on those with 10,000 or more subscribers. A demo takes the same thirty minutes whether the customer will pay $29 a month or $299. Choosing which thirty minutes to spend was the lever.
Decision two: name a niche small enough to feel uncomfortable
ConvertKit started as email marketing for authors. In the $15M retrospective, Barry describes narrowing that to "email marketing for professional bloggers" before later widening to "email marketing for creators."
The narrow version did two things at once. It made the cold email specific enough to answer, because a professional blogger reading "I build email marketing for professional bloggers" does not have to translate anything. And it made referral chains short: professional bloggers in 2015 all read each other, spoke at the same conferences, and shared tool recommendations constantly. A niche is not just a marketing position. It is a network with edges you can walk.
If you are trying to find your own version of this, our guide to where first customers actually come from covers the same ground from the buyer's side.
Decision three: absorb the switching cost yourself
Every email tool in 2015 had the same defence: a customer with 20,000 subscribers, dozens of forms, and a working automation sequence will not rebuild all of it to save $20 a month. The switching cost, not the feature list, was the moat.
ConvertKit's answer was to do the migration for the customer. Barry lists free concierge migration for lists above 5,000 subscribers among the tactics that mattered, and calls the one-on-one migrations unprofitable in the short term and effective anyway.
This is the single most transferable move in the story. If you sell anything that replaces an incumbent, the objection is almost never price and almost never features. It is the afternoon of unpaid work your buyer imagines. Paying that cost yourself converts a maybe into a yes and buys the switching cost back at your labour rate rather than theirs.
Notice the deliberate asymmetry: the offer was gated at 5,000 subscribers. Big enough accounts justified human hours; small ones self-served. That is how a concierge offer stays solvent.
Decision four: borrow other people's audiences on stage
The fourth engine in Barry's list is webinars run with affiliate partners, of which he says ConvertKit ran hundreds. The structure is worth spelling out, because it is often confused with ordinary affiliate marketing.
A creator with an email list hosts a live session on a topic their audience already cares about, teaching how they run their own email marketing. ConvertKit appears as the tool inside the workflow. The partner earns a share of whatever revenue follows. The partner is not selling software; they are teaching, which is what their audience subscribed for in the first place.
This works because the seller is trusted and the demonstration is real. It is the highest-leverage form of the principle behind owning an email list: if you do not have one yet, rent access from people who do, and pay them out of revenue rather than upfront.
The shape of the recovery
Barry's published month-by-month figures show what compounding looks like when the machine finally engages:
- September 2014: $1,337
- December 2014: $3,237
- January 2015: $3,885
- June 2015: $10,000
- July 2015: $14,800
- August 2015: $18,296
- September 2015: $24,699
- October 2015: more than $30,000
Three details deserve attention. First, the first nine months of the turnaround produced roughly $2,500 of additional monthly revenue, which at the time would have felt like failure. Second, the growth rates in the last four months are 48%, 25%, 32%, and 40% month over month, a range you only reach when the same repeatable action is being performed more times, not when a single tactic goes viral. Third, Barry put a further $50,000 of his own money into the company during this phase, on top of an initial $5,000, and told Indie Hackers he did so while revenue was still around $1,300 a month.
That is a bet, and it is worth being honest that it could have failed. Not everyone has $50,000 to put behind a hunch. Barry had earned it from previous design books and courses, which is its own kind of head start.
What holds up and what does not
What holds up: manual outreach that qualifies on account size rather than volume; a niche narrow enough to name in one sentence; removing the buyer's switching work by doing it yourself, gated at a threshold that keeps it economic; borrowing trusted audiences and paying for results.
What does not transfer cleanly: cold email in 2026 is a harder channel than in 2015, with authentication and complaint-rate rules that punish sloppy senders, as we covered in our piece on Google's sender requirements. Barry also had a real reputation before ConvertKit, plus the discipline behind his line to Indie Hackers, "I wrote a thousand words a day, every day, for 650 days in a row." A first email from a stranger with a public body of work behind them gets answered more often than one from a stranger without.
The lesson underneath all four decisions is the one Barry states directly in the $15M post: "The customers you recruit are higher quality than the ones who just walk in the door." Recruiting is slow, unglamorous, and does not scale, which is exactly why the founders who do it early end up with something that eventually does.
All revenue figures are from Nathan Barry's published posts and his March 2017 Indie Hackers interview, checked July 25, 2026.
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