In short
- A widget embedded on customer websites became its own distribution channel, but only after the product had something worth embedding. Senja's testimonial widgets sit on customers' own sites and are seen by their visitors, so every new paying customer quietly advertised Senja to their own audience — but this loop only started compounding once the onboarding fix (below) got users to actually publish testimonials instead of abandoning the app.
- Wilson Wilson spent six months at exactly $0 MRR before anything changed. 65 launch users, zero paying customers, and only one person who ever actively used the product — the founder's own account of this stretch is a rare unflattering data point that most build-in-public retrospectives skip over.
- A single onboarding rewrite doubled activation, and that number is oddly specific for a soft metric. Activation (defined as create a form, share a form, collect a testimonial) rose from under 15% to about 40% after co-founder Olly rebuilt the flow around one task at a time, no empty states, and instant proof of value — a claim with an exact before/after number rather than a vague 'onboarding got better.'
- Twitter build-in-public audiences and Indie Hackers milestone posts still exist in 2026, but the specific channels are more crowded than they were in 2022. The underlying discipline — publish exact monthly numbers, fix activation before spending on acquisition — has no expiration date, but Senja's own later posts didn't each replicate the traction of the earliest ones, per the same pattern seen elsewhere in this corpus.
The mechanism
Senja's growth chain runs: an onboarding rebuild converted existing (already-sufficient) traffic into activated users who actually created and shared testimonial widgets; because those widgets live on customers' own websites, each newly activated customer became a small, ongoing advertisement for Senja to their own audience, compounding word of mouth on top of every other channel; and because the founders paired that flywheel with monthly build-in-public reports of exact numbers, they built enough credibility to make a pricing increase and even a support-channel shutdown read as more transparent content rather than risk. Each link explains why the next held — activation made the widget loop possible, the widget loop made the growth numbers worth publishing, and the publishing habit is what let later, riskier changes land safely.
A fixed onboarding rewrite converted existing traffic into activated users, which is why acquisition tactics only started paying off after this fix
Senja never lacked visitors — it got 1.5K-3K monthly visitors even at $0 MRR — but almost none of them activated because users were dropped into an empty app with no clear next step. Wilson and Olly rebuilt onboarding around forcing one action at a time (starting with 'create your form'), replacing empty states with dummy data and a pre-seeded testimonial, and cutting dead ends; this alone took activation from under 15% to roughly 40%. Because the product finally converted the traffic it already had, every subsequent acquisition tactic (influencer roundups, Product Hunt, affiliates) had something to convert against, which is why growth compounded only after mid-2022.
Building a good product got us from 0 - 1. Building an incredible onboarding took us from 1 - 5.
Because activated users actually published testimonials and widgets on their own sites, the product itself became a distribution surface, compounding word of mouth on top of paid-feeling channels
Senja's core output — an embeddable wall-of-love widget and testimonial carousel — lives on the customer's own website, visible to that customer's own visitors. Once onboarding got a meaningfully higher share of signups to actually create and share a form, each new customer's widget became a small, continuous advertisement for Senja on someone else's traffic, reinforcing the flywheel Wilson described explicitly: more referrals and testimonials led to more signups, which led to more customers, which led to more feature requests and a better product, which led to more referrals.
The recurring theme here though, is compounding growth. More referrals & testimonials = more signups. More signups = more customers.
Monthly build-in-public reports with exact numbers built enough credibility that a pricing increase and even quitting live chat could be framed as more content rather than risk
Once Olly began publishing monthly reports with exact MRR, revenue, visits, signups, customers, and churn from mid-2022 onward, the same transparency made later operational changes — a January 2023 price increase, and later turning off live chat entirely — legible to an audience that already expected candor. The pricing increase against an established 'too cheap to be credible' customer complaint converted fence-sitters without reducing signups, and turning off live chat (a support-cost decision, not growth hack) became one more blog post reinforcing the same public, numbers-first narrative instead of a hidden operational retreat.
When I first tried Senja it was the best option of all my choices but way way cheaper than the others and it definitely made me wonder 'why'
How it went
Six months at zero: launch, no activation, no revenue
2022-01 → 2022-06Wilson Wilson started building Senja on January 2, 2022 as a New Year's resolution, logging the journey on Twitter from day one [S1]. The first version launched in February 2022 with 65 signups, none of whom became paying customers and only one of whom actively used the product; from April through mid-June, signups trickled in at around 20/month, mostly from Twitter, netting $350 from two one-time lifetime-deal (LTD) sales but $0 in recurring revenue [S1]. Oliver Meakings (Olly), who had felt the same testimonial-collection pain firsthand and brought marketing expertise, joined as co-founder at the end of June 2022 [S1][S3].
Onboarding overhaul and the first paying customers
2022-07 → 2022-11With Olly aboard, the co-founders rebuilt onboarding from scratch: forcing one primary action at a time, replacing empty states with dummy data and a pre-seeded testimonial, and cutting dead ends, which more than doubled activation from under 15% to roughly 40% [S19][S1]. MRR went from $45 in July 2022 to $832 by November 2022, with visits growing from 4,200 to 8,400 per month and customer count rising from 3 to 18, still overwhelmingly driven by Twitter [S17][S18][S13][S14][S15].
Affiliates, influencers, and a pricing correction take MRR past $2K
2022-12 → 2023-02In December 2022, Senja migrated its affiliate program from Rewardful to FirstPromoter for better signup notifications and analytics, generating 5 new paying customers in the first month alone; the same month, Twitter influencers Easlo and Pascio began including Senja in tool roundups [S2]. Senja crossed $1,000 MRR after 11 months, then $2,000 MRR just 40 days later (January 22, 2023) [S2]. In January 2023 the founders raised pro-tier pricing and introduced a cheaper starter tier after repeated customer feedback that the product seemed suspiciously underpriced; the change didn't reduce signup volume and pushed fence-sitters to upgrade [S2][S6].
Compounding growth to $10.8K MRR and operational maturity
2023-03 → 2023-08MRR climbed steadily through 2023 — $4,240 in March, $6,112 in May (300 customers, per a separate mistakes-retrospective post), $9,103 in July, and $10,794 by August 2023, with 939 signups and 77 new customers that month alone [S7][S9][S3][S11][S12]. Alongside this, the founders set up proper analytics (Segment, PostHog, Pirsch) after six months of tracking almost nothing but MRR, migrated their hand-coded marketing site to Framer so the non-technical co-founder could ship changes, and eventually turned off live chat support in favor of a ticket system to protect focus time as support volume grew with the user base [S3][S20].
Milestones
- 2022-01Wilson Wilson starts building Senja as a New Year's resolution
- 2022-02First version launches; 65 users, 0 paying, only 1 active
- 2022-06Six months at $0 MRR ends; Oliver Meakings joins as co-founder
- 2022-0745$45 MRR, $157 monthly revenue, 3 customers
- 2022-08141$141 MRR (+213%), 4.2K visits, 123 signups
- 2022-09321$321 MRR (+126%), 7.9K visits, 215 signups
- 2022-10476$476 MRR (+48%); traffic/revenue dip, likely seasonal
- 2022-11832$832 MRR (+75%), 8.4K visits, 0 churn this month
- 2022-121289$1,289 MRR (+55%); affiliate program migrated to FirstPromoter
- 2023-012643$2,643 MRR (+105%); pricing increase; 5 customers via new affiliate tool
- 2023-01-222000Crossed $2,000 MRR: 11 months to $1K, then 40 days to $2K
- 2023-023349$3,349 MRR (+26%), $142 churn
- 2023-034240$4,240 MRR (+26%), $187 churn
- 2023-045036$5,036 MRR (+19%), $134 churn
- 2023-056112$6,112 MRR (+21%), 4% churn; separately: 300 customers / $7.4K MRR noted in retrospective post
- 2023-067293$7,293 MRR (+19.3%), 2.2% churn
- 2023-079103$9,103 MRR (+25%), 4% churn
- 2023-0810794$10,794 MRR (+19%), 18.6K visits, 939 signups, 2.5% churn
Whether it fits you
Senja's loop depends on structural conditions tied to a two-founder team willing to fix product before marketing and publish real numbers monthly. Run it if these hold for you; the costs are concrete and easy to underestimate.
What it needs
Your core output is something customers will publish on their own site or feed
The word-of-mouth compounding here depended specifically on Senja's widget living on customer websites, visible to the customer's own visitors [S2]. A product whose output stays inside a private dashboard doesn't get the same free distribution.
You're willing to fix activation before spending on acquisition
Senja already had 1.5K-3K monthly visitors before it had any real MRR; the founders' own account is that nothing else mattered until they fixed onboarding first [S1][S19]. Skipping straight to paid or influencer acquisition on top of a leaky funnel wastes the same traffic this case had for free.
Both founders can absorb a long, income-constrained stretch, including at very different costs of living
Wilson worked six months for $0 MRR while relying on family support in Nigeria; Olly gave up roughly 80% of his disposable spending (dining out, gym, personal trainer) to hit his own ramen-profitability target of $4,500/month versus Wilson's $1,500/month [S1][S4]. The model assumes both founders can sustain very unequal personal runway for months without the growth curve compensating them equally in the short term.
What it costs
Committing to monthly public reporting is a permanent, compounding obligation, not a one-off post
Olly published a Build in Public Report every month from July 2022 through at least August 2023, each with exact MRR, revenue, visits, signups, customers, and churn [S5-S18]. Skipping a month or fudging a number after 14 straight months of transparency would cost more credibility than never having started.
Unequal cost-of-living between co-founders requires an explicit, sometimes uncomfortable equity/payout conversation
Olly and Wilson are 50/50 equity co-founders, but the company temporarily paid Olly's higher London living costs while tracking the difference so both would ultimately receive equal amounts — a negotiation the founders explicitly say could be difficult for other pairs to have [S4]. Founders unwilling to have this kind of open financial conversation risk resentment or an unfair-feeling arrangement.
Under-pricing to seem approachable can itself become a growth ceiling that must be corrected in public
Senja's own customers told them the price was suspiciously low and made them question quality, not just affordability [S2]. Correcting a self-inflicted pricing mistake requires publicly reversing an earlier public claim (that the product was worth its low price), which is a real reputational cost this playbook doesn't avoid.
The numbers we could verify
- activation
- Under 15% before onboarding overhaul (mid-2022) -> ~40% after, defined as create a form, share a form, or collect a testimonial [S19]
- churn
- Ranged roughly 2.2%-4% monthly through 2023 (dollar-denominated churn of $134-$187/month in Feb-Apr 2023, converting to percentage churn from May 2023 onward) [S6][S7][S8][S9][S10][S11][S12]
- visit to signup conversion
- Roughly 3.5%-5.5% across 2022-2023 monthly reports, derived from signups/visits in each Build in Public Report [S5-S12]
- costs
- Two-founder team; Olly's ramen-profitability target $4,500/month (London, ~$3,000/month rent), Wilson's $1,500/month (Nigeria, ~$500/month living costs); at $7,000 revenue and $1,000 expenses, $6,000 profit covered both targets [S4]
Channels it actually used
- Twitter (X) build-in-public audience
- monthly Build in Public blog reports
- Indie Hackers milestone posts
- unautomated Product Hunt launch
- affiliate / referral program
- influencer tool roundups
- SEO / content marketing blog
- word of mouth via embedded widget
Our read
The popular reading of build-in-public case studies like this one is 'transparency built the audience' — but the more precise mechanism here is that the onboarding fix came first and made everything after it (affiliates, influencers, pricing) actually convert. Founders who copy the monthly-report habit without first fixing activation are copying the visible half of the mechanism, not the load-bearing half.
The 300-customers/$7.4K-MRR figure in the 'From 0 to 300 customers' post doesn't cleanly match the same-month $6,112 MRR / 57-customer figure in the May 2023 Build in Public Report; both are primary, founder-written sources, so this reads as a different snapshot date within the same rough period rather than a real conflict, but it is a reminder that even careful build-in-public founders don't always reconcile their own retrospective posts against their own monthly numbers.
The founders frame turning off live chat as a focus/productivity decision, not a growth hack — but its timing, right as the company was publicly documenting steady MRR growth, suggests the credibility built by 14 months of transparent reporting is precisely what let a support pullback be read as thoughtful operations rather than the company skimping on customers as it grew.
Sources
- From $0 to $250 MRR. How we broke out of absolute zero.2022 (est. Jul/Aug)
- We hit $2,000 MRR. 3 things fueling our growth.2023-01-22
- From 0 to 300 customers. 12 mistakes we made.2023 (est. May-Jun)
- Some notes on ramen profitability at Senja2023 (est. Feb-Mar)
- January 2023 Build in Public Report2023-02
- Senja's February 2023 Build in Public Report2023-03
- March 2023 Build in Public Report2023-04
- April 2023 Build in Public Report2023-05
- May 2023 Build in Public Report2023-06
- June 2023 Build in Public Report2023-07
- July 2023 Build in Public Report2023-08
- August 2023 Build in Public Report2023-09-04
- Senja's September Build in Public Report2022-10
- Senja's October Build in Public Report2022-11
- Senja's November Build in Public Report2022-12
- Senja's December Build in Public Report2023-01
- Senja's July Build in Public Report2022-08
- Senja's August Build in Public Report2022-09
- How we doubled the activation rate of Senja's new sign-ups2023 (undated)
- We're turning off our live chat support. Here's why2023 (undated)
