Unlike many indie founders, I’ve never shared revenue numbers for Preceden, my SaaS timeline maker tool. Even if they were remarkable – which they are not really – I just don’t think there are many good reasons to publicly share revenue numbers, and there are lots of downsides.

However, below I’ll share a chart showing Preceden’s yearly revenue (though omitting actual numbers), because I think there are some lessons there and it may serve as inspiration for other indie founders.

Check this out:

Some thoughts…

I started Preceden as a side project in late 2009 when I was 24 and still a lieutenant in the Air Force. I knew I didn’t want to make the Air Force a career, so began learning web development in my spare time, and Preceden was one of the first products I launched. I only went full time on it at the beginning of 2023, a milestone I wrote about in this blog post.

When I started Preceden, I really had no idea what I was doing. I was an entrepreneurial amateur web developer with little experience building, marketing, or growing a business. For example, Preceden was entirely free for several months after launch, then I introduced a $19-for-life PayPal-only payment option, as recalled by this HackerNews user:

Payments started trickling in though. It didn’t make much money that first year, but over time, I got a bit savvier thanks to conferences like Microconf and slowly – very slowly – turned it into a better business.

There were years early on where I put it on the back-burner to work on other products. Most of those were duds, but one, Lean Domain Search, was acquired by Automattic after I got out of the Air Force, which is how I landed a software engineering (“code wrangler”) job there.

While I was at Automattic, I still had Preceden running on the side. Early on, revenue was nowhere near enough to even consider leaving Automattic to go full time on it and honestly I didn’t even want to. I enjoyed the work I was doing there and was learning a ton.

But, I could work on Preceden here and there on nights and weekends (at least before I had kids), and I could do some math to see that if I could grow it at X%/year, then down the road it could grow to the point where it would give me the option to go full time on it.

And so that’s what I did: kept it as side project while at Automattic and later when I went to go work at Help Scout. At both companies, I sought out opportunities to work with different teams so I could get more exposure to the marketing and the business sides of the companies, knowing that they would get smarter about growing my own business.

And each year, Preceden’s revenue grew. Looking at the history of the business, the compounded annual growth rate is 37%. That’s a decent growth rate for a business earning lots of money, but that wasn’t the case for most of Preceden’s existence: imagine making $5k one year and growing 37%ish to $7k. Not great, but… then that $7k grows to $9.6k, then $13k, and so on, and eventually those jumps start becoming meaningful.

For most of Preceden’s history, it was not a proper SaaS business with recurring revenue. For the first few years, it was all lifetime deals: pay $29 or similar and you can use Preceden forever (the nature of the product back then was that most people didn’t use it long term, so I offered plans that reflected that). Eventually I put a 1-year limit on it, so customers would have to manually pay again if they wanted to keep using it each year. A few years ago, I switched it to standard automatically-recurring SaaS pricing and that has certainly helped with revenue growth.

One thing I realized years into it is that Preceden wasn’t a great business to start in the first place. It’s mostly B2C (people creating history timelines and for personal projects, though some B2B for people using it for project planning) and the nature of it is that most customers don’t need to use it that long and don’t want to pay a lot for it. Combine that with me starting as an inexperienced entrepreneur working on it as a side project, and you’ve got a recipe for a very difficult business to grow. (I’ll add though if I had been savvier, I wouldn’t have started it, but it did work out in the long run, so maybe my inexperience was somewhat of an advantage.)

It’s interesting to me though if you look at that revenue chart, there’s fairly consistent growth through most of Preceden’s history, even though it didn’t have automatically recurring SaaS revenue until the tail end of it. (One exception being 2020 which saw abnormally strong growth due to lots of people moving processes online because of Covid.)

The way I look at it is that every year, I’ve made just enough improvements to the product/marketing/business that they (combined with a small amount of recurring revenue and compounding marketing efforts) all sum up to result in that year-over-year growth.

There have been very few big, immediate jumps in revenue. Mostly just lots of slowly improving every aspect of the business, as you can get a sense of from the commit count and dates from the Preceden repo:

For any indie founders out there who have not seen hockey stick growth for their product, I hope this serves as some evidence that it is possible (and perfectly fine!) to slowly grow your side project over many years.

If you can maintain slow but consistent revenue growth year after year, it should eventually grow into a meaningful amount of revenue and give you options down the road, whether it be to go full time on it, or use it to support yourself while pursuing other projects (like I am now with Emergent Mind, a resource for staying informed about important new AI/ML research), or something else entirely. And even if you never go full time on it, the lessons you’ll learn trying to grow your business will make you a much more valuable employee and help you grow your salary, which is a great outcome as well.

Drop me a note if you’re on a similar journey, I’d love to say hey: matthew.h.mazur@gmail.com.

I’m honestly surprised it took spammers so long: Preceden is a freemium product (meaning people can sign up and try it for free), the product makes it very easy to create link-filled user generated content, I had no automated spam prevention mechanisms in place, and I was too busy with other things to do anything about it.

Around a year ago, I started noticing some spammy timelines being created on Preceden, my SaaS timeline maker tool.

Here’s a simple example of what a spammy timeline looks like:

Most of the spammy timelines were like this:

• The spammer signed up for a free account
• They created 1 timeline and made the timeline public
• They added 1 event to the timeline and in the event’s notes, added backlinks to other sites

Along with the spammy Preceden timeline, the spammer usually also created pages on Facebook, Tumblr, and a host of other sites:

Best I can figure, the spammers were hoping some of the pages would rank well on search engines for key search terms, which would then drive traffic to the destination site (an online gambling site in this case) on behalf of some client (who I’m guessing paid someone to do this type of work). And the purpose of interlinking the pages was to try to make them more discoverable to search engines. I think most are overseas in southeast Asia, and they have some checklist of sites they work through which Preceden got added to at some point.

Backlink building is a possible purpose too, but all of Preceden’s backlinks in user generated content is set to nofollow, so don’t pass on any authority to the spammy site, and surely the spammers must have realized this. That makes the spray-and-pray theory of creating pages and hoping somehow they would drive traffic to the destination site the most likely explanation to me.

Dealing with it

At first, like I mentioned, I didn’t do anything. If I happened to stumble across a spammy timeline in the course of support work or data analysis or whatever, I’d delete the account and the timeline with it.

This obviously wasn’t scalable though, and the spammers must have realized I wasn’t doing anything to stop this, and so they flooded in, creating hundreds of spammy timelines.

Most were simple like the example above, but sometimes the spammers would wind up creating complex timelines with multiple events:

Eventually I built some initial tooling to look at event notes and through a combination of automated and manual work, ban spammy accounts.

Quick aside: banning users took some consideration. Should I delete the account and the timeline? What if I incorrectly identify something as spam and delete a legitimate user’s data? How do I prevent them from signing up for a new account? I wound up implementing it such that it made their timeline private and locked them out of their account until they emailed support, and also flagged their browser to prevent them from signing up again. There was one day where I banned 500 old accounts from prolific Vietnamese spammers. To my surprise, someone wrote into support asking what happened to their accounts. I asked what the purpose of the timelines were and never heard back 🤣.

It’s a bit of an arms race though. I originally was only looking for outbound links in event notes, but I think some of the spammers realized that, so started adding outbound links to the overall timeline notes as well as layer notes (layers are used to group similar events together on timelines) which my tool didn’t pick up.

This took me some time to realize (only this week tbh) and required some further adjustments to the spam tools to identify.

To date, I’ve banned 1,248 accounts with 1,573 timelines. And I now have solid tooling set up now to automatically ban suspicious accounts and give me ways to manually review outbound links periodically.

The impact of these timelines on Preceden isn’t clear, but there’s no way it’s helping things. Google has been rolling out lots of updates to fight low quality, spammy content, and maybe Preceden has gotten penalized for the presence of these spammy timelines.

Maybe that’s part of why Preceden’s rankings have been fluctuating so much in recent months:

One of the million things you gotta deal with running your own SaaS, or at least a freemium one with public user generated content 😅.