From 0 to 16K Paying Users: A Deep Dive into a Pure PLG SaaS Growth Story
Published 2025-10-23
The starting line: 0 → 2,000 in 18 months
I’m going to open with a raw number: the company we’re looking at — Resend — reported going from 0 to 2,000 paying customers in about 1.5 years.
Then they ramped to 16,000 paying customers and are adding ~2,000 new paying customers each month.
All of it without a traditional sales team.
That kind of growth doesn’t happen by accident.
What did they do?
They followed a two-pillar model:
- Create – Build a product significantly better than the competition.
- Share – Outward-facing transparency: every little shipping step, every update, every insight.
Why it matters?
Most indie SaaS makers grind on “build, hope someone finds it.” This story shows a systematic engine: build the product right, and build the distribution loop around it. If you’re aiming for growth without heavy sales overhead, this is the template.
Pillar 1: Create something 10× better
What we should do?
Let's focus on the product experience and remove friction.
Onboarding, value delivered fast, ease of use.
Benchmark what users hated in competitors, and flip it: “if they complain about X, we make X effortless.”
The founder of Resend, @zenorocha stated: “we build the best product possible. we aim for at least 10x better than competition” That’s audacious, and it shows clarity of target.
Why five percent better isn’t enough when you’re going to rely on word-of-mouth and self-serve growth.
What we learned
- Early users will judge you on first experience. If you don’t deliver value fast, many won’t stick.
- Focusing on a feature-set that the competition tanks on gives you leverage.
- With no sales team, product becomes your salesperson. If that fails, growth stalls.
Why it matters
For indie makers, resources are constrained. You may not out-feature a big player, but you can out-deliver on niche experience, speed, clarity. That means your value prop must be razor-clear: who you serve, how you deliver, what pain you solve.
Pillar 2: Share what you ship — daily transparency
What we should do?
Share progress, don't hide it.
We blog/tweet/changelog every small shipping bit: “Today we launched X that reduces Y by Z %”. We made it part of the loop: build → ship → talk → feedback → build again.
For example, @zenorocha stated said: “we don’t build in a vacuum. we talk about every little thing we ship. every single day”
That level of public iteration creates trust and inbound interest.
What we learned
- Sharing builds momentum: people see movement and want to be part of it.
- Public shipping serves as marketing. If you ship silently you lose the traction of sharing.
- Transparency exposes you to feedback — early signals of feature-market fit emerge faster when you’re visible.
Why it matters
In DIY growth, especially without a sales team, your content + share becomes your outreach engine. You don’t need big ad budgets — you need visible progress and clarity. Sharing helps build community, trust, awareness.
Create and Share sounds easy, but they take time. Early traction (first few thousand) takes time and fine-tuning.
But once you hit the right model & niche, growth accelerates.
If you’re at 100-300 users now, don’t panic at slow growth. The build phase might take a while.
Focus on nailing the loop. When it runs, growth isn’t linear—it becomes exponential.
Action plan for indie makers
If I were you, building this week:
- Audit your onboarding: within first 5-10 minutes, can a new user see value? If not, fix that.
- Identify one friction point in your product (drop-off in signup, confused onboarding, missing outcome) and ship a fix.
- Share the shipping: write a short post (on your blog, Twitter, product community) explaining what you shipped + why it matters.
- Measure: track new sign-ups → paid conversions → churn for that change.
- Repeat the loop: next week pick another small improvement. Build → ship → share → measure.
Final reflection
Back when I first started working on Indie10k, I underestimated how much the “share” part matters. I am so glad I did the right thing - so far there are 75 build logs you can find on Indie Hackers and that drives most of my first 200 users.
What I learned from Resend is: your product must be excellent and your iteration visible.
Because indie growth is both inside-product and outside-product.
If you're serious about doing a SaaS business, I suggest you to commit to daily shipping + daily sharing from day one, even when user count is tiny. That signals momentum early and builds the audience before the growth jump.
👉 If you’re an indie founder chasing growth without a big sales team, you might want to read deeper and join our community at Indie10k.
Share your shipping stories, learn from others, and build your own growth loop.