How Tim Nolet grew Checkly to about $1K MRR by rewarding early adopters

During the private beta, Tim spent €100 on Twitter ads, which produced a lot of impressions and clicks but converted to only around 3 signups.

“I spent €100 on Twitter ads. I got a ton of impressions and quite some clicks: that's the easy part. I got about 3 signups.”

Tim attributes the weak conversion to his own inexperience with targeting, segmentation, timing and ad copy, not a problem with Twitter's ad tools.

“This is probably due to me being a complete noob with regard to targeting, segmenting, timing, ad copy etc. etc.”

Tim paid for Betalist's most basic plan during the private beta and got some traffic and signups from the listing.

“I signed up, paid for the most basic plan. I got some traffic and some signups.”

He came away skeptical of the traffic's quality, since Betalist's tweets to its 50K+ followers seemed to mostly get retweeted by bots rather than drive real engagement, and he ultimately took a refund.

“It seems like their tweets to 50k+ followers fall on dead ears and are just retweeted by bots about 160 times.”

Tim spoke at the Vue.js and Node.js meetups in Berlin during the beta period, largely recycling material between blog posts and talks; he singles out the Node.js meetup as a particular success with strong turnout and developer interest.

“Specifically the Node.js meetup was a big success. Major turnout, lots of interest from developers from the Berlin developer community.”

Signup attribution from talks is hard to measure directly, but Tim says his gut feeling is that the effort was worthwhile, independent of it also being enjoyable.

“Attributing signups is a bit hard, but my gut says the effort was worth it.”

Tim open sourced Puppeteer Recorder (shipped mid-August 2018), a Chrome extension that records a user's browser interactions and turns them into a runnable Puppeteer script with no coding required, giving developers a free taste of the same click-flow scripting Checkly runs in production.

“a Google Chrome extension that records your browser interactions and generates a Puppeteer script.”

The extension reached well beyond Checkly's own audience (over 5,000 GitHub stars, about 11,000 users, a feature on a Google Developers blog, and conference speaking opportunities), and Tim says he can attribute a large share of Checkly's signups directly to people discovering it through Puppeteer Recorder.

Beyond the beta-period posts, Tim stayed an active, non-salesy member of relevant Reddit and Slack groups, mainly /r/devops and the devopsengineers Slack, sharing his blog posts and genuinely joining the discussions rather than pitching.

After realizing his earlier tweeting/promoting/ads had been unfocused, Tim refocused on the specific places his customers actually gathered; Reddit, Slack, and Hacker News became his best-performing referral sources to the Checkly site.

Tim got a Ghost blog subscription and dedicated roughly 20% of his weekly time to long-form technical and opinion posts; he says three of his recent posts reached Hacker News's front page in the run-up to $1K MRR.