Mike Slaats turned customer feature requests into a business

The founder who turned a customer feature request into a business

Mike Slaats is the founder of Upvoty, a SaaS product that collects customer feedback and feature requests and organizes a product's development direction. He goes by the name Mike Strives online, and his past interviews and his current handle refer to the same person. His business started from the inconvenience he ran into while operating his own service, and it grew into a structure where he meets his next customers while existing customers use the product.

The next business found in an existing one

His entrepreneurial experience began well before Upvoty. In 2005 he made T-shirts he designed himself in his parents' garage and sold them online, and he studied search engine optimization, or SEO, to increase sales. Later, after working as a freelancer helping other businesses acquire customers online, he started an agency, and he recalled growing that business past 100,000 dollars in annual revenue within two years.

The next business he ran was Vindy, a Dutch online marketplace that connected customers looking for home improvement and renovation services with contractors. The business at one point reached about 1 million dollars in annual revenue, but Slaats felt that his interest in the market he was serving and in his customers' problems was fading. He was satisfied with the product and the team, but whether he wanted to keep working for that customer group in the future was a separate question.

Around 2018, as Vindy's user base grew, so did the feedback. He recorded opinions in a spreadsheet at first, but as requests piled up, organizing them and turning them into actual development work became a burden. After looking at existing feedback tools, Slaats found it hard to find a product that fit his service in both price and approach, so he decided to build a new tool himself.

While preparing the new product, he drew on the cash flow from his existing business. In an October 2021 interview he explained that Vindy, after he delegated work and reduced the team, was generating about 500,000 dollars in annual revenue, and that the business supported his living costs and Upvoty's development. That is what let him secure time to improve the product even while Upvoty was still earning only a few hundred dollars a month.

Demand confirmed before development

The first thing he made was a simple landing page with an explainer video and a signup form. It described what product was being prepared and collected the email addresses of interested people, and over about two months more than 300 people signed up. That list became the starting point for recruiting early beta testers and learning what people actually needed to use.

Development took about three months, and he released the first beta version in August 2018. Rather than expanding features from the start, he implemented the basic flow for collecting and managing customer feedback. After incorporating responses from the beta period, he launched officially in February 2019.

He also set the point at which to start charging early. Slaats explained that before the public launch, some beta customers chose paid plans, generating about 200 to 300 dollars in monthly recurring revenue. By checking whether a free signup led to an actual payment, he judged how much value customers placed on solving this problem.

He gradually narrowed the customer scope. Collecting feedback was a capability that could apply to many kinds of companies, but early on he focused on the needs of SaaS founders and product managers. Slaats said that once he made the target customers concrete, it became easier to write the landing page copy and blog posts, and growth within that customer group sped up as well.

The product's basic structure runs through a feedback board, voting, a development roadmap, and change announcements. When a user requests a feature, other users add their opinions through votes and comments, while the operator changes the request's status and shares the development plan. After a feature ships, the results are delivered to the relevant users through a changelog and notifications. It is designed so that everything from the moment a request arrives to the moment the outcome is announced is managed in one place.

It also offers integration features so it can be used inside a customer's existing service. Customers can apply their own domain and design settings, let users sign in with their existing accounts, or collect feedback inside Intercom. A customer company can set up a point of contact for user opinions without building a separate feedback system itself.

A product discovered by the customer's customers

He found his first paying customers in product and startup communities such as Indie Hackers, Product Hunt, Makerlog, and BetaList. Later he also used a blog, an e-book, and interviews. In an interview published in February 2020 he said that an e-book covering Upvoty's growth had been downloaded more than 1,000 times, and the experience he gained running the product itself became content to deliver to potential customers.

He also drew content material from the customer support process. Slaats explained that he emailed new signups himself to ask what they expected when they signed up, and recorded the questions and opinions customers left to turn them into articles. By writing content based on the words and concerns that people searching for the product actually used, he met other customers with similar problems through search.

The channel he repeatedly described as the most effective was the 'Powered by Upvoty' link on the feedback screen. When a customer shared the feedback board with its users, Upvoty was shown along with it, and some of those people, who ran their own products, discovered the tool and signed up for a trial. The fact that a SaaS company's users include other SaaS operators worked in this channel's favor.

He also ran some paid marketing alongside it. In a November 2021 AMA, when asked about the share of his customer acquisition channels, he answered that content marketing was about 40 percent and search ads about 10 percent, and he said he targeted search terms related to competing products and was also testing podcast sponsorships. It was a setup that kept content and in-product referrals at the center and used paid channels as support.

On his personal channels he made his startup process public through activities such as YouTube and SaaS Pirates. At the time of a 2021 interview, his YouTube channel had about 10,000 subscribers, and he saw long-term value in sharing what he learned running the product. He also wanted to keep relationships with people who would listen to his story, even if he started another SaaS later.

Recurring revenue growth and a delegating operation

Looking at the published revenue figures in chronological order gives a sense of the business's growth rate. In an interview published in February 2020 he stated that monthly recurring revenue, or MRR, was over 1,500 dollars, and in an Indie Bites interview on October 13, 2021, it was described as over 15,000 dollars. On November 30 of the same year, he disclosed in an Indie Hackers AMA he wrote himself that MRR had passed 20,000 dollars.

The work of developers and marketers went into producing this revenue. Slaats described himself as not a developer and entrusted product implementation to freelance developers. Since he said in November 2021 that he was working with a remote team of eight people, this should be understood as a solo founding with no co-founder that actively used outside workers.

By delegating development and marketing he secured time to work on several activities at once, and he managed his own tasks by splitting them by priority. The 'Now, Next, Not Yet' method he described in a 2022 interview was a way of separating what must be finished today, what comes next, and what to do when there is room. Collecting the things to do in a task management tool and setting the order every day was his basic operating habit.

Growth continued after 2021 as well. In an Indie Hackers interview published on January 24, 2024, Slaats stated that Upvoty's MRR had passed 50,000 dollars and that it was highly profitable. That figure, however, is the company's recurring revenue, and the interview did not disclose the specific net profit after deducting development, marketing, and customer support costs, nor the founder's personal income.

The revenue model is a subscription plan divided by features and usage scope. According to the official pricing page checked on September 30, 2026, the monthly billing prices are 15 dollars for Power, 25 dollars for Super, and 49 dollars for Hyper, with a 14-day free trial. The plans are set up so that customers choose a higher tier as their needs grow, such as managing multiple projects and using integration features.

Slaats thought about the speed of growing the business separately from the speed of growing the organization. In the 2024 interview he mentioned how the manager's role had grown as he scaled his previous business, and said he wanted to keep Upvoty deliberately small and light. At the same time, he emphasized a way of working in which new features are released relatively early to gauge the response and are then quickly revised in the direction that the results confirm.

What is especially important in the Upvoty case is that the screen providing value to customers also worked as a channel for promoting the product. The more feedback a customer company received, the greater the tool's usefulness became, and the people visiting that board became the next opportunity for adoption. It is a case showing that when you turn a repetitive task found in an existing business into a product, you can design both who pays and who discovers the product in the course of using it.