Luke Thomas, Friday
From Side Project to $10K MRR: How Friday Got Early Traction
Luke Thomas is the founder of Friday, a SaaS product that helps distributed teams share regular updates and communication at work. The product started as a simple idea: if his former manager had just asked a few regular check-in questions, Luke would never have quit that job. Luke spent nearly three years thinking about the idea before launching a Ruby on Rails app in late 2015. He shipped the product in January 2016, and it took three months to land his first customer by emailing everyone he knew. That first customer paid $45 a month. With no plan and limited time, Luke tried everything to build early traction. He wrote 30 to 40 long-form blog posts targeting keywords like "weekly check-ins" and "one-on-ones" for managers. He left comments on Harvard Business Review articles - so many that he got banned and had to use a VPN. Both channels delivered measurable signups because he asked every new user how they found Friday. Luke started with freemium but switched to a three-week trial when he realized free users were not converting predictably and he was spending his own money to keep the product running. The switch immediately generated three to five new paying customers. A pivotal moment came when a team leader at a 150-person company wanted to roll out Friday company-wide. The expansion required months of work on roles, permissions, and multi-team features. Then came a devastating bug: a single line of code caused one company's check-in data to be emailed to employees at a different company. Luke calls it his worst day as a founder. Luke also pivoted toward HR tools when enterprise interest pulled him in that direction, but realized after a year it was wrong and pivoted back. He spent months talking to investors but failed to raise money because he could not explain why he was not working full-time. The early traction he had built gave him options, though. In 2019, three years after launch, Luke finally quit his job to work on Friday full-time at $10K MRR, raised a small round, rebuilt the product, and launched on Product Hunt a week before COVID sent everyone remote.
