How I got our first customer in 30 minutes after our first pivot!

Hi everyone 👋,

I recently shared how I launched my new product - Stock Market GPT - after 2 successful exits and 4 failures.

Today, I would like to share on how I launched => learned => pivoted and finally got my first paying user!

Getting Early Users and Feedback

As with all my products, Reddit and Indiehackers has been one of my largest early user acquisition channels. Find relevant communities to interact with. Add value by commenting and posting relevant useful information. My best performing posts are the one where I am launching FREE tools.

For Stock Market GPT, I didn't have any free tools at launch but the product initially had a free tier. This incentivised early visitors to give it a shot. After sharing the tool in the relevant communities, I started getting initial traction.

Luckily, the product was picked up by a few AI directories and newsletters like There's an AI for that and others. This lead to a surge in traffic ( 2k users in 2 days! ). All this resulted in ~250 users that I could talk to and get valuable feedback.

First Pivot and Paying Users in 30 minutes

It was expected that most users were just trying out the product and weren't interested in talking much. However, we did have a small subset of users who were willing to share their feedback on the product and the features that will make the product worth buying.

I started to work on a Stock Comparison AI that would help users compare multiple stocks without having to go through rows of data. This has been the most important core feature.

THE PIVOT

I removed the Free tier completely and instead decided to provide users a 7 DAYS FREE TRIAL with a LIFETIME 50% OFF as part of our Early Bird pricing.

This was a major decision. My hypothesis was this will filter out the free users and we will be left with people who actually are interested in using the product. However, I had my doubts as well since after 250 users we still didn't have any paid users.

I sent the email regarding the pivot to my users at 8:30 AM IST. And by 9:00 AM, we had our first paying user! I took a huge sign of relief as this meant our product was worth it's price and my decision was not wrong!

Learnings

I have never created a paid only product before. All my products had a free tier. This is uncharted territory for me. However, I am now more confident on my judgement. Moving to paid tier does mean less signups but this will also help reduce our investment in customer support.

I have now started working on FREE tools as well and started to work on the SEO. I will be sharing more experience here in this community!

PRODUCT HUNT LAUNCH

If you would like to support my journey as a solo founder, please consider upvoting my product as we launch on product hunt today. It would really help me grow and gain traction.

Link to product hunt

Thanks a lot for reading my journey. I would love to get your feedback on the business. Looking forward to talking to you all!

• Gautam