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In order to provide the most value to other IHers, please structure your answer as follows:
I'm sure there will be many lessons for all of us who are trying to break the first-sale barrier.
Thanks in advance for taking the time to respond! 🙏🏻
Tiny side project so not really a company.
I posted on Kern.al comments that I'd solved someone's idea/problem.
Got a clickthrough and sale via Kern.al.
Just 1 sale for the year haha. Here's the product if curious: https://petershi.gumroad.com/l/excel-to-market-map
Lessons:
Hi Zahra! Your website looks good - simple but clear.
I'm a cheapskate, but $19 for 240 links seems high to me. Of course, the advice is to always charge more than you think you should... What other price points have you tried?
How are you driving traffic to the website? How many visitors have you had?
Yeah, I'm struggling finding the balance between the cost and the size of the database. I want to keep it lean so it doesn't become overwhelming to find useful resources. Not sure what the sweet spot is yet. I'm curious - what price you would have paid for it?
Traffic is low but steady - about 10 visitors per day and then jumps when I start promoting via Facebook or on Slack communities for learning to code. But this project isn't my main focus at the moment.
Hmmm... I would probably say $5-$10 is more enticing to me. Maybe you could lower it until you get a sale, and then incrementally increase it from there?
Good luck!
Hey Daniel!
How many total users did you get from betalist?
It seems like betalist is similar to Product Hunt. Did you do a Product Hunt launch, too?
How have you been putting the word out thus far?
Only a couple users came from Betalist, the number is much higher for ProductHunt. We did two launches there, one in Beta and a full release.
You can see the resulting traffic spike of the second one on our dashboard in October. We are currently at 50 paying customers and a few of them converted from that launch.
Startup: BuildwithFramer.com
What it does: Selling ready-to-deploy website templates for designers, developers, founders, etc.
How I made 1st $$$: I shared the idea on Twitter and asked designers who'll be interested in making their portfolio website live in a few hours. Got a lot of response and learned that the work of designing, coding, making the site responsive, etc, is a lot for people in launching their website (in designer's case, their portfolio website).
I made a quick gumroad pre-order page explaining how I'll help designers launch their portfolio site in a matter of few hours. Made my first 4 pre-order sales in 2 days, without even actually designing the template yet.
All the best for Framer. Looks amazing.
Btw, I knew about your platform from Aditya's tweet(PH guy).
Thanks Atul!
Welcome
Recently we made a partner directory template for saas companies. But we wrote landing pages even before we had it. It’s not like we are trying to sell which we don’t have, but only the partial is done and not the full thing.
All the best to everyone who is building! If you are looking for any help from us, let us know.
Hey there,
I am at a stage where I launched my website
https://theminimilitiaapk.com/ visit us thankyou
I'm not really a company, still very much a side project but answering as best as I can:
Nifty AR - https://www.niftyar.app - https://twitter.com/niftyarapp
I sell consumer products for people to flex their NFTs in AR.
I'm in Discords for a few NFT projects I own. When I first got the idea for Nifty AR two weeks ago, I started making a demo app and laser cut a prototype "Nifty Card" to show off the NFT of whichever group I was messaging in. Got lots of "dude, that's awesome"s and "omg so 🔥🔥🔥"s, so enough validation to keep going. Set up a website and a twitter (THE space to be in the NFT community) and ran giveaways for two of the popular NFTs I owned and posted the links to the tweets in each Discord; people had to follow and retweet to win 1 of 5 free Nifty Cards for each giveaway. One tweet got 62 retweets and the next 168 retweets. I had an email waitlist set up (it's all presale right now, the iOS app and Nifty Cards ship Feb 15th, Android app coming Q2) and got 37 signups during those five days of giveaways. After the winners claimed their free cards, I tweeted that the site was live and emailed the waitlist, both with a promo code for $10 off their card. I've had four sales since launch on Thursday. Not really raking in the dough just yet, but I actually got some cold, hard validation (cash), so I took the next step and turned on facebook ads (NFT ads against Twitter's ad policy :/) and retargeting ads this morning. No conversions yet, but so far the ads are getting a 14.29% click through rate at $.18 per click, which I think is pretty good (I'm an iOS developer not a marketer 😂). Hopefully the retargeting will start closing deals pretty soon.
Honestly, things have gone pretty well on this project: concept to 4 sales in 10 days. I think that's the culmination of years of slow or failed projects and the lessons learned from them. Primarily, start as minimal as you can and validate as quickly and often as you can. Also, I've been an iOS / AR dev for quite some time and already had working code for other projects, so I was able to build on that super fast to make the demo videos (which are super slick, imho lol). Finally, we're still super early to NFTs (which are a blast, by the way... I know there's a lot of confusion/disdain for them here on IH but after years and years of clients asking me to do crypto / blockchain / and more recently NFT projects for them, which I've ignored as a fad, I finally took the plunge this last October and dived into the world, and I've just gotta say again... it's a blast. Highly recommend.), so there's lots of room to disrupt the space and frankly, I think Nifty AR is a fantastic idea and the app is already pretty polished and the AR / parallax tech is pretty eye catching, so hopefully it'll start gaining traction soon.
I plan to start with smaller NFT influencers and give them affiliate promo codes to give to their followers, where their followers get $10 off their card and the influencer gets $5 for each order using their code. Once it starts gaining traction (and I have the infrastructure to keep up with demand), I hope to work my way up the influencer chain. Probably totally naive of me, but it'd obviously be so sick to get a shout out from Neymar, Steph Curry, Jimmy Fallon, Paris Hilton, etc. at some point 😂 Right now I'm only selling the Nifty Cards (metal cards the size of a credit card), but I'll be rolling out Niftees (AR t-shirts) and Nifty Cribs (AR "homes" you and your friends can go out to the park and set up life-size-ish AR models of the Nifty Cribs with galleries inside and each friend can show off their favorite NFTs in their own section of the crib) soon.
I built a mailing list for Deployment from Scratch. It started by a post on Reddit + link on my blog. Once I had an alpha release, I announced it on the list and got the first sales!
Gilli that’s cool. How did you make sure Reddit doesn’t flag you? Any tips ?
They liked the support we gave them regarding current hosting and were willing to swap over. To them it's the same end product but as we are smaller we can charge them the same price but via invoice quarterly. This saves them the hassle of monthly expenses forms from personal credit card.
From this we learnt we could charge a bit more for the same product if we can demonstrate extra value. That and SME like invoicing over credit card to cut down on paper work each month.
Typed on phone, sorry for any mistakes.
My mom's a fan of my work .
Practice Probs - programming practice problems to help you learn.
Waiting to publish a bit more content before I turn my focus towards marketing and sales.
I thought that this would be enough. However, if I would go back, I would provide a Free Trial plan from day 1, so people would have a possibility to test the product right away and have no friction integrating it.
PriceWell
A tool to collect, manage and optimize subscriptions in less then an hour without coding needed.
Imagine it as a billing team for your company, from UI to invoices and taxes optimization without having to hire a developer or bookkeeper to do it.
we went on Fiverr, started a gig on Stripe Checkout integration and asked our first leads to do it for them automatically. Once they realised how much time and effort we saved them, one of them upgraded!
Not build before proper validation. We were lucky that there’s demand for the product, but people might not have taken it with such warmth. (Thank you for that 😊)
I am at a stage where I launched my product sociomata.com (social media content scheduler) this month. People are signing up but none have converted as a paid user so far. I am still confused how to get the first paid user.
do you ask for the payment data when the user creates a free account ? It should be free for 10 days for example then you start to charge
We don't ask for card. Users can sign up and get a 7-day free trial. Once the free trial expires, their access gets locked and they need to enter card details and pay.
You could try to ask it before maybe ?
Yes, we may need to reconsider the 7 day trial.
Curious if you are focusing only on twitter?
Not actually, we started with Twitter because mainstream tools like Buffer and Hootsuite didn’t allow thread scheduling.
We got the LinkedIn MDP APIs last week and will integrate into the platform by the end of February 1st week. We will then add Instagram, Facebook and Google My Business.
We also plan to add features like link analyser which tells you if your links contains parameters, preview images which are in line with what’s suggested.
This comment was deleted 2 years ago.
Spam 👆
Is it the good website ? It seems to be not related to social media scheduler!