How I made $2k in pre-orders in just days
Indie hacking has some very high highs and low lows...
It's been almost a year since I started doing products on the side and I think now for the first time I am starting to believe that somewhere in the future this could be my main revenue source.
In 2023 I've launched about 5 major products (listed at the end).
One by one, none of them seemed to me like they could get so big that they'd become my main gig.
That's until I announced Shipixen.
How it started
I didn't have a name for it. I stitched together a prototype that required many manual steps and wrote a post on X about it.
It blew up.
š 175k views later, I knew I was on to something.
I had to move fast. Come up with a name, make a landing page and have a pre-order link ready.
First marketing push
The funny thing about this product is... I could use it to build the landing page for itself š
The absolute best proof / dogfooding / whatever you want to call it was ā if I manage to build this landing page with it and make any sales, it's a solid product.
So I set out to do just that.
Came up with a name with the help of ChatGPT.
Made a logo with Dall-e.
Then I generate the landing page in literally 5 minutes, deployed and started on the copy.
Few hours later, I had the website ready.
I wrote another post on X.
Within the first 5 minutes I got a pre-order.
That post also did 125k views.
In less than 24h, it got me $1k in pre-sales.
Second marketing push
After I realized I'm getting many eyeballs on the post, I had to act quickly.
In just a couple days I got 8k visitors.
So I limited the pre-order number. That further accelerated the number of orders.
At the same time, I thought if more people saw the value that I see, they'll be more likely to pre-order.
What's the best way to show that? Easy.
Make a video showing how I built & deployed the initial Shipixen landing page & blog.
That post also made it to 75k eyeballs and ultimately got me to $2k in pre-orders days after announcing.
Mistakes
After the 30th pre-order, I increased the price by 20%.
That took away some of the momentum. I think even though the price increase made sense, I should have reduced the license duration instead for the same price.
It seems that $50 crossed a threshold for what many people were willing to pay in pre-orders. I could have kept it at $36 and reduced the license duration from 1 year to 6 months.
It remains to be seen if I'll make up for those on launch day.
Also, my Vercel analytics exceed the amount included in the Pro subscription and I ended up paying 20 bucks for the privilege :D
Probably could have avoided that.
Next steps
Soon after the pre-orders I had a number of user interviews where I watched them use the app.
I then made the Beta available and collected even more feedback.
A large part of that has been implemented and I plan to go on Product Hunt with Shipixen within 1-2 weeks.
I am excited to continue marketing this product and have big ideas for how to bring more users after launch.
Thanks for coming with me on this crazy journey! š
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Footnotes. Products I've launched this year:
- Clobbr an app to load test APIs
- Crontap a SaaS to schedule API calls online
- MRRArt a web app to make ascii charts that can be shared on SoMe
- ContentPal a SaaS to generate SEO content.
- Hunted.space product hunt live stats that could support ads
