Launched a SaaS on December. Got 24 paying customers. What I've learned

TL;DR:
You can't just "charge more" for any product.
I think my main mistake was not giving anything to the community before releasing my paid product.
You can become an IH working a few hours a day without quitting your day job.
Can't rely on only one distribution channel.
Your product doesn't have to be finished or perfect before releasing it.

On December 25th I launched my first SaaS ever https://mylegendscollection.com. In this few weeks I already have acquired 24 paying customers and I'm really grateful for that. Here's what I've learned.

I started working on this in mid October after submitting a really simple video to the reddit Marvel Legends sub.Lot of people liked it. I started working on it that very same day working around 2 hours a day every morning.

I kept posting updates and after a month I set up a server with DO and Laravel Forge, and added a Convertkit newsletter form and posted the site to Reddit. In the first day I got 150 subscribers and another 58 the second day. I currently have 230 subscribers.

To this point I wasn't sure how I was going to monetize the app and I kept reading everywhere to "charge more". At the end I decided to charge $6.99/mo, $69.99/yr, $139.99/lifetime. The backlash was HUGE.

One thing I realized you can't "CHARGE MORE" for any product. People were complaining that it was too expensive and it wasn't worth it. Most collectors just keep a spreadsheet with the figures they own.

I decided the release date a week before and sent a newsletter with it and an early access pricing update. $4.99/mo, $49.99/yr, $139.99/lifetime. I was about to bail out but I knew that if I pushed the release date I would keep pushing it.

I set up a feature to create demo accounts that would die at midnight. This way, every possible customer would be able to give the app a try before becoming a paying customer. They don't even need to submit their email address.

The next day after launch I had my first monthly customer and a two or three days later I got my first yearly customer, and then my second monthly customer. I was going nuts.

When January started I realized I needed a new distribution channel, soon I wouldn't be able to keep posting on reddit and my newsletter wasn't growing. I launched https://mylegendschecklist.com a free alternative to MLCollection.

MLChecklist doesn't have any feature that MLCollection has but it lists every figure and shows when it was released, it's fed by MLCollection data, is built with NextJS and deployed on Vercel. It's intended to be the ultimate source of truth for ML Collectors.

The idea is to use MLChecklist as a hook to add potential customers to my Newsletter and sell MLCollection there. Until now I wasn't giving any value other collectors. I was just trying to sell.

Recently I came to the conclusion that if I had released MLChecklist first and then the paid product I could have obtained more customers.

TO BE CONTINUED...