Show IH: Not running a SaaS? Show me!
Seems like roughly 90% of products here are SaaS businesses. While I don't think there is anything wrong with that, I would like to shine a spotlight to other business models. Especially excited for creative ones.
With mentorcruise.com, I am running a marketplace for mentors. Mentees can 'rent' mentors and we get a commission based on that.
I'd wager I have one of the most random ones. I sell carpet cleaning leads to local companies with one of my side projects: https://www.carpetcleaningsydney.com.au/
Makes around $1000/month with a few minutes work. It came about from a non-paying client job. I've thought about writing a post about it because it's a simple way to generate revenue. If anyone is interested let me know.
Very interested!
RIghto! I'll type something up over the coming week.
Interested - did you ever elaborate in a separate post?
Me too. Sounds like something very interesting. Off the beaten path.
Interested!
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Really interested. Please post it!
Wait so I'm confused, the site looks like a carpet cleaning business. So you're not actually running a carpet cleaning business right? People quote through your site, and the actual quote goes out to a carpet cleaning business? I think a post about it would be very useful :)
Yep you got it right! There is a surprising amount of interest in this so I'm going to write something up to provide more details.
interested bro!
Would love to read about that!
I'm interested.
Really interested in hearing more - very out of the box idea!
Super interested! I think I'll be able to add some value, becouse I love to hack marketing for that kind of local projects. ;) So just do it Mike! :D
Interested to hear what kind of local stuff you are doing. I've been thinking about getting into this sort of thing for a while.
Greg you asking me or Mike? ;)
Haha that's funny, when did you start that?
Had the site since 2013. Time flies :)
Hey Mike, how did you get it out to customers?
Cold calling. Brutal but effective
I'm running Boss as a Service (https://bossasaservice.life/) -- a productized service for productivity, accountability and getting stuff done in general. 🙌
hahaha! didn't imagine this kind of service. nice!
Who are your type of customers? Are they freelancers? Are you finding people are hiring you for 'work to do lists' or more 'personal to do lists'?
Hi! We have customers from lots of fields and backgrounds now -- freelancers, writers, students, and founders, working on a mixture of work and personal todos.
I love the copy on this page, it has a strong voice and really resonates.
Any thoughts or experiment with offering a one week free trial (with CC) for people to give the service a spin for a work week? Or even a token $1 trial?
Thanks Scott! We actually had a free trial when we launched -- and found that very few people even got started with thinking about what they wanted to do. I think the commitment you make when you pay some money really helps.
Cool idea!
Do you have this as a IndieHacker product? Would love to see how you are doing. Love the concept, this is fun
I love this concept! How has it been going so far? Do you have paying customers?
Oh yes, we got our first customer exactly 1 hour after we launched (that was approx 6 months ago). :)
Love it! Great name too :)
I use the product and it's fantastic! Quite helpful.
Wow, James, great to see you here, and thanks a lot for saying that!!
Can you tell me how it works when you don't 'get shit done'. Do you just get email follow ups?
Hi Avi, we basically follow up via email (we also support other channels like Whatsapp, Telegram, and working on SMS now), ask why the task isn't done. Since we're not automated, and pretty persistent, it's not that easy to ignore us. Making sure there's accountability and someone to ask questions if you don't get things done helps in more effective planning (you find the "right" amount of work you can reasonably commit to pretty soon).
Yeah I'd say the most valuable thing is telling another person when/why I don't get something done. For some reason it's harder to BS someone else than myself. It's nice though bc unlike a real boss, there's no negative career repercussions for falling behind, so that stressor isn't there.
Recently launched the NLP-FOR-HACKERS book: https://leanpub.com/nlpforhackers .
It was a natural step and it originated organically from the blog: https://nlpforhackers.io .
It has been on the market for 3 months averaging $600/mo so far.
The book contains complete code snippets and step-by-step examples for getting started with Natural Language Processing. No need to fill in the blanks or wonder what the author meant. Everything is written in concise, easy-to-read Python 3 code.
I'm always curious to know how much income a book can bring in on a recurring basis. Thanks for sharing your numbers!
I'm sure one can make more but I try to not go over the board with marketing. I do not push the sell every newsletter I send, the sample chapter is free to take without the need to subscribe and no super annoying popups
As someone super annoyed with subscription popups appearing two seconds after you load the site, thank you for not doing that :)
I made about €20k over 18 months selling used cardboard boxes. It's actually how I got into web development all those years ago. Business is no longer live but have a detailed writeup here: https://chrisdermody.com/made-e20000-selling-second-hand-cardboard-boxes-side-hustle/
amazing, love how the size of the boxes was made obvious by placing house hold objects with them! great thinking. Looking forward to reading about future side hustles!
Cheers! yeah it was a nice simple way to solve that problem, while also giving the site some character and friendliness as opposed to the industrial factory-look that most box-selling websites had at the time.
Great article. Being a lazy person (or so everyone tells me!) I see the value. My own project is also targeting people too lazy (or too busy) to make their own book layout. Cheers to lazy people!
Haha yeah lazy is kinda negative. It's the convenience though right, providing value to people by making an annoying task easier. Seems so simple. :D
I'm recently launched SVG\HTML5 visual animation authoring tool (https://aphalina.com/). It's desktop app, perpetual license, no recurring fees.
At what point did you feel confident charging for the product? How did you manage that transition. Also, mind sharing numbers on monthly revenue?
I'm working on my own desktop app and am wondering how in the world i'm going to get it good enough to start charging people for.
Actually, I still not really confident. But I believe that the only way to validate an idea and get real feedback is to ask for real money. Just be sure that you have good "money back" policy - in the worst case, if someone is not satisfied with the software, you will refund his\her order.
I just recently launched this product (almost silently - just made several posts on sites like IH to collect feedback) so it's too early to talk about any stable revenue.
Great point on the money back policy being a good back-up plan.
This looks amazing! Did you build it by yourself? I can't imagine how much work it must have taken.
Thank you!
Yes, I did everything myself for the first release. I work on this project for about a year (last 6 months almost full-time) and I was able to reuse a lot of code from my previous product (diagrams editor).
I recently built https://deathclock.io which approximates your life expectancy and allows you to order your own life/death calendar as a poster.
My grandma is 20 years past my end... I don't know how I feel about this. I'm going to go sit in the corner now.
@dqmonn Thanks for opening up this discussion!
My team and I have built a few open source web apps, so we wrote a book about how to build a web app from scratch:
https://builderbook.org/book
We teach you how to build the same app that we use to publish + sell the book (with Stripe, of course).
Interesting, I like it!
I'm probably one of the few people here trying to launch a non-software business. I created Noocoffee to scratch my own itch as I love being productive but don't like the anxiety that coffee gives me. Noocoffee is organic coffee with L-theanine, an amino acid present in tea, which when combined with caffeine increases cognitive benefits and reduces side effects such as jitters and headaches.
https://thenoocoffee.com
I sell a tool for Unity developers: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/utilities/hdg-remote-debug-live-update-tool-61863
It makes on average AU$300 a month. Not really a lot but at least it covers some of my business expenses like Xero and Photoshop. I mostly do video game contracting. It's a debugging tool for live updating properties on game objects on your build as it is running on device. It's something I think should be built into Unity actually. I find it tricky to market Unity assets. I think the Unity forums are really the best place, but there's only so many times you can post about your asset on there.
Our team fully managed WordPress websites for small businesses and entrepreneurs!
We also run a white-label program for digital agencies, hosting companies and WordPress businesses to help them push into 24/7 support.
Us on IH! :) https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/30eda898c9
I sell macOS apps in the Mac App Store and via my own rails store:
https://sweetpproductions.com
👍
I totally need to learn marketing.
🙃
I built a desktop wallpaper app called Splashify (https://splashify.app) and am selling it with perpetual licenses.
I've got a book out, the Landing Page Cookbook. I'm working on my products in that space that will come out later this year (hopefully :) ).
I run (what I think) is a unique consulting business. I use programming to analyze data and then write about my findings and turn it into a blog post. I offer this as a service. You can see my website at growista.com
I've gotten a few clients and am slowly but surely growing.
This is really cool! Let me know when you're looking for a second writer/analyst 🙌
Great point! I have a tech consultancy I recently launched to help those not in tech to embrace it.
Check it out here: https://nulla.io/
I've spend a lot of time those last year building two ebooks that sell quite well. It does not have always to be SaaS, indeed. :)
https://thehackerguidetopython.com
https://scaling-python.com
I have two questions:
how do you market these?
can you share some numbers? How many sales + profit you get per month?
Just curious :-) I'd love to sell ebooks (WordPress related) as well at some point.
I've been blogging about Python for a few years, so I'm pretty well indexed in various search engine now, and I do have a few hundreds of followers. Once you start collecting emails addresses of people, it gets easier to get in touch and sell them your products..
@NathanBarry's Authority book explains that marketing very well.
http://nathanbarry.com/authority/
As for numbers, I wrote a blog post on the making of the first one with launch numbers: https://julien.danjou.info/making-of-the-hacker-guide-to-python/
That gives a rough idea of what you can expect as a starter. Then keeping traction is hard and is a constant effort.
Depending on your field and audience, you can get from a few hundreds $ a month to a few thousands.
Im tackling the crypto market with my own wallet (https://morphwallet.com) - It did generate some profit through a premium subscription but I scrapped that to focus on building a user base.
Soon my money will come from an a built in exchange and merchants accepting payments through our platform.
I'm creating PixxiBook (https://pixxibook.com) - a service to print your blog as a book with beautiful automatic layout, delivered to your door. Decidedly B2C, almost out of Beta.
B2C has shown up a lot of challenges: my "niche" is far too wide and without community, so it's difficult to target customers precisely. Customers won't tolerate an ugly book, so the MVP is not very M. Sales are one-off, so no MRR. etc.
Would like to see the same
Fresh off the oven. Launched just a couple of hours back.
Video Dojo. https://www.videodojo.co .
For $259 /month, you can request for unlimited social videos.
These videos can be used for video ads, article summaries, video covers for podcast episodes, slideshows, quick product feature intros, explainers, video intros, and lots more.
just a heads-up! I use another early stage product called Lumen5. Looks like it could be your competitor.
Pagestead sells a downloadable web application (self hosted and white labeled), currently doing close to $10,000 a month. We currently sell life time license, for a one-off fee but we're working on a subscription product which comes with a fully managed service and other perks.
Would you say you're in a hard market? I can imagine your life is tough with so many options and many big names out there. How do you market your product?
I just finished a basic MVP for a unique project.
It's called Bird's Eye News (birdseyenews.org) and helps folks fly above the craziness/confusion/information-overload/bullshit in online news and news media.
It's just a super basic project now (no business model in sight), but this post compelled me to heed the advice of tons of Indie Hackers and share it before I'm ready.
Next step is validating whether it actually helps people...
I am maker of MailSwift (https://mailswift.io), an email marketing app that helps you send newsletters and promotional emails via Amazon SES with zero coding or maintenance efforts.
We are a desktop app currently available for Mac and Windows. We charge a one time license fee which includes future upgrades too.
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