How we got $600 in 20 days (after sitting at $0 for 6 months)
I’ve been building Clipwing (a super simple video editor) for 6 months now.
Despite the users, there have been no paid ones.
We changed our strategy: decided to build 1 free micro tool per week.
Already released:
• Promo video generator https://clipwing.pro/free-tools/promo-video-generator
• ProductHunt launch video generator https://clipwing.pro/free-tools/producthunt-promo-video-generator
• Subtitles generator https://clipwing.pro/free-tools/subtitles-generator
Micro tools work well - they are easy to find in Google using keywords and lead to the main product.
And this month we have 400 new users! It's crazy, but they're still on free plan...
New step: launching a custom video service.
Validating the idea we made 22 videos for free for different founders!
Then we launched 3 video spots for just $29 per video. Sold out 💸
The next spots were for $39.99... $49... $59... Sold out!
What's the point?
Our service is an excellent start for an Enterprise plan - when you don’t have enough of an editor and want something complex and personalized, you can book our team.
All this should bring Clipwing to profit.
We reached full capacity with requests and now one video costs $89.99. But we are ready to take orders for next week!
Do you want a custom video about your product or service? Hurry up and book the video from us: https://clipwing.pro/services/product-demo-video
Cool so basically you dogfooded your tool for now? That's super interesting that the direct end users of the tool refuse to pay for it, but people are willing to pay more for other people for the service.
Just curious, what kind of email sequences do you have to try to convert the free users into paid users?
i think that the only disadvantage of our free plan is the watermark, and perhaps people can live with it. or maybe everyone who register is not our target audience 😅
we haven’t tried the newsletter, i actively posted about our new micro tools and custom video service on Twitter - all the people came from there.😊
Why not try reducing it to a free trial/credits? Enough usage to let them see the value, then a hard paywall. That's my strategy for my site catfishes
Not a newsletter. When they sign up, do they get a welcome email and how many do they get? These are pretty effective with converting free users to paid.
Also helps to understand of the free users, how many actual are active users and are there power users that maybe download a lot vs the others?
These would help inform your tiers so say 20% of users are creating 80% of the videos and that's an average of 20 videos per user.
You can change up your tiers so that it limits the free videos to only 10, and those power users can be encouraged to upgrade.
If you need help finding out those numbers, give me a shout. I do free consultations for startups!
What exactly is a micro-tool? Like a more specific version of your tool?
in general, yes :)
Clipwing is super simple video editor where you can upload your long video and get short clips from it and add a cover image + subtitles.
but there are other video needs:
for example, you already have your short clip and just need to add subtitles. so meet the micro tool - subtitles generator 😁
I belive you can make next month X2
thanks so much for your support!
The results are pretty impressive. The free micro-tool strategy is a great way to generate significant growth.
Congrats Lera!
thank you! 😊
This is awesome - good for you, thanks for sharing, and we have videos to turn out, so looking forward to reading more on your site!
I have 2500 registered (validated) emails for my micro-SaaS LINQ Me Up. Of those, about 2200 are real, and of those about 20 have a monthly subscription, 3 have a yearly sub and a handful purchases credits.
So I can relate on the conversion issue. Especially when people don't respond to any outreach, it is hard to find out what's the tipping point for them to pay for the service or only use the free part (free starting credits in my case).
Using some stats tools and analytics tools, I found out that most of the people using my saas are from lower-income countries (vietnam, iran, india). Typically countries where project converstion / migration tasks are delegated towards.
Those aren't the devs that will reach out money from their pockets to speed up their dev, but they ARE looking for quicker ways to get going.
Slowly but steadily, I'm gaining more serious users (C# developers from higher income countries like USA, Canada, European countries, ..).
All the best with your less "passive" income but higher income at all aproach :).. Take care and keep sharing how it's going.
Free tools are such a big boost.
I'm implementing the first one on BaliBam as well.
Let's see how it works!
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