9 Things I realized while making $5,000 from my startup 🤯
Hey Makers,
Nithin and I started LaunchPedia on Jan 8th 2023 and it's been an year of roller coaster ride🎢
From literally making no money in the first 6 months and coming close to shutting down,
to making $5000 from our digital products in the last 4 months.
Here are the 9 lessons I learned from our journey:
→ It's not wrong to pivot. It's better than giving up.
→ Build multiple small bets, until you know what works.
→ Plan monetization whenever you're building a new product
→ Build products that make money, especially when your savings are on line
→ Don't overlook email marketing. Collect email addresses, build funnels and setup email sequences from day 1
→ Don’t delay your launch. Ship fast, validate the idea, get feedback, and iterate.
→ Leverage side project marketing. Build free tools and directory sites to increase your distribution and upsell your paid products.
→ Validate the idea using short term distribution strategies. Ex: PH launch, listing on directories, & Ads.
→ You don't need to build fancy products, you can also build info products as long as it is helping people.
The point about "leverage side project marketing — build free tools" really resonates. I've been doing exactly this — built 125+ free calculators covering finance, health, legal, and travel. No signup, no ads, just genuinely useful tools. The idea was to build trust and drive organic traffic before monetizing.
The "don't delay your launch" lesson hit me hard too. I kept polishing instead of shipping. Eventually just pushed it live and immediately got real feedback.
Congrats on the $5k milestone, Karthik!
Which directories worked best for you?
We in a similar boat and niche, i havnt made anything yet with my site besides some commission deal. Working on my info product now to finally monetize what i created..
Since ours is an infoproduct, we haven't launched on many. We launched Affordhunt, Peerlist, Hackernews.
But if you're building a tool or a tech product, you can launch here
https://launchpedia.co/places-to-promote-your-startup/
Hey Karthik, glad to see your hard work paying off and really thanks for sharing your own lessons.
Your journey is truly inspiring, and the lessons learned are invaluable.
Glad to know that our journey is inspiring Prem 🤗
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Congratulations on the one-year anniversary of LaunchPedia! Your journey from facing initial challenges to achieving success with your digital products is truly inspiring. The lessons you've learned and shared are valuable for anyone looking to start or grow a business, especially in the digital space.
Thanks a lot Warren 🤗
I've seen this post on reddit, twitter, here and any other tech place i can imagine
Just trying to be active everywhere and share our journey 😅
Hi it sounds fine. Do you also have some social media campaigns running or you just use email marketing?
We did only email marketing till now.
When it comes to social media, we build our products in public and share our journey. We didn't do any campaigns till now.
Hi. May things be even easier and better for you! Thanks for the post. Even though I'm just starting to figure it out and only see the tip of the iceberg it's still awesome 👍!
All the best for your journey 🎉
Hi, appreciate the info! Can you share details on the email funnels you set up? Curious about the number of emails, topics, etc. Currently working on a startup and have some reservations about email strategies.
We created free products and setup email sequences to upsell our paid products and services.
Will create a detailed post about it.
In the meanwhile, you can checkout our free and paid products to get an idea of our funnels here: https://launchpedia.gumroad.com
Hey, thanks for sharing. Could you please tell what email funnels did you create? Like, the number of emails, topics, etc. We are building a startup right now and always were sceptical about emails.
We created free products (a part of our paid product), then setup a 3 step email sequence to the customers (in a span of 5 days) and upselled our paid products.
Will work on a detailed post about it.
In the meanwhile, you can checkout our free and paid products to get an idea of our funnels here: https://launchpedia.gumroad.com
Thanks for the article! Could you please elaborate a bit more on point "Leverage side project marketing. Build free tools and directory sites to increase your distribution and upsell your paid products."
Do you mean I should include some free functionality to let users use my product without paying and by doing that I will increase number of potential paid users?
No not like that, We built free tools, directory sites and plugged our products in the footer or on the side bars.
For example
whattomeme.com (meme library for startup founders) - We plugged our places to promote your list and reddit ebook in the footer
phhunters.com (list of product hunt hunters) - We plugged workbook in the side bar.
Get it, thanks for the response!
Thanks for sharing.
I'm trying to make an email list. Do email marketing actually works?
Yeah, if done right, it will always work.
For us, emails does better conversion than. other platforms.