A journey to 100 paying subscribers

• Singing Carrots - a website to learn singing
• 10 months since the 1st subscription. (The project exists for 2 years, but was not monetized in the beginning.)
• Staying motivated and accepting failures. Learning from them and moving forward. (Around 90% of my experiments go to the trash bin).
• I wouldn't start from the freemium business model. It might bias the customers and make it extremely hard to figure out how to separate between free and paid features.

That's excellent Sergey. Well done!

And it's nice to see someone doing well with a product/service that isn't just another SAAS tool for makers.

Andy

A great milestone. Keep it up Sergey

Hi Sergey!

Congrats on your first 100 subs! That's a big milestone.

• I run a small online yoga streaming site together with my wife. We started it as a side hustle to supplement our regular income. It's now our main source of income.
• It took us about 1 year to reach the first 100 paying subscribers. Year two we reached 1000 paying subs, mainly due to us having a solid product "just in time" when COVID hit. Year three, 2021, we were able to grow to and sustain around 1200 subs, even though our country was no longer in lockdown for most of the year.
• The hardest part has been figuring out how to develop the product in order to make people stick around. We politely ask for a reason when people cancel their subscription, and the main one is that people don't feel they have the time, or that they don't get around to doing yoga. So we've added a lot more engaging live content, made the process of selecting a video to do easier by putting out a short playlist every week, as well as engaging people in a closed facebook group for motivating each other and sharing stories/experiences.
• I don't feel like we could have done thing much more different. It's been a crazy learning experience, and we've had to fix thing as we go along. But if I had to chose one thing, it would be to trust that the product is good enough as it is, and spend more time on marketing and getting the product in front of people's eyes. :)

• Lordicon.com - animated icon library
• Around 15 months. We offered 50 animated icons to download for free for the first year in exchange for an email address. After 12 months, we collected 9000 email addresses, added 300+ new icons, and put a $99 price tag.
• Facing the fact that less than 0.5% from that initial 9000 email list purchased the premium project.
• I would put a price, even very small on the product itself. This makes people more bound with the product. Especially if you offer creative resources, which are accessible for free by nature.

Congrats! It just proves that hard work pays off! You mentioned the project exists for 2y, and waited 10 month for the 1st subscription. Well - it is 100% true and everybody should learn, that there are no shortcuts, just hard (and clever) work.

I am on the same side with pagemtr.com I founded at the end od 2020 (started working on that). Then hard and boring work without any fireworks :) Right now, after 1 year (a bit more) I feel the same, people are noticing the saas, want to test it etc. I've to mention I am not actively promoting the tool, just like now, in a comment, or facebook etc.

Yeah, that's funny there are no shortcuts which a lot of people take for granted :-) Just hard work, real work, at the desk :)

Congrats!!

Just spent ten minutes on your website... And you win the award for the funnest website ever!! 😂. Awesome job! Thanks for sharing and good luck getting to 1000 subscribers!

Congratulations Sergey. Onwards to even more success.

I LOVE the branding of your product. No wonder you reached 100 customers! You're well on your way for more. Congrats.

How you came up with your saas idea or problem of people to solve and how you find your early adopters and how you market your product

How much are you charging and what's been your main source of growth? SEO/Social/Youtube/ect...?