AMA - $12.5k in sales for Bullet within a month of launch
After working on several products in the last couple of years, I finally got Bullet.so reaching $12.5k in sales, within the first month of its launch. Here are a few points that helped us get there.
Product: Bullet.so - a notion-based website builder
Idea validation:
I built a landing page with early access forms, and posted it across social media and found a strong demand for a no-code website builder that creates professional sites quickly and easily using Notion. I was able to get 100+ signups within a week’s time.
Building product:
I then quickly built the product within 2 months of time and launched it to test.
Finding existing forums to launch the product:
We extensively researched the social media platforms where our target audience is active and talked about our tool every day on Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook.
Lifetime deal:
Since this is a very competitive space, to get the initial set of audience to test the product, gather feedback, and fine-tune roadmaps, we decided to launch a lifetime deal.
When I first decided to run a lifetime deal campaign, I was sure that I should not go to platforms like Appsumo since they take almost 80% of revenue as their commission.
Instead, we leveraged the existing audience on Facebook, which resulted in a few conversions. We also launched lifetime deals for certain Facebook groups, along with giveaways and discount coupons. We also got in touch with group admins and a few affiliates who helped spread the word about Bullet to their audiences. This resulted in more conversions than expected.
Not only did this help us gain conversions, but we also received a ton of feedback from people that helped us tweak the product and build a solid roadmap.
After all this initial hustling, we finally launched Bullet on producthunt today, the same day as our competitor.
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/bullet-so
But why on the same day? That's a story for another post.
Out of those 12.5k sales, how much of that was lifetime deals? How much do you expect in reoccurring payments in the next month?
All of it is basically lifetime deal. We are finding channels for recurring customers.
Congrats, dude.
Just one question - as you rightly mentioned, there are already many products in this space (super, popsy etc), but what convinced you to build another tool? What specific gaps did you find?
When I tried multiple tools, all of them looked good for a simple website. We cant use sub-directory hosting, RSS feeds, ads.txt, 301 redirects etc. Most of these are important if you want to win in terms of SEO.
Also, I wanted to implement Programmatic SEO from Notion, so we built it on top of liquid syntax
https://bullet.so/liquid-syntax/
How did you get people to write reviews? Besides PH, where do your reviews and testimonials get posted?
A small issue: your chat bubble on your site is overtop "made with bullet".
Hey,
Primarily we got feedback in Twitter and Facebook. Some people also gave reviews during the live chat to customer support. You can see our wall of love here https://bullet.so/wall-of-love/
This is super cool. what was your source of traffic? if you ran ads how much did you spend?
We did very minimal ads, spent only $10 that came with free Reddit ad credit and tried with $10 on Twitter, just to test the waters. Facebook and Twitter has been main source of traffic.
We did lot of hustling. Anyone who posted about Notion, we jumped there and replied about Bullet. (Lot of those things won't scale). We are figuring out our next best acquisition channel.
Thanks for sharing and congrats! What would you say was your top medium for promotion / getting the initial users and was there a marketing budget involved?
Zero marketing budget. If you have an audience in Twitter, it is the best.
But since I do not have any audience, Facebook groups felt to be a better place to start.
Hi Aswin, thats some impressive growth! Would you be willing to share your Bullet story?
Founder Club (https://founderclub.com) provides resources and support to those who want to start and grow a successful online business.
We want to hear about your journey and share it on our site to help and educate other founders and business owners while bringing visibility to your own project.
We are initially looking for 10 founders who want to talk about their business journey and would love it if you would be one of them :)
Hey @emmahersh, Sure, I would love to. Please DM me in twitter @aswin_db
Your DMs don't appear to be open?
Opened the DM. Thanks for getting back.
This comment was deleted 3 years ago.
Fantastic. Will do. Thank you :)
Congratulations on the win :)
Thanks :)
Our team, originally from Ukraine, has created an intuitive website widget builder that helps increase conversions and optimize the user journey. Yesterday we did our first launch for Claspo on Product hunt and we became «The product of the day». Right now, we're battling it out to make it into the top three of this week's rankings. It’d be awesome to get your support and feedback on our product!
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/claspo
🎁 We are giving you free access for a month so you can increase conversion and optimize the customer journey on your sites. If you're planning your launch, this might be useful for you, and I'll be happy to help you if you have any questions.
Thank you ^_^
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huge congrats, that's impressive! I'm curious tho as to how large is your online presence and what social media you used to validate your idea!
That‘s awesome, thanks for sharing!
Wow great! What did you enjoy the most about this project? And what was the biggest challenge you faced? :))
The challenge that I faced and still facing is getting recurring customers. Need to figure out the next great channel for getting more customers.
Any tips on marketing?
Try multiple channels in the first week and stick to one channel that works well for the next 1-2 months.
And measure a channel's performance only by $$ that you got on stripe. Never consider page-views as a success metric for marketing.
What methods did you use to encourage people to write reviews? In addition to Product Hunt, where else are your reviews and testimonials published?
Regarding the second part of the message, there seems to be a minor problem with the positioning of the chat bubble on the website, as it is covering the "made with Bullet" text.
We didnot actively encourage users to write reviews. Its just people tweeting, commenting on the product. And talk about the product during live chat.
Ah, yes, we are aware of it. We'll get it fixed soon.
Curious to know what were the metrics on the landing page conversion that made you decide the problem was worth solving? Like at what conversion rate/signup rate do you decide that your idea is validated?
I don't remember the numbers. Since we zero audience, we thought getting 50 people within a week would be hard. I thought who would signup for non-existing products with the fierce competition? But to our surprise, we have actually had over 100 signups. That made us move forward with the development of the product.
Sounds great. Congrats! How long did it take you to go from idea to launch?
SEO may help you in the long run
Yes, we will be focussing on those. Thanks for the advise.
Is Bullet website built on Notion (using your product)?
Yes, it's built on Notion (with a little bit of custom code on top of it)