Hey guys, Joel here I’m the founder of recently launched membership platform - Paytable.io. I’ve been meaning to do an honest write-up of what it really took to get my product from idea to actually turning over some money, but you know how it is as a bootstrapped founder!
Last October (2020) I had an idea to make a Saas product that enabled people to sell access to curated Airtable content & gate access to Airtable resources, directories & databases, I didn't know it at the time but ultimately what I was to build would become a full full blown membership platform with Payments, user logins & the ability to gate access to all your favourite no code tools documents (not just Airtable).
By around January this year (2021) I had the first version of the product which at the time looked a little like this:
The name was initially Curateable - my thinking being that I was creating a product that enabled people to curate content. It was totally wrong and didn't say what the product really did, meaning when I started DM’ing potential users, most people didn’t really know what it was, how it worked or how to set it up with questions like how can I use it on my site and how can I white label it?
I had made a vital mistake - I had positioned my product at the every day maker and creator and hadn’t really thought how users could fully white label their products, or even better; add it to their own domains and websites so it made more sense to their customers, the real end user.
So after some mixed feedback I went back to the drawing board, with a focus on a new name that made sense straight away and a clearer positioning to hopefully avoid the lack of clarity my ideal users were expressing.
By April here is where I was at:
When I launched version two as Paytable I still didn't even have any onboarding stuff finished or any pro / paid tiers planned out yet. I just wanted to get a product out that made sense to people, and that people would at least start using, hassle-free to help them begin selling gated access to their content, and then I decided I would focus on the paid tier after.
The queries and confusion started decreasing and I began receiving some very positive comments about my product. By around Mid May, I knew things were getting clearer and the sign-up rate of free users was increasing, I launched our pro tier end of May, sent a newsletter out to 300+ people who had given (both version 1 and version 2 of the product a go) and waited.
After around 11 days of introducing the paid tier, at a friends house one eve enjoying a BBQ I got my first paid customer who went for the annual tier of $144.
Now 6 weeks since that first paid customer signed up, I’ve had 9 more paid subscribers and my MRR is at $150 MRR.
It’s not been an easy journey and I honestly felt like giving up after I launched version 1 and wasn't getting the response I wanted. I had this constant feeling that ‘if only these potential customers could see and experience what I had envisioned in my head'. I realised I needed to make things way clearer for people and without that name change and full repositioning I would probably still be in zero club today!
Any questions? Feel free to reach out and I'll be happy to share any knowledge or lessons learnt!
Thanks for sharing Joel! Inspiring!
Would love to know more about how you found your first users?
Thanks Lee! It's been pretty much Twitter the whole way - a few SEO related articles, and post in reddit / the Airtable community.
Very cool! Thanks again for sharing. Clear and to the point! Learned a lot!
Especially like how you said you worked hard to make sure Paytable made sense to people!
I've been using Paytable and it's amazing! One of the most underrated products for the indie hacker community! Airtable + Paytable = 🔥💸🚀
Love what your doing with Paytable Kushank! Thanks for being a supporter since the start :)
This is the most needed product of this year and coming years too, please don't quit. I am sure it will be a big hit on ProductHunt
Wow, thank you man. I hope so! :)
Love what you're doing Joel!
Thanks Jay! Congrats on your No1 Product of The Day using Paytable to help!
Tha ja for sharing this Joel. Inspiring
Thanks! Its been a crazy journey :)
Have you contemplated adding percent fee for free users? or copying gumroad's decrease of percent fee if a user pays a monthly fee.
Hey Andrew, I've explored both options. Going to stick with subscription only and 0% transactions for now. With Paytable memberships you can use Gumroad or Stripe for checkout which means many of my users already have a percentage taken from them when using Gumroad.
Also as we have free tier with 0% transactions too, it means users can try us out before having to pay a penny. All of my users who have started earning by having a good info-product and strong marketing strategy have gone on to upgrade :)
Thanks for your input and suggestions!
This was a really great read, thanks for writing it up. Best of luck!
Thank you so much Will! Appreciate your support.