Hey Indie Hackers!
Every week, I send a marketing Case Study from a profitable Indie Founder.
Today I want to share with you the recent issue with Fed, who will reveal the secrets behind Gummy Search growth.
GummySearch is my audience research tool for Reddit.
It helps startup founders & marketers understand their audience:
It also lets you know when a Redditor mentions something related to your product so you can chime into the conversation and close a sale.
GummySearch has a few customer personas:
Focusing on multiple customer personas is both a blessing and a curse!
I’ll get more into the challenges later, but I have to do a lot of user education on various use cases to make it not confusing for users, including having a customized knowledge base.
The pain point is there because startups need customers to survive. And to acquire customers, they need to have the proper intelligence about their needs, desires, and opinions.
GummySearch helps to do this research in hours instead of months, and the added benefit is that the research tool can also help instantly find sales opportunities (as opposed to lighting cash on fire with ads or waiting months for SEO to kick in).
I’m big on communities, so my favorite places to find customers are in communities and social networks. Obviously, I use Reddit a lot for customer acquisition, but I’m also very active on Twitter and in smaller private communities for founders.
GummySearch has >10k users and 400 active customers. Since I started it 2 years ago, it has brought in ~$100k of revenue.
MRR is currently at about $3k, but GummySearch is unique in the sense that it makes a lot of one-off revenue as well (which I’ll cover a little further below).
My first 10 users for GummySearch came from the folks I talked to in my validation interviews.
The next 100 came from Reddit by dogfooding the product I was building. The benefit of building a marketing tool for early-stage founders is that there’s no shortage of early adopters willing to try it out. Here’s my guide on finding customers from Reddit.
The next 1000 came from building in public on Twitter, writing content for early-stage startup founders, and continuing to leverage Reddit communities.
I do A LOT of experimentation with pricing.
This is due to the nature of my SaaS product. Simply put, not everyone needs a research tool every month. For a while I’d lose sleep over this, having stressful dreams of high churn rates.
Now, I’ve found my peace with the fact that it’s a part of my unique business, and I lean into this buying style instead of forcing my way through it.
If I were to chart my SaaS journey, it certainly would not be a straight line. It has many zigs, zags, pivots, and repositionings.
Part of this is due to the tool starting out not as a product with the intent to monetize. I built Gummy for myself (to market the Hive Index). At a certain point, I decided to release it to other indie hackers in case it would be helpful for them. Now I’m targeting more established businesses that can afford to pay for a research tool continuously.
Although I’ve really enjoyed my journey, and I find value in all of the things I’ve learned & experimented with both successfully and unsuccessfully, the next time around I’m going to keep things simpler by picking 1 customer type and solving 1 problem.
GummySearch customer here and what Fed isn’t telling you here is that his customer support is second to none. He emails customers back in 20 minutes. He goes beyond answering the support question and offers extra value. He’s always developing the product and making it better. I’ve told at least 5 people about Gummy because of this.
Thank you so much for sharing, Sveta! It's been a very fun ride so far, and I'm excited to continue growing GummySearch to be the community-powered market research tool that indie hackers and startup founders can rely on!
Very interesting, thanks a lot for sharing your journey. If you don't mind me asking, how many customer personas have you identified? On top of user interviews, do you use questionnaires to get a good volume of insights? Thanks!
Too many haha, so just trying to focus on a few core ones so far. I'm big on user interviews, and also do have some surveys in-product which help guide the user experience.
Wow, this is awesome 👍
This is really awesome. Thanks for sharing.
Very inspiring! Currently passed 130 paying customers with my own SaaS tool. Hopefully I'll get to that 1000!
I just tried it and it's really really impressive! Love it!
Would definitely dive deeper into it.
Did you build everything by yourself? (coding etc)..
Thank you! Yes I've been working on Gummy solo. If you have any questions or ideas as you dive into the product, feel free to DM me on Twitter!
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Does Fed consider this project to be successful, and does he consider it viable in the long term?
I am going to read your article about finding customers on Reddit rn, when did you started gummy for yourself and when you started to monetize it?
Great post! Thanks for sharing your learnings!
Never heard of it but definitely going to use it from now. I am big fan of scrapping idea from reddit.
Reddit is a gold mine of problem. People are whining and complaining on reddit for every problem and the best part is it comes with auto market analysis and distribution. Whatever problem from the reddit that you are solving, you can offer them back the solution.
Great place and I heard of this trick from Sam Parr. And if anybody want to know how to scrap the idea basically its go like this:
This is also an article of how to scrap idea from reddit really make my life easier . Here’s How to Extract Ideas from Reddit
Hi Sveta, Interesting tool. Reddit is new area for me. Would like to try it. Also, you mentioned about "LTD promotion" it gave you a good boost. Can you give some details about it?
How do to plan to scale with new API restrictions coming in?