Case Study: How I've made my first $9.99 online with a SaaS product

Stats from launch day

• 210 new unique users (Google Analytics) (although I saw 500~ on Cloudflare 🤔)
• 28 new sign ups
• 20 logins
• 14 users actually used it
• 1 paid

I'll give some context, talk about the execution and how I launched it.

Context

The idea originally came from building my first product, a LinkedIn post scheduler. The most original idea, I know, at this point it's kind of a rite of passage for indie hackers 😅

So I started reaching out to people on LinkedIn to see if the post scheduler could help them. Along the way, I experimented with my outreach and I noticed a much better reply rate when I personalized my intros 💡

Although effective, the downside was that it took a lot of time 😮‍💨

That's how the idea to make this automated and scalable came to mind. Which finally lead to the creation of hotreachai.com ! 🔥

Hot Reach AI's tagline: Generate personalized first lines at scale for cold outreach using artificial intelligence

Execution

I've been working on hotreachai.com for 2 weeks before launching. I kept the tech stack simple, since I was unfamiliar with most of what it involved.

Steal my tech stack

• Frontend
  • HTML
  • CSS
  • JS + (JQuery, could have done without)
• Backend
  • Express JS
  • Linode (VPS)
  • Cloudflare (DNS)
  • PM2 (Process Manager)
  • NGINX (Web Server)

I learned a lot of the frontend stuff on the fly. Not the prettiest code I've wrote, but it was good enough to ship.

In the end, the tech stack is unimportant. What matters is how you can acquire customers.

If you can keep yours similar across your products, you'll learn the in's and out's of your tools much quicker. This will ultimately make you ship faster. At that point, you're golden. If I needed to build the same project again. I could do it in a few days vs 2 weeks.

Launch

The most notable launches I did were on LinkedIn and Product Hunt.

On LinkedIn, I was thankful to have friends that helped out and spread awareness by sharing, interacting or making their own post about the product.

Optimization
For launch day, I polished the landing page and made sure it was served statically. That way, it could be cached instead of being generated at runtime. I think ~90% of the requests were served by Cloudflare CDN cache layer on that day.

Something people really liked was the hero video (see picture at the top of the post). It looked like the outreach was being generated in real-time. It was simply eye-catching in general. I realized that paying attention to details on your landing page matters a lot.

I added Crisp for chat functionality in order to collect feedback. If anything ever goes wrong, visitors would have an easy way to contact me.

Result
The launch post on LinkedIn had 1.5K impression towards the end of the day.
linkedin.com/posts/edrick-da-corte-henriquez_sales-recruiters-startup-activity-7022216168677543937-E5rq

The launch on product hunt ended up with 51 upvotes and landed at number #19 for the day. All in all, it was well received.
producthunt.com/posts/hot-reach-ai

Future

What's next for hotreachai.com?

Talking to current users and going from there. I'll split my time between two areas: marketing and product.

Product wise
It could make sense to learn from @ alexwestco and @ Ryan___Doyle who've seen great success pivoting to a done for you business model, and do something similar.

Their stories are inspiring and they've documented a lot of their journey on their blog.

alexwest.co
ryanpdoyle.com/blog/0-to-100k-in-3-months

Marketing wise
I'll start by doing cold outreach on LinkedIn, Twitter and target specific niches using hotreachai.com to generate my intros (dogfooding). The goal is to increase awareness of the product.

Overall, learn more about cold outreach and becoming more familiar with the problems my own customers face.

End

Hope this was insightful. If you have any questions or just want to chat about anything I've said, feel free to post it in the comments or reach out to me on Twitter @ edrick_dch.

If you haven't already it, check out hotreachai.com and let me know your thoughts!