From Torn to Over $25K: How Listening to My Wife & Launching a Lifetime Deal Became the Best Decision Ever Made

Hi Indie Hackers,

I wanted to share my story with you all and express my gratitude for all the wisdom and support I've received from this community. So for almost 2 years now I've been working on this keyword research tool called www.InstaKeywords.com. It's what people need to do SEO for finding good keywords with good search volume and low competition.

It has had some traction from PH but the tool never crossed more than $1k monthly. So for almost one year now, I was torn between two options for this site. I was either going to focus on selling the tool or port it to Laravel first as that ways I can add more features to it faster.

My wife, who is a business consultant, advised me to focus on sales instead. She also suggested that I create a lifetime deal for InstaKeywords to see how customers would respond. At first, I was skeptical since the PHP code isn't the best I have written (didn't know about Laravel when I made the site), but after much consideration, I decided to listen to her and focus on sales first. Lesson here: listen to your wife lol

Fast forward to today, and I'm so glad I made that decision. By focusing on sales and customer satisfaction, I was able to not only validate my product but also attract more customers. This, in turn, gave me the funds I needed which I can now invest in Laravel and build a more robust version of InstaKeywords at my own pace.

The real highlight still is when I launched a lifetime deal for InstaKeywords. I was blown away by the response. In just two days, I made over $25K and so many people who signed up and never purchased it just jumped on it!

It has been so overwhelming that PayPal even put my payments on hold (they only allow up to $5K a month).. but that's a good problem to have, right?

I'm now in a much better position than I was a year ago. InstaKeywords old code is working just fine and everyone who has purchased it is super happy. I'm incredibly grateful for my wife's advice and for the Indie Hackers community for being such a supportive and helpful resource.

Guys if you have a website with a bit of traction and if you're stuck deciding whether you should make it better or sell first.. always pick sell. and give your customers a greaaaat deal.

We as programmers judge our code too harshly and always thinking about adding more features and improving the code (my main reason for laravel was writing better unit tests). But you will be pleasantly surprised how little your end users care for it. They rather care about a huge discount than your features or code.

Thank you, everyone!