Here's how I sold out two months' worth of sponsorships in 23 hours
This one tweet helped me sell out over two months' worth of sponsorships for my newsletter Bot Eat Brain in less than a day:
I dropped my prices from cheap to dirt cheap for two reasons:
- Next month I can say "last month we sold out!"
- If a post is sponsored I feel obligated to finish writing and publish it.
One thing I've really struggled with as an Indie Maker is consistency.
Maybe you've had this problem too?
I get a new idea and have a burst of energy and inspiration. It's enough to get a product out the door, but it's not enough to follow through.
Sometimes it's not even enough to get to launch.
After a few weeks, I lose the motivation to keep working on it, then I lose momentum, and the project falls flat on its face.
Then it's on to the next shiny new idea and the cycle repeats.
The only solution I've found that works?
External motivation.
Carrots and Sticks. The threat of public humiliation or people getting angry at me.
That's why I decided to drop my prices so low. If every post is sponsored, then every post comes with a big stick poking me in the back to follow through.
Either I finish and get my reward: Money! New subscribers!
Or I fail and get my punishment: Angry sponsors! Shame!
All the good stuff as an Indie Hacker comes after the fun runs out and the grind begins, so find whatever ways you can to force yourself to follow through.
Then you'll finally get to see a project succeed.
This is interesting, Anthony!
We get to bring our potential when we make ourselves fall into risks.
Nice strategy 👏
No risk, no rewards right?
Yes, definitely.
No pain, no gain.
Have you tried something similar to keep yourself motivated on projects before?
Yes, very much. I actually made myself create one useful product every single month last year and launched them on ProductHunt. And all are free.
The mistake I made was that I didn't concentrate on building the audience. So other than the ProductHunt people not many of them know about the tools I created.
Just in December I realized this and started building an audience.
Now I have quite a many tools that I can tinker them and add features to monetize them.
This year I'm starting with my first Saas tool 😍
It's not too late to go back to all those landing pages and add a simple form to collect emails. You'd be surprised how much it can add up getting a few emails trickling in per day from multiple sources.
Thank you for the idea. I should definitely do this :)
Smart move!
Thanks Kody! Hope so :)
I'd be interested in the digits behind this - How many spots do you have available each month and what does "one spot" entail? What exactly is a sponsor buying?
currently publishing 3 times a week, so there are 12 spots per month.
sponsors get an ad slot near the top of the newsletter.
you can see how many slots we have available at any give time and what an ad looks like on our booking page here: https://www.passionfroot.xyz/boteatbrain
What was your price before doing this?
You don’t think you leave money on the table with this approach?
Yes, probably. It's worth it to me to make sure every post is sponsored so that I'm obligated to write. Before doing this my price was $100/three and I'd only sold a couple sponsorships.
Do you know the angle before you sell a sponsorship or is it known it's generally AI related?
I use passionfroot to manage my sponsorships. The sponsor has to tell me a bit about their product and then I approve or reject the sponsorship depending on whether I think it's a good fit for the audience. https://www.passionfroot.xyz/boteatbrain
I love it. Hope it continues to grow!
Thanks, me too!
We just passed 1,000 earlier this week
Congrats!
Nice one Anthony!
Thanks Leo!